Is the public library as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold?
Coming in September.
Increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human. Or worse, do pretend, when they are actually bots—tiny, skeletal, incapable robots, usually little more than a few crude lines of computer code. The scary thing is how easily we can be fooled.
You know. You've known as long as you can remember.
What is MagnaCarta worth? Exactly $21,321,000. We know because that’s what it fetched in a fair public auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Twenty-one million is, by far, the most ever paid for a page of text, and therein lies a paradox: Information is now cheaper than ever and also more expensive. Mostly, of course, information is practically free, easier to store and faster to spread than our...
"... it has invented the railway, the motor car, the areoplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing."
A look at the organization, or movement, or “shadowy, snide international collective of hackers and online activists” known as Anonymous.
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...