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I wanted the book to be less about what happens in Silicon Valley and more about what happens in our lives. In particular, I wanted it to be about what happens in the lives of people in India and Cambodia and Turkey and Brazil. Often our policy debates about Facebook are all about Trump and the United States and how th... | How is Facebook eroding democracy in other countries? Let’s start with India. If you look at what Prime Minister Narendra Modi did with Facebook to promote his campaign in 2014, he was building on a long career of using social media. His success taught others of his ilk—like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines—that Face... |
And for them, the law of repeat business reveals its ugly side. “None of this litigation happens in this industry, because nobody wants to be blackballed,” my anonymous lawyer says. Or, as an angel investor puts it, it’s important that even a failed venture “facilitates the founder’s story.” Something similar seems to ... | That’s the funny part of the tech industry’s narrative about itself. For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal. Taxicab companies are going out of business because they’re losing money? Creative destruction, my friend—sink or swim. Uber hemorrhages cash? Well, that’s just a s... |
The prevailing account of computer dating’s origins is the same kind of stylized informational portrait that you might put up on an online dating website. It hides a lot and only shows the things that you think people want to see. Brilliant young men of privileged backgrounds taking a risk by applying machines to a rea... | No Meetcute In 1953 a young woman named Joan Ball stepped out of a mental hospital in England. Her mother had beaten her and ended up abandoning her—to say nothing of verbally and psychologically abusing her. When she ended up in the hospital, she found more of the same. In an era before mental illness was well-underst... |
At a typical fulfillment center, certain workers unpack products arriving from manufacturers and suppliers; others stow them amid vast rows of shelves; and “pickers” fulfill orders by grabbing the correct items from the shelves and putting them in a tote, which is conveyed to “packers” who prepare the order for shipmen... | The scanner is a powerful surveillance tool. It records your productivity rate — displaying it on its interface — as well as the time between subsequent scans (aka Time Off Task or TOT). If your TOT exceeds fifteen minutes or your rate falls below the prescribed speed for the day, you’ll get a visit from a manager or a... |
Above: the original, correctly classified inputs. Below: the incorrectly classified inputs, post-perturbation. The writer Evan Calder Williams defines sabotage as: the impossibly small difference between exceptional failures and business as usual, connected by the fact that the very same properties and tendencies enabl... | Serendipitously, this is the literal mechanic by which the universal perturbation algorithm works. An object recognition neural network, for instance, takes an image and maps it to a point in some abstract space. Different regions of this space correspond to different labels—so an image of a coffee maker ideally maps t... |
The danger of TCE exposure is that it is carcinogenic and can impair fetal development. The chemical penetrated deep into the groundwater as a liquid and then began to evaporate, moving through air pockets in the soil. This migration continued through cracks in the foundations of homes and buildings, creating an indoor... | Endicott proves that it is only through extraction, refinement, and manufacturing that computational feats of any kind are possible. The machine is made of materials from the earth: copper, gold, nickel, silicon. In order to purify, clean, and combine its pieces, intensive chemical baths are used. The computers and sma... |
Of course, human efforts to achieve particular ends by introducing new species don’t always go well. The genre of stories about “invasive species” is one of the most reliable sources of cautionary tales about unintended consequences of human meddling in nature. The East Asian vine kudzu, for example, was widely planted... | Of course, Biosphere 2 didn’t just rely on human labor to help nature function. Its vast technosphere was built expressly to fill in for Earth systems like ocean currents and water cycles. Biosphere 1 now has a rather substantial technosphere of its own, currently constituting 30 trillion tons of human artifacts, from ... |
Autopilot’s enabled for this region, though I’m quick to shut it off. The highway’s riddled with flooding issues now, and I doubt the car could keep up. As we exit the parking lot and get on the road, Aluna and I pass the low, inflated lozenges of the refugee tents, pinned to the soil with near-invisible lines of rope.... | *** There was once a time—probably late ’50s, early ’60s—when vehicular windshield HUDs were an inescapable trend of automotive design. Glowing, transparent skins hemmed glass borders, providing location-specific updates, weather, and navigation tips. By then, every other American had a retina display, though the AR no... |
So we tried to build a bunch of different apps. None of them found a huge amount of success. But the last one we tried, a social app for making plans with friends, did well enough to get some attention from TechCrunch and other places in the tech press. It was fun, but scary. Because we always knew that if one of the t... | But you didn’t. Not exactly. But after a year, we were still living off our savings. It was clear that we either needed to get funding, get a job, or get acquired. Around this time, we went to an up-and-coming company to ask them whether they would give us access to their private API. They said, essentially, “No way. Y... |
What is the Carceral Tech Resistance Network? The Carceral Tech Resistance Network (CTRN) is a coalition of organizers who are campaigning against the design and experimentation of technologies by police, prisons, border enforcement, and commercial partnerships. We work to abolish the carceral state and its attendant t... | The network was created out of two primary needs: first, we started to realize that these technologies, often rolled out at a local scale, have afterlives—they travel to other contexts, where communities may have less familiarity with them, or no organized base prepared to confront and dismantle them. So there was a ne... |
They ended up inviting me to this crazy meeting in Shanghai that they were having. INBlockchain was running the biggest crypto exchange in China at the time, called Yunbi. They took the hundred biggest Yunbi customers and all their portfolio companies to a secret summit at the Park Hyatt in Shanghai. They also asked if... | When we got to the meeting, I gave the pitch for Stream, the project we were working on. I gave it in Chinese, which totally freaked everyone out. My partner Ben is Chinese-American, but he doesn't speak Mandarin very well. It was funny; I was this white kid on stage giving our pitch in Chinese, and my Chinese partner ... |
Yet this daily deprivation, while at times made visible through popular protests, is largely suffered in silence in the desolate housing blocks of marginalized zones like Iztapalapa. This reality seems worlds away from the gleaming towers of the financial and political elite whose swimming pools never run dry. Across t... | To add insult to injury, the falling water table has provoked severe land subsidence, causing many of the same problems in the periphery that the city center had faced in the decades prior. This has left sewer lines—carefully constructed to flow downhill—flipping like see-saws or simply broken. With even modest rains, ... |
