Society

Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.

To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon.

Data in the 21st Century is like Oil in the 18th Century: an immensely, untapped valuable asset. Like oil, for those who see Data’s fundamental value and learn to extract and use it there will be huge rewards. We’re in a digital economy where data is more valuable than ever. It’s the key to the…

Treating data like a commodity has led some governments to hoard it in silos, locked behind borders. The result: dwindling economic and social benefits.

The data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules

Measuring—and delivering—what consumers really want

Henry VIII, after Hans Holbein the Younger It's fun to imagine traveling back in time and engaging with the then-prevailing technologies. Wo...

Do you want Immortan Joes? Because this is how you get Immortan Joes. One thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water: In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022, to nearly 1.7 billion gallons [...] "It's fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI," including "its heavy ...

I am tired. Exhausted from struggling and imagining a better world. I have given up, in a way. Yet I am cheery.

Voters deserve far better than the decrepit Democrats and Republicans.

Citizens’ Assemblies convene people from all walks of life to deal with tough political questions like abortion and climate policy

Passion is a state of mind that can't be objectively measured, yet many bosses believe they can spot a passionate employee.

It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when […]

U.S. Digital Service Chief Mina Hsiang on how government’s IT has—and hasn’t changed since the Obamacare website mess

At Reason (“Did NYC Just Kneecap Airbnb?”), Liz Wolfe seems to be diversifying beyond her normal focus on tech platform apologetics and crowding onto the turf of resident landlord whisperer Christian Britschgi. I confess my first reading of the title brought a smile to my face — probably not the effect Wolfe intended — as...

Former president Donald Trump's infamous photo op in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, June 1, 2020. The photo op wa...

According to the Bible, God punished the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah by obliterating the city. “Fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all,” so says the scripture. That…

Google exec said users get hooked on search engine like “cigarettes or drugs.”

This is the second post in a series on what Meta did in Myanmar and what the broader technology community can learn from it. It will make a lot more

Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.

Former President Trump during a speech on Saturday depicted the U.S. as a “beloved nation” that is “teetering on the edge of tyranny” and painted his 2024 presidential campa…

Long time readers of the blog will remember that I have written, a couple of times, about the Holy Roman Empire in the past before. There’s a few reasons for this – first of all the HRE goes so har…

As I write this in mid-November 2020, there’s quite a stir over the new version of Apple’s Mac OS, the operating system that runs on its laptops. For more than a year, Apple has engaged…

Why Lina Khan and the F.T.C. must prevail in their long-awaited lawsuit against Amazon.

More and more Brits are being convinced to ‘become their own boss’ and monetise their personal interests, turning life into a 24/7 financial opportunity. Eloise Hendy meets the people who came to regret it

A few years ago I had some fellow Tulsans reach out to me and tell me about a tailor in town that I had to meet. His name is Sherman Ray, and though he’s 97 years old, he continues to work in his shop almost every day. Sherman’s had an interesting life: he learned the […]

The Atlantic has an adapted excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, Democracy Awakening: The Origins of the Socialis

More propaganda, more moral gaslighting, more bullshit. Steal! Feed your children and yourself. Steal all you will! Just do not get caught.