Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Power needs a critic. But a paradox mars criticism of the ascendant technological elite who are seeking to remake our lives: The people who understand technology well enough to criticize it tend to adore it uncritically; the critics are often Luddites who struggle with their toasters. It is notable, then, when a techie insider steps…
CONTENT OF THE POST Anti-vax Twitter consists of several thousand vaccine denialists whose present project is stopping California’s mandatory vaccine bill, through campaigns of lockstep tweeting to lawmakers, workplace and home-based harassment of dissenters, and coordinated SEO campaigns that muddy the waters for concerned parents who try to research the subject. Renee DiResta (a vaccination…
In 2012, Twitter made the decision to allow Sunlight to curate the deleted tweets from lawmakers and those seeking elected office. Last night all that changed. When we launched Politwoops three years ago, our goal was to create accountability and a public record for the messages elected officials and candidates for president, vice president, Congress…
Every day, 750,000 workers log into enterprise chat software Slack to communicate with colleagues. Todd Kennedy, a 37-year-old CTO at a software startup, also uses the service—to talk with his wife, Julie. The couple created a fake company name, “TheKennedys,” to sign up for the two-member Slack chat that has replaced iMessage for them as…
Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need to be told that threatening to rape and murder women is not okay. It’s not a casual means of communicating disagreement; it’s not a hilarious riposte; it’s not a valid expression of frustration at being a sad and lonely individual. And if you know and understand…
An officer pulls someone over on the side of the highway. The cop sits in the car a moment, runs the plates—they’re fine—and gets out of the car. As he or she approach the driver’s side window, the driver pulls out a gun, shoots the officer, and flees. This is something close to what happened…
Sometimes it slips Kristin Parisi’s mind that she’s disabled. After 25 years in a wheelchair—the result of a car accident when she was 5 years old—her means of transportation no longer registers as abnormal. “It’s one of those things I forget—that I’m disabled—until someone tells me I am,” the 30-year-old public-relations executive says. That reminder…
There is a chicken in my shower. It’s 8:30 a.m., I’ve just sat down on the toilet to pee. I casually glance around and there it is, drinking some of the residual water puddled on my shower floor. This is not the first creature to make an appearance in my bathroom. Since I moved to…
Do you have a fancy college degree or a job in a STEM field? Do you have fewer than two tattoos? Do you avoid Tinder dates and songs with explicit lyrics? Do you spend more than two hours a day exercising? Then you may be qualified to live at the Startup Castle, a self-proclaimed “community…
But Andreessen waved away the criticisms as the ravings of “a self-hating software engineer.” When I persisted, he said, “Ordinary people love the iPhone, Facebook, Google Search, Airbnb, and Lyft. It’s only the intellectuals who worry.” He raised counter-arguments, then dismissed them: technology would solve any environmental crisis hastened by an expanding economy, and as…