“Your online influencer girlfriend is actually a rotating cast of low-wage workers. I became one of them.”
Technology
Posted inEditor's Pick
Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad
“This ad breaks things. By implication, it threatens to break people, or at least their livelihoods.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
We Need To Rewild The Internet
“The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.”
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Josh Dzieza, Mark Krotov, Wendy Brenner, Paul Brown, and Andrew Normal Wilson.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Silicon Savanna: The Workers Taking on Africa’s Digital Sweatshops
“Kenya has become ground zero in a battle over the future of content moderation in Africa and beyond.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Text File That Runs the Internet
“For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Memory Machines
“Data centers have proliferated across Ireland, at great cost.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?
“Almost 2,000 years ago, a volcano preserved Herculaneum’s vast library of scrolls but left them unreadable. A volunteer army of nerds has been racing to decipher them.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Meet Me in the Eternal City
“Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias. Who’s ready to move in?”