These early and overlooked books revealed Facebook was plagued from the start — and are crucial to understanding it now — Hardly a week goes by without another Facebook scandal. Frustration with Facebook and criticism of it — even despair over it and outright hatred of it — seems constant, evergreen. It’s been this way since at least the 2016 election. There are now more journalists investigating the world’s largest social…

What it meant to grow up as a lurker on the information superhighway — In an excerpt from Lurking, a history of being a user online, Joanne McNeil remembers the profound impact of coming of age in the small communities forged on the early internet. “Information Superhighway” once had a valence of provocative optimism, sort of like “Green New Deal” does today. It was…

On December 1st, I joined a crowd of hundreds of artists, activists, writers, and technologists (and people who identify as all four) at the School for Poetic Computation for the New York Tech Zine Fair. It was a day-long event and the first of its kind. Entering the classroom nearest…

Discussing the implications of face recognition technology with artist and researcher Adam Harvey — Artist and researcher Adam Harvey launched a project known as CV Dazzle in 2010. It involved a series of abstract hairstyles and jagged makeup patterns designed to spoof facial-recognition surveillance. It camouflaged him to a camera, yet it made him even more visible to other people on the street, revealing…

Navigating data, unconscious bias, and our own human feelings while developing emotion recognition technology — Most of us have at one point felt anger toward an automated system. An incoherent chatbot. A GPS automated voice that misdirects. A self-checkout scale that calibrates the weight of your purse instead of a bunch of bananas. Generally, we expect that anger to go unnoticed by the machine. …

Mary Lou Jepsen is inventing the future of seeing inside your head. — Mary Lou Jepsen was an executive at Oculus, led “moonshots” at Google, founded the low-power computer display company Pixel Qi, and co-founded One Laptop Per Child. But the company she launched last year, Openwater, is her most ambitious project yet. The plan is to use optoelectronics and LCDs to create…

An Interview with Crystal Nwaneri, explorer of the boundaries between law, intellectual property, and high-tech public policy. — “Where Is the Future?” is a series of interviews with industry leaders considering the potential and complexity of technology on the horizon.

An interview with data scientist, Courtenay Cotton. — “Where Is the Future?” is a series of interviews with industry leaders considering the potential and complexity of technology on the horizon.

A few weeks ago, I held the sixth and final panel in a series I hosted at Eyebeam called New Topics in Social Computing. The series was an attempt to reset the clock on the discourse around internet and technology in culture. This is a moment of transition and uncertainty…