Be Evil

For better or worse, social media is the new public square. Of adults, 68% use Facebook, 73% use YouTube, and a quarter use Twitter. The numbers are much higher for adults under 50. Two-thirds of adults and roughly 4 in 5 under 50 use social media to consume …

The text messaging systems that people use on their phones today have been pretty awful for a while. They started as SMS which was a hack to sneak text-based data into the signaling connections of cell phones in the 90’s. Multimedia Messaging System was added…

From Lurking: How a Person Became a User, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A user of Google products might be put off by the companys cheerfulness and believe that its old byword, Dont Be Evil, was always bunk. But its steady dominance over…

As I was reading The Atlantic article Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World I kept flashing to the end of Anna Wiener’s awesome memoir Uncanny Valley. And it was no surprise to see this article in the Boulder Daily Camera titl…

I was pretty young when the internet was still a haven for idealists, a place where I posted benign links to MySpace and downloaded music via obscure Blogspot pages. When I started college just before the Great Recession, the web wasnt yet tangled up with the…