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I want to ask you about social media and “cancel culture.” In July 2020, Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” signed by a number of prominent people, including Noam Chomsky and J.K. Rowling. The letter criticized “an intolerant climate” on the Left, and in particular, “an intolerance of opposing vi... | But how do we negotiate this issue? Is calling people out on Twitter our only mode of addressing power dynamics in the AI ethics space? How can we put forward a vision that is constructive and not just reactive, even though our operational capacity is so low, even though we’re all exhausted, grieving, and torn into so ... |
There’s a Shakespeare program on the inside. There’s a radio show. There’s a newspaper. There’s a lot of men really working on themselves and preparing to go back out to the community and become productive citizens. If people understood that, they might be willing to give these men a second chance. A lazy sprawl of bri... | But Chattanooga doesn’t quite fit the tired narrative evoked in the president’s grim portrait of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” This is a city with a plan. Situated in the heart of the Great Appalachian Valley, Chattanooga is widely known by a silicon-tinged moniker... |
Yet when asked for details on how his service worked, Patterson shrugged off the question. He told the London Times in 1972 that even if his clients had nothing else in common, at least they had in common the fact that they had all joined Dateline. But had they? In 1969 he was arrested and convicted of fraud and conspi... | Though Patterson was convicted and somewhat disgraced, this setback didn’t deter him. But it didn’t seem to teach him much, either. Throughout its existence, a veneer of sleaze plagued Dateline. Women customers often complained of being matched up with men they had nothing in common with, or whose questionnaire prefere... |
By the time Ting left New York, the city had become a viral hot zone. Before she departed, Taiwanese authorities required that she fill out an online health screening form, providing her medical information and, most importantly, an address where she could quarantine in Taiwan. Upon landing, all passengers underwent te... | Moreover, telecommunication companies are already collecting the data being used to construct the digital fence. “This is not new information being collected,” Tang emphasized. The emergency warning broadcasting system, which sends texts about flash floods or earthquakes, relies on the same data. “Instead of collecting... |
Where once you might have had to do some research and guesswork to see how much your home cost, the Zestimate claims to make checking in on your home equity as easy as looking up the weather forecast. But why stop at your home equity? A teenager once told me that, at his school, kids would look up the Zestimates of eac... | Yet despite the satellite-recon dreams of its founders, Zillow is often wrong, and its estimates can fall drastically short of a property’s ultimate market price. Shortly before the pandemic, Zillow began a program known as iBuying, using its vast troves of housing market data to automatically predict which houses it c... |
JS: I am uncomfortable with lying in general, even when it isn’t harmful, or if it’s just an exaggeration. I had a couple of advisory conversations recently where I was asked whether I would ever do Reboot full-time as a nonprofit. I told them, “Oh, I feel like I couldn’t get the money to do it.” And they were like, “N... | Second Languages You all had to learn to present yourself a certain way in order to be maximally appealing to the gatekeepers of the industry, whether it was VCs who might fund your startup or companies that might hire you. But how did you learn to perform these roles? Was it just a process of trial-and-error, or was t... |
The Black internet has a long history. It has multiple points of origin, as Charlton McIlwain has documented—from Afronet, a BBS network for Black users, to NetNoir, an AOL-based portal “devoted to Afrocentric material,” both of which launched in the mid-1990s. Today, the Black internet has entered the platform era, di... | What would it mean to take the Black internet seriously? What would it mean to see Black digital practices (in all their diversity) not in pathological terms—as hailing from the wrong side of a “digital divide”—but as creative, joyful, affirming? What if the Black internet offers a standpoint from which the rest of the... |
Misidentifications can also be a problem, even though companion apps for community scientists generally require multiple identifications before an observation is confirmed, and some apps like iNaturalist use computer vision to suggest identifications. In an effort to ensure the quality of their dataset, scientists usin... | Since the charisma, visibility, rareness, and location of a given species can all affect data collection in ways that don’t necessarily reflect the species’ actual distribution, it can be difficult to determine whether an absence of observations corresponds to a real decline of the species or something else. Some platf... |
Neurath believed that such a process would enable a particular kind of rationality to emerge. Even where it proves impossible to make clear and precise calculations, he argued, we can still decide rationally. However, the rationality we deploy will be a practical and political rather than purely algorithmic. People wil... | In Neurath’s model, decisions made collectively, at the highest level, would then filter down through the rest of the economy, to be implemented across various industries and workplaces. But how would that work exactly? How are local production decisions made? What happens if conflicts or collisions arise—for instance,... |
The likelihood of very little interference is why Green Bank was selected in 1954 as the location for a new radio astronomy observatory facility. It’s close to Washington DC, yet sparsely populated and conveniently protected on all sides by the Allegheny Mountains. But just in case, lawmakers drew a square on a map of ... | We are told that when we board the school bus that will take us to the telescope, our cell phones must be switched off. Even though there is no cell reception here, our phones are tiny transmitters that will keep searching for a signal, emitting radio waves all the while. Dave steps up onto a thin strip of stage and wh... |
The 1990s were a heady time, but not everyone was convinced. If Wired was the pulpit for a new gospel of venture-funded tech, Schultz’s mailing list, called Nettime, was an effort to build a home for the early commercial internet’s discontents. Drawing on various contemporary anti-capitalist currents, from the anti-glo... | The Californian Ideology, through its “bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism,” celebrated the rampant commodification of digital networks as a force for personal liberation. The 1990s are often remembered as a time in which this vision of the internet went unchallenged, but the Nettime crowd wan... |
I remember looking for rent stabilization data when I lived in New York, and the closest I found was this project, AmIRentStabilized.com, which is someone’s personal project to help people do this. The city has that data and could share it with tenants, but they don’t. Erin: Totally. Azad: And New York is a special cas... | The website walks you through the process of contacting a city office, which is then supposed to mail you the answer, but if they don’t, you’re supposed to set a calendar reminder for yourself to follow up with them! Azad: That’s because these institutions are beholden to property owners who fight tooth and nail for da... |
