Tech
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Tech and Teens August 12, 2025
When school principal Christina Mehaffey first saw the Discover page of Snapchat, she could not believe what she was seeing. The algorithm of an app that was ubiquitous on the phones of her students at Faustina Academy was promoting content that was ...
The First Tech Right August 04, 2025
The term “tech right” seems to have been coined by Richard Hanania in a 2023 Substack post that heralded the rightward turn of various Silicon Valley luminaries, most prominently PayPal mafiosi Elon Musk and David Sacks and venture capitalist Marc An...
The Rise and Fall of Urbit June 19, 2025
During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the privately owned realms of the internet became the obligatory venues for public life. As Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google saw their stock prices soar, I became more frustrated with how much of my time and attent...
Tech Bros Don’t Get René Girard June 17, 2025
Reading René Girard’s careful, scholarly writing, you wouldn’t bet on him inspiring Silicon Valley. The rather old-fashioned literary scholar focussed on “great books” — Proust, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, the Bible — and eschewed deconstruction and ...
Higher Ed Is ‘Disrupting’ Itself Into Oblivion June 16, 2025
Around 2012-13, one of the many tech hype cycles that have punctuated the past few decades reached its crescendo. I’m referring to the craze for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which began when a cluster of new startups started promoting free, o...
Turbo America June 13, 2025
It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena had gathered to wave signs and shout into megaphones. Packs of bureaucrats who worked in the building stood together ...
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...
Right Wing Civil War June 09, 2025
And so, as it was foretold, the great tech right / populist right wing schism of 2025 begins.Yesterday, following several days of increasingly furious posting over President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Elon Musk’s relationship with the White Ho...
“Mountainhead” Channels the Absurdity of the Tech Bro June 06, 2025
Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It sounds like the setup for a punch line, but it also forms nearly the entire conceit behind “Mountainhead,” a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong,...
Parent Power Versus Big Tech June 06, 2025
At this point in history, screen time for children can be considered “Lindy”—it has been done for a long time and seems to have staying power. The baby boomers tuned into Captain Kangaroo on weekday mornings. Gen Xers munched on cereal while watching...
Competing Moral Visions June 04, 2025
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, held just one month into Trump’s second term, Attorney General Pam Bondi took the stage to inform the audience that Trump’s cabinet officials were the best of friends. “We’re all on the phone t...
More American Than America June 04, 2025
While my career technically began in publishing in 2009, my journey through venture, and tech, and ultimately the kind of publishing I do today all began with Peter Thiel, who I first met that same year at a meet-up for a wild little organization cal...
The Californian Ideology in Ruins June 02, 2025
Richard Barbrook is a British media scholar best known for co-authoring “The Californian Ideology,” a seminal and highly prescient 1995 study of what they described as the “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech ...
The Mortality Equation June 02, 2025
I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess myself. I meet enough enthusiasts, or at least those who swear by its potential. AI is...
In Living Technicolor May 26, 2025
What happened and who’s to blame? The smooth-textured, frictionless experts only deserve half of it. The other half falls on us, in a sideways, tech-drift, drowning-in-the-algorithm TikTok scrolling kind of way. We got got, and we didn’t even realize...
The View from Here May 26, 2025
Even as America welcomes its first native-born Pope, few would question that we live in a secular age. Nearly 30 percent of Americans now call themselves “religiously unaffiliated,” according to the most recent round of Pew polling data: making them ...
Your Chatbot Won’t Cry If You Die May 21, 2025
A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg went on tech guy Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to hawk his company’s new chatbot, which he thinks can sell to a gap in the market: “The average American has three friends, but has demand for 15.”The judgement was swift, an...
The Anti-Tech Canon: 30 Books May 19, 2025
Back in 2024, I felt an urgent need to challenge the new doctrine of techno-optimism. This ideology told people to shut up and keep scrolling.Silicon Valley would build utopia for us. We just needed to stare into those tiny screens 24/7, download all...
When Did Meat Become Right-Wing? May 13, 2025
In America, there are two famous vampires named Brian Johnson. Well, sort of. The first, who admittedly spells it “Bryan”, is the preternaturally ageless tech entrepreneur who charts his erections and uses infusions of his teenage son’s blood plasma ...
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...
The Technological Republic May 07, 2025
While Silicon Valley tech billionaires may be household names for their wealth, there are many equally influential, though lesser-known, technologists who are themselves as much thought leaders as businessmen. Among them are Alexander Karp, CEO of Pa...
Tech Founders Bet on New York May 05, 2025
In early April, at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, a crowd gathered amid the blocks and pulleys that once laid the keels of America’s navy. As I looked around, one face stood out, chiseled and familiar from New York Post front pages and courtroom sightings: Da...
Amusing Ourselves to Debt April 14, 2025
He opened the door in a company sweatshirt. I noted the ominous suffix “.ai” in the URL printed across the chest. I set my bags down and two cats scampered up to nose my ankles. There were rows of recessed white ceiling lights. The decor consisted of...
Beware San Fran’s Rationalist Cult April 14, 2025
A few weeks ago, after the first preview of my play about artificial intelligence in San Francisco, I found myself talking to Edward (not his real name), an agreeable programmer with a ponytail who didn’t make much eye contact but was eager to discus...
We Shall Be As gods April 04, 2025
I promised Santiago I’d stop trying to make every column I write for Wisdom of Crowds somehow about magic. But there’s no way to write about tech investor Bryan Johnson’s recent call to start a new “Don’t Die” religion — one he claims will usher in a...
