Amazon’s acquisition of mesh router company Eero is a smart play that adds a number of cards to its hand in the rapidly evolving smart home market. Why shouldn’t every router be an Echo, and every Echo be a router? Consolidating the two makes for powerful synergies and significant leverage against stubborn competition. It’s no […]
View More Another fine meshCategory: Opinion
Privacy is a commons
“The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society,” quoth Wikipedia, “held in common, not owned privately.” We live in an era of surveillance capitalism in a symbiotic relationship with advertising technology, quoth me. And I put it to you that privacy is not just a virtue, or a […]
View More Privacy is a commonsInstagram thinks you want IGTV previews in your home feed
If you can’t beat or join them…force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch content from […]
View More Instagram thinks you want IGTV previews in your home feedThe infrastructural humiliation of America
I’m flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it’s nice to be going home, but I’m dreading the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible […]
View More The infrastructural humiliation of AmericaThe new Two Minutes Hate
You see it first on Facebook or Twitter. Something contemptible: an image, or a video, or a tweet. One accompanied by a furious, snarky caption, highlighting just how awful and unacceptable it is, a dunk fueled by rage. The outrage rises within you. How can it not? You’re primed for outrage. We all are, now. […]
View More The new Two Minutes HateHas the fight over privacy changed at all in 2019?
Few issues divide the tech community quite like privacy. Much of Silicon Valley’s wealth has been built on data-driven advertising platforms, and yet, there remain constant concerns about the invasiveness of those platforms. Such concerns have intensified in just the last few weeks as France’s privacy regulator placed a record fine on Google under Europe’s […]
View More Has the fight over privacy changed at all in 2019?Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimism
A blood-splattered Theranos machine nearly pricks an employee struggling to fix it. This gruesome graphical rendering is what you’ll walk away from HBO’s “The Inventor” with. It finally gives a visual to the startup’s laboratory fraud detailed in words by John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood”. The documentary that premiered tonight at Sundance Film Festival explores […]
View More Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimismFacebook launches petition feature, its next battlefield
Gather a mob and Facebook will now let you make political demands. Tomorrow Facebook will encounter a slew of fresh complexities with the launch of Community Actions, its News Feed petition feature. Community Actions could unite neighbors to request change from their local and national elected officials and government agencies. But it could also provide […]
View More Facebook launches petition feature, its next battlefieldTechnology’s dark forest
We used to be such optimists. Technology would bring us a world of wealth in harmony with the environment, and even bring us new worlds. The Internet would erase national boundaries, replace gatekeepers with a universal opportunity for free expression, and bring us all closer together. Remember when we looked forward to every advance? I […]
View More Technology’s dark forestIn defense of screen time
Silicon Valley engineers who design our tech gadgets won’t let their kids anywhere near those devices — they’re convinced too much time in front of smartphones and iPads is rotting kids’ brains.
View More In defense of screen timeOur dystopian cyberpunk here and now
We in the West love our apocalyptic science fiction, in which cartoonishly evil authorities ruthlessly oppress all who so much as wonder about its absolute power, enforced via ubiquitous surveillance technology. Think The Hunger Games, Blade Runner 2049, V for Vendetta, just to pick a few. Well — to trot out that infamous William Gibson […]
View More Our dystopian cyberpunk here and nowThe YKarma experiment
Blockchains are boring now. It’s been ten years since Bitcoin launched, and cryptocurrencies have almost exclusively been used to recapitulate existing monetary systems in slightly new forms. This is boring. Programmable currencies give us the ability to build whole new categories of economies, ones which reject all traditional assumptions about how value is generated, transferred, […]
View More The YKarma experiment