A middle-aged Uyghur businessman from Hotan, whom I will call Dawut, told me that that, behind the checkpoints, the new security system has hollowed out Uyghur communities. The government officials, civil servants, and tech workers who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system don’t seem to perceive Uyghurs... | In response to the misreporting, several researchers have attempted to correct the narrative with well-documented examples of where foreign press coverage gets things wrong. Common mistakes include the assumption that all surveillance technology in China feeds into a centralized database, that every recordable action i... |
The case of Cloudflare clarifies the stakes of choosing different paradigms for security. At some point, technical questions about how vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated collide with questions about how technical security relates to other forms of security. When is a site like 8chan benefiting from technical ... | After two more 8chan-linked shootings, Cloudflare ultimately caved to public pressure and cut ties with the site. But a million similar issues are raised on a smaller scale every day, where the question isn’t whether to host a single site, but how to treat a particular piece of content, or a feature that allows that co... |
The best way to explain it is to tell you about the first tool we ever made. For our campaign in 2015 with borrowers who had attended Corinthian, we worked with lawyers to develop an app like TurboTax to file for defense to repayment. TurboTax is easy. A little wizard comes up and asks you questions, you answer them, ... | You mentioned that a campaigning feature is coming to the platform. How do you envision campaigns coming together? The intention is to organize democratically, so people on the platform determine the campaigns. What if Debt Collective members in some city found each other on our platform and decided to do something tog... |
Much discussion of social inequality and class divisions in Australia treats these issues as phenomena that occur elsewhere. Home ownership is seen, somewhat uncritically, as an inviolable fixture of the Australian dream rather than a tax racket for the rentier class. Pouring scorn on “dole bludgers” and shaming welfar... | In June 2017, the government released a report of the nation’s top ten suburbs for welfare non-compliance—or “bludger hotspots,” to use the parlance of a News Corp tabloid. These are places where recipients failed to meet the conditions for receiving welfare, which include attending interviews and appointments. It’s di... |
Li Yinghui, a thirty-nine-year-old housewife in the village of Heyang, Zhejiang, agrees. “Wages around here aren’t high enough for me to be shopping online every day,” she told me. Low wages aren’t the only factor that constrain Li’s capacity to participate in e-commerce. “My phone can’t even run most [apps]; it’s a ch... | The urban-rural gap in China is not just an economic divide in consumption power but a cultural divide based on consumption habits. Rural residents don’t just consume cheaper goods. They consume different kinds of goods—including, in some cases, ones that the government may not approve of. This is no less true in onlin... |
You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the bus. You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the toilet. When you tell the internet what you want, the internet remembers. Somewhere, a company is building a library of every longing on earth. A record of every fetish, every crush, every passionate a... | What an erotic, and terrifying, vision: our desires all crammed together, sharing the same strips of disk, indefinitely. My dick pic next to your love letter, your Google search for tentacle porn next to my flirtatious Facebook message. One soup of sexuality, expanding at the speed of human thought. |
More public oversight is welcome, but insufficient. Regulating how data is extracted and refined is necessary. To democratize big data, however, we need to change who benefits from its use. Under the current model, data is owned largely by big companies and used for profit. Under a more democratic model, what would it ... | Resource nationalism isn’t necessarily democratic. Revenues from nationalized resources can flow to dictators, cronies, and militaries. But they can also fund social welfare initiatives that empower working people to lead freer, more self-directed lives. The left-wing governments of Latin America’s “pink tide,” for ins... |
The ruling elite built samara.kg to get Jeenbekov elected, and he remains in power. Still, the fallout from the scandal may come back to haunt the government. Rinat Tuhvatshin, executive director of Kloop Media, who was summoned and questioned by Kyrgyz security services for three hours for his team’s investigation int... | Digital Distortion Samaragate is just one example of how technology can warp elections, especially in fragile democracies. There are many more cases—most of which will not make it into local news, much less receive global attention—of governments in poor countries using technology to distort the democratic process—not ... |
What is at the center of my attention are land and water sovereignty struggles, such as those over the Dakota Access Pipeline, over coal mining on the Black Mesa plateau, over extractionism everywhere. My attention is centered on the extermination and extinction crises happening at a worldwide level, on human and nonhu... | Do you still think the cyborg is still a useful figure? I think so. The cyborg has turned out to be rather deathless. Cyborgs keep reappearing in my life as well as other people’s lives. The cyborg remains a wily trickster figure. And, you know, they’re also kind of old-fashioned. They’re hardly up-to-the‑minute. They... |
To talk about surveillance online, you have to talk about how the internet works, and it seems like a fine line between being too high-level and too technically nitty-gritty. How do you teach about the internet? Most of the time, what we're teaching is fairly 101-level. In terms of getting into the structure of the in... | User Testing in Uganda I want to make sure we also talk about Tor. What does your work on the community team look like? I was the community team lead for two years and I'm still a contributor, though not at the level I used to be as Library Freedom Project has taken up more of my time. The community team works on outr... |
You’re already seeing big changes at investment banks. Even though investment banks continue to be very large in terms of their physical footprint, number of employees, and impact on the economy, the actual participants inside banks have changed a fair bit. It’s far more automated. Many of the actual operations inside ... | The culture has mellowed quite a bit. It’s less driven by adrenaline. It’s less loud. The value is provided not by the person yelling into the phone but by the person who’s sitting at their computer, writing the right algorithm, who needs a little bit of thoughtfulness to do that work. The old model was about driving t... |
The only option to support his family and get them out of debt was for Owen to pick up government contract work, bouncing around federal nuclear sites. “From 2011 to 2017, I was gone. [I was] living in a hotel, going on an airplane, sleeping in a minivan,” Owen says. He would FaceTime in for the Advent calendar, to say... | In 2014, during his ample free time at work, Owen came across a white paper about a new blockchain called Ethereum. While Bitcoin is a distributed list of financial transactions, Ethereum is that plus a distributed list of computer states. In other words, it stores programmable ones and zeros that act as a giant, decen... |
Sometimes, though, gaming gets serious. Games can embody a set of assumptions, even an ideology. Playing a game about cities, for example, you can absorb assumptions about how cities are supposed to be run. A model for gaming an auction can become the basis for an entire platform economy. New rules can restructure glob... | Managers have promoted “teamwork” at work for decades. More recently, gamification has become a buzzword. In every job that must be done there is an element of fun, the song goes. You find the fun and—snap!—the job’s a game. But in reality, gamification may serve less as a technology to speed chores than to destroy sol... |
