Latest
February 22, 2023
The Real Developmental Engine
Jeannette Estruth
Despite the persistent myth that Silicon Valley was built by rogue engineers in Palo Alto garages, federal funding — especially from the military — has long been the real developmental engine of the American technology sector. It was robust government spending in science, technology, computation, and higher education that fueled the explosion of American technology after World War II. And these same federal powers eventually rescued the sector when, after...
February 22, 2023
Socially Caustic Protagonists
Jordan Coley
Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s 2015 biopic, begins with an excerpt from a 1974 television segment. In it, science-fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke tells an Australian journalist that, by the year 2001, his young son will be able to retrieve “all the information you need in the course of living in a complex modern society” through a small computer console in his home. This opening is, of course, meant...
February 22, 2023
Still Blind to the Extent of the Problem
David Adler
There is no Meta office in Ethiopia, but Facebook counts 6.9 million profiles in the country, and WhatsApp millions more. For Ethiopians — as for others across Africa, Asia, and Latin America — Meta is not merely a tech company, but the entire internet. Its apps come preinstalled on mobile phones; their use is included in prepaid mobile packages. Ninety-six percent of South African internet users are on WhatsApp, as are...
February 22, 2023
A War Chest of Lobbying and Dark-Money Dollars
Jane Chung
The call to “Break Up Big Tech” was initially more pithy slogan than political possibility, but today, its realization seems far more plausible. President Biden, under pressure from workers and tech-accountability activists, appointed a gang of Big Tech critics to the Federal Trade Commission, his circle of advisers, and other positions. So far, they have led aggressive attacks: the FTC has sued Facebook for crushing competition, probed Amazon’s acquisitions of...
February 22, 2023
A Necessary Credential
Lora Kelley
On a balmy Monday evening last summer, I attended a networking event for young venture capitalists on a rooftop in midtown Manhattan. I asked some if the state of the economy — teetering, as it seemed to be, on the brink of a recession — worried them. One recent Harvard graduate, standing with a view of Grand Central Terminal, told me that, on the contrary, he was excited for the...
February 22, 2023
The Engineer’s Predicament
Ben Tarnoff
It might surprise you to learn that a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living are socialists. There aren’t as many as the right would have you believe — how lovely to imagine a Twitter staffed exclusively by blue-haired reds — but enough, and more than there used to be. The reasons are probably not terribly specific to tech. The well-documented material factors that have been...
February 22, 2023
Back in the Doomsday Spirit
Tarpley Hitt
There are a couple of anecdotes that routinely come up in media coverage of Sequoia Capital, the V.C. firm now notorious for investing and then losing $150 million in the crypto exchange FTX. A recent one is Sequoia’s assurance that its partners had run a “rigorous diligence process” on the failed platform. Another is the fact that Sequoia deleted a fawning, 14,000-word profile of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, from its...
February 22, 2023
Saving Kids from the Street
JS Tan
We were always told that the internet would bring about a new era, one marked by dynamism, entrepreneurship, and innovation. And if you look at the numbers, the economic contribution of the tech sector speaks for itself. As of 2021, a Harvard Business School study found, the American internet economy accounted for twelve percent of the nation’s GDP and had grown seven times faster than the rest of the economy...
February 22, 2023
A Volatile Internet Landscape
Annie Rauwerda
As a kid in Huntsville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales would eagerly plaster his family’s World Book Encyclopedia set with stickers made by the company containing updated information. Some twenty years later, in 1996, he was a PhD dropout building a fledgling company called Bomis, which created web portals linking to sites about laddish topics like cars, philosophy, and sports. The site didn’t find success, however, until it started focusing on porn,...
February 22, 2023
The Invisible Workforce
David Ethan Jones-Krause (as told to Lora Kelley)
When the Alphabet Workers Union announced its union drive in early 2021, I joined pretty much immediately. I went to the union website and filled out a sign-up form, and I got connected with committees and a steward. At the time, I was working for Google as a vendor, which entailed writing, editing, and publishing support content. For my entire career, I’ve only worked jobs where I was a temp,...
