Tech
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The Great Tech-Family Alliance March 05, 2025
Listening to President Trump’s inaugural address, I couldn’t help but be struck by the references to colonizing Mars, splitting the atom, and holding all the world’s knowledge in the palm of our hands. After years of denigration by Washington, it’s r...
How Tech Created the Online Fact-Checking Industry March 04, 2025
Earlier this year, Meta pulled the plug on its US fact-checking program. Google now refuses to add fact-checks to Search and YouTube. Nearly a decade of work — hundreds of millions of dollars spent, thousands of people hired — is gone, essentially ov...
Ditch the Grindset January 20, 2025
A performatively long workweek is one of the major status signals in the contemporary American meritocracy—whether it’s crushing hours as a medical resident, BigLaw associate, McKinsey consultant, or Silicon Valley coder. This class prejudice appeare...
The Alliance Between Tech Titans & the MAGA Faithful January 20, 2025
On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of “luminaries from across the New Right” are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel. The event is being hosted by the ...
Clownish Biden Warns of ‘Oligarchy’ January 17, 2025
In a farewell address on Wednesday (boo hoo, so sad), Joe Biden suddenly found himself concerned by what he deems an emerging American “oligarchy,” primarily influenced by tech billionaires....
The End of Fun in the NBA January 03, 2025
The big power forwards and centers, wide as canyons in the shoulders and waist, used to bludgeon each other in the post like elephant seals. That was basketball once — Charles Barkley backing down defenders like a bulldozer, Shaquille O'Neal shatteri...
America Should Not Become a Nation of Tiger Moms January 01, 2025
A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an econo...
Where the Tech Right and Restrictionists Can Agree December 27, 2024
In the 1968 Cold War thriller Ice Station Zebra, Patrick McGoohan’s British spy character explains to the American submarine captain played by Rock Hudson, “The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German s...
Bet on YouTube December 23, 2024
Over the past year, I’ve been a skeptic various social media platforms and technological developments. I do not think artificial intelligence represents a revolution on the order of what came before us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do ...
Inside the Mind of Luigi Mangione December 10, 2024
The news that UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, had been killed sent an immediate shockwave across America, prompting quick assumptions about the assassin’s motive. Early chatter on platforms such as BlueSky speculated that the shooter, who is ...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
The Fantasy of Cozy Tech November 21, 2024
At a wide desk in a bedroom somewhere sits a figure, her back facing the camera, supported by an ergonomic white office chair. Her head is bracketed by puffy, white noise-cancelling headphones. Her wrists rest on a foam cloud as she plays a pixelated...
Bubbling Up November 20, 2024
In Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (out today via Stripe Press) tech and finance writer Byrne Hobart takes his biggest risk yet. Hobart is currently best known for his newsletter, The Diff, in which he explores business strategies and technol...
We Need Raw Awe November 12, 2024
What if I told you – like the eerily moving Control Voice in the 1960s TV show The Outer Limits – that ‘you are about to participate in a Great Adventure’, that ‘you are about to experience the awe and mystery’ of the Universe on this journey. And wh...
The AI Chatbots Are Rooting for Kamala November 04, 2024
Silicon Valley may pride itself on being a home for people who think outside the box. Yet when it comes to the hottest product in tech right now—artificial intelligence chatbots—there’s a stunning amount of political groupthink.The country is evenly ...
The Most Opinionated Man in America October 28, 2024
Mike Solana has opinions. Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good. The media are unduly harsh on tech companies. Labeling things as “misinformation” is just an excuse to stifle speech. Donald Trump is “the greatest clown in human history” (tho...
The Tech Divide Driving Male and Female Voters Apart October 28, 2024
From the moment JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” became a media firestorm, the divide between the sexes has dominated much of this US presidential race.On the Republican side, the messaging has been aggressively masculine. At the part...
My Year of Tech and Relaxation October 16, 2024
I used to go to the mall to use the internet. Until a few months ago, I would leave my apartment after dinner, carry my laptop five minutes down the road to the Kingsland Shopping Center, and squat on the dirty linoleum floor outside Costa Coffee, on...
How to Fight Tech Censorship October 16, 2024
The news that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pressured X, formerly Twitter, to censor journalist Ken Klippenstein has reignited the controversy over tech censorship in terms that replicate, almost word for word, what transpired four years ago w...
Seeing Like a Simulation October 07, 2024
WHEN I WAS 20, I believed dogmatically in mass transit, dense urbanization, and a nine percent tax rate. These were not political beliefs. They were gameplay beliefs that I had picked up—through online strategy guides and in-game experimentation—to b...
In the New Miami, the Old Office Culture Reigns October 02, 2024
Miami has long had a reputation as a balmy party destination, a place where spring breakers, Lamborghini-driving showoffs, Cuban culture, and clubs coalesce.But the South Florida city has undergone a major transformation over the past 15 years. It be...
The Quest for a Great WWE Movie October 01, 2024
On a recent episode of SmackDown, WWE aired a nine-minute video package featuring storied foes Roman Reigns and Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes meeting face-to-face on the Georgia Tech football field. A plethora of drone shots featured all types ...
The Sadness of AI Boyfriends September 10, 2024
ChatGPT has become a common feature of the workplace, with many people reaping the benefits of AI to help them with their tasks and projects. But, some women in China have been using a “jail-break” version of ChatGPT, which bypasses some of the safet...
A Conversation with Tony Tulathimutte September 09, 2024
In 2016, I was lolling around Miami on the eve of Florida’s Republican presidential primary. I had time to kill in the March sun, and with me was a new book called Private Citizens. The debut novel of Tony Tulathimutte, a graduate of the famed Iowa W...
Author Spotlight: Matthew Davis, ‘Let Me Try Again’ September 06, 2024
Ross Mathcamp might have just become a millionaire overnight due to losing both of his parents in a helicopter crash on route to Turks & Caicos, but it’s the least of his worries. He willingly let go of his girlfriend Lora Liamant, the love of his li...