Something like Ellie could be useful to the military in other ways, too. To identify and help all current and former personnel with PTSD would be a massive undertaking. Estimates from the US Department of Veterans Affairs suggest that between 11 and 20 percent of the 2.7 million service members who deployed to Iraq and... | Behind this possibility lurks a larger vision, too. Though the Ellie program is in some ways crude, it seems to herald a future system that can continuously track, report, and support users’ mental health on an ongoing basis. At the time of the demo, consumer devices like the Fitbit and Apple Watch were being marketed ... |
At one level, this forgiving attitude reflected the influence of Bay Area hippies who shaped tech culture from the beginning. At another, it reflected the rise of new funding models. Early venture capitalists embraced risk rather than avoiding it; they expected most of the companies they invested in to fail. The failur... | The rise of software and, later, the web, made it possible to succeed at a whole new scale. This in turn enabled investors to tolerate more and bigger losses, because when the moonshot landed, the returns were astronomical. When you found the right product-market fit, you could eat the world, fast. In the meantime, wit... |
Important also was the work of groups like Citizen Lab. Created in 2001 by a University of Toronto researcher partly inspired by cDc, Citizen Lab enlisted computer security techniques such as auditing, threat modeling, and penetration testing in support of civil society—an approach sometimes called “digital security.” ... | Unlike in the 1990s, it wasn’t enough for organizations to take technical security seriously. Security research was now being weaponized to promote forms of insecurity—helping governments crack down on dissidents, for example. Building on the earlier ideas of the anti-security movement, these watchdog hackers made clea... |
A simple act of sabotage is to violate this assumption by generating “noise” while browsing. You can do this by opening random links, so that it’s unclear which are the “true” sites you’ve visited—a process automated by Dan Schultz’s Internet Noise project, available at makeinternetnoise.com. Because your data is not o... | Of course, the effectiveness of this tactic, like all others described here, increases when more people are using it. As the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual explains, “Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizens, can be an effective weapon…[wasting] materials, manpower, and time. Occurring on a wide... |
When it comes to angel investors and venture capital funds, while much of their money comes from endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, and the like, one major source is “family offices.” That is a euphemism for investment funds run for one or sometimes a handful of immensely wealthy families. As the historian... | One partner at a venture capital fund told me that, in his experience, VCs turn to family offices when first starting out. Big as family funds can be, the inflow of capital represented by, say, a pension fund or a university endowment is both much bigger and much more reliable. Family offices generally do not get acces... |
As in the Progressive Era, technological revolutions have radically transformed our social, economic, and political life. Technology platforms, big data, AI—these are the modern infrastructures for today’s economy. And yet the question of what to do about technology is fraught, for these technological systems paradoxic... | The problem, however, is not bigness per se. Even for Brandeisians, the central concern was power: the ability to arbitrarily influence the decisions and opportunities available to others. Such unchecked power represented a threat to liberty. Therefore, just as the power of the state had to be tamed through institution... |
It can also be hard for them to consider solutions to political problems that might be extremely low-tech. And for that reason are probably even more difficult—like the question of what happens in the future—which may not be a hundred years away or 200 years away—when robots or algorithms can do 90% of the jobs. How do... | I think the strangest thing about being out here in the Bay Area is that the Aspy worldview has just completely saturated everything to the point that people think that everything is a technical problem that should be solved technologically. It’s a very privileged view of very smart people who just want there to be sin... |
At a high level, computer vision algorithms work by scanning an image, piece by piece, using a collection of pattern recognition modules. Each module is designed to recognize the presence or absence of a different pattern. Revisiting our cat-detector model, some of the modules might be sensitive to sharp edges or corne... | Nonetheless, Li forged ahead, convinced that ImageNet would change the world of computer vision research. She and her students began gathering images based on WordNet queries entered into multiple search engines. They also grabbed pictures from personal photo sharing sites like Flickr. Li would later describe how she w... |
Working in the 1950s, Benjamin was one of the first doctors to take trans people even marginally seriously, and at a vital time — the moment when, through public awareness of people like Christine Jorgensen (one of the first trans people to come out in the United States), wider society was first becoming seriously awar... | Containing case studies, life stories, diagnostic advice, and treatment approaches, The Transsexual Phenomenon became the standard medical work on trans subjects, establishing Benjamin as an authority on the matter. And it was, for its time, very advanced simply for treating trans medicine as a legitimate thing. It arg... |
Blockchain is the technology that underlies bitcoins. The idea is that at each “stop” along a chain of users, a database associated with a particular coin (or component) updates to register the change of hands. The identity of each user could be cryptographically concealed, or it could be recorded transparently. Either... | Blockchain is security for the age of decentralization, and it could, in theory, make it possible for companies to verify the safety, composition, and provenance of manufactured goods. Supply Chain 24/7, an industry newsletter, calls blockchain a “game-changer” that “has the potential to transform the supply chain.” Io... |
It would also miss the complex changes to the internet in recent years. For one, the design of the internet has changed significantly, and not always in ways that have supported the flourishing of the wisdom of the crowd. Anil Dash has eulogized “the web we lost,” condemning the industry for “abandon[ing] core values t... | The wisdom of the crowd’s critics also ignore the rising sophistication of those who have an interest in undermining or manipulating online discussion. Whether Russia’s development of a sophisticated state apparatus of online manipulation or the organized trolling of alt-right campaigners, the past decade has seen ever... |
That creates a sense of urgency when it comes to raising awareness—particularly as gerrymandering becomes more effective with ever more granular data and ever more predictive algorithms. Our democracy depends on it. Everyone knows what gentrification looks like. Community gathering places are replaced by boutiques and ... | These new businesses don’t just reflect gentrification, of course. They actively drive it. Take New York City’s SoHo neighborhood: sociologist Sharon Zukin has described how art galleries and live-work spaces displaced industry from Lower Manhattan and paved the way for luxury residences for non-artists. Or Dumbo: in t... |
