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In a broader sense, hating COBOL was—and is—part of a struggle between consolidating and protecting computer programmers’ professional prestige on the one hand, and making programming less opaque and more accessible on the other. There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read... | In a field that has elevated boy geniuses and rockstar coders, obscure hacks and complex black-boxed algorithms, it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use—and which was created by a team that included multiple women in positions of authority—would be held in low estee... |
This vision was partially fulfilled: by the mid-1980s, socialist Bulgaria was producing up to 47 percent of all computer hardware within the Eastern Bloc, from Berlin to Vladivostok. But the country still suffered from negligible growth rates and low worker productivity, in part due to the party’s inability to implemen... | In reality, however, the 1980s generation of Bulgarian children found themselves becoming cogs in an economy that continued to suffer shortages, bottlenecks, and scarcity—all of which contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. When that happened, the technological skills and entrepreneurial desires th... |
In November 2016, the British tabloid The Daily Mail published some sensational news: escorts use the Internet just like the rest of us! The paper reported that sex workers had set up a website to rate their clients. With the air of breaking a scandal, journalist Dave Burke described sex workers “comparing notes on cli... | This information was far from new. The online forum in question, SAAFE, had been created by escorts for escorts in 2003. And as Burke himself admitted, SAAFE serves a purpose well beyond rating johns on a ten-point scale. SAAFE stands for Safety and Advice For Escorts, and members use it to share life-saving informatio... |
The role of these systems is not just to reproduce inequalities, but to naturalize them. Capitalist difference-making has always required a substantial amount of ideological labor to sustain it. For hundreds of years, philosophers and priests and scientists and statesmen have had to keep saying, over and over, that som... | It takes a lot of work. Machine learning systems help automate that work. They leverage the supposed authority and neutrality of computers to make the differences generated by capitalism look like differences generated by nature. Because a computer is saying that Black people commit more crime or that women can’t be so... |
The shift from looking at unintended side effects, of leaks for example, to intentionally surfacing or creating side effects reminds me of your project “Unfit Bits.” You and your collaborator Surya Mattu demonstrate all these ways to “hack” a Fitbit by making it register steps when you’re not actually taking them, such... | I haven’t really thought about leaks and “Unfit Bits” together, but that project is also about the manipulation of infrastructure and the deliberate glitching of a dataset for a different political end. Whether you look at leaks in a water system or leaks in an information system like the Panama Papers or the Snowden l... |
These open-world playgrounds extend the opportunity to act in ways often denied to us in the physical world. The criminality of games like Grand Theft Auto and its imitators may grab headlines, but often it’s the far more innocuous moments that feel the most freeing. Spotting something interesting in the distance and r... | The year-on-year growth in computing power means that our open-worlds are growing richer and more immersive all the time. Today, video games can sometimes feel more fulfilling than the real world. The Legend of Zelda was inspired by creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood exploration of the forests and caves around his ho... |
But as it turns out, different units within the FAA had similar records in their possession and redacted them in different ways. The FAA wound up producing the same emails in redacted and unredacted forms, inadvertently revealing how subjective the process really is. What to keep and what to omit appeared to be depende... | The email conversations show FAA employees casting doubt on General Atomics’ claim that their technology is safe. In one email, an FAA employee notes that the company is “worried about getting an approval” and that time will run out before the permit process can be completed because, “as usual, they have diplomats from... |
All of this — Atyrau’s extreme security measures and the steady flow of American businesspeople — comes from the fact that the city is home to Kazakhstan’s biggest and most important oil extraction project. In 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent nation opened its borders to foreign i... | The market is dominated by Amazon’s cloud computing wing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which now makes up more than half of all of Amazon’s operating income. AWS has grown fast: in 2014, its revenue was $4.6 billion; in 2019, it is set to surpass $36 billion. So many companies run on AWS that when one of its most popular... |
Drones are being heralded as revolutionary in agriculture, but they have many known vulnerabilities since their security is essentially unregulated. They can be hijacked, remotely tampered with to return false data, or piloted to infiltrate remote Wi-Fi networks. The US Department of the Interior also sees espionage ri... | The tools of precision agriculture generate valuable datasets, and the value of those datasets corresponds to their size. To give a sense: the largest dairy farm in the world occupies more than 22 million acres and the largest field operation sits on more than 500,000 acres. Data from these operations can move markets.... |
What we’re doing at the Indigenous Futures Institute is we’re really thinking about ways to do that. This work is couched within our design lab and engineering school. We’re intentionally trying to make it as multidisciplinary as possible, but sometimes it’s hard to be disruptive and chaotic in academia. But we’re tryi... | Then there’s the focus on education, educational tools and creating a safe space for all of our Indigenous and historically marginalized communities of people to come, learn, and be productive and innovative. We have a huge focus on sustainability, whether it’s environmental sustainability or looking towards Indigenous... |
The strongest example of this multimodal way of communicating are the parts of the film when my poetry and the oil-paint animations of the British artist Em Cooper converse with each other. In Cooper’s constantly flowing work, no image is static. Figures emerge briefly and then merge into the background, before re-form... | Imagining that technology alone can liberate us is a bit shortsighted and, in some ways, disabling. But, if we imagine the cultivated garden of a speech-based society is the only way of being, then the communication technologies we build will continue to keep us stuck in an inclusion/exclusion binary, in which some bei... |
I mean, everything I’ve ever worked on has failed. I’ve worked on some ambitious projects at several of these big companies, and none of them have succeeded. But I’ve still been rewarded and promoted. And I think that’s a good thing about Silicon Valley. Failure isn’t looked down upon, which is a positive aspect of tec... | When you fail inside a big company, does it still feel like failure? The average time spent on a team is well under two years at most of these big companies. So when a company wants to change direction and abandon a product, people usually don’t take it that hard because they weren’t planning on being there for very lo... |