A Pinpoint on Google Maps Although Bogdan had listed his Guantánamo experience on his LinkedIn profile, knowledge about most of the guards that return from Guantánamo is extraordinarily hard to come by. This is largely the result of decisions made by the Pentagon, which worked for years to ensure that most guards’ iden... | The Guantánamo that emerges online tends to be a pinpoint on Google Maps, a small strip of land through which all kinds of people—private contractors, intelligence agents, soldiers, sailors, policymakers, lawyers, journalists—pass through, disappearing in discourse once they leave the base. Google Images almost inevita... |
Prominent tech investors like Eric X. Li have long doubled as defenders of the Communist Party. Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Party membership came to widespread attention when he was honored by the Chinese government as a “reform pioneer” in 2018. The figures who preside over China’s tech boom aren’t all Party members. Bu... | 4. As Chinese-built telecommunications infrastructure breaks ground around the world, as Chinese companies buy American apps like Grindr and offer cloud-computing services from Indonesia to Canada, and as WePay and Alipay become accepted everywhere from duty-free shops in European airports to New York City taxi cabs, i... |
In the same way that computers are automated to fail over to the next system, the app will fail over to the next human if one of them is down. Yeah. If I sleep through an alarm, our escalation is set up to try my team members first. Then my boss, then my boss’s boss, all the way up to the executives. If all of us sleep... | What has happened is that I’ve been paged for something, didn’t know how to deal with it, and then paged someone else to wake them up to help. How does it feel to do that? I mean, I wish I never had to do that. It sucks, because I know how garbage I feel after I’ve been woken up at that time. But this is actually a pla... |
Yet with the digital era, even this bastion of privateness seems to have fallen. The popularization of the internet and social media, and the fact that they are often accessed through portable devices like smartphones and laptops, has unanchored media consumption from specific sites. The bedroom is now as permeated by ... | Movement Homes The places where politics take place have important consequences for both its form and its content. So what are the implications of the bedroom becoming a place of politics? At the level of form, we see bedrooms everywhere in online life. They have become the contemporary equivalent of the speaker’s podi... |
Once these devices are widespread, it becomes easier to justify accessing the data for prosecutorial, rather than rehabilitative, purposes. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation claims that “GPS has proven to be an effective tool used in supervising offenders who are at high risk of re-offending a... | Sometimes such location information is gathered for the express purpose of prosecuting new crimes, unrelated to any rehabilitative purpose. In a recent case out of New York, a judge finally pushed back. Judge Jack Weinstein ordered the suppression of all evidence gathered through an ankle monitor. He found that law enf... |
But the boss wasn’t the only source of risk in a remote workplace. Without being able to meet face-to-face with their coworkers, organizers also struggled to build relationships. Before the pandemic, such relationships had sustained collective action campaigns. With the lack of a shared physical space, many of these fa... | “It’s harder to do this over a video call than it is in person, because in person you’re gonna see them in the office again in the real world, and it continues to humanize and endear you… When it’s a video call, it’s more structured and a little less humanized.” — Employee at a marketing firm Online, organizers had to ... |
The inspiration for the app came from Reason Digital co-founder Matt Haworth’s work with Manchester Action on Street Health, a sex worker support service. They keep an ugly mugs list, but it’s not updated fast enough—in the time it takes to produce a physical booklet, or even to push new information to their website, a... | Reason Digital worked closely with sex workers from the beginning to develop the app. That’s why the background of the app is black—to prevent the backlight from illuminating the worker’s face and betraying what they’re doing. It’s also why the phone’s location data does not feed back into a database—otherwise, the app... |
How automated would that process be? Are we talking about software making recommendations to human traders, or actually executing trades itself? The level of human oversight varies. Among sophisticated quantitative investors, the process is fairly automatic. The models are being researched and refined almost constantly... | One of the challenges with machine learning is explainability. As the model becomes more complex, it can become harder, even impossible, to explain the results that it generates. This has become a source of concern as public scrutiny of the tech industry has increased, because you have algorithms making decisions that ... |
Sometimes the tools that we need most urgently are the lowest tech. When cutting-edge fertility medicine fails, you can find counsel and comfort in a decades-old web forum. Sometimes it may be harder for a blind user to master the Be My Eyes app on his iPhone than to call a friend. Sometimes the benefits we get from to... | 3/ In the past decade, cheaper and smaller computers have brought cyberspace into meatspace. Now that the internet is everywhere, it is not only tracking our bodies. It is changing them, too. What even is a body? It may seem like the original ground truth. But the word is also a metaphor. It can mean anything we are s... |
For example, from what we know about the companies operating in the oil market in Uganda, we can reasonably assume that they’re employing some security firm like NSO Group to spy on the activists. [Eds. NSO Group is an Israeli spyware company that sells surveillance software to governments.] And we know that the Uganda... | Absolutely. That's the common thread in all of this, and that's my approach with Library Freedom Project. To me, privacy is the Trojan horse. Then when I get in the building, I'm like, “Alright, let's actually talk about capitalism.” Privacy is important, but what we're really talking about is the newest frontier of ex... |
Today, age discrimination is a central feature of the Valley. But another thing to remember about the Valley is that people tend not to live there forever. They migrate in and out. I often think of the Valley as an island. I believe 40 percent of its residents at the moment were not born in the United States. People co... | So do you think Silicon Valley’s obsession with youth is driven more by economic imperatives than the cultural residue of the 1960s? Our society tends to give permission to younger people to do certain kinds of experimenting that also happen to be really valuable inside the tech world. So, for example, we give our youn... |
The night of the action, everyone on the shift was talking on the company buses on the way to work. The idea was to do something in the last hour, during our obligatory overtime, but it ended up starting much earlier. The slowdown took place mostly in the Pick department. The pickers picked one item from the shelves fo... | What happened after that? Retaliation. Amazon interviewed about ten workers and some of them, under pressure, signed a statement saying they took part in the action and regretted it. Amazon only stopped when we made their interrogations public. We defended a woman in court who was fired afterwards—or, she was not tech... |
That said, it depends on the platform. Content moderation doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Take Twitter. Rose McGowan was a good example of what automatic flagging looks like in terms of doxxing. They figured out what a phone number looks like: it’s a parenthesis, three numbers, end parenthesis, three numbers... | At Twitter, they’re trying to fix things with code first, instead of hiring smarter people. And that can be really problematic. I don’t think Twitter knows enough about harassment. They’re trying to solve problems in a way that they think is smart and scalable. To them, that means relying on autonomous systems using al... |
