Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It is a truism to say that relationship is hard to maintain. It might be even more difficult when the Atlantic Ocean separates them. But thanks to internet and those big data companies that feed themselves with our personal informations, we can now have a real relationship even with 5,500 km between us. Real in…
After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is…
Our future workplaces are increasingly managed by apps and algorithms. Is technology empowering workers, or making them ever more helpless cogs in a corporate profit machine? When we talk about the “on-demand economy”, we are really talking about two things: the ability of a consumer to summon a vehicle, their lunch, or their groceries with…
It’s 2015, and feminism is still a dirty word. But it’s a real expletive on places like Tinder, where sexism is all-too-often all-too-visible. That’s why Laura Nowak created the Instagram account Feminist_Tinder, showcasing what happens when women put the word feminist into their Tinder bios. For the account, Nowak screenshotted various conversations she had…
Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” — packaged online as “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” — looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s…
On July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service called Napster, which had debuted…
It was a Saturday night in San Francisco, and so, of course, there was a booze-fueled start-up launch party at a hip SOMA bar. We were among the Kickstarter backers and enthusiasts invited by SpaceVR to “be an astronaut” by donning a virtual reality headset to explore a 3D-version of space pulled together from publicly…
Photo Amazon employees entering the company’s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working. They are told to forget the “poor habits”…
Last year, San Francisco released BART Watch, an app for reporting crimes on the Bay Area’s main transit system. After filing a California Public Records Act request to see what people were reporting, the East Bay Express found a disturbing pattern: Of the 763 alerts sent to BART, 198 included a description of the race…
In 2006, Condé Nast, the New York-based publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, among other magazines, bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. At the time, social media was just taking off and big media conglomerates were scrambling for a piece of the action. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had recently outfoxed Sumner…