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Tag: Silicon Valley

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Fresh Hell
January 05, 2018
From the folks who brought you Juicero. After unsuccessfully trying to foist a $400 juice-pouch-squeezing machine on the masses, Silicon Valley luminary Doug Evans took some time to ponder the Next Big Thing. He found it in water—raw, unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized ...

Pets or Livestock?
November 27, 2017
Anthony Levandowski's AI church, the Way of the Future, reminds us that the Silicon Valley power elite is utterly beguiled with gnosticism.

Dunce’s App
August 17, 2017
Behavior management apps are, in many ways, a culmination of B.F. Skinner's vision for “teaching machines.”

The Attention Deficit
February 03, 2017
Once upon a time a lot of hope was invested in adblockers. Many saw them as a way to halt the blight of online advertising. The thinking was that if everyone got adblockers, it would not only make the ads disappear, but it might make the internet a more enjoyable place, too. We ...

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything
February 01, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

Innovator-In-Chief
September 16, 2016
Earlier this summer, President Obama told Bloomberg Businessweek that he was eyeing Silicon Valley for his post-presidential life: he wanted to become a venture capitalist. And as the summer wound down into Labor Day weekend, his efforts to transform his lame-duck term into a ...

The Fabled and Enabled
September 08, 2016
We interrupt the cloddish accumulation of campaign effluvia to bring you Nick Bilton’s epic anatomy of the downfall of Theranos, the smoke-and-mirrors Silicon Valley startup that was allegedly poised to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Its very name said ...

Enemy of the PayPal
August 18, 2016
The financial unwinding of Gawker Media’s tawdry tour through the justice system landed on an oddly anticlimactic note this week: Univision, the Spanish-language TV network that has been aggressively colonizing the digital mediasphere, picked up the bankrupt web empire for ...