To identify whether someone was such a patient, and what treatments should be made available, Benjamin built his book around his Sex Orientation Scale, often known simply as the Benjamin Scale. The Sexual Orientation Scale from Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). Courtesy of the Digital Transgender Arc... | A doctor using the Benjamin Scale would first work to understand the patient, their life, and their state of mind, and then classify them into one of the six “types.” Based on that classification, the doctor would determine what the appropriate treatment options might be. For Type V or Type VI patients, often grouped a... |
When Lange and Lerner were writing, modern digital computing didn’t exist. But at the end of Lange’s life, as computers emerged, he discussed the possibility that they could perform this price-guessing work far better than humans. This line of thinking has been taken up by contemporary digital socialists, who point to ... | As Mises’s student Friedrich Hayek later emphasized, an economy is not a set of equations waiting to be solved, either with a capitalist price system or a socialist computer. It is better understood as a network of decision-makers, each with their own motivation, using information to make decisions, and generating info... |
— Del Harvey, Vice President of Trust and Safety at Twitter, from “Protecting Twitter Users (Sometimes from Themselves),” March 2014. Scale and size, though, are not the same thing at all. If we think about simple massification, we might talk about the difference between a single cell and ten million cells, but that’s ... | —Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (2017) Social media platforms must moderate, in some form or another. They must moderate to protect one user from another, or one group from its antagonists. They must moderate to remove offensive, vile, or illegal content. Finally, they mus... |
US thinkers generally welcomed these moves, expecting them to erode the power of the Chinese Communist Party. In March 2000, after the United States reached a deal with China that would lead to WTO accession, President Bill Clinton said Chinese leaders “realize that if they open China's markets to global competition, t... | They believed that the internet would have a similar effect. In the same March 2000 speech, Clinton famously quipped that trying to crack down on the internet was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” “We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society,” Clinton observed. “Imagine... |
What would public options look like in a technological context? Municipally owned broadband networks can provide a public alternative to private ISPs, ensuring equitable access and putting competitive pressure on corporate providers. We might even imagine publicly owned search engines and social media platforms—perhaps... | We can also introduce structural limits on technologies with the goal of precluding dangerous concentrations of power. While much of the debate over big data and privacy has tended to emphasize the concerns of individuals, we might view a robust privacy regime as a kind of structural limit: if firms are precluded from ... |
Virtual Mrs. Dodd Maryann’s experiment with techno-care occurred against the background of significant national investments in nursing. In 1960, the US Public Health Service created a new Division of Nursing tasked with improving patient care, increasing the number of nurses, and ensuring better nursing education. In 1... | That programming was based on the standard of care for pregnancy in the 1960s, which was developed for, and applied to, white women—a bias that reinforced the invisibility of Black women to the medical establishment. (At many hospitals, including Mercy, the nurses, too, were overwhelmingly white; according to an archiv... |
Do landlords do these kinds of evictions in order to get rid of rent control in their buildings? Erin: Indirectly, yes, because they can rent and sell the units for more money if there’s no rent control. In San Francisco, after a landlord uses the Ellis Act to evict tenants from a rent-controlled building, the building... | Azad: I was thinking we could add a feature to EvictorBook that shows how much a landlord profited from an eviction. We have the sale price before and the sale price after. Erin: Oh, yeah, that would be great to see. Azad: It wouldn’t be hard to do. We have all this data that we’re actually not spending much time analy... |
For this reason, Joan had a devil of a time advertising her new endeavor. No respectable newspapers wanted to publish ads for this unseemly type of establishment. So Joan used her creativity and went one better than print media. The people likely to use her service would already be somewhat edgy, and somewhat marginali... | In the 1960s, all news media—and, by extension, entertainment—was regulated by the British government. In part an artifact of the war, and in part the historical result of a strong centralized government, media regulation restricted not just what was said on the BBC, but also what was sung and played. This meant no roc... |
But it’s also an open question as to whether those kinds of resources actually have substitutes. Plastic chairs can substitute for wooden ones, or plastic bags for paper — but can you build a substitute for an entire forest? Can human technologies or human labor substitute for the nonhuman work done by other organisms?... | Neither of these positions is satisfying. It’s true that the Ecomodernists are wildly optimistic about human capacities and willfully obtuse about their limits. But it’s not enough to smugly tut-tut at human hubris while the planet burns. Given how quickly the effects of climate change are materializing, even drastic d... |
My sources are quite broad because the project is not a finite and finished one, but rather an open framework for addressing the multiple layers of the molecular colonization that currently traps us and the planet in a collective mutagenesis — mutation to our bodies, sex, gender, fellow non-humans, and environment. Ho... | What materials does a person need to make open source estrogen? How much knowledge of chemistry, and how much of code? It is currently out of reach for the average citizen to make estrogen in the kitchen. But even if it were possible, there are many risks involved with dosage and purity. Nonetheless I collaborated with... |
Coding the Invisible Hand Ever since Thomas Hobbes portrayed civilized man trading obedience for protection to escape a perilous “state of nature,” security has been central to the liberal political tradition. Government, Adam Smith proclaimed, exists “for the security of property.” Similarly, John Locke insisted that ... | Today, market logic so suffuses the concept of security that the term literally means property, like the security deposit you make before signing a lease or the “securities” owned by the affluent. It was these ironically-named securities that brought down the global economy in 2008. Traders, using algorithms that coded... |
December 2000 – There are 22.5 million internet users in China. May 2003 – Alibaba launches Taobao, bringing everyday online shopping to consumers and connecting small shops to a broader market. Alibaba, with its intense focus on China’s specific needs, out-competes eBay, which eventually leaves the Chinese market. | 2003 – Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. The spread of SARS news online, combined with the government’s efforts to cover up the severity of the outbreak, demonstrated the ability of internet and mobile phone networks to break the propaganda authorities’ hold on a major story. 2004 – Alipay launches, fa... |