But the additional exposure that the internet brings can also put sex workers at risk. Online platforms may provide workers with safety, convenience, and community, but they come with a danger: surveillance. In countries where sex work is criminalised, law enforcement will monitor a suspected worker’s online presence. ... | An escort named Suzie tells me that she uses forums like SAAFE, but that she finds the underground social media groups much more “cohesive.” “There’s something more intimate about belonging to a network of workers who are local to me and part of a wider community too,” she explains. Molly reiterates this point. “These ... |
In response, g0v hackers came up with a solution. The idea first originated in the g0v Slack channel: a digital map that would visualize the quantities of masks available in different pharmacies. Howard Wu, a programmer and member of g0v, noticed that many of his family and friends were sharing information in LINE grou... | The maps and apps have not only served as useful tools for people trying to purchase masks, however. The government has also relied on these tools to improve its own distribution supply chain. Officials have been able to track the fluctuating numbers in different cities and provinces, which they can use to adjust mask ... |
The established disorder of our present era is not necessary. It exists. But it’s not necessary. Playing Against Double Death What might some of those practices for opening up new possibilities look like? Through playful engagement with each other, we get a hint about what can still be and learn how to make it stronge... | In the Cyborg Manifesto, you use the ideas of “the homework economy” and the “integrated circuit” to explore the various ways that information technology was restructuring labor in the early 1980s to be more precarious, more global, and more feminized. Do climate change and the ecological catastrophes you’re describing... |
And Facebook tracks everything you do. They track everything, yes, but mostly they just funnel your usage towards Facebook. More than sixty countries have Free Basics now. In a country that has Free Basics, the entire digital media ecosystem is governed by Facebook, especially for poor people. In many cases, the entire... | It’s true in the Philippines, Myanmar, Kenya, and Cambodia. Those are four politically fraught places where we’ve seen tremendous success by ethnic nationalist and religious nationalist groups using Facebook either to support a particular candidate in a campaign or to instigate mass violence against the other side. |
A few years ago, the mantra seemed to be, “Don’t read the comments, don’t read the retweets, just accept it for what it is.” But now it’s more like, “Okay, we should read the comments. We should treat that as a problem.” What do you think people should focus on with harassment online? Think about being on systems that ... | [1] The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school, has helped popularize “design thinking,” particularly in tech. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (AAA) Luxembourg is very bullish on asteroid mining. They think it’s gonna be a huge business five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. And the... |
In fact, many of the technologies that are developed here are being developed with an eye to a global market. I’d go as far as to say predictive policing wasn't even really for the United States, which has a high threshold for things like accountability and transparency. When predictive policing first came to American ... | But it’s not just about global markets. It’s also about global contexts. American policing functions as a research site for military innovation—the “green to blue” pipeline is bidirectional. For instance, the National Institute of Justice’s 2009 predictive policing innovation grants (which funded Chicago’s now-deprecat... |
After seeing the DARPA demo, I was unsettled by the idea of an emotionally-aware technology ecosystem constantly reporting back to companies or governments about our mental states, and then trying to intervene in them. But the thing I kept coming back to most often was the avatar of Ellie, sitting in her chair with her... | An Algorithm for Thoughts When I began researching computerized therapy, virtual mental health care was already a booming category—and that was before the world was struck by the coronavirus. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the possibility of inexpensive, scalable virtual mental health tools may very well become a ... |
Did you start studying biology as an undergraduate? I got a scholarship that allowed me to go to Colorado College. It was a really good liberal arts school. I was there from 1962 to 1966 and I triple majored in philosophy and literature and zoology, which I regarded as branches of the same subject. They never cleanly ... | Did you get into politics at Yale? Or were you already political when you arrived? The politics came before that — probably from my Colorado College days, which were influenced by the civil rights movement. But it was at Yale that several things converged. I arrived in the fall of 1967, and a lot was happening. |
We’ve always been particularly interested in how our work was being received by younger people. How do they engage with Logic? Do they find it useful? To help explore these questions, and to reflect on the story of Logic thus far, Ben Tarnoff and Xiaowei Wang from Logic sat down with Jasmine Sun, Jessica Dai, and Emily... | Ben Tarnoff (BT): As we transition to Logic’s next chapter, we wanted to create space in this issue to reflect on the project so far: what we’ve achieved, where we’ve failed, how and why we did what we did. And we thought of you all at Reboot as ideal conversation partners for that reflection, because our projects feel... |
The first silence is related to the second. Women, after all, were seen as having largely failed in computing until recent historians’ attempts to correct that assumption. But as it turns out, technological failure and womens’ erasure are intimately related in more than one way. When we put these facts together—our avo... | The failure of one unnamed and ignored postwar computer worker is a good place to start. In 1959, this particular computer programmer faced a very hectic year. She needed to program, operate, and test all of the computers in a major government computing center that was doing critical work. These computers didn’t just c... |
My research group has begun to practice some aspects of restorative justice in online communities in coordination with the moderators of those communities. Pre-conferencing, which involves one-on-one conversation between the mediator and different people involved in the harm, is often the first step of a restorative pr... | In building a just future we cannot however rely solely on the intervention of platforms, or on restoring justice one harm at a time. Even as we work towards restoring justice right now, our long-term aim must be to transform the societies in which harm occurs. This is the work of transformative justice, which was popu... |
The Red Deal I want to change gears to talk about the Red Deal, The Red Nation’s proposal for climate justice and decolonization. What would you say are the main pillars? Our program is influenced by the divest/reinvest strategies of Standing Rock and the Movement for Black Lives. At Standing Rock, Water Protectors cal... | We’re also using the idea of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal, which essentially argues in its legislative text that every social justice issue should become a climate justice issue. Indigenous people have long been the most confrontational arm of the environmental justice movement, but have rece... |
More insidiously, such narratives also serve to sanction the dominant technologies by presenting them as the only ones ever conceivable. They overlook the many possible alternatives that did not prevail, thereby producing the impression that the existing technologies are just the inevitable outcome of technical ingenui... | If peripheral innovations like the Latin American experiments with informatics did not become mainstream, this is not because they were necessarily inferior to corporate, military, and metropolitan competitors. The reasons why some technologies live and others die are not strictly technical, but political. The Cuban mo... |