Scope Creep Given this history, it seems likely that electronic monitoring will continue to become more popular, especially with the advent of new technological capabilities. The state-of-the-art LOC8 device introduces an accelerometer, which measures the user’s movement. This means it can now function as a tracking de... | As the technology improves, an important question technologists must ask is whether we should build these tools, not whether we can. For most wearers of electronic monitors, being out in the world is better than being in prison, even if one is under surveillance. But like many techno-utopian solutions, the reality of e... |
What exactly is a “data body”? Recently, we’ve seen the rise of various tools that let you see the data that companies have about you. But your approach seems more holistic. It’s not just, does Facebook have this data about me, but what are all of the different pieces of data that the government or private companies mi... | That’s what we mean by data bodies. It’s not just the individual; it's the information that's been generated about this individual and the systems that interact to make decisions about this individual, this individual's family, this individual's neighborhood—all the data’s tentacles. In the Digital Defense Playbook, yo... |
It was really neat to see the grassroots unification around inclusive ideals, without having to push for an official set of “values.” In a way it was easy because the company was small. It was about thirty or thirty-five people when I left in 2014. In a group that size, it is pretty easy to have value alignment without... | That’s thirty-five people on the engineering team, or in the whole company? That was the entire company. Oh wow, okay. I didn’t realize it was that small. Yeah, that was what so neat about OkCupid: how many people are reached and impacted by such a small team. You’ve spoken before about the internet literally saving th... |
Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out t... | Several years ago, I spent a lot of time around Google engineers who were connected to the journalism enterprise early on. They had a robust language around information control and management. When the conversation shifted to news, however, they had no idea what the conversation was about. News was something different. |
Target Acquisition Ever since Mel Farr helped popularize the first generation of SIDs, lenders have stood by the claim that SIDs allow them to fill the crucial role of extending credit to people who would otherwise not qualify for the cars they desperately need to get to work—the so-called “subprime” market. According... | This is a multi-billion-dollar market. Auto dealers target these millions of borrowers with low or non-existent credit scores for loans even without SIDs because, despite the potential for default, they can still make money both by inflating car prices and by charging high interest rates. And the market is growing: In ... |
By the 1960s, utility bills, catalogs, advertisements, invoices, receipts, and other forms of impersonal, bulk communication had come to account for more than 80 percent of all mail—clogging up the mailstream, but also providing a critical revenue stream. It was clear to postal management that, on their own, hardware i... | Homegrown alternatives to the Transorma were developed throughout the 1960s, designed specifically to take advantage of the new ZIP system, which theoretically enabled faster keying by workers. As installation expanded, sorting machines began to play the part of crucible for a brewing hostility between postal workers a... |
Pit Schultz was sitting in a Kreuzberg art gallery, less than a mile from the ruins of the Berlin Wall, when he sent one of the first emails to a mailing list that he had just helped launch. Schultz laid out a vision for what it might become: It should be a temporary experiment to continue the process of a collective c... | It was June 1995, and the internet was changing in fundamental ways. The US government–funded National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), once the backbone of the internet, had been decommissioned a few months earlier. New companies like Amazon, Yahoo!, and Netscape were racing to cash in on an early wave of commerci... |
These taxi workers were experiencing the very earliest stage of a global re-organization of private and public transportation, fueled by billions of dollars of financing from venture capitalists. Under the shadow of the Great Recession, in a period of high unemployment and slow job growth, Uber, Lyft, and their erstwhi... | Cabbies, however, saw Uber and Lyft as well-financed corporate continuations of the taxi companies that had long subjugated them. “This isn’t about technology,” Mark, a long-time taxi worker and advocate told me in 2013. He explained that, for the previous few years, San Francisco taxi drivers had already been using an... |
While there are certainly emancipatory potentials here, they are far from adequate to the task of planning production in a post-capitalist world. The digital socialist focus on algorithms presents a serious problem. It risks constraining the decision-making processes of a future socialist society to focus narrowly on o... | This is where planning protocols come in. They streamline decision-making by clarifying the rules by which decisions are made. Deployed in concert with algorithms, protocols enable a range of considerations—besides those available to an optimization program—to enter into the planning process. We might say there is a di... |
I think it’s deeply unhealthy. I think it has caused a lot of mental health problems that founders are not able to talk about, because it would hurt their prospects at raising another round and hiring people, not to mention keeping bread on the table. That’s the thing: as an employee, you can just show up and do the jo... | AL: The way people view you affects how you raise money. That is definitely true. JW: I remember a conversation I had with a mentor of mine where I told her, “I only want to say things that are true.” To me, words and language are almost the only things that we have; they’re so precious. They’re how we dream and make c... |
There’s another angle on Agile, though. Some people I talked to pointed out that Agile has the potential to foster solidarity among workers. If teams truly self-organize, share concerns, and speak openly, perhaps Agile could actually lend itself to worker organization. Maybe management, through Agile, is producing its ... | A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Al Tenhundfeld as a co-author of the Agile Manifesto. The present version has been corrected. Net zero has gone viral. Everyone is announcing their net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets, from Saudi Arabia to Australia. By the final day of COP26—the annual Un... |
Packing and Cracking To understand how gerrymandering works, consider a pile of stones, some blue and some red. You have to group the stones into as many piles of three as possible. But you want to arrange the piles so that blue wins—in other words, you want the maximum number of piles to have a majority of blue stones... | Suppose the pile has fifteen stones: nine red and six blue. Even though there are more red stones—red has a three-to-two advantage over blue—this is a combination that can nonetheless be grouped into piles of three so that blue has the overall majority. Forming groups of three blue stones must be avoided, for only two ... |
Something of a Revolution In January 2006, Ric Sternberg made what he thought would be a simple phone call to his power provider, Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC). PEC is the largest REC in the country, covering over 8,000 square miles of territory west of Austin, Texas. Sternberg wanted to get information on any ... | The unprecedented level of mobilization by co-op members, combined with growing scrutiny from state legislators, cracked open the once-impenetrable fortress of the PEC administration. Key figures resigned or announced their retirement, including the general manager, who had held his position for three decades and would... |
