Banning White Supremacy Isn’t Censorship, It’s Accountability
When I began organizing in earnest to defend the internet in 2009, my efforts were driven by the great promise that an open internet without corporate gatekeepers would, in time,…
What the Arab Spring Can Teach Us About GameStop
When I first learned of the campaign by folks on Reddit that has wreaked havoc on wealthy hedge funds looking to profit off struggling companies like the videogame retailer GameStop,…
Online Harassment Toward Women Is Getting Even More Insidious
It was somewhere between the calls to repeal the 19th Amendment and the declarations that I was a traitor who belonged in Guantanamo Bay that the trolls started to wear…
Impeachment and Deplatforming Aren’t Enough to Move Forward
These firebrand Evangelical media made clear that anything with a whiff of leftism—from science to higher education to the news and entertainment media—was aligned with a nefarious them out to…
Stop Calling Everyone a Tech Bro
Fresh-faced Stanford grads yapping about their startups. Ruthlessly capitalist billionaires in their 50s. Soulful, shaggy-haired billionaires in their 40s. Greedy venture capitalists. Earnestly liberal social media critics. New York political…
The Ethics of Vaccinating Teachers—and Keeping Schools Closed
How valid are these concerns? The degree to which vaccination will reduce transmission isn’t yet known. But taking into account concerns about data being preliminary, Paul Sax, an infectious disease…
To Beat China on Tech, Biden Will Have to Learn from It
And along with Australia, Japan, Vietnam, and others, India is also moving to deny Huawei’s involvement in developing 5G mobile networks within its borders. These decisions weren’t the result of…
I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You
Imagine walking into a greeting card store to get a bespoke bit of poetry, written just for you by a computer. It’s not such a wild idea, given the recent…
White Nationalism Is Far Worse Than a ‘Disease’
In 2020, Condoleeza Rice wrote, “Our country has a birth defect: Africans and Europeans came to this country together—but one group was in chains.” After President Joe Biden addressed the…
Stop Ignoring the Evidence on Covid-19 Treatments
Thanks to Twitter, you can now watch a doctor’s heart break in real time. Like everyone else, we’ve often made our feelings plain during the pandemic—our despondence over all the…