In 2018, a group of researchers at the Technical University of Dresden made a breakthrough to that end when they released DEDA: the Dot Extraction, Decoding, and Anonymization toolkit. Analyzing over a thousand printouts from over a hundred printers, they developed an algorithm to detect and decode the tracking dots of... | The rationale behind building surveillance mechanisms into laser printers laid the foundation for more far-reaching forms of surveillance that we encounter in our devices today. The modern internet is full of invisible tracking mechanisms that, like MICs, are marketed as beneficial at best and harmless at worst—as long... |
The second viewpoint is that the cost of Bitcoin "mining" supports Bitcoin price. As the "mining" cost increases, Bitcoin price will rise too. However, this viewpoint is hard to hold. At any given time, the supply of Bitcoin is determined by a prespecified algorithm and has nothing to do with how much computation power... | Price stability is a necessary condition for Bitcoin to become an effective medium of exchange. One proposal is Bitcoin futures. On December 10 and 18, 2017, CBOE Global Markets and CME Group respectively introduced Bitcoin futures. In addition to price discovery and risk management functions, Bitcoin futures facilita... |
I’m always surprised by the cleverness of the people outside the company who try to steal things, and the stupidity of the people inside the company who feel they can get away with things. In the first days after I found out I was pregnant, my number one pleasure was tracking my embryo’s growth on various apps. As naus... | I got my first exposure to such “communities” through pregnancy tracking apps like Glow. But when I did Google searches for things like “round ligament pain” or “morning sickness when will it end,” I discovered another place where people were discussing pregnancy online: website forums that look like relics of the AOL ... |
This extractive logic is, crucially, inseparable from the need to discipline workers and consumers. In the Marikana massacre, the mining conglomerates sent the police to shoot the protesting miners in order to force them back to work. Corporate landlords and banks use subtler means, deploying credit-scoring technologie... | This may remind you of the famous episode of the popular TV show Black Mirror in which people rank each other on an app after every social interaction. Lacie, the main character, desperately tries to increase her score so she can rent a property in Pelican Cove, the estate of her dreams. (She fails, and is eventually e... |
But then why are members of certain groups considered riskier than others? This is where we need to talk about “cumulative disadvantage.” For example, some of these models make predictions on the basis of an individual’s level of education. Well, we know the education system is highly unequal. Therefore, there is cumul... | True enough. Look, I’m an old guy. I did statistics by hand. Statistics has been around for ages. The estimation of risk has been around for ages. And while discrimination on the basis of race may not have been based upon statistics at first, it soon was. But the nature of statistics has changed, and the nature of the ... |
We sat down with Mai Ishikawa Sutton, lead organizer of DWeb Projects with the Internet Archive and cofounder and editor of COMPOST, an online zine about the digital commons, to discuss what the distributed web and DWeb are, community principles as an organizing tool, and the ways decentralization is a verb not a noun. | Could you tell us about your background and political and technical evolution? I went to UC Santa Cruz for college and was part of a program now called the Everett Program. The program focuses on training undergraduates on practical technologies—like contact databases and website building, branding, social media, thing... |
Finally, antitrust-style restrictions on firms might reduce problematic conflicts of interest. For example, we might limit practices of vertical integration: Amazon might be forbidden from being both a platform and a producer of its own goods and content sold on its own platform, as a way of preventing the incentive to... | Civic Scale Creating public options or imposing structural limits would necessarily reduce tech industry profits. That is by design: the purpose of such measures is to prevent practices that, while they may bring some public benefits, are both risky and too difficult to manage effectively through public or private over... |
Underwriting this arrangement are inmates and their families. GTL bears the cost of installing the infrastructure for tablet deployment and then distributes its devices to inmates free (with exceptions: in Pennsylvania inmates pay $147 for theirs), charging them for access to content. Subscriptions typically start at 9... | This model has the signal merit of getting taxpayers off the hook. The political untenability of asking us to pay for anything that appears to cosset inmates is considered axiomatic. “The public doesn’t want to pay,” says Martin Horn, who led the Pennsylvania and New York City Departments of Correction in the late 1990... |
Yet Joan created the program, in the sense that she designed it and determined the logical flow of how it worked. It would not focus on matching people up through their similarities, but rather according to what they did not want. In other words, her program took strong negative feelings into account first when determi... | It seemed to work. In fact, Joan’s first run at computer dating was so commercially successful that she immediately changed the name of her business from the Eros Friendship Bureau to the St. James Computer Dating Service. The name change trumpeted the importance of computing to her service at a time when this sort of ... |
When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. In Japanese, the system was named 弹幕 (danmaku), or “bullet curtain,” after a subgenre of hardcore shoot-em-up games in which enem... | In China, several sites seeking to clone the Niconico experience copied the feature, as well as the Japanese characters for the name, which are pronounced “danmu” in Chinese. Today, the most successful of these clones by far is Bilibili, a social video site that has become an entertainment staple for young people in Ch... |
With a platform like Facebook, we know a lot less. Until someone leaked the Facebook guide for moderators, we actually had no idea what was considered harassment or not. And this is the guide that says black children are not a protected class, but white men are. Until these materials are leaked, it’s really hard to kno... | That brings us to the subject of automated content moderation. Big platforms have a lot of users, and thus a lot of content to moderate. How much of the work of detecting harassment and abuse can be outsourced to algorithms? At Wikipedia, content moderation is very human and very grassroots. It’s being performed by a c... |
It’s difficult to say exactly why Five Star relied on old, self-maintained software. Perhaps it was simply a legacy system with high switching costs. But its proprietary nature also fit with the general culture of the people running the party. Though Five Star has presented itself as a populist movement empowered by di... | Casaleggio had some intensely bizarre political beliefs that seemed to verge at once on the paranoid and the utopian. He was a fan of Genghis Khan’s horseback couriers and Benito Mussolini’s radio broadcasts, and foresaw a future a few generations hence in which a total war would annihilate billions of people, leaving ... |
These kinds of violent, spectacular disasters are what the public has come to understand as a technological failure. But most technological failures, especially when dealing with the environment, are decidedly mundane. They often disproportionately affect the poor in ways that are spatially diffuse and take generations... | The story of Mexico City’s battle against flooding offers a telling lesson for us as we face the slow-motion disaster of climate change. The danger today is that we will again fall for the promise of technological fixes peddled by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that seem to allow us to continue with business as usual. Th... |