Data is useful for capitalism. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale and significance of data, thanks to breakthroughs in information technology. Take scale. Digitization makes data infinitely more abundant, because it becomes much easier to create, store, and transmit. You can slap a sensor on almost anything and st... | But observing the productive process isn’t the only way we create data. More broadly, we create data whenever we do anything that is mediated or monitored by a computer—which, at this point, is almost everything. Information technology has been woven into the entire fabric of the economy. Just because you’re not direct... |
We highlighted the fact that they were telling us the system was wrong at least 350 times and that they were relying on the naked eye of two analysts to catch the errors of the algorithm. This caused great concern about the potential of false arrests. So, we dissect what's being said and present that back to people con... | You’ve mentioned how Detroit is 80 percent Black, a stark contrast to other, primarily white cities that have banned facial recognition. How does your fight in Detroit look different from the fight in whiter cities like San Francisco or Boston? We've built relationships with organizers in pretty much all the other plac... |
What was it like talking to that kid who was your student’s friend? I mean, it’s very painful talking to these kids. Because he was, you know… there is this sense that it’s impossible to imagine a full life in these places. I hope that’s changing quickly in Bulgaria, as it’s changing elsewhere. But even the conversatio... | As for the kid in the village, he went to university in the West. So it’s nice to think of that story having a much happier trajectory now. When I first spoke to him he was probably fifteen, but he did find a way out. He did find a way to a place where there will be much more possibility for him to live openly. |
2/ In this issue, our contributors talk about distribution in many different senses. These include: the distribution of physical objects, like pieces of US mail and utilities like electricity; the use of algorithms to distribute work and wealth and risk; the distribution of computing power, including to devices not typ... | 3/ As we closed the issue, vaccination rates in the US picked up and a container ship, having completed tracing an obscene graffito, then wedged itself in the Suez Canal. This year has been a reminder that, even as many of us have been more isolated than we would have ever thought possible, everything remains connected... |
Recently there was a huge exposé of the sexism that happens at Riot Games, the company that makes League of Legends. I have a friend who works at Riot who told me things that weren’t in the stories that were published—it’s just been toxic for years and years, and only has come to light recently when workers tried to de... | This is unfortunately very common. In the game development industry, if you are a woman, or if you are trans or nonbinary or intersex, you've always had to deal with sexism or workplace discrimination, whether in the form of outright harassment or lower pay. I am hard-pressed to think of anyone that I know personally i... |
More than 150 years later, black workers in Detroit toiling at what were widely regarded as America’s most secure and iconic jobs—the automobile assembly line—called out another form a false innovation. In 1968, radical organizer and editor John Watson decried the prevailing and degrading situation of “speedup, bad wor... | As Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin make clear in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, the term caught on and for good reason: “In 1946, some 550,000 auto workers had produced a little more than three million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little more than eight million vehicles.” The rapid pace too... |
We've definitely seen fund managers who don’t understand why we care so much about Asia, because they don’t have access to the exchanges and because of this perception that there are so many scams. Our perspective is, you have to care, because it's half the crypto volume. As an example, we know some people who shorted ... | What are some of the more interesting blockchain projects in China that you've come across recently? There are areas that I think are exciting. One is that there are a lot of Chinese people making games on EOS, a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain project (ed. For explanation of building games on the blockchain see Si... |
I feel like it’s always a question of, what are you optimizing for? There is this fetish of capitalism as supremely rational. And it does optimize for certain things, like technological innovation. But if you think about it from another perspective, it’s also catastrophically irrational, because what could be less rati... | I feel like I encounter this a lot in conversations with people who are in tech—my colleagues—who often have good intentions, but sometimes it’s hard for them to move their frame of mind from the technical to the political, to move from the technical question of how to optimize the process in front of you to the politi... |
Let’s start by talking about your background. How did you get involved in finance? I was always interested in economics and had a quantitative background. Anyone who succeeds academically where I grew up ends up being very quantitatively oriented. After school, as I was trying to find a profession that would be financi... | When I think of a trading floor, I think of a bunch of guys screaming into the phone, Wolf of Wall Street-style. It’s not so much people yelling into the phones anymore. The trading floor has evolved quite a bit over time. It used to be more about being alive to the transactional flow of global markets. It’s increasing... |
This is the path of retreat from the digital, towards the “authentically human”—an idea that’s constantly invoked by the new techno-moralists but rarely defined, although it’s generally associated with reading more books and having more face-to-face conversations. The other route is to build a better Blob. | Building a Better Blob Data is the new oil, says everyone. The analogy has become something of a cliche, widely deployed in media coverage of the digital economy. But there’s a reason it keeps coming back. It’s a useful comparison—more useful, in fact, than many of the people using it realize. Thinking of data as a res... |
These capabilities deliver on key tenets of neoliberal prison reform. Two out of three ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years of release. Education interrupts the cycle. Inmates who take classes are 43 percent less likely to reoffend. Tablets can extend educational offerings to prisoners at “zero marginal cost,... | They can also serve as digital umbilici, nourishing “social capital” shown to fortify inmates during imprisonment. Studies in Florida and Minnesota linked staying connected to loved ones to reduced recidivism. The findings relate to in-person visits, but prisons are frequently remote from inmates’ homes—hard for friend... |
From Pac-Man to eSports My gaming genealogy isn’t so unusual. In countless family photos, I am holding a Game Boy. My cartridges of Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Sonic, and Kirby were constant childhood companions. I was nine when I swore to never return to Europe after losing my Game Boy and a bu... | Aside from occasional multiplayer rounds on GoldenEye 007 with my brother, being a “gamer” (as I understood it then) was a solitary activity. This changed around the time I wrote my parents a two-page single-spaced letter on why they should pay $5 a month to let me have a premium RuneScape account. We had just moved (a... |
