Society

Make a list of the richest people on earth. Behind their wealth are large organizations comprised of hundred of thousands of people who make stuff that millions of others want to use in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of Amazon

Fourteen years ago, Kevin Kelly famously proposed that an artist could make a living online with a thousand true fans. Has time proved him correct?

Two stories hit the doom scrolls at roughly the same time this month. First, Bloomberg Media asked if the era of remote work is coming to an

I’m a fan of appropriate placebos. They often have few side effects, they’re inexpensive and they work when used in the right situations. You can check out my rant on them here, it&#821…

Neither you nor I have consented to the genes we inherited. Our general makeup was dictated to us by our ancestors. I had no say in my allergies, my short stature, my baldness, my tone deafness, nor in my even

By every geologic measure, modern human life is a tiny blip, a spark of static on a very long-playing record. For most of the time that life has existed on Earth, there were no humans. And when the…

The reality of AI is something harder to comprehend.

A tidal wave of chronic illness could leave millions of people incrementally worse off.

Political philosopher Chris Freiman makes the case.

Chinese chops are used to sign many types of legal documents. They have been in use for thousands of years and are an important part of Chinese culture.

Here on Techdirt, we’ve written about a bunch of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight shows that are quite frequently directly in agreement with what we write about on Techdirt. We’re …

The new beta product lets PC users change their voice in real time, which may be a boon for not only streamers, but for the trans community as well.

Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head. This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version w…

Are we already in World War III? In many ways, it seems so. There is a hot war between Ukraine and Russia that's only worsening and demanding more and more from the West. Sweden and Finland are joining NATO. Scotland is now planning to break with the UK and join the EU and NATO. Russian is certainly alarmed by these developments and is threatening to take "retaliatory steps." At this point, those who believe the...

Humans are born to make stuff. We almost can't help it. Place us in an empty flat plain and we'll start building things. Put us on a dried lake bed in the middle of the desert and we'll build things, take them down

The early promises about the utopia that the internet would bring us have proven wrong. The internet can never deliver on all it’s capable of when it’s run for profit — we need a publicly owned internet.

More than 100 of the coffee shop’s locations have unionized, while just one Amazon warehouse has managed it

The nation’s fourth-largest city hasn’t solved homelessness, but its remarkable progress can suggest a way forward.

"No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error. It can only be attributable to human error." Musk's regulatory woes mount as U.S. moves closer to recalling Tesla's self-driving software: On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot

The Last Week Tonight host examined Google, Amazon and Apple and efforts to address ‘anti-competitive conduct’

And explains how Congress could shake up the industry

A fair question that will reveal a lot about that person is to ask them what they believe that the people they most respect do not believe. This question is similar but not the same as one that the investor