So when the APA’s Task Force on Gender Identity and Gender Variance met in 2008 to write a report updating its approach to questions of gender, one would expect them to take these challenges seriously. And they did address them: in a footnote, after reasserting the validity of the 1970s numbers. Not only that, but the ... | The reason for this response is fairly obvious: power. Professionals in trans healthcare—particularly at GICs—get a lot of their official power and authority from the perception that they are singular experts in all things trans. The Clarke Institute in Canada, for example, was for the longest time the Canadian governm... |
What did you do if you were stuck on something outside of class? No one was there to help. Could you all work through it together? What was that problem-solving like? We would just have to theorize about things and maybe write them down. Some of the guys actually had their own study sessions in the gym. They would meet... | Did lockdowns happen frequently? There’s a lockdown right now. I would say it happens two or three times a year. You just never know when—or for what. This time they said one of the officers lost a bullet. I call it the magic bullet because it seems to happen about once a year. All of a sudden a bullet is missing, and ... |
How do you see crypto mediating trust in China? In China, crypto provides two things that are really nice. The first is to provide automatic transactions that denies parties the opportunity to cheat. I can swap thing Y for thing X, and it just happens, with no counterparty risk. The second is that crypto transactions h... | The Chinese government is excited about blockchains, and that’s part of the reason why. There is a huge problem in China with corruption, and blockchains bring increased transparency. What’s your take on all the big companies like Alibaba getting into the blockchain space? It strikes me as a classic innovator's dilemma... |
A young securities analyst named Arthur Rock tried to find funding for them. He pitched thirty large aerospace and electronics companies. All refused. The only place they could secure financing from was a failing aerial camera manufacturer named Fairchild. Its founder, Sherman Fairchild, was an eccentric bachelor who h... | They eventually closed the deal. Those eight engineers—the “Traitorous Eight”—would go on to form Fairchild Semiconductor through a $1.38 million loan from Fairchild Camera for their first eighteen months of operation. And Rock would in turn become one of Silicon Valley’s very first venture capitalists. He would later ... |
Using the language of open-source programming communities, g0v claims that its goal is to “fork the government.” Digital Minister Audrey Tang, who is herself a veteran of the Sunflower Movement and a longtime contributor to g0v, explained the concept to me. Essentially, it means that g0v hackers produce alternative ver... | When the pandemic began, g0v responded creatively, using its “fork the government” model to help the authorities contain the virus. Perhaps the best known example is the collection of digital tools—apps, maps, chatbots—that g0v hackers created to make it easier for the public to buy masks through the government’s mask-... |
So I think a lot of the strong AI stuff is like that. A lot of data science is like that too. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a bunch of people who got PhDs in the wrong thing, and realized they wanted to have a job. Another way of looking at it—I think the most positive way, which is maybe a bit contrarian—i... | As someone who tries not to sell fraudulent solutions to people, it actually has made my life significantly better because you can say “big data machine learning,” and people will be like, “Oh, I’ve heard of that, I want that.” It makes it way easier to sell them something than having to explain this complex series of ... |
Continuations Khadijah and Xiaowei will be building upon the foundational infrastructure and editing that has been a labor of love by a network of people over the past six years. This includes: Jim Fingal, Christa Hartsock, Ben Tarnoff, Moira Weigel, Celine Nguyen, Jen Kagan, Alex Blasdel, Sarah Burke, Max Read, Aliyah... | It seemed like half of Los Angeles had turned out for boat tours at the Port of Long Beach: parents corralling toddlers, couples on dates, even dog owners in line for pet-friendly tours. The port offers free guided tours to the public once a year, a sort of goodwill gesture to the community that has suffered decades of... |
The flip side is that the entire financial industry also has an incentive to encourage people who don’t know as much as them to give them money to do all the things that ordinary investors don’t know about. “Give me money to use a machine learning technique to manage your money, even if the machine learning technique d... | What is the mechanism that’s going to eliminate that? Well, it’s the recognition that the industry as a whole may be getting paid far in excess of the value it’s providing. How does that recognition actually begin to remake the industry, and what role will new technologies play in that process? The short answer is that... |
Forms of platform labor organizing in Jakarta and Bengaluru reflect some of the varied strategies workers in the Global South have adopted to survive and transform their precarious working conditions—low pay, a lack of standard contracts or benefits, physical danger, and threats of violence. In both cities, mobility pl... | Basecamp In Jakarta, Mba Mar, a ridehail motorbike driver, spends more time at her driver community’s basecamp than she does at home. In this roadside shelter, constructed over the course of a year by her community of ojol, or mobility platform drivers, she dispenses advice to new drivers, charges her cellphone, catche... |
Although I do really like Westworld. I was going to ask you about that. It’s like there’s this particular media moment right now—there’s a lot of good television that revolves around these questions, it’s science fiction but it’s increasingly closer to reality, at least in the popular imagination. So like Westworld, or... | The rate of progress in AI over the past decade has been astounding. Ten years ago, Go was something that would never be solved by anybody, and now it’s there. That required tremendous leaps forward. And so I think that although the popular imagination is always going to be leaps and bounds ahead of what’s realistic, a... |
Despite the staggering number of satellites, the business of capturing satellite imagery is dominated by a small number of major players. DigitalGlobe and Orbital Sciences (by then called GeoEye) merged in 2013; the resulting corporation, Maxar Technologies, became the largest satellite imagery company in the United St... | The GEOINT Singularity Thanks to their size and technological advantages, Maxar and Planet have become the go-to suppliers of satellite imagery used to document everything from tornado damage to the 2021–2022 military actions in Ukraine. According to its own statements, Maxar “provides 90 percent of the foundational ge... |
TM: We are very reactive when things happen because there are no conversations being held with our community about changes being made. That flow of information seems to not flow to us in the way that it should, which is where I want OBA to be able to step in. I want us to be a hub. A lot of these technology companies, ... | Housing and (De)Funding The Police As far as the gang database, who gets categorized as a gang? You mentioned that National Grid is putting poisonous gas under the ground, affecting a lot of people. Nobody is calling them a gang, right? But if you’re fifteen years old, Black, with certain colors on, you’re more likely ... |
The offline vs. online efficiency question is an interesting one that I am not sure I have an answer to. I’ve always found talks and conferences and such kind of odd because, when you go to them, you are speaking to a few dozen people and maybe a couple hundred at most. But if I deliver the same content online, I can e... | The kind of offline work that I suspect is really valuable is paradoxically the stuff that is the most private: meeting with politicians’ staff, the editors of other publications, and that sort of thing. I do more of that than I do big public appearances. We’d love to hear your broader thoughts on the prospects of usin... |