Ushahidi went on to become a great success story for Kenyan tech and an inspiration to entrepreneurs across the continent. Its tools for incident reporting have been deployed around the world, often for the purposes of election monitoring, crisis response, and human rights reporting. Soon after launching the site, the... | Leapfrogging Politics The story of Ushahidi illustrates an important point about tech in Kenya, and in much of Africa. Tech is a metaphor as well as a business. It’s a metaphor for a future that is not only prosperous, but also free from politics. African tech promoters often talk about “leapfrogging” to accelerate dev... |
I actually don’t know if the steps that have been taken around COVID have made things worse, or whether they have improved the warehouses. Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.” But I don’t know if that’s the case. There were other challe... | And there’s been so much e-commerce growth in general during the pandemic. The question on everybody's minds in retail is: can Walmart and Target use their local distribution infrastructure to get packages to people's doors faster than Amazon can? Walmart and Target’s only advantage is their physical stores. When the s... |
Winners and Losers One wonders if it’s possible to carve out a third way between the purely intuitive and the mechanically standardized. Atul Gawande has written extensively about this possibility, depicting a meeting of minds between autonomous doctors and health systems designers—and he manages to do so without makin... | Natural language processing and dictation will allow physicians to use any words they like while recording notes into an EMR, as opposed to drop-down menus and pick-lists. Artificial intelligences like IBM’s Watson will comb through research on behalf of the physician and aid in clinical decision-making. The doctor’s l... |
And, of course, joining a movement to fight persecution is the very meaning of political subjectification. Times of political revolt have long been attended by claims about the revolutionary force of challenging traditional sexual prescriptions. And little wonder: sex is a discourse that plays a major role in shaping w... | The problem with my ex’s position was modal. He viewed certain sex—certainly not all sex—as a necessary rite of passage, without which no appropriate radicalization was possible. His belief touched on the religious—a faith that certain sex acts between certain bodies carried a radically transformative quality a priori.... |
The spread of knowledge about disability news and affirmations of disability identity via social media have produced profound shifts in my life. I wish I had the mental and physical support as a teenager in the 1990s that I have on the web now. I consider so many people my family that I have never met in person but hav... | Could you give us some examples from your own life? I would be remiss if i did not tell the story of meeting my wife on Craigslist in 2009. It is so humorous that we met each other on the bathroom wall of the internet. I was seeking intellectual intercourse, and her friend found the ad and made her write me. |
*** I check the back while Aluna’s fast asleep. The trunk, too. Moving as quietly as possible through years and years of our shit, all of it bursting at the seams and threatening to fall across the parking lot. Every exhale is a puff of mist, and I blink to clear my eyes. Journals, clothes, random pieces of silverware,... | I find it wedged on the trunk floor, beneath the corner of a box. It must’ve fallen out of the case. Unmarred, a thin silver ring. After scooting back in the driver’s seat, I hover with the ring tucked in my palm. It grows warm there, in the safety of my hand. I don’t ever want to let it go until Aluna’s ready to take ... |
Human on the back end—so does that mean it’s going overseas? In the Philippines or in the Midwest, somebody is tagging parts of the speech, and correcting things, and actually parsing whether I misspelled something or meant to write something else. It’s becoming training data for the machine, and eventually it will get... | It’s the MVP. Yeah, it is just so much easier to build a web app that connects someone in the Philippines to a series of database questions, and has them do the work, than it is to build an AI than can handle arbitrary responses to a calendar invite. So you just tell your venture capitalists that you’re working on AI, ... |
In 1830, Harvard College sued a man named Francis Amory. Amory was accused of mismanaging funds that were intended to be donated to the university once a donor and his wife had passed away. Amory put the money into riskier investments like insurance, manufacturing, and banking stocks—and then lost half the money. Harva... | If venture capital was going to grow, it would need a different interpretation of prudent investing. It would need to change how investors managed risk. In the late 1970s, venture capital scored a major victory. Congress was crafting a comprehensive set of rules governing private pension management to ensure that worke... |
Crucially, gatekeeping power subordinates two kinds of users on either end of the “gate.” Content producers fear hidden or arbitrary changes to the algorithms for Google Search or the Facebook News Feed, whose mechanics can make the difference between the survival and destruction of media content producers. Meanwhile, ... | A third kind of power is scoring power, exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases. Increasingly, many business and public policy decisions are based on big data-enabled scoring systems. Thus employers will screen potential applicants for the likelihood that they may quit, be a problematic employee, o... |
There’s a degree to which you have to make tradeoffs to create distributed protocols that work, but you need to prioritize certain things from the get-go to make sure that they work for the types of people that you’re building for. Again, a crucial part of decentralization is questioning the universality of technology ... | When we started to discuss what to build, we didn’t want to start from a place assuming we knew what we were talking about. So we did an ecosystem review, interviewing around a dozen people in the IndieWeb and DWeb movements, the journalist/crypto scene, and researchers in rightwing extremism in social media. We wanted... |
Wow, two years is a long time. Eventually I discovered the United States Digital Service (USDS) on Twitter. I applied to USDS and I went through their very tedious six-interview process. Apparently I passed that. But, because I’m a former officer in a foreign army and they do most of their work with the Department of ... | But there’s a circle of government technology organizations where they all know each other and work together—USDS, the General Services Administration (GSA), Technology Transformation Services (TTS) which includes 18F, etc. They forwarded my resumé to them. I interviewed for GSA and then waited three months to hear the... |
To illustrate Mises’s point, let’s take a simple example: the manufacture of a pencil. The manager of a pencil-making factory has to make many production decisions, because there are many ways to make a pencil out of its component parts. How does a pencil maker decide how to produce his “final good,” the pencil, out of... | Each producer can make rational decisions about what and how to produce, only because a struggle for market supremacy forces producers to maximize their revenues and minimize their costs. All of these market-dependent producers absorb information to the best of their abilities, make decisions, and take risks in search ... |
First there are the text messages. Impersonal, incessant, and devoid of context, they reveal few hints of their purpose. The language is so vague you’d be forgiven for thinking it was spam. “Message from the Probe Group regarding an urgent matter. Please call us.” Then, a deluge of phone calls—up to ten times a day, of... | Should you choose to return the missed calls, you’ll be greeted by an automated voice and placed in a queue. The identity of your caller remains a mystery. When a human operator at an overseas call center at last assumes the reins—whose identity and place of employment, by the way, remains unknown—you’re asked to discl... |
