Category: Technology

The algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps don’t know when your life changes course — and can keep up a stream of painful memories.

“Algorithms…don’t go on mutant rampages, they only sometimes reveal and amplify the cruddy human biases that underpin them.”

“The role of the cartographer isn’t just data analytics,” says Molly Burhans, an activist mapping the land assets of the Catholic Church. “It’s also storytelling.”

Can we survive the social web?

“It’s a feeling instead of living as a guinea pig for an opaque set of private interests, and a feeling that I can’t trust an industry that would ever put unsecure devices inside patients in the first place.”

A reading list on travel influencers and the implications of Instagram on tourism and politics.

“They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge.”

“There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind.”

The Information Age is also the age of information overload. Here’s what one person learned about the human brain after cleansing himself of screens.

With physical distancing the order of the day as COVID-19 spreads, cultural locales — sites for communal experiences, like museums and theaters — are emptying out. What are we sharing if we’re not sharing these spaces? And were we really sharing them to begin with?

Trudging to the grocery store to laden up with milk and toilet roll may seem like a chore, but does it improve your health?

We’re developing high-tech genetic tools to pour new life into animals lost to human destruction. Deciding how — and whether — to use that power is as complex as the science behind it.

There’s no such thing as a 140-character exegesis: the (non)-discourse around “Joker” is the latest to prove that social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue.
 

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process.

From global capital to YouTube, carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, Will Meyer has compiled a reading list on who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped.

Is tech disrupting spirituality, or is spirituality finally disrupting tech?

Jia Tolentino talks about what kinds of personalities thrive online, why she is suspicious of her own self-narrative, and the pervading sense that everything’s spiraling out of control.

Here’s a 📖 list for 🗺️Emoji Day.

The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.

The science of medicine is based on male bodies, but researchers are beginning to realize how vastly the symptoms of disease differ between the sexes — and how much danger women are in.

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.

A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?”

From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. Yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather blame the user.

Digital labor is valuable even when we do it for free. Should we get paid?

The attention economy is killing us and the planet. Artist and writer Jenny Odell talks about why slowing down could be the only way to survive.

Robocalls are a scourge, and it’s only a matter of time before the technology learns to spoof your mother’s voice.

Seven schools in China have installed facial recognition technology in classrooms to monitor — and score — their students. At The Disconnect, Yujie Xue reports on this “intelligent education” initiative.

Maybe it’s time for an internet break… after you read this.

What happens when you ride an e-scooter out of the city limits — until its battery dies?

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.