Kenyan and Ethiopian entrepreneurs are building homegrown tech scenes — with and without the help of their governments — By Scott Malcomson The Kenyan tech scene was born in pain. On December 30, 2007, Ory Okolloh was blogging as quickly as she could. A Nairobi-based lawyer and investment adviser, Okolloh was writing about the recent presidential election — which the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, had just won amid allegations of…

A conversation with the novelist Garth Greenwell about the impact of technology on gay sexual life — Garth Greenwell is a novelist from Louisville, Kentucky. His debut novel What Belongs to You (2016) received universal critical acclaim — The New Republic called it “the Great Gay Novel for our times.” …

A conversation about the booming world of Chinese blockchain — Interview by Xiaowei Wang Eric Meltzer is a Peking University dropout and a founding partner at Primitive Ventures, an Asian blockchain investment firm. He first acquired his extensive knowledge of the cryptocurrency world as a partner at INBlockchain, one of the world’s top blockchain and crypto funds. …

A conversation about building political alternatives with the internet — Originally published in Logic on April 1, 2018. Everyone knows that the internet enables new kinds of scale. Companies can grow very big very fast; organizers can put huge numbers of people into the streets on short notice. But until recently, no one had tried it with a think tank…

A failed experiment in the Arizona desert holds valuable lessons for earthly survival — By Alyssa Battistoni On September 26, 1991, surrounded by the cameras of the world media, eight people dressed in bright red jumpsuits sealed themselves inside a three-acre steel-and-glass dome in the Arizona desert filled with over three thousