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Nostalgia 2.0
January 30, 2015
If there were one thing that we could never outsource, it would have to be our memories. Personal, intimate, and unique, memories are a part of us that not even the ruthless efficiencies of computer code can improve. Nor could these precious memories be commodified in any ...

Where Are Silicon Valley’s Surveillance Whistleblowers?
January 22, 2015
Last week, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, British Prime Minister David Cameron said—surprise!—that his government needed more power to monitor online communications. He went so far as to imply that encryption itself was a problem, and later said that American tech ...

I, Start-up
December 04, 2014
Listen and you’ll hear it humming along quietly in the background of your life. It’s the sound of other people’s labor. Alfred, yet another start-up in the on-demand service economy, promises to make it easy and affordable for you to finally tune that sound out. Offering ...

Hacking the Planet: What Could Go Wrong?
November 24, 2014
You remember this science fiction story, right? Faced with the threat of extinction on a warming planet, an advanced race flies gigantic mirrors into the stratosphere to create a giant “space umbrella” that will bounce the sun’s rays back into the cosmos. But it doesn’t ...

What To Do About Uber?
November 19, 2014
On Monday, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published a report from a dinner he and several other media figures attended with Uber executives. During the dinner, Smith wrote, senior vice president Emil Michael proposed spending $1 million to dig up dirt on journalists critical ...

Musk on Mars: Silicon Valley Disrupts the Universe
October 29, 2014
It only took the mega-entrepreneur and fume-drunk Delphic Oracle of innovation Elon Musk six years to win the favor of the federal government and use it to get into space. The turnaround is so fast one wonders if he didn’t just call an Uber. Musk’s galactic start-up SpaceX ...

Predictive Policing and Automated Peace
October 27, 2014
If you’re a teenager in Los Angeles planning a party and looking forward to a night of drink, debauchery and chemical highs, you’d better keep quiet about it. The twenty-four-seven “eComm Unit,” a police division established in 2012 as a kind of online patrol squadron, ...

Silicon Valley’s Futuristic Mega-Zen Brain Machine
October 06, 2014
Biohacking, the hacking of biology, is a broad label that, in its most extreme form, can include DIY plant gene sequencing and the installation of magnets into your fingertips. But the term is also used to describe the habit of obsessively manipulating your diet and gobbling ...

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human
October 02, 2014
In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a ...

Harassment in the Online Workplace
September 26, 2014
As if we needed another, September kicked off with an acrid reminder that yes, all women—even the most privileged and powerful—are still subject to the cruel whims of anonymous men. On the great celebrity nude hack of 2014, Roxane Gay wrote in the Guardian, “What these ...

David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?
September 19, 2014
David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go? Once upon a time, in the heyday of social prognostication, many Americans believed that gadget-related knowledge would surely yield immeasurable leaps forward in the progress of the human species. Yet as David Graeber ...

U2, Apple, and the Strip-Mining of Punk Rebellion
September 18, 2014
“Wasn’t that the most incredible single you ever heard?” asked Apple CEO Tim Cook as the last note of The Edge’s guitar died away. He was playing U2’s new single “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” to the audience at the end of a press conference this month for the new ...