Or is it time to simply move on?
There is a line of thinking that even Facebook’s critics help to strengthen its bottom line. Take the spread of misinformation, for instance. Soon after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that misleading information optimized for his platform had pushed Trump into the White…
Facebook’s new smart glasses will have you thinking like an algorithm
In the future of the past, cyborgs were different. In the The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors played Steve Austin, a test pilot who suffers severe injuries after crashing an experimental plane. He loses both legs and an arm, and is blinded in one eye. Austin then becomes an…
The last half of the 20th Century was a party we never want to end
There’s a TikTok account I follow that’s just clips of the World Trade Center as it once was, in the decades and months preceding its destruction on September 11th, 2001.
One recent post is an excerpt of an old home video. It begins with a slow panning shot from the…
Don’t act like you’re not interested in horse dewormer
“So, obviously one of the big stories going around right now is that all of the people that have been calling everyone ‘sheep’ for the last year and a half for getting vaccinating and wearing masks and taking the pandemic seriously are now eating a deworming cream intended for, among…
How to keep writing human in a world of A.I. tools
Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 futuristic romantic drama, opens on Theodore Twombly sitting a a desk dictating a letter. “To my Chris, I have been thinking about how I could possibly tell you how much you mean to me,” he says, pensively. …
Can a Twitter account of Canadian paintings save the country?
If you want to know a country, look at its art. This is the advice the curator of the Twitter account @CanadianPaintings once gave as a tour guide in Europe. It’s advice she now thinks Canadians might well consider taking, too. …
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek column is the worst thing ever written about the internet. Or is it?
“After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community.”
Our general acceptance of climate change as a shared reality is slipping away
An alert pings on my iPhone. I look over to learn that the Amazon rain forest is now emitting more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. Sounds bad, I think. …
We’ve created a society of endless personal pseudo-events. No wonder we’re all so confused.
Influencers in the Wild is an Instagram account with just over 4 million followers. The name suggests that the account’s posts feature popular social media personalities, but instead the name is ironic, and curated in its stream are clips of ordinary people making social media content — in other words…
Nobody wants to be the internet’s main character. So why are we all still trying?
Our social media content was supposed to only be a temporary problem. Back in 2007, when people began to worry that maybe all the stuff they were posting to Facebook might affect their job prospects, Jason Warner, a then-recruiter at Google, no less, offered reassurance. Eventually, employers aren’t going to…
