Jul 23, 2020
Now, more than ever, as we work from home, gather with friends on social media, shop for groceries online, it feels like this tsunami of digital dependence and loss of personal privacy will wash over everything. That once these companies (and now governments) storm the beaches of our minds, they will not give those...
Apr 13, 2020
This argument about efficiency feels like it has seeped into every aspect of our society. We give up more and more of ourselves to tech companies because we want to use our time as efficiently as possible. We structure our economy in such a way that the entire success of our nation is determined by whether the growth of...
Mar 31, 2020
This week’s episode of Everything They Know was supposed to be about a hypothetical dark future, where we’ve done nothing to rein in Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, where algorithmic prediction has gotten to 100% and has created perfect echo-bubbles for each of us, where authoritarian techno-governments and...
Mar 17, 2020
In previous episodes we’ve looked at this issue of tech dominance from several angles. We’ve seen how they gather data, what they can do with it, how they make money from it, and how social media allows them to muddy the water and shape the narrative. You may have asked yourself along the way, “how can they do...
Mar 10, 2020
When I got on Facebook in 8th grade, it was worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million. By the time I was a junior in college, studying abroad in Senegal and forced to have a much more limited Internet experience, it was worth $50 billion.
Today, it’s worth about $550 billion, the 5th most valuable company in...