Sextech, by contrast, steers clear of this radical message. Some sextech looks radical, but it essentially rephrases watered-down feminist insights for a general audience, and musters new data in order to teach old-fashioned communication skills. At its best, sextech treats women’s sexuality not as a pathology requirin... | As a counterpoint, it’s useful to consider one of the pioneers of sextech, and sexual revolution: Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s visionary, utopian, and at moments utterly barmy schemes were predicated on Marxist politics. Reich preached the power of sex and libido as a source of “bioenergy” in his work The Function of the Org... |
If one expands the set of comparisons on police and military stockpiles to other OECD states, America also starts to resemble our unfortunate next-door neighbor Mexico. There, civilian rates of legal gun ownership are quite low—but Mexico is also where ongoing violence between drug cartels and security forces generates... | But then there are our other peers, in Canada, Western Europe, and the Scandinavian countries. Much beloved as go-to benchmarks of stability and low gun crime for liberal American pundits, these states also have surprisingly large quantities of guns, civilian and otherwise. What deeper structure produces this strange s... |
As a way to figure out what writers and artists would actually want to use, we decided to create a magazine called COMPOST. It’s an initial use-case for the tool—the magazine is a lab for Distributed Press in a way. We decided to make the project even more meta, and make the magazine itself about the digital commons, w... | There are different ways that we see Distributed Press as a budding digital commons project. It’s a free and open source tool, and we’re also contributing to these distributed protocols and projects upstream—as part of this work, Ben filed tickets with IPFS, Beaker Browser, and Hypercore. When he’d come across things t... |
On November 8, 2018, a live 115 kV line broke off from a transmission tower owned by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) in Northern California. The tower was ninety-nine years old—twenty-five years past the expiration of its planned operating lifetime. The wire hit some vegetation and set it alight. The fire rap... | The destruction of Paradise was the result of interlocking trends within capitalism, technology, and ecology—as are other recent catastrophes of power infrastructure, such as the February 2021 outage in Texas that had me revising this essay in the cold and dark. The transmission and distribution grid is arguably the ve... |
That seems like it gives you the opportunity to curate the conversation around “what we are talking about when we talk about the distributed web.” The DWeb Principles came out of that vacuum of political agnosticism, to identify what it is that we are actually saying when we say we want to “decentralize” the web. We we... | Putting the principles into practice requires recognizing our own needs and addressing them in creative ways in solidarity with others. That is what centralized top-down systems cannot do—create locally-situated networks of communication that emerge out of the imagination of people who live in their unique economic, so... |
Another internet phenomenon that fascinates me is live cams: these websites where you can go and watch couples having sex in a very exhibitionist way. You can see the same couple day after day after day and get a sense of them as human beings, of the narratives of their lives. That’s really fascinating in the way that ... | Really, our whole sense of intimacy has been utterly transformed. And that’s true even without porn, when you think about how porous our privacy has become because of social media, and how much of our private lives we share. It’s fascinating. And it’s scary. And yeah, I guess I feel as ambivalent about it as I do about... |
Curiously, however, the origins of these very same AI systems now installed in mail processing plants—known as “deep” neural networks—can be traced back to the USPS. In the late 1980s, a young researcher at AT&T named Yann LeCun began to experiment with neural networks using a dataset provided by the Postal Service. It... | Just a few years before LeCun was given access to the formative ZIP code dataset, the USPS had been forced to acquiesce to AT&T on another front. Despite message volume increasing by a factor of ten in its first two years, the USPS’s ambitious E-COM program—a proto-email system—was discontinued after pushback from the ... |
What is a termed position? And what are the other positions available in government, whether salary or contract? The federal government has four positions that I’m aware of. You have general service (GS) employees, who are salaried employees who work for the federal government. They’re somewhere between GS-1 and GS-15,... | Then there are people like me, termed service. To make my position valuable, they let me slide into GS-15 step 8, which is two steps below the maximum salary of GS-15 step 10. They try to match our salaries from the private sector. They couldn’t—they could only match two thirds of what you make in fintech in New York. ... |
That’s what I think makes the GSA’s Centers of Excellence (CoE) so special; because the CoE is a part of the federal acquisition service, we can cut that time down to get a new system. But there is value in people like me, people who are angry at the way government works, sticking around for five years, for ten years t... | Right now, government is shortcutting the hiring process with termed employees like me who have short two-year stints to try to make change. I don’t think that’s effective because you need someone to stay and see it through. Especially for an organization like the federal government where, every four years, regardless ... |
Such a movement will require a broad, organized assault on the neoliberal political apparatus. Had I the recipe for such a program, I would gladly share it. However, I am confident that our economy can be, if not remade, at least equalized, and the bootstrapping cycle broken by the people within these institutions. Th... | Strategically, both sides need each other. The helping professionals are few in number, and state and capital can easily paint their protests as a dereliction of sacred duties (e.g., “teacher strikes hurt kids”). They need support from the communities they serve in order to stand up to this political pressure. On the o... |
So I'm still thinking about labor and open source and access in tech, but there are some life or death issues in front of us that software is not going to solve. The technology industry has landed at this point where it is not separable from prisons, policing, and surveillance. If companies are there to make the profit... | Amazon is a huge and complex organization. How should we think about it as a whole? Amazon is an opportunistic corporation. It invests in businesses where we think we have a competitive advantage. In general, Amazon thinks of itself as a technology company. So we put the technology first, whatever the product is that w... |
Doing so will require acknowledging how the material substrate of our lives is intimately, and often violently, connected to ecosystems and people beyond our borders. Trade, production, and consumption could, in theory, be reorganized to prioritize climate safety, socio-economic equality, Indigenous rights, and the int... | Let’s begin at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood? I grew up in Denver, in the kind of white, middle-class neighborhood where people had gotten mortgages to build housing after the war. My father was a sportswriter. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I probably saw seventy baseball ga... |
