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Last week, tech billionaire Peter Thiel admitted to funding lawsuits against Gawker Media, including the lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan. Hogan won a $140 million judgment against Gawker after the site published a small portion of a recording of Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife and talking about eating too much sushi.
...moreFor Motherboard at VICE, John R. Platt examines the gender disparity in journalism sources and the consequences in his own work when addressing and correcting that disparity. Platt’s piece ran as part of Motherboard’s Silicon Divide series that looked at gender inequality in the tech industry.
...moreAt the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance delves into the popular belief that technology naturally bends towards equality and progress to show how rarely that idea actually plays out.
...more...moreWas this a brilliant viral marketing scheme, a literary treasure hunt orchestrated by some corporation angling for free publicity to promote a new energy drink or video game? Or was it a purely artistic endeavor, aimed at stimulating a discussion about how the tech boom has altered our culture, economy and society?
Hackers are taking down the police.
Should we regulate the most addictive substance known to humans aka the Internet?
The dark side of Silicon Valley.
The food legacy of the great cranberry scare.
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Are you a science dummy?
Do you need to be happy? There is an app for that.
Algorithms don’t know best.
The history of Silicon Valley.
...moreVirtual reality is the final frontier.
Do livestreaming apps change the news?
Ellen Pao and the media and Silicon Valley and Twitter and sexism and everything.
Is virtual medicine real medicine?
...moreGoogle wants to rank searches on fact.
But who decides what is a fact?
Your dog ruined everything. You did too.
For the last time, take those baby pictures down.
It is time to log off the Internet.
...moreA world of enchanted objects is both alluring and deeply terrifying.
And now, a little about how Silicon Valley treats the LGBT community.
It’s every bibliophile’s wet dream, but is Kindle Unlimited worth it?
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to “Like.”
...moreWill computers replace teachers?
In Silicon Valley, ladies don’t get no respect.
And that difficult intersection between women, Silicon Valley, and speaking up every time is embodied in one woman: Shanley Kane.
Crowdsourced editing and fact-checking. It’s a thing now.
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Ever wonder what John Steinbeck would make of angel investors and Google? McSweeney’s contributor Thomas Scott has reimagined Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men, taking George and Lennie from the fields of Great Depression-era California to modern-day Silicon Valley.
...moreIn 1983, “Silicon Valley” meant something different: different tech companies were dominating for different reasons, in different areas of California’s Santa Clara County.
The Atlantic’s Alexis C. Madrigal went to look at what remained of that Silicon Valley from thirty years ago, and what he found is actually kind of shocking:
...moreI explained myself to him, trying not to sound completely ridiculous.
At the London Review of Books, Rebecca Solnit provides readers with historic and contemporary insight into the Bay Area’s long history of “booms and busts”–from the California gold rush to the dot-com bubble—and examines the positive, but mostly detrimental effects these economic changes had/have on Bay Area residents.
...moreWhen Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings, a book about the sexist culture she encountered while working at Facebook during its early days, came out, Melissa Gira Grant paid attention.
Grant had worked for a Silicon Valley gossip blog during the same time period and had come to her own dismayed conclusions about women’s roles in the tech industry.
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Facebook employees know better than most the value of privacy.