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.
A look at the organization, or movement, or “shadowy, snide international collective of hackers and online activists” known as Anonymous.
ids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there’s a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every branch, not to mention the video cameras, and we’ve entered the condition that David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.” When terrible things happen, people naturally reach out...
How the internet looked to a possibly naïve journalist and entrepreneur in 1994.