Unfortunately, this change occurred right as the mainframe was on its way out, in a period when smaller and more decentralized systems were becoming the norm. This meant that by the time ICL delivered the product line they had been tasked with creating, in the mid-1970s, the British government no longer wanted it, and ... | Hiding Tech’s Mistakes Stephanie Shirley’s company succeeded by taking advantage of the sexism intentionally built into the field of computing to exclude talented and capable technical women. At the same time, the rest of the British labor market discarded the most important workers of the emerging computer age, damagi... |
Furthermore, Brandeis, like many classical liberals, saw the marketplace itself as a machine for enforcing checks and balances. Once cut down to size, firms would face the checks and balances imposed by market competition—and through competition, firms would be driven to serve the public good, to innovate, and to opera... | Around the same time, the architects of modern corporate law were trying to solve the same problem from another angle. In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a landmark work that laid the foundation for modern corporate governance. For many modern defenders of fre... |
Into this stepped Press for Change (PfC), a long-running trans campaigning group in the UK that has fought for, among other things, increased access to medical treatment. Robust data showing positive outcomes for patients would seem to challenge both of the NHS’s excuses for not resourcing it: not only would this data ... | So what happened? When I sent that question to Claire Eastwood (who organized the survey) through PfC co-founder Christine Burns, the answer came back: nothing. The data was collected, but it was never analyzed. Why? In a word, “capacity.” PfC was, in Claire’s words, “massively overloaded as the [overall] campaign expa... |
Erin: Different states have different policies about this. A few years ago, California passed a law that’s supposed to protect tenants from having their data collected by these screening companies. New York just last year passed a law that bans tenant blacklists. But apparently it’s still happening in both California a... | That gets to a security issue: there are housing justice groups already using EvictorBook, but it’s not publicly available yet. Can you talk about how you’re thinking about whether or not to make it public? Azad: We’ve been thinking through worst-case scenarios: how could this data be used in a way that we didn’t plan ... |
Despite the proliferation of slick apps dedicated to fertility and pregnancy, much of the conversation still happens on old-school, web 1.0 forums like BabyCenter and What to Expect. Hectic, disorganized, and largely anonymous, these message boards recall the chatrooms of the 1990s, where you could be anyone and say an... | Down the Rabbit Hole Once I was referred to a Maternal-Fetal Medicine practice to run more tests, I quickly understood the primary reason women take to the boards: getting a hold of a doctor is too annoying and takes too long. “If you have a question and you don’t want to wait until your doctor’s appointment and don’t ... |
The far greater violation, by my lights, was his assumption that I would want to have sex with this person, and his acting on that assumption—he said this was the condition under which they went home together. Moreover, that I should want to have sex with this person because they were, as he put it, “queer and cool.” T... | And that’s all true. No one should be expected to fuck anyone. But this is complicated by the fact that sometimes our desires are worth questioning and challenging. Sometimes experimentation, while it should be conditional on consent, does require trying things we might not immediately desire in and of themselves, but ... |
No one says any of this explicitly, of course, which is why the problem of women in technology is thornier than shoehorning women onto all-male panels. The developers I spoke to told me about much more subtle, very likely unconscious incidents of being steered toward one specialization or another. Two different women t... | And everyone can rattle off a list of traits that supposedly makes women better front-end coders: they’re better at working with people, they’re more aesthetically inclined, they care about looks, they’re good at multitasking. None of these attributes, of course, biologically inhere to women, but it’s hard to dispute t... |
This isn’t to suggest that every piece of data needs to be public. As the Indigenous scholar Stephanie Carroll Rainie and her colleagues have explained, open data can be in tension with the rights of Indigenous peoples to govern their own data. In particular, it may cause tensions for communities that continue to exper... | Across the Binaries How do we get there? The answer is not fancy. It involves assembling a coalition for public ecological data infrastructures, drawn from several existing communities. There’s the long-standing open source software movement that could participate. There’s also the open data movement in science, and th... |
This turn to technological solutions for training caregivers in the face of an inadequate healthcare system is nothing new. At least since the early 1960s, when the country faced a shortage of trained nurses, computer-based education has been touted as an efficient and cost-effective way to patch holes in the nation’s ... | But computerized medical education has inevitably represented complex patients through grossly simplified models. Because you can’t fit the diversity of human health experience into a software program, this education has always been oriented around notions of so-called “normal” or “typical” patients. In reality, these ... |
There’s a contradiction here, the most fundamental contradiction in capitalism: wealth is made collectively, but owned privately. We make data together, and make it meaningful together, but its value is captured by the companies that own it, and the investors who own those companies. We find ourselves in the position o... | The solution is to take up the template of resource nationalism, and nationalize our data reserves. This isn’t as abstract as it sounds. It would begin with the recognition, enshrined in law, that all of the data extracted within a country is the common property of everyone who lives in that country. |
For many people who are teaching themselves to code, front-end work is the lowest-hanging fruit. You can “view source” on almost any web page to see how it’s made, and any number of novices have taught themselves web-styling basics by customizing WordPress themes. If you’re curious, motivated, and have access to a comp... | Which is not to say it’s easy, particularly at the professional level. A front-end developer has to hold thousands of page elements in her mind at once. Styles overwrite each other constantly, and what works on one page may be disastrous on another page connected to the same stylesheet. Front-end development is taxing,... |
In exchange for assuming greater risk, venture firms expect higher returns. Its model tolerates losses—sometimes obscene ones—for a chance at grabbing an entire market or customer “mindshare” first. Since some of the companies a VC fund invests in will fail, the ones that succeed must succeed big time. The venture mode... | A fund that has $100 million may only be able to justify investing in companies that seem likely to result in an exit that pays out $1 billion or more. And since most VC funds are structured as ten-year partnerships, they’re not only looking for big exits—they’re looking for big exits on schedule. The VC model isn’t ri... |