This friend told me about this thing called Bitcoin that he was really into. He described it as a form of digital money that you could actually hold, unlike PayPal balances which are really just notional numbers in a database and at the end of the day are completely under the control of Paypal. I went on to read the Sa... | I didn’t pay much more attention to the space until about 2015 or 2016, when there started to be a lot of interesting non-Bitcoin blockchain projects. Before that, it was basically Bitcoin and then a ton of scams. There was Megacoin and Feathercoin and all these things were just like... obvious scams. It didn't seem li... |
But each of these communities has critical things to contribute. Climate activists can help us avoid the trap of “platform determinism”—that is, the risk of fetishizing the platforms as mythically powerful actors, instead of centering the choices made by the humans who design the platforms. Such activists also bring ex... | I wonder what’s taken me so long to pop the question, and why this ritual that’s been performed countless times by so many before me bears down on me like I’m the first woman in history to put a knee to the floor and offer the ring and say the words. She’ll say yes. We talked about it. When we lay beside each other, Al... |
In the financial industry, investors want firms that use big data and machine learning and artificial intelligence—but do those new tools actually generate better results? That’s a good question. The best way to explore it might be to talk about the role of data. There’s a lot of excitement in the financial industry a... | Along with new forms of data, there are also new forms of data analysis. The early versions of complex data analysis included looking at the financial statements of publicly traded companies. But now you can parse through the data in those statements in more interesting ways. Back in the day, you might care about how m... |
In other words, the tube sites make money the same way that Facebook does. And the fact that the same companies also own many of the big studios means that they can use the data they collect not only to sell targeted ads but to make their videos even more engaging so that users spend even more time watching them, thus ... | Don’t Fight the Data While a lot of people (most likely you and everyone you know) are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned b... |
The Flexner Report recommended that medical education develop an evidence-based curriculum. Under its influence, medicine was subjected to the rigors of peer review and the scientific method for the first time. Residency programs were established, uniting the university and the hospital, and placing apprenticeship with... | The recommendations in the Flexner Report also formed the basis of what we today understand as the social contract between the medical profession and the people whom it serves. Patients are entitled to competence, altruism, morality, integrity, accountability, transparency, objectivity, and promotion of the public good... |
Don’t Leave Me Whether or not we acknowledge it, our phones and laptops have access to us that’s just as close and unfiltered as a lover’s. Closer, even. What our relationships to them enact, and perhaps therefore amount to, is an intimacy whose loss would leave us feeling humiliatingly, and comically, abandoned and be... | Most eerily perhaps, they also propose that fears of abandonment and betrayal are inevitable in our current technological context: not because our computers are less complicated than us, but because their networks of images and sounds so greatly exceed our cognitive capacities and individual contributions. The internet... |
If your vision of the progress of life includes a long hiatus for your twenties, that’s great for tech firms. If you stay all night at Google, that’s great for Google. They can bring you the barber. They can bring you the restaurant. You can have your love life at the firm. Have multiple partners, they don’t care. As l... | Because you mentioned age discrimination, I wonder if you could speak to the prevalence of sexism and sexual harassment in the tech industry. There’s been a lot of media coverage recently about a spate of recent scandals—but sexism is obviously something that’s been a core feature of Silicon Valley for awhile. |
Organizing the Lab Rats The coalition decided to focus on three goals. Articulating these was crucial to keeping the various political and ideological factions within the coalition from splintering over other issues. First, it called for an immediate moratorium on streetlight acquisition, installation, and operation. T... | Those changes to public policy were the coalition’s second goal. Organizers sought public participation in the creation of legally enforceable policies over all surveillance technologies used by the city, not just the streetlights. A wide range of technologies beyond the streetlights—known and unknown—made up the surve... |
The law says that federal contractors can’t manage contractors, so a federal employee has to be the contracting officer representative who manages that contract. So you have people whose job used to be technologist or system administrators, but now they are federal employees who are middle management and as a result al... | For example, VB6 was decommissioned in 2012, I think, but there are many VB6 systems across government because VB6 presents a fairly low barrier to entry for development. There’s a whole bunch of these lying around. Say I have a contract with the vendor and that contract says I need VB6 experts to manage these VB6 syst... |
There are solutions, though, I should note. Give us some optimism. So let’s be positive for a moment. It’s easy to point fingers at all of the terrible stuff that happens with capitalism, and we can get stuck in that kind of negative feedback loop really easily. We have been thinking about different types of solution... | But, in the meantime, the reason why this is problematic is because once that data hits the open market, it gets aggregated by these companies like Regeneron and others and is used in the development of pharmaceutical drugs. Meanwhile, the communities who graciously contributed their genomes to this, based on the false... |
We also created a lookup tool and pledge map back in 2014. You can type in an address, see if there’s been an eviction there, and then pledge to not rent from that landlord. The map was pulling in public eviction data from the San Francisco Rent Board. The obvious next step was to connect other data to it, like parcel ... | Search EvictorBook by entering an address, landlord, or neighborhood name. How did you all build it? Erin: The work began in early 2019 in collaboration with other member organizations of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC), and in collaboration with the Mapping Action Collective (MAC) in Portland, Or... |
The scales possible with exponential growth are as incomprehensible as they are impossible. E. coli’s potential for exponential doubling is realized only in the highly controlled environment of a researcher’s test tube, where food is abundant and no other species are in the way. Even then, the time that bacteria can be... | Biological growth scales to fit its context. There are no gas giants full of identical E. coli. More than one hundred years ago, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a treatise on the mathematics of biological growth. In it, he summarizes this central maxim for biological scaling: “The effect of scal... |
