As small businesses closed and layoffs hit, Amazon expanded its power — despite a string of crises and worker uprisings — When the Covid crisis went into full swing in March, two trend lines emerged almost immediately: Small businesses were forced to close down, and Amazon started hiring. At the time, I worried that as the pandemic raged we would see an accelerated consolidation of power among the tech companies that…

These 21 books about technology and its impact on society are crucial to understanding our fractious future — There was a quiet but serious shift in mainstream thought about technology underway this year, even before everything went to hell. …

Arecibo is the last gasp of ambitious, publicly funded efforts to understand the universe — When news broke that Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo radio telescope was going to be demolished, it sent the scientific community into the kind of mourning typically reserved for its most beloved human heroes and pioneers. …

If anyone has any ideas about what the hell is going to happen this week, it’s speculative fiction writers — Seemingly infinite branching futures lay before us, most of them bad-shaped. Will the pandemic and wildfires leave us in withered, blasted ruins? Will the new Supreme Court finally transform us into a full-blown theocracy? Will voter suppression continue unabated until election day? Will the militias show up? …

If the Uber-backed ballot initiative passes, it may lay the groundwork for unrest not seen since the onset of the Industrial Revolution — In a moment absolutely overstuffed with events that all bear the weight of historic significance — the hard-right lurch of the Supreme Court, an election the president appears destined to lose and then contest, another surge in the deadly pandemic — it’s easy for California’s Prop 22 to get lost…

How ‘visionary fiction’ can be used as a framework for building a better world for all humans — One of the key steps to building a survivable, sustainable future is envisioning and articulating what that future should look like. That might sound obvious, but it’s easier said than done, and it’s a step that’s too often taken for granted. And yet: Black-led movements have been advocating for police…

The late rock god was also an unsung tech genius — Every rock song is the sound of advancing technology. The electric guitar was maybe the first popular instrument that was an ongoing engineering project, a device whose sound was constantly refined, distorted, and modernized to the mold of the cultural moment by musicians themselves. The best rock guitarists knew this…

As robotization scales up, so do injuries — For the last decade, Amazon has been on an automation spree. The retail behemoth is mechanizing its warehouses, buying up robotics companies, and transforming its facilities into state-of-the-art, semi-automated distribution centers. The goal is clear enough: to move, sort, and ship products to customers as fast as inhumanly possible —…

‘New Atlantis’, Francis Bacon’s pioneering work of proto-science fiction, has just been reissued. Here’s why it still matters. — Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange, egalitarian land of Utopia that gave the concept its name, telling stories whose chief aim is to describe what an ideal world might look like became an enduring…