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February 28, 2023
All Roll Is B-Roll | Adam Curtis Goes Quiet
Mitch Therieau
Is there anything left to say about Adam Curtis? Over the course of more than 25 BBC documentaries, depending on how you count — each an attempt to trace the workings of what he repeatedly, enigmatically calls “power” across the twentieth century to the wreckage of the present — the director has developed a sensibility so idiosyncratic that it simultaneously begs for and preempts parody. Along the way, he has...
February 28, 2023
Editors’ Note | Circling the Drain
The Editors
It’s a truism that there are no new stories, that each narrative, no matter how novel it appears, is actually an iteration of one of three or seven or twelve archetypal plots. Maybe so, but the cultural landscape feels especially grim these days. After the shock of March 2020, something like a renaissance was supposed to play out — that’s what happens, the forecasters forecasted, when the patterns of ordinary...
February 28, 2023
On Snowfall | Poetry
Joanna Klink
Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing — who I was, others are, what any burden meant. The nights come and go, my thoughts loosen and return, and even now I am not sure the cardinal in the empty tree is there or if I dreamed it waiting. If I walked out now into that muffled quiet, my face would cover in ice-dust and my...
February 28, 2023
Thrown | Fiction
Clare Needham
From London’s King’s Cross to Edinburgh’s Waverley station, the evening journey of four hours seemed short. All along, coaxed into being by the smooth motion of the train, Marie’s thoughts took a glimmering, hopeful shape, and she recorded them in a small notebook. Several times, she got up to go to the bathroom in her excited state, and on each return believed she saw the eyes of other passengers flick...
February 22, 2023
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Annie Rauwerda, Ben Tarnoff, David Adler, David Ethan Jones-Krause, Jane Chung, Jeannette Estruth, Jordan Coley, JS Tan, Lora Kelley, Sophie Haigney, Tarpley Hitt
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
February 22, 2023
Running Like Ticker Tape
Sophie Haigney
I’m on Twitter all day every day, which doesn’t mean I’m looking at it all the time, but that it’s a kind of burbling backdrop to everything else going on in my life — all the reading and writing and thinking and talking. “Backdrop” isn’t quite right, though, because Twitter is also integrated into whatever it is I’m doing, feeding and sometimes poisoning it. By which I mean I don’t...
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...