Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This weekend, the New York Times published a piece by Cade Metz about Scott Siskind, the brilliant blogging psychiatrist formerly known as Scott Alexander, and the so-called “rationalist” community that grew up around his former blog, Slate Star Codex (SSC), which Siskind sunk to the bottom of the sea this summer because Metz was working…
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…
Transformational change cannot occur suddenly — and sudden changes rarely turn out to be transformational. It’s clear that common practices at many of our largest tech platforms must change, but hoping for a shouting-at-the-barricades revolution is unrealistic and possibly unhelpful. While we — representing doctors, health tech professionals, and elements of the policymaking community — recognize and share public dissatisfaction with…
American companies continue to build surveillance tools that are used to violate human rights. Workers who refuse to comply deserve protections. Mr. Poulson is a former research scientist at Google. ImageA protester outside Google’s London headquarters in January urging the company to scrap the Dragonfly project, a censored search engine for China.CreditCreditBen Stansall/Agence France-Presse —…
The coward who gunned down 49 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left behind a white-nationalist screed rationalizing his mass murder as a necessary act to preserve the white race. The manifesto is striking for its trolling—its combination of fanaticism, insincerity, and attempts at irony. The killer was particularly obsessed with the idea of “white genocide,” a…
More than 100 Microsoft employees have signed a letter sent to CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith criticizing the company’s plans to build HoloLens AR tech for the military, the organizing group said Friday. The development is part of a $480 million military contract that Microsoft won this past November. The group’s letter demands…
Photo: Artwork by Ayatgali Tuleubek In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications…
Harvard Business School invented the “leadership” industry—and produced a generation of corporate monsters. No wonder Sandberg, one of the school’s most prominent graduates, lacks a functioning moral compass. Sandberg arrives for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on September 5, 2018. By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call. The ongoing three-way public-relations car wreck involving Washington, Facebook, and…
Photo: Getty If you’ve been online today (God help you) perhaps you’re aware that a piece masquerading as critical discourse—while really just being a coming together of two oversized egos—ran in the newspaper of record. In other news, it’s a day ending in y. Lord alive, online has been bad: media types justifying their friendships…
Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012 We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as…