Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.
Internet
Posted inEditor's Pick
This Is Life in the Metaverse
“Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters of the immersive, three-dimensional internet that Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Failure to Launch
“True community-building, as tech founders should have realized by now, requires more than renting a mansion in Beverly Hills.” In this Vox investigation, Rebecca Jennings does what she does best: reporting on the influencer and creator economy while writing compellingly about some new corner of internet and tech culture. In this piece, she gets behind […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Twisted Life of Clippy
In the 1990s, Microsoft created a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office that users found annoying — so it was swiftly retired. For Seattle Met, Benjamin Cassidy recounts the history of an unloved and doomed office assistant that has lived on in pop and nerd culture. These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Very Online
CJR fellow Karen Maniraho talks with five very online journalists — Ryan Broderick, Jason Parham, Taylor Lorenz, Rebecca Jennings, and Rusty Foster — about what it’s like to cover tech and internet culture today, how they navigate through viral moments and algorithms, and how they look for meaning in a constantly noise-polluted, chaotic space. Because […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach
After a year of loss and grief, Madison Marquer signed up to lead a team of gamers at a community college in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Brendan I. Koerner chronicles the journey. By early 2021, Walsh had gathered ample evidence to prove that esports could bring in as many as 20 student-athletes per year and boost the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming
The reviews editor at Pitchfork writes about the effects of streaming music on listeners and artists, the differences between passive and intentional music consumption, and the overall loss of our individual connection to music. The more time I spend on Spotify, the more it pushes me away from the outer edges of the platform and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
In the Dark
This is an in-depth look at the rise of government-led internet blackouts around the world over the past decade, since the Mubarak regime’s shutdown of the internet in Egypt during the Arab Spring of 2011. Whole countries, including Sudan, Uganda, and Myanmar, have gone offline for days on end, as leaders try to cripple their […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Taking Stock
Rob Horning explores the term “creator” in this essay on labor, exploitation, and content production and consumption on the internet. “Creator,” like “creativity,” is essentially a null term that signifies nothing about one’s activity but instead marks one’s limitless availability — a willingness to make anything at all in one’s life into content for sale.
Posted inEditor's Pick
“Take Her Down”: Inside eBay’s Stalking Campaign Against a Natick Couple
“Amazon. Etsy. eBay. Lots of companies appeared in David and Ina Steiner’s E-commerce newsletter. Only one tried to take them out.”