A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:
The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.
Making sense of the CEO’s very public tour of America, which feels like a political campaign minus the politics.
Computer scientist tycoon Robert Mercer is at the heart of a shockingly well-funded propaganda network.
Libertarian, futurist, billionaire: a profile of Peter Thiel.
The social network positioned its plan to bring the internet to millions of Indians as a gift. The country saw a catch.
On the history of content moderation and what it means for the future of free speech.
The humans behind the algorithm.
Famous people and the media have always needed each other. It has been a long, mutually beneficial (and mutually profitable) partnership. And it’s over.
The search for an Iraq veteran on the brink of suicide.
A murder case in Mississippi catches the eye of amateur sleuths on Facebook, who proceed to harass everyone involved in the case.
A French reporter went undercover as potential “caliphette” and recieved a marriage proposal from a senior ISIS commander.
How Facebook ‘likes’ landed Jelani Henry in Rikers.
An interactive fiction: a son and the illusion of his dead father; the intersection of technology and real life.
"Once I created his page I tried to return to my life. I was twenty-six years old, a man of inconsistent employment. During the winter I shoveled snow for the elderly. They paid me in germs and butterscotch candy. My landlord, an independently wealthy sexagenarian, accepted the candy as payment. She also insisted I tidy the complex. I changed light bulbs. I dusted the parking lot. I swept cigarette butts into the street. I clubbed the occasional beehive. My life was guarded and lonely, and susceptible, I soon discovered, to the distraction my father provided."
A troubled wife's obsession with her husband's ex.
"I’d been researching generic articles on divorce for a long time, but never found anything that reminded me of Henry’s. They were young, but they weren’t as stupid as he seemed to say. They seemed to have really been in love. The picture he’d shown me was of them on a boat on a lake—a lake we’d been to, one we’d brought a picnic lunch to. They looked so happy and he looked so young, his hair not yet flecked with stray whites and grays."
The grim world of outsourced content moderation.
“There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.’
Privacy, memory, data and advertising—how the modern web has become a Ponzi scheme and how we might be able to fix it.
Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.
“I guess what you post on Facebook matters.” An 18-year-old faces 10 years in jail for a sarcastic threat on Facebook.
The capitalist evangelism of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In feminist manifesto.
The emerging political consciousness of Silicon Valley.
How Wall Street won.
Marketing research,the pre-Facebook history of ‘likeability,’ and why there will never be a ‘dislike’ button.
A former Facebook executive critiques Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” movement.
On Ilya Zhitomirskiy, an idealistic young developer who committed suicide 18 months after founding Diaspora, his well-publicized, open-source alternative to Facebook.