If there’s one thought on the subject of mental health and young people on the internet that you’d like our readers to carry out into the world, what would it be? Again, I would push back against the “real-name web.” Lots of people have made the argument before me but it still stands. The kids I’ve spoken to feel so mu... | Ex nihilo is one of those concepts that makes you immediately suspicious. When someone claims to have made something out of nothing, there is almost always an inconvenient history that they intend to eclipse. The fantasy that before us there was nothing has a great deal of ideological power. The creator ex nihilo gets ... |
Image courtesy of Os Keyes. When you run into a system that uses AGR, it takes a photograph (or video) of you, and then looks at your bone structure, skin texture, and facial shape. It looks at where (and how prominent) your cheekbones are, or your jawline, or your eyebrows. It doesn’t need to notify you to do this: it... | “Automatic detection and aggregation of demographics and behavior of people,” a patent for a system that includes AGR. Google Patents. There’s only one small problem: inferring gender from facial features is complete bullshit. You can’t actually tell someone’s gender from their physical appearance. If you try, you’ll j... |
Adult Only, Adult Always Summer and I began fundraising for our platform, which we called V Union, in late 2020. The following January, we received a message from Donia Love, the founder and CEO of PeepMe, another nascent platform for adult creators. The PeepMe team was a mix of people already involved in sex work and ... | Our aims for the platform are ambitious. In addition to creating a worker-owned cooperative, in which workers have democratic power over the running of the platform and a share in profits, we also want to give individual workers ninety percent of the revenue they generate. Additionally, we intend to donate ten percent ... |
There’s clearly a whole lot of thinking and writing that will have to be done to map out these problems, and to develop potential solutions. And it’s reasonable to expect that a lot of that thinking and writing will be done by people working at universities and think tanks. But that raises a question: many of the schol... | How do you manage these concerns at Berkman, and how do you think others should manage them? I think you have to depend on the professional tenets of people at think tanks and universities. There are astroturf organizations that are designed to present and launder industry views. There are other organizations that purp... |
Or at least more than what we have already. Exactly, yeah. It’s already a social credit system in Detroit, but we don't want to add more and more technologies to that and exacerbate the violence and marginalization that residents are already feeling. And we don't want this rolled out all across the globe as a way to co... | The hardest part for us is that law enforcement, government institutions, and too many people don't seem to see an alternative, especially in areas that have been deemed dangerous. But everyone needs to understand that most crime in our neighborhoods is rooted in poverty and disinvestment and racial violence. We need c... |
Khakis and Dad Jeans Enter what may be the world’s most unlikely group of rock stars: seventeen middle-aged white guys, dressed in khakis and dad jeans, all obsessed with management. The now-legendary authors of what came to be called the Agile Manifesto gathered at Utah’s Snowbird ski resort in February 2001 to hammer... | The manifesto, supplemented by twelve additional principles, targeted the professional frustrations that engineers described. Waterfall assumed that a software application’s requirements would be stable, and that slowdowns and logjams were the result of deviating from management’s careful plan. Agile tossed out these h... |
But we can’t simply abandon social media. It is too dominant, too ubiquitous, and, occasionally, too useful. For instance, its use in connecting friends and families in a time of mass migration and refugee resettlement, driven by climate catastrophe and war, remains an essential lifeline. Rather, we should aim to loose... | Retros: Intro There is a lot of labor that goes into founding and running a magazine, and few if any guides to help one understand what choices matter and how to consider them. Many times through our growing pains as a DIY publishing project, we talked about the idea of having the equivalent of a “developer blog” to sh... |
A year after her near-crash on the freeway, Smith testified about her experience to the Nevada Assembly Committee on Commerce and Labor. Her testimony sparked a wave of national media coverage on SIDs. Calling them “kill switches” and invoking “Big Brother,” reporters from the New York Times and Mother Jones highlighte... | At the time, the devices followed a simple schematic. There was a small computer, about the size of a billfold wallet, connected to a switch between the ignition and the starter motor, with a voltage monitor on the engine, and small keypad. The computer was preprogrammed with a schedule and a list of numeric codes, whi... |
In the midst of this, Com-Pat’s telephone number got misprinted in the telephone directory, which severely damaged the business until the mistake could be corrected. Worse yet, one of the major newspapers that carried Com-Pat’s ads suddenly decided to change its advertising policy and drop them. So imagine Joan’s horri... | John Patterson made a big splash with Dateline. He had several advantages: he both learned from his predecessors’ mistakes and benefited from their innovations. By the time Dateline came along, companies like Com-Pat had already softened the resistance of advertisers to the idea of computer dating and helped sell the p... |
“We have a policy of not mentioning names [in our online organizing spaces]… We’re trying to be impersonal, talk about systems and structures. Individuals are only actors in that.” — Engineer at a software development firm “I saw how important it was to build community in general. The place we can do it is the place we... | Finding Abundance in Moving Together The rise of remote work forced organizers to broaden their definition of digital safety. While technical considerations and individual behavior still mattered—using the right encryption, promoting the right privacy practices—their focus shifted to a more collective and more social u... |
Virtually everyone who has worn an ankle monitor has had a technological issue with their device, compounding the psychological stress. Battery life is a constant concern. Many parole officers believe that wearers let their monitors die in order to travel more freely, so they view dead batteries with suspicion. Thus we... | There is also a literal cost to being monitored. Individuals wearing ankle monitors are often required to pay a $5 to $20 fee per day of use, despite the fact that the retail price for a GPS monitor is only between $150 and $250. LCA, the primary provider of electronic monitoring technology for the state of the Califor... |
In fact, an entity that operates in this manner not only exists, but is present across the US, in forty-eight states and covering a majority of its landmass. These are the rural electric cooperatives (RECs): nonprofit, local, democratic institutions that collectively control 42 percent of the country’s power distributi... | RECs are a model of what democratic control of infrastructure can look like. Of course, the reality is more mixed. The history of RECs over the past century is littered with cases of mismanagement, corruption, and antidemocratic practices. As the scholar Abby Spinak explores in her 2014 doctoral dissertation, many RECs... |
Selling sex online provides several advantages: a better opportunity to screen clients, a stronger ability to negotiate, and a lot more independence. Online marketplaces give workers the ability to craft ads on their own terms, clearly outlining their services, prices, and boundaries long before a client may even acqui... | “Online advertising provides a level of safety to those in the sex industry that many other spaces do not,” explains Kate D’Adamo from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Centre. Not everyone can make use of these tools, of course. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein describes the kind of workers who have benefite... |
