Tag: Internet

How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape.

Lucie Greene’s new book “Silicon States” is about the danger of concentrating so much power in so few hands.

Facebook’s botched war against propaganda campaigns.

A woman who doesn’t feel like going to work today stays in bed and looks at the internet instead. She finds a blog by a fed-up call center employee who complains about the customers.

Tim Berners-Lee: “For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it.”

The precarious future of messaging apps.

Is it possible to be queer, lefty, and a Latter-Day Saint? After leaving the church, Sarah Scoles sets out to understand liberal Mormons.

As once-popular Snapchat becomes an increasingly irrelevant platform, Helena Fitzgerald finds beauty in its uselessness.

They perform daring escapes from slaughterhouses, zoos, and laboratories. But animals on the run are only as free as we want them to be.

He’s not very good at his job.

The more work that journalists create for the internet, the more work is rendered obsolete.

Searching for a teen girl who was once internet famous for her coding skills, a former fan uncovers a story of harassment.

When an online news outlet goes out of business, its archives can disappear as well. The new battle over journalism’s digital legacy.

Online harassment is as serious as offline harassment, and it rarely stays “only” online.

I haven’t peeked at eBay in years, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s forgotten it exists.

The mysterious creator of bitcoin asks a journalist to help reveal his identity.

Some tech companies are taking a stand against neo-Nazi users, but claim it’s a still dangerous decision to make.

Four times a year, lexicographers update and add words to the OED. Katherine Connor Martin helps decide what makes the cut.

“I took the NASA shirts from the ‘boys’ section from where they were prominently displayed, and put them little kid eye level next to tank tops in the ‘girls’ section 20 feet away.”

Sixty-three percent of Americans don’t have money to cover an emergency costing $500 or more. I’m one of them.

In Real Life Mag, information accessibility and data-use expert Zara Rahman explores the coercive power of the location drop-down menu.

Filmmaker Kyrre Lien was curious about what drives people who make hateful comments online, so he traveled the world to interview internet trolls in person.

At watching-grass-grow.com, you can watch Alex Komarnitsky’s lawn. In Southwest magazine, Bradford Pearson profiles Komarnitsky and explores his own fascination with a stranger’s front lawn.

Ben Popper takes a look at Koko, a startup with an app that helps people connect and provide emotional support to peers and, in the process, allows them to recognize and “rethink” their own problems.

At Backchannel, Andrew McMillen writes on how one young Wikipedia admin fights back at trolls by raising the profile of notable women in science, one new Wikipedia page at a time.

Sophie McBain asks what will become of human memory at the age of smartphones, social media, and unlimited storage in the cloud.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi writes about proxy services which help Western shoppers navigate the Japanese online marketplace and buy the goods retailers refuse to sell outside Japan.

Over at The Kernel, Jesse Hicks has put together a fascinating account of the Church of Scientology’s relationship with the Internet. So, how has a notoriously secretive and hierarchical organization dealt with the world’s most “open and radically nonhierarchical platform for communication”? Not well. Scientology’s antagonistic relationship to the Internet dates back to the web’s early days: when an early […]

“I’m sure there were phonies who claimed to be the sole survivor of Thermopylae,” [Don] Shipley says. “Guys that claimed service at Gettysburg, Valley Forge. But they could only project it down a couple of barstools at the village pub. Now with the internet, you can be anyone you want to be.” —Michael Gaynor writing for Washingtonian about […]

Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of […]