Still, the mining rigs in the Collins household run most hours of the day. And so does Cassie’s trading. “If something comes up, I’ll drop everything to look at the chart… I can think of times that I’ve been pulled out of bed at three in the morning when my husband has seen something on my phone,” Cassie says. Even tho... | Then disaster struck. Within a month of DAO’s launch, a hacker found a hole in the code and began to drain funds out at a rate of $4,000 worth of Ether every three or four minutes. The attack ran into its own bug six hours after it began, but the hole was still exposed. The Ethereum community was divided over how to re... |
2/ Viral, we call content that spreads quickly by means of preexisting bodies and behaviors. A virus takes our tendencies to make new cells, or touch one another, or share a laugh, and turns them to its own sole purpose: self-propagation. What makes something catch on is a subject of much speculation. What is clear is ... | In one sense, the dynamics that it explores are not new. The rise of capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided some insurance against the whims of, say, the weather. Labor markets promised to free workers from physical coercion: rather than toiling on the particular piece of land where you happened t... |
This Victorian Jekyll-and-Hyde model of desire and sexuality informs the recent bestseller Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Stephens-Davidowitz, who holds a PhD in economics and worked briefly at Google as a data scientist, claims that for his sections on pornography he was given access to “the Pornhub data,... | The many pieces of clickbait that claim to illuminate these desires by drawing on Pornhub Insights are often ridiculous. “While interest may be hot and heavy,” Mashable wrote in 2017 about the supposed rise in searches for fidget spinner porn, “what you’ll actually find on Pornhub is pretty hilarious. It’s just a lot o... |
RECs are also moving beyond electricity, making use of their existing network of electric poles to build out fiberoptic networks and connect their rural members to high-speed internet. Perhaps even more ambitiously, some co-ops are stepping into the world of ecology. Roanoke EC, in eastern North Carolina, is running a ... | An electric co-op entering the world of land management is not quite as random as it may seem. Power transmission and distribution systems require extensive land management in order to ensure that trees and foliage do not interfere with electrical lines and poles, and vice versa. And, as the wildfires in California hav... |
But panics over new firearms technologies are older than plastic guns or action movies. So are grandiose techno-futurist claims. The American-born Hiram Maxim, inventor of the first real machine gun, confidently predicted that his creation would actually “make war impossible,” rather than producing more lethal conflict... | Evaluating the prophecies of gun futurists, then, the novelty (or lack thereof) of their inventions seems less important than the question of what problems, exactly, they claim to solve. And, by the same token, our collective fascination with gun futurism—our reactions, variously hopeful or hysterical, utopian or bleak... |
But if cellular agriculture is going to improve on the system it is displacing, then the critics are right: it needs to grow in a way that doesn’t externalize the real costs of production onto workers, consumers, and the environment. There are serious questions about whether production can scale up safely and affordabl... | While some cellular agriculture research is being carried out at public universities with support from NGOs, most research and development is being done privately. Substantial capital is needed for research, development, and commercialization. But that the private sector sees potential in a technology that governments ... |
Machine-breaking is often a good idea; for more ideas, we can turn to other movements. Tech workers are taking collective action against contracts with the Pentagon and ICE, and demanding an end to gendered discrimination and harassment. Gig workers for platforms like Uber are organizing for better wages, benefits, and... | “It’s kinda like the Parthenon now, it’s a testament to something…” —Nick Bongiorno, former IBM temp worker and activist The IBM country club on a hill overlooking Endicott, New York has been empty for thirteen years. Now beyond repair, it was once abuzz with the activity of some 14,000 IBMers and their families. Ther... |
JF: Yeah, with physical magazine distribution there’s usually a 50-50 split with the distributor, and then it’s expected that they’ll sell about 50% of those, meaning you usually expect to make 25% of cover price at best as the producer. It’s standard for it to be a quasi-consignment set up with the distributor where t... | CH: Things are even more complicated for magazines, since the previous issue basically deadstock once the next issue arrives. They don’t have the shelf life of books in the eyes of distributors. Anne Trubek who runs Belt Publishing writes a lot about the economics of small publishers, including working with distributor... |
Today, a growing number of people are thinking about how to regulate Big Tech. Think tanks are studying the complex interactions between social and technical systems, and proposing ways to make them fairer and more accountable. Journalists are investigating how platforms and algorithms actually function, and what’s at ... | But while all of this has been crucial in refocusing the public conversation, it needs to go further. We won’t fix Big Tech with better public policy alone. We also need better language. We need new metaphors, a new discourse, a new set of symbols that illuminate how these companies work, how they are rewiring our worl... |
To top it off, the interface is addicting: cartoon-like icons on a red background; daily lotteries and games through which shoppers can win further discounts; and the ability to share your finds and recruit friends to buy together via WeChat, China’s biggest social media app. These attractions helped make PDD the young... | Paper Towels and Tasty Fruits The countryside has immense importance to the Chinese Communist Party. Urban population only surpassed the rural population for the first time in 2011, and over forty percent of Chinese citizens still live outside cities. Economic development—and in particular, bringing an estimated 1.3 mi... |
But one of the reasons that the Tea Party came to power was that they organized—they built institutions. So the challenge for those of us who want a different world is not to simply trust that the expressive variety that the internet permits is the key to freedom. Rather, we need to seek a kind of freedom that involves... | The New Communalists believed that the micro-world was where politics happened. If we could just build a better micro-world, we could live by example to create a better world for the whole. I think that’s wrong. Our challenge is to build a world that takes responsibility for people not like ourselves. And it’s a challe... |
My assemblywoman responded to my letter, and shared it with the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation. An inquiry was initiated; I heard through the grapevine that the agency had to go through a full audit. As for the allegation of child abuse, I eventually beat the case and received a letter from the ... | I was financially poor but professionally fortunate to have connections who put me in touch with various family defense clinics in the city to ask for advice about my case. Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While... |
Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi got plenty of press attention a few years later with similar comments. “It’s not just going to be in the fast food business,” Rensi said. “If you can’t get people a reasonable wage, you’re going to get machines to do the work… And the more you push this it’ll just happen faster.” Employer... | Soon after making these remarks, Rensi provided gloating commentary for Forbes.com that his warnings about automation had already proven true. “Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide,” boasted the headline. Rensi could barely contain his glee—though he di... |