Sextech, like porn, monetizes the orgasm. For Reich, however, the orgasm wasn’t a commodity—it was a weapon. It held the power to demolish the old world and build a new one in its place. It promised not only sexual liberation, but the liberation of humanity as a whole. Sextech doesn’t begin to approach the utopian inte... | Legalized abortion is at the top of Trump’s hit list. Non-discriminatory policies protecting LGTBQ people are also vulnerable. If sextech raises its ambitions to not only help users overcome the barriers to their bliss, but also get them to think about the conditions that created those barriers in the first place, and ... |
Where Hollywood’s sci-fi futurism and leading tech pundits lead us astray, however, socialist feminism can lend invaluable insight, inoculating us against techno-capitalism’s self-flattering claims. The socialist feminist tradition is a powerful resource because it’s centrally concerned with what work is—and in particu... | That women have special insight into technology shouldn’t come as a surprise: after all, they have been sold the promise of liberation through labor-saving devices since the dawn of mass consumerism, and this applies to kitchen appliances in particular. (It’s a short and rather sad leap from self-cleaning ovens to self... |
We’ve published a range of pieces, and some do point toward possible solutions. But, as editors, I hope we’ve discouraged our writers from claiming any easy victories. If you’re going to propose a solution, we want it to feel earned. We want it to feel specified. AB: The solution is often the least interesting part. O... | MW: It’s true, as Ben says, that we don’t occupy a traditional literary scene. But we do have a certain literary streak to us, and that’s expressed in our shared desire to create a space for writing about technology that doesn’t demand simple solutions, whether it’s swapping algorithm A for algorithm B or, you know, fu... |
In recent years, that insight has led the government to encourage more siloed digital nooks, such as WeChat’s 500-person-max group chats, and to more heavily police the open digital spaces where enough strangers can congregate to become a problem. The type of digital spaces, in other words, that bullet comments enable.... | In October 2017, the 5th Plenary of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China announced the future direction of Chinese economic development: Fully develop the basic role of consumption in economic growth; focus on expanding household consumption; steer consumption in intelligent, green, healthy, and s... |
In China, by contrast, there is less room for such activity. For one, it’s unclear how credit legislation could be used to mount comparable efforts. And, although a few Chinese consumer protection organizations have become attuned to the ways that tech firms’ use of customer data can lead to privacy abuses, they have n... | The current state of the social credit system is far less sophisticated than its portrayal in the foreign press. But if the scope of what can count as blacklist data widens, and if the tech sector takes an even more pervasive “searchlight” approach to seamlessly melding these data into their core offerings, the system ... |
Carceral technologies are racist because the institutions that develop and use them are intended to manage populations in a country that has a white supremacist inheritance. These technologies are not incidentally racist. They are racist because they're doing the work of policing—which, in this country, is a racist job... | In recent years, scholarly communities have focused more attention on issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning. We’ve also seen a broader conversation emerge around “AI ethics.” What’s your view of these discourses? A lot of these research communities begin with methodologies from STS (S... |
[Ed.: The idea of “libidinal economy” originates with Freud, was further developed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and more recently has been taken up by Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred Moten, and other Black thinkers. It emphasizes that emotional intensities, such as desire or antiblackness, drive “ratio... | Data science and information science have long been and will continue to be resistant to theories like libidinal economy, but also to theories like critical race theory, because they are resistant to things which are not of them. They think about things which they can reach out and fix, like ethics. Or reach out and br... |
JW: I didn’t know anybody in the Bay Area when I came here. I didn’t even know what books I was supposed to read. So I joined as many different communities as I could. I thought they could give me what I was missing. It can be hard to find that information, because there are so many limits in terms of what is chronicle... | Ultimately, I felt like I had to learn the right language to pass in the Valley. A lot of what you need to know is what you’re not supposed to talk about. In tech, you don’t really talk about money or power. Everyone’s default is, “I have no idea how much anyone earns.” Everyone dresses approximately the same and lives... |
These changes are affecting the content of contemporary politics. The transmogrification of the bedroom from a place of rest into a space in which people not only sleep but live and work—and, crucially, participate in political conversations online—goes a long way toward explaining both the form and content of contempo... | The Conquest of Bed Traditionally, the places of politics have been squares, streets, conference halls, churches, meeting houses, and party offices. In his influential analysis of the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas observes that such sites are the physical equivalents of the news media: they are where ideas c... |
Do you think the lack of internal communications tools is intentional? I think this is one of those cases where you should not presume malice. Amazon doesn’t actively not want employees to talk to each other. They just don’t see how employees talking to each other benefits productivity, morale, or the bottom line. If i... | Google, by contrast, has very robust internal communication infrastructure. And that infrastructure played an important role in facilitating organizing at Google. (Although more recently, management has been limiting the kinds of conversations that can happen on internal platforms.) Do you think the absence of similar ... |
JS: That makes sense. But I’m also curious about the politics of the transition. It’s one thing to say the team is burned out, so we need to raise funding to pay people more fairly. But it also seems like, at least from my reading of “Logic(s): The Next Chapter,” that there is an ideological shift at work. Xiaowei, you... | BT: Xiaowei touches on an important continuity between the two eras of Logic, which is the emphasis on the agency, and indeed the wisdom, of people who are affected by technology. That is, not seeing them as objects or victims, but rather as agents, as experts, as subjects of their own liberation and of everybody’s lib... |
The company probably benefits from people being kind and showing up for each other in cases like that. Definitely. I mean, on-call can go lots of ways. What I’m describing, even if I don’t love on-call, is being on a team with people I trust, knowing that I won’t get yelled at or fired for unintentionally doing somethi... | “Taiwan is a paradise bubble,” my dad told me in March, during my first few days back at my parents’ home. “This is probably one of the safest places in the world right now,” he said. Seeing the rush hour crush on the Taipei metro and children in school uniforms clustering at bus stops after school, all without exhibit... |
