By the time I had a few thousand followers on Twitter, people began to refer to me as a “public figure.” While mine was a paltry fame compared to literally thousands of cishet white men in the industry, that type of visibility for women is far rarer due to sexism, misogyny, online harassment, the way […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Trust Us: The Ethics of Our Automated Future
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but […]
Posted inFiction, Quotes
What Happens When the Internet Takes Over Your Home: Virus Edition
I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The History of Literacy, and the Future of 'Code Literacy'
In the latest Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja argues that “code literacy” is becoming just as critical as reading and writing in education. To understand how we as a society might begin to take it seriously, it also helps to understand the history of literacy itself: Reading and writing have become what researchers have called “interiorized” […]
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Which Kind of Failure Are You?
Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Problem with Journalism and the Internet, in One Quote
Jonah Peretti: I think there’s an interesting tension between what’s good for the user and what’s good for the industry. That was really created by Google. Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our industry should […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When the Internet Takes Away Our Paul Newman
Building up to 2005, [Tom] Cruise had tackled some of the most challenging dramas of any actor of his generation: Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky. Even his popcorn flicks — Minority Report,Collateral, War of the Worlds — were intriguingly dark. He’d never played it safe or shot a cash-grab. He trusted that if he chose movies he believed in, the […]
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Before Google: Larry Page’s Early Ideas for Changing the World
Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
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The $30 Million Clinkle Mystery
Clinkle’s growth team proved effective at signing up more than 100,000 would-be users — this, despite being a little hazy about precisely what they were selling. Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.” The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, […]
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Netscape, 20 Years Later
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]