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Tag: technology

Columns

Fresh Hell
January 26, 2018
Pass Go, Collect $2.8 billion. This week, Amazon inched us further into our nightmarish future with the opening of Amazon Go: a grocery store without checkout lines or cashiers but chock full of cameras that sense, record, and charge you automatically for every impulse ...

The Longest Miles
November 28, 2017
I convinced myself of an extreme position, that the miles racket could be manipulated to turn the tables on the free market.

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

De-Muslimization
February 27, 2017
In Trump’s America, that “terrorist” label is cast in indelible ink. The previous precautions would not suffice, I realized. It was not just what was visible, but everything that was searchable that was now at play. A reversal had taken place. If before my possessions ...

#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 ...

Facebook’s ‘Injection Tools’
May 26, 2016
So it’s come to this. After half a century of right-wing invective targeting the alleged scourge of liberal media bias, conservative activists are up in arms over the (unverified) claim that social-media page designers are tweaking impartial news-feed algorithms—in a ...