Beyond answering phones I assume you’re also monitoring security cameras. How much of the job is that? People always assume someone is watching a camera at all times. I can 100 percent say no one is watching a camera at any time. We might have some up for peripherally keeping an eye on trouble spots. For the most part,... | So in manufacturing, beyond security and managing the infrastructure or assets of the tech company, it sounds like there is also a level of surveillance over the work that people are doing? In a way. They have cameras on the production itself. It’s more a matter of making sure that if there is damage done, the person ... |
We have to be in community. We have to be in conversation. And we also have to recognize what our piece of the puzzle is ours to work on. While it is true, yes, we’re just individual people, together we’re a lot of people and we can shift the zeitgeist and make the immorality of what the tech sector is doing—through al... | I mean, I fuck with that. We need allyship in the form of funneling actual, material support out of these Western institutions. In July 2019, one of us, Khalid Alexander, received a tip from a fellow San Diego community organizer. “You should be paying attention to the city’s new streetlights.” The message continued, “... |
Like every other piece of legacy software, when you work with it long enough it shapes the organization around it. Workflows are created to handle the limitations and people like me start building bits and pieces on top of it to make it better so that the workflow can become better. And what you end up with is a whole ... | How did you feel about your job at the time? Initially, I was very grateful because I wasn’t driving a truck. Being the clever guy who can do these reports when everybody else gets stuck was exciting for a while. But then I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. You just have to copy and paste, change t... |
Tindering Gitmo If Guantánamo is more than a physical detention camp, if it is also a network of people and ideologies that have successfully implemented the continuous extrajudicial detention of individuals, then how can researchers, reporters, and future generations trace its contours online, and formulate questions ... | I considered different platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Reddit—where current and former guards might hover. All seemed too public—except Tinder. And so, in the summer of 2017, I plugged in a little personal information about myself on the app, geolocated to Guantánamo, and began to chat with men who were stationed there. I... |
The Los Angeles Police Department’s Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division (RACR) is housed in a hulking, institutional-gray building about a mile north of downtown. Its only marking is its address: 500. In the fall of 2013, I had an early morning meeting there with Doug, a “forward-deployed” engineer from P... | Palantir’s goal is to create a single data environment, or “full data ecosystem,” that integrates hundreds of millions of data points into a single search. Before Palantir, officers and analysts conducted mostly one-off searches in siloed systems: one to look up a rap sheet, another to search a license plate, another t... |
Imagine the world as a strange apple. The depressions at both poles are deformed and deepened until they connect, turning into a doughnut. The skin of the apple, meanwhile, remains intact and can slide up and down the “hole” of the doughnut like an endless treadmill. The observer is situated somewhere in the hole, and ... | More fantastically, as the observer moves towards any point in the wall of the doughnut, the point would automatically open up, expand and surround the observer in a new doughnut-view. A perfect, self-organizing, fractal structure. Hundreds of passengers wriggled under Mimi’s wings, getting impatient. |
Around the end of World War II, the first general-purpose electronic computers were introduced. The data being entered into these machines was numerical, it was subjected to mechanically coded mathematical formulae, and the output was a solved equation. An amazing innovation, and one that—provided the inputs were enter... | Machine learning sorts through vast amounts of chaotic data and, using adaptive algorithms, closes in on specific arrangements of information while excluding other possible interpretations. But, in order for any computation to occur, a process of rationalization must first create machine-readable datasets. Real-world p... |
In contrast to the digital frontiersman of Barlow’s declaration, Indymedia activists built a platform that prioritized communities. Within Indymedia, communities built their own trusted online spaces. Autonomous groups were then connected to others in a common network, with the aim of providing mutual support and mount... | Whether an IMC was started to cover an anti-globalization protest or to serve as a community media outpost, one thing they all shared was a website with some level of “open publishing.” This meant it had a usable interface that made it relatively easy for anyone to post on the central newswire. Most Indymedia sites had... |
In the middle of the night on March 8, 2018, Feminist Voices was shut down on Weibo because of the “posting of sensitive and illegal information.” After a few hours, the WeChat account was also banned, under the vague charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations.” On its last day, Feminist Voices had 250,000 foll... | After that, the popularity of search terms related to feminism on the Chinese internet plummeted. Obviously, people had gotten the message that feminism was “unpopular” and should be taboo. This represented yet another front in the war that the state had been waging against feminism since 2015. However, this time, the ... |
CH: On top of laying things out, we had to decide how to actually print the books. There’s a cost continuum in printing from print on demand, to digital printing, to offset printing. Print on demand is much more expensive on a per unit basis, and there’s not much discount really as you print more copies. Then there is... | JF: We decided early on to just not do print on demand. I got advice from our friend Gabe Durham who runs Boss Fight Books. He used a lot of print on demand services early on, then eventually moved on to do larger print runs, both because printing individual books is expensive and the quality of print on demand was pre... |
If we’re going to require companies to pay a chunk of their data revenue into a fund, however, we first have to measure that revenue. This isn’t always easy. A company like Facebook, by virtue of its business model, is wholly dependent on data extraction—all its revenue is data revenue. But most companies don’t fall in... | Boeing, for instance, uses big data to help manufacture and maintain its planes. A 787 can produce more than half a terabyte of data per flight, thanks to sensors attached to various components like the engines and the landing gear. This information is then analyzed for insights into how to better preserve existing pla... |
In recent decades, we’ve seen a greater destigmatization of mental health. People use terms like depression much more frequently than they used to. But I wonder how far destigmatization has really gone, if 76 percent of people don’t feel comfortable talking about the lived realities of depression while using their real... | Real name policies are motivated, at least in part, by the idea that the ability to be anonymous or pseudonymous on the internet is a major contributor to online toxicity. But what your research reveals is that the same anonymity or pseudonymity can be a life-saver, since it enables kids to discuss mental health issues... |
“I find that infuriating,” Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance told the magazine Next City. “Chattanooga has not only one of the best networks in the nation, but arguably one of the best on Earth and the state legislature is prohibiting ... | Arguments against Chattanooga’s municipal network and others like it usually take up a familiar anti-government line of attack. Critics often point to the high cost of building new broadband infrastructure, which Chattanooga partly covered with a hefty federal stimulus grant. They further argue that this level of state... |
