Computer
Story Stream
Could You Live Without a Computer? I Can. June 18, 2025
As an antitech activist, I spend a lot of time telling people how to live without a smartphone. I gave mine up for a Nokia 2780 flip phone a few years ago. “Moderation is a myth,” I say, and I mean it. You simply can’t forge a balanced relationship w...
The Not-So-Great Algorithmic Novel June 17, 2025
Tom Comitta, author of the new novel Peoples Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels, is eager to reassure readers that “only” about 25 percent was written by prompting the AI model Playground and then “massaging” its responses into Co...
How Britney Spears Ushered in a New Era of Pop June 17, 2025
The dawn of the twenty-first century was characterized, primarily, by something that did not happen. I have some fuzzy recollections of Y2K, the panic at the end of the 1990s that ensued after a handful of computer scientists raised concerns that the...
Stop All the Clocks June 13, 2025
Excerpted from Stop All the Clocks. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Arcade Publishing.“I was raised in South Florida,” Marcos said once Mona had finished. He didn’t offer any sympathy for her or ask follow up questions, which, oddly e...
Who’s Afraid of the Anti-God? June 11, 2025
There is a memorable scene in the first installment of the final Mission: Impossible film where thousands of government workers sit in a huge room transferring digital files to plain white paper using old-fashioned typewriters. A super-intelligent al...
Stop All the Clocks by Noah Kumin June 09, 2025
A Thrilling Debut that Explores the Profound Mysteries of Life in the Digital AgeMona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI com...
The God that Glitched June 09, 2025
In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom presented what he carefully termed the “simulation argument” (SA) — a probabilistic thought experiment that posits that, if there are advanced civilizations with Godlike computing power anywhere in base physical real...
The History of the Personal Computer June 04, 2025
The personal computer came into existence because, at a time when the idea seemed far-fetched, certain individuals wanted so passionately to have a computer of their own that they just made it happen. Computer power to the people! was their rallying ...
The Spirit in the Blue Light May 28, 2025
Do you know the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, a classification system for European folktales? It was first compiled in 1910 by a Finnish man named Antti Aarne, and it was his attempt to group folktales by plot and motif. For instance, Type 311 is Rescu...
The Reenchanted World May 28, 2025
The first time I saw a computer was in 1984. I was fifteen years old and living in a sparsely populated area near a river, miles away from the closest town, in a far-northern country at the very edge of the world. A sign lit up above the convenience ...
Glass Century May 23, 2025
From the BQE she caught the holy hell of it, the way smoke was streaming from burning steel. It was cinema, bad fiction, a plot point dreamed up as too ridiculous for art and discarded somewhere else. She drove on thinking that soon this would all di...
Recurring Screens May 21, 2025
The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-ou...
Alex Karp’s Technopolitik May 08, 2025
As America undergoes a political realignment, Silicon Valley is experiencing its own shake-up. It’s not just the Big Tech CEOs tactfully aligning themselves with President Trump in a way that was unthinkable his first time around. The tech industry’s...
Am I Too Online? May 08, 2025
There have always been “two Americas.” Our country has always reflected deep social, economic and cultural divides. It’s threaded into the fabric of our national identity, with origins dating back to the very beginning: should America exist on its ow...
A Midsummer Night’s Stream May 02, 2025
There’s no real substitute for live theater, but during the pandemic lockdown, companies across America hastily threw together online performances to keep their audiences engaged and their actors at least partially employed. “Zoom theater” grew incre...