Diane has been in Green Bank since 2007, but her own assimilation hasn’t been entirely smooth. Besides her personality, there are cultural differences and class differences. She’s a religious Christian who says grace before every meal, while many of her neighbors worship bluegrass music and hard work. She comes from a ... | To try to bridge this gap, Diane has taken to recommending a trial visit accompanied by a three-pronged homework assignment while they’re here: Buy a copy of the local newspaper, The Pocahontas Times. Go to the local grocery/hardware/gas station and buy something, anything. Take a tour of the Green Bank Telescope. |
And how does the system that you built fit into the appeals process? It tracks all the elements of the appeal. If a veteran was in an accident, he could’ve injured his knee, his elbows, his head—so there could be different issues on appeal. He could be rated 30 percent for an elbow injury, 10 percent for a knee injury... | So that was the main purpose of VACOLS to begin with: let’s track where these folders are and who has them and the outcome of the appeal. Since then, we’ve added on module after module to schedule hearings, hold virtual hearings, and do all sorts of other things that are part of the appeals process. Originally, the sy... |
The first crop of 350 students arrived at Fort Rodman in January 1965. They hailed “from the big cities and the small ones, the shut-down mining towns and the farm country” in New York, Texas, Alabama, and thirty-one other states, according to a 1966 promotional film about the program. Some of these young men may have ... | Students at Fort Rodman were separated into small cohorts, with one instructor assigned to five or six students. The instructors were white college graduates, some from the Peace Corps, who had been trained on site to be “tutor-counselors” to the young men who for more than a year would make Fort Rodman their home. The... |
A legacy magazine run by an old man with inherited wealth, Harper’s, reveals that they plan to identify the creator of the Google Doc in an upcoming cover story by Katie Roiphe, a pundit who established her career by dismissing the existence of date rape in the New York Times, back in the 1990s. Dayna Tortorici, the yo... | Nicole Cliffe, a writer and editor best known as the founder of the (now defunct) feminist website The Toast, retweets Tortorici, and offers to compensate any writer who pulls a piece from Harper’s. The campaign gathers momentum on Twitter. The creator of the spreadsheet, Moira Donegan, preempts Harper’s by publishing ... |
In 2014, I moved into the Silent Barn, a three-story DIY space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There were art galleries, a recording studio, a barber shop, murals on every surface, and shows every night. On one of my first nights living there, I came home to a kitchen filled with dozens of collective members, sitting on chairs ... | But there’s another factor fueling the crisis of DIY: Facebook. To be involved in a local music community today means maintaining an inextricable reliance on Facebook events, and Facebook-owned Instagram, for promotion. Further, some DIY spaces have become dependent on Facebook groups for everything from connecting wit... |
The tech industry typically speaks the language of engineering and finance. Increasingly, however, its leaders are coming to realize that they may need to become conversant in other idioms as well: the social and the political. And the social and the political, as our writers make clear, are the territories where tech’... | Social media is the site of much hatred and delusion. It is also the soil where social movements can take root. Hashtags enable individual incidents of injustice to go viral, revealing systemic patterns. Yet that virality is made possible by monopoly—it requires one Facebook, one YouTube, one Twitter. And these large c... |
Therefore, Setién Quesada and his colleague argued, publication counts did not conclusively determine the “productivity” of authors, any more than declining citation counts indicated the “obsolescence” of publications. Cuban libraries shouldn’t rely on these metrics to make such consequential decisions as choosing whic... | Cuban information scientists didn’t just critique the limitations of traditional informatics, however. They also advanced a more critical approach to mathematical modeling, one that emphasized the social complexity and the historical contingency of informational regularities. In the 1980s, when Cuban libraries were beg... |
How Are You Going to Pay for It? Nature, Raymond Williams once said, is the most complex word in the English language. But I’ve come to think that “natural” mostly means “freely given.” Nature offers the “free services” on which human life depends. More generally, nature describes what we take for granted, what we expe... | This means that substitution is rarely economical. In China’s Hanyuan County, for example, where pesticides have wiped out many bee colonies, human workers have subbed in, using feather dusters to pollinate pear trees by hand. But human pollination is only viable in Hanyuan because it’s cheaper than renting beehives. I... |
Could you talk about the connection between genetic determinism and disease likelihood, because one of the things that you mentioned in your papers is “just-so” evolutionary explanations. If you get a high likelihood of a disease on 23andMe, are you just doomed forever? What is a just-so evolutionary explanation? Are y... | It’s just so racist because it’s like—no, maybe the reason why we have high rates of obesity is because you took away our access to reefs, to fishing, hunting rights and all these other things, and then you replaced our highly nutritious diet of poi and fish with spam, white rice, and soy sauce. Why are you blaming thi... |
If you're working in Seattle for Amazon and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, you have far fewer opportunities. Where are you going to go, Microsoft? There's not nearly as much mobility. So I think a big part of the reason we have less organizing is that people are more afraid to jeopardi... | Statistically it is also more likely that an Amazon employee will have a family than a Google employee. So that’s another factor that makes people more risk-averse. Why should they do something that would potentially jeopardize their job? Particularly when it has a low chance of success? As you pointed out, one of the... |
Taking venture funding can also involve surrendering a certain amount of control, although the way that venture firms exert influence varies widely. At an early-stage firm like the one where I work, we engage in so-called “soft advising.” By contrast, venture firms that invest at a later stage usually hold seats on the... | The Masters of the Masters of the Universe To a startup founder seeking financing, venture capitalists might look like masters of the universe. But they answer to higher masters in the form of “limited partners.” These are the masters of the masters of the universe—venture capital’s customers, who supply most of the ca... |
Rather, big data describes a particular way of acquiring and organizing information that is increasingly indispensable to the economy as a whole. When you think about big data, you shouldn’t just think about Google and Facebook; you should think about manufacturing and retail and logistics and healthcare. You should th... | Understanding big data, then, is crucial for understanding what capitalism currently is and what it is becoming—and how we might transform it. What Makes Data Big? As long as capitalism has existed, data has helped it grow. The boss watches how workers work, and rearranges them to be more efficient—this is a good examp... |
Yet regardless of the critics, the belief in the wisdom of the crowd framed the design of an entire generation of social platforms. Digg and Reddit—both empowered by a system of upvotes and downvotes for sharing links—surfaced the best new things on the web. Amazon ratings helped consumers sort through a long inventory... | Intelligence Failure The platforms inspired by the “wisdom of the crowd” represented an experiment. They tested the hypothesis that large groups of people can self-organize to produce knowledge effectively and ultimately arrive at positive outcomes. In recent years, however, a number of underlying assumptions in this f... |
