The internet was not meant to suck. Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and the industrial-scale harvest of user data.”The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states. The creation of a powerful new oligarch class. The collapse of the aforementioned old media; the loss of a consensus reality; the rise of...
With the entity formerly known as Twitter vanishing in the rearview mirror, here are two articles from the early days, when we wondered what it was and what it might become. A global conversation? A mosaic of communities and interests? Perhaps you remember.
These people threaten to destroy one of the internet’s nicest things. Twitter is a happy accident, a fortuity, a quirk.
First published in the New York Review of Books, January 16, 2013. or a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams—in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history “Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting...
When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: “The patented One Click® feature."
How the internet looked to a possibly naïve journalist and entrepreneur in 1994.