That sucks. We were told that if you know how to code, your record isn’t going to be that much of an issue just because the job demand is so high here. I haven’t started applying yet. Did you start The Last Mile knowing when your release date was? I was sentenced to sixteen years to life. What that means is that you do... | It’s really hard for lifers to get found suitable for release. And it should be, I think. Maybe not as strict as it has been in the past—and the door is opening up a little more every day, especially with Jerry Brown in office. But I understand the parole board commissioners have a tough job to do. I went to my first p... |
Martin Pichinson is about seventy, a former music manager who came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1980s. His business partner is Michael Maidy, another septuagenarian who, judging from a Google search, favors dark suits that look about a half-size too big for him. Maidy was recently the CEO of another failed tech company... | Their actual company is Sherwood Partners, and unlike Kozmo.com, Pebble, and about a thousand other companies they have wound down over the years, it (a) still exists and (b) its business is always booming. The company is Silicon Valley’s premier specialist in “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC)—a process b... |
Visualizing census data by district is invaluable for drawing legal districts. But a gerrymanderer needs more than just census data—they also need to predict election results by census block. They need to know the color of the stones, in other words. Election results, however, are not reported by census block, and meth... | The Voting Tabulation District (VTD) is the Census Bureau’s general term for the “unit” at which election data is reported. A VTD might be a voting district, a ward, or a county, depending on the state. Fortunately, these VTDs are themselves built from census blocks, so that the process of integrating this data involve... |
The Pornhub Awards afterparty, a swanky affair held on the rooftop of affluent hipster mecca the Ace Hotel, was organized by Greg Lansky. The 2018 porn industry includes larger-than-life characters like Lansky—creator of big international brands like Vixen, Tushy, and the biggest interracial brand of all time, Blacked—... | Obviously inspired by Hugh Hefner in terms of exposure, projected lifestyle, and the desire to be embraced by mainstream publications, the French-born Lansky is known to pay top rate to his performers and spends lavishly on promotional stunts and PR. By crowning girls “Vixen Angel” of the month or the year, Lansky deli... |
Fast forward a couple of years. We now have close to six hundred cameras all over Detroit, and the Mayor would like to push that number to 4,000. Project Green Light locations pay a monthly rate so that if something happens at that location, they get priority from police over non–Green Light locations. So they pay for ... | What did the rollout of Project Green Light look like within the community, and how did you start to organize folks against it? The police really tapped into this negative narrative that has hovered over Detroit for decades. They were touting Project Green Light as the salvation of the city, like, “Hey, we have the ans... |
Software engineers now expect to be on call and sometimes get called in the middle of the night. Were you on call for these systems? Yes, I was. All thirty-some years. We would have two or three people in a group, so we could rotate. But then we got people in that had grown up around PCs, and they just don’t appreciat... | Most nights I didn’t get called, but then some nights would be bad and I’d get two to three calls in one night. Other times, I wouldn’t be called but once a month. When I got towards the very end of my career, it was less than once a month because we kept so on top of those storage groups, made sure we had enough space... |
The religious and political transgressions of these detainees were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uyghurs are required to produce at thousands of checkpoints around Xinjiang. Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital fo... | Most Uyghurs in the detention centers are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of massive internment camps which the Chinese state has described as “transformation through education” facilities. These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some... |
No single technology contributes more powerfully to our perpetual data hemorrhage than the internet, of course. The internet both facilitates the flow of data and constantly creates more of it. It goes without saying that everything we do online leaves a trace. And companies are working hard to ensure that we leave mor... | This is broadly known as the “Internet of Things”: by placing connected devices everywhere, businesses hope to make corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Imagine a brick-and-mortar store that watches you as closely as Facebook, or a car that tracks you as tho... |
Criminal Justice Creep New data sources are incorporated into Palantir regularly. One captain commented: I’m so happy with how big Palantir got… I mean it’s just every time I see the entry screen where you log on there’s another icon about another database that’s been added … they just went out and found some publi... | Another interagency data integration effort is LA County’s Enterprise Master Person Index (LA EMPI) initiative. If established, LA EMPI would create a single view of an individual across all government systems and agencies: all of their interactions with law enforcement, social services, health services, mental health ... |
Sex, like computing, puts one body in a feedback loop with another. Each body sends signals to the other, and each modulates its actions accordingly. But with cybersex, which overlays the principles of computing onto sex, the feedback cues are configured by the interface’s materiality—a materiality itself configured by... | Within the enabling constraints of the RTI Network, the cam worker cultivated an intimate, cybernetic relationship to the sensors distributed throughout the device, to the algorithms that rendered her movements visible and tangible, to the latency of the network that transmitted her commands, and to the body of the sub... |
But to be able to wrestle with these questions, we need to change the language we use to think about engineering and technology. Saying engineers “solve problems” implies a kind of mathematical tidiness that doesn’t reflect our messy reality. This language suggests that problems just disappear or are neatly contained t... | This subtle shift in language brings our attention to the fact that any “solution” produces, inevitably, more and different problems—many of which may not be visible in the moment or place it is implemented, or to the particular group of people designing the intervention. This seems to be, at first glance, obvious. We ... |
Recently, however, this optimism has begun to unravel. The problems of technology have come into sharper focus. But this has brought difficulties of its own: technological power today operates in distinctive ways that make it both more dangerous and potentially more difficult to contest. First, there is transmission po... | On the consumer side, this places Amazon in a unique position to target prices and influence search results in ways that maximize its returns, and also favor its preferred producers. On the producer side, Amazon can make or break businesses and whole sectors, just like the railroads of yesteryear. Book publishers have ... |
In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million inter... | Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And ... |
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