But the rise and fall of gripe sites are an important chapter in the history of the internet. Gripe sites were far more than a place to complain. Rather, they offered a lively, anonymous outlet for consumers and workers to criticize corporate power, and even to organize against it. As a result, they faced an onslaught ... | Talking Shit In 2004 there were around 7,800 .com websites that included company names and derisive slang verbs like “sucks” or “blows.” They were so popular in the early 2000s that Forbes even published several annual “Top Corporate Hate Websites” articles, ranking gripe sites on criteria like “ease of use, frequency ... |
No Bosses, No Knife Missiles I want to switch gears and ask you about labor organizing and union busting at NPM. I found a GitHub gist that you published in 2015, titled “A Feminist Hacker's Guide to Labor Organizing,” a year or so before Trump’s election sparked the current wave of white-collar tech worker organizing.... | Labor organizing is a solution. It helps us leverage what we have, which is people—multiples of people—against these institutions. But it requires that workers are informed and talking to each other. In many ways, it’s like organizing an open source project: we have people, we have a need, how do we share what we know ... |
Logistics and Translations Each of these three labor forces—the internal team, the crowdworkers, and the flaggers—is an answer to the problem of moderation at scale. Each provides a way for either a few people to do a great deal with limited resources, or for a lot of people to each do a little, together. | The challenge of content moderation, then, is as much about the coordination of work as it is about making judgments. What the press or disgruntled users might see as mistaken or hypocritical might be the result of slippage between these divisions of labor—between what is allowed and what is flagged; between how a poli... |
So in order to be ethical, in order to be moral, in order to be decent, in order to be kind, in order to have a society that’s functional, in order to even tell if your technology is working well or not, you have to grant a specialness to that thing we call a person. And that’s what I mean by humanism. | Virtual Reality as a Medium GW: I love that. Now, I want to turn towards how these ideas relate to your work on virtual reality. As you know, I’ve never experienced virtual reality myself. But you’ve told me how much you’ve learned about human sensory perception from working on virtual reality. And I wonder whether an ... |
EJ expresses a variation on a familiar techno-utopian theme: networked digital technology will destroy the gap between bodies separated by geography, nationality, gender, class, and age. But this new proximity would come on very specific terms: the future will have arrived once the female can reach out to manipulate th... | Although the company promoted the device using scientifistic jargon that suggested a devotion to achieving some absolute standard of fidelity to the haptic real of sex, the RealTouch Interactive produced instead a particular, heterosexual male fantasy of female sexuality—one where the female body was reduced to particu... |
That’s supposed to help correct gendered pay discrepancies. But it doesn’t really work, because there are all sorts of escape hatches built in. Salary bands only cover your salary. There’s lots of other ways that people get paid. As we discussed, talent acquisition is one of them. Talent acquisition gives companies a w... | When you take an offer at a company, you’re given either stock options or grants of shares in the company. Those options or grants vest over a four-year schedule. And there’s really no restriction on how high that can go. So for a lot of people, a majority of total compensation comes from stock. Salary typically tops o... |
Yet somehow, people have always found plenty to say. And much of what they’ve said, using one technology or another, has been dirty. Indeed, as soon as humans build new tools for transmitting words, sounds, and images, they start using those tools to get each other off. From erotic daguerreotypes to Skinemax, “blue fil... | The internet, however, marked a significant advance. It’s hard to imagine a more accommodating medium for human sexuality. Not only is it infinite in its form—its packets can carry anything that can be encoded as information, from text to video to VR—but it’s limitless in its content, since that content can so easily b... |
I’m thinking of Alyssa Battistoni’s piece for us on Biosphere 2, or Miriam Posner’s piece for us on supply chain software. Those pieces have a normative and critical dimension, but they’re mostly trying to describe how a system works. AB: There’s always an argument you’re making implicitly along the way, just by virtu... | JF: As editors, how do you motivate writers to make that journey? I sometimes feel like you have to play the role of coach, cheerleader, and psychiatrist all at the same time. I know that you spent a lot of time having conversations with people even before they had something to pitch—just to hear about what they were w... |
The real-life Anne shared many of the same talents and characteristics as the fictional one. She was also young, white, and had technical skills. The fictional Anne enjoys an exciting career in a growing field, as she proves her knack for technical work, laboring with quiet diligence each day on a secret, high-tech air... | As women, neither the real Anne nor the imaginary one was making an unusual decision to put their career behind their other life goals. In fact, each was making the socially expected, and strongly encouraged, choice. In the book, Anne stays in the workforce after marriage, but only after being admonished that she must ... |
Another way to use the analytic suite is to paint a detailed picture of the population of interest in an area. One officer explained this: The big thing that Palantir offers is a mapping system. So, you could draw out a section of [his division] and say, “Okay, give me the parolees that live in this area that are known... | A Palantir software engineer spoke of the gang unit monitoring entire networks of people: “Huge, huge network. They’re going to maintain this whole entire network and all the information about it within Palantir.” Palantir, one sergeant explained, is also an “operational game changer”: it gives him the data he needs to... |
For the next several weeks, I deliberately avoided opening my feedback summaries. I stocked my vehicle with water bottles, breakfast bars and miscellaneous mini candies to inspire riders to smash that fifth star. I developed a borderline-obsessive vacuuming habit and upped my car-wash game from twice a week to every ot... | Aggressively Managing Freedom The language of choice, freedom, and autonomy saturate discussions of ride hailing. “On-demand companies are pointing the way to a more promising future, where people have more freedom to choose when and where they work,” Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber, wrote in Octobe... |
1/ As we close this issue, COVID-19 case numbers are surging across the European Union, and if they are not yet as high in North America, it seems to be mostly for a lack of tests. Oil prices are plunging, the Dow Jones is plunging, and Ted Cruz is in voluntary self-quarantine. New York State prisoners are making hand ... | For months, prominent figures in the tech industry have been warning that it will get worse before it gets better. In February, Recode reported that the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz was already on high alert, canceling employee travel to China and banning handshakes in the office. In early March, Sequoia Cap... |
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The text of all the articles from Logic Magazine issues 1-18, in a prompt/response format, in JSONL.
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