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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 ...

Token-Hunters: Your Friendship Is Not a Gift
September 21, 2016
“Say it to my face” may sound righteous and brave, but the smug boors who shout that slogan the loudest are often the ones least prepared to listen. If you try to tell this person how her tokenism makes you feel, it could mean a lot of work for you. Do you really have time ...

Q & A with Geert Lovink
August 09, 2016
Presently holed up at the Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences, 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, tech critic Geert Lovink has held it down in different forms of European bohemia since the eighties, asking, over a series of five books: How can we use technology to actually make ...

Sexting, Lies, and Videotape
June 09, 2016
Midway through the painfully exhaustive documentary Weiner, the title subject’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin, is puttering around her Manhattan kitchen, fumbling through an array of flatware in an effort to give a semblance of normalcy to her day. One of the ...

Power to the Pixels
February 18, 2016
It sure was a short “end of history.” Back in 1992, with the Berlin Wall leveled and Russia abruptly abdicating its self-appointed role as bureaucratic overseer of the historical dialectic, Francis Fukuyama and his neoconservative confreres surveyed the reconfigured world ...

Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack.
May 22, 2015
This Monday, President Obama joined Twitter. That, clearly, was his first mistake. In short order, a barrage of racist tweets greeted our first African American president. The whole contretemps called to mind the premise of the popular “Obama’s Anger ...

BuzzFeed Among the Brands
April 15, 2015
On the social web, all roads lead to brands, so let’s start with a story of a #brand. Five years ago, Domino’s acknowledged what most of us already knew: they made shit pizza. So the company launched an advertising campaign in which it offered a mea culpa and promised better ...

Taking a Cat Photo Approach to History
March 27, 2015
In the midst of chaos and tragedy of the 2014 Ferguson riots, a white cop embraced a black youth. It was a moment of harmony within a storm of racial conflict. It was a beautiful photograph. No wonder we made it the defining image of the riots by sharing it 400,000 times on ...

Feeding the Social Media Slot Machine
March 20, 2015
When Andrew Sullivan, the big bearded granddad of political blogging, announced his retirement in February, the Internet was quick to perform an autopsy—as usual, slightly before its patient had died. Blogging was finished, everyone agreed, or at least it was looking wan and ...

Peer-to-Peer Pressure
March 20, 2015
There’s a telling scene near the end of The Social Network. Punching air as they watch the company pass the millionth user threshold on a large overhead screen, the young Facebook founders suddenly resemble the victors of another kind of bubble economy—NYSE brokers watching ...

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, ...

An Army of Eyeballs: The Rise of the Advertisee
September 12, 2014
During a blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl, a bright spark on Oreo’s marketing team had a brainstorm. With one tweet, the snappy insta-slogan “You can still dunk in the dark” inspired a tidal wave of shares amidst the snacking. It was the free publicity coup every brand ...