How did you first come across Beer? It was quite serendipitous that Stafford Beer had published his book Decision and Control in 1966, and that Fernando found it in a bookshop while he was visiting New York City. He brought it back to Chile, and a group of us read and discussed the book. At that time, I was a student o... | With great elegance, Beer developed these ideas about how to manage complexity. They appealed to us, because we were not intending to have a centrally planned economy. We were intending to develop organizations that had the capacity to make decisions within themselves to support the development of the economy. |
Are there other features you find especially problematic? Well, the Graph API was a super idealistic and profoundly dumb idea. What’s that? Facebook launched the Graph API in 2010 as an app platform for third-party developers. In exchange for developing apps for Facebook, developers received an extraordinary amount of ... | This was how the Obama campaign in 2012 ended up with the whole social graph of the United States—and probably beyond—after building a Facebook app. They probably had no idea they were going to get all that data. And they quickly had to figure out how to use it. It’s also how Cambridge Analytica obtained the data of mo... |
The story, of course, is more complicated. Internet porn has become a big business, but amateur communities are thriving. Just as millions of little-known SoundCloud musicians didn’t prevent the rise of a megastar like Taylor Swift, the ready availability of free amateur erotic content on spawn-of-newsgroups megasites ... | As for the performers, many are torn between endorsing the “success” narrative being pushed by Big Porn outfits like Pornhub and voicing very real grievances—some of them brought about, in their opinion, by the rise of the tube sites. In September 2018, Pornhub produced their first award show at a historic theater in D... |
No other object is addressed so explicitly or at such length in our Constitution, no matter what you might think of either the Second Amendment itself or the convoluted history of its competing interpretations. And no other object is quite comparable as an icon of contested cultural identities and as a flashpoint for v... | Cognitive psychologists have documented how guns appear to activate our “affect heuristics”: when a senator holds a rifle up for a photo-op on the floor of Congress, or a researcher displays a picture of a gun to a subject in a lab, most people will have some kind of immediate and intense reaction, whether positive or ... |
The Robotic Reserve Army As socialist feminism usefully highlights, capitalism is dedicated to ensuring that as much vital labor as possible goes uncompensated. Fauxtomation must be seen as part of that tendency. It manifests every time we check out and bag our own groceries or order a meal through an online delivery s... | One recent afternoon I stood waiting at a restaurant for a to-go meal that I had ordered the old-fashioned way—by talking to a woman behind the counter and giving her paper money. As I waited for my lunch to be prepared, the man in front of me appeared astonished to receive his food. “How did the app know my order woul... |
A Continuum of Strategies For many people in the Global South, work has long been isolating and uncertain by design. As “low-tech” workers such as platform drivers build community and collective power, they are able to draw on different local histories of resistance, and different methods for negotiating the social and... | Often, in the analysis of gig worker power by academics and observers in the Global North, an absence of unionization is thought to indicate an absence of worker power. Unions in the Global South, though, are not seen as the only or best way to collectivize in these labor regimes. This is not to argue that workers in t... |
When I went to Burning Man, that’s what struck me: I am in the desert. The desert of Israel, from the Bible, under the eye of heaven, and everything I do shall be meaningful. That’s a Protestant idea, a Puritan idea, a tech idea, and a commune idea. All of those come together at Burning Man and that’s one of the reason... | Burning Man has many problems, of course, and I am distressed by many pieces of it. However, there was a moment I had during my first visit when I went two miles out in the desert and I looked back at the city and there was a sign that looked just like a gas station sign and it was turning, the way gas station signs do... |
Under such an arrangement, countries are free to continue burning fossil fuels, so long as they offset their emissions. For this reason, many climate advocates have been critical of net zero as a goal. One common critique is that net-zero pledges won’t stop the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Furth... | Yet net zero is harder than it looks. The difficulty isn’t just political—compelling countries and companies to make promises and abide by them—but epistemological. At the center of net zero is a knowledge problem: How do we know when we’ve gotten to net zero? Answering this question is surprisingly hard. There are tw... |
An Industry is Born Today, the computer security industry and its associated institutions are firmly established. Along with dozens of high-profile companies dedicated to diagnosing, fixing, and preventing breaches, many corporations hire specialized professionals to deal with a host of technical security issues. All o... | This industry hasn’t always existed, of course. It had to be built. And among the most important contributors were underground hackers who enjoyed breaking into systems and sharing what they found with their peers. In the early days of computing, security largely revolved around control of physical access to shared mac... |
In the attention economy, successful platforms find a way to turn more and more of our fun into an opportunity to extract profit. Ironically, the people who make computer games have themselves become highly exploited. Platforms that claim to be public squares or even playing fields can in fact encourage actors to game ... | If the end game of gamification is playing yourself, what would it take to reclaim play? Writers in this issue explore how homo ludens has put and might still put our instinct to better ends. How to build a better “bite”? As we gain new computational powers, we can use them to build and explore virtual alternatives to ... |
The apex—or climax—of the device’s popularity and public visibility came in January 2014, when the machine was featured in the HBO late-night documentary Sex/Now. For only $200—which included free credits for streaming encoded videos over the RealTouch servers, lubrication cartridges, and cleaning fluid—men could buy t... | Over the centuries, technological innovation has made it possible to automate the production of an ever-growing number of goods, from clothes to chemicals to cars. With the RealTouch, AEBN aspired to automate the production of male orgasms. You Can’t Pirate a Rollercoaster When AEBN first hatched the project, they had ... |
Looking at these tech elites who represent the new era of a rising China, I felt as if I were seeing something much larger played out in miniature. And I was forcefully reminded of several recent events that have sparked heated debates in China. Wolf Instincts On August 7, 2018, the founder and CEO of the Chinese sear... | The third piece of explosive news happened during the Burning Man Festival. Liu Qiangdong, also known as Richard Liu, the founder of the online retailing giant JD.com, which has a stock market value of $310 billion, was embroiled in a sexual assault scandal following a night of lavish eating and drinking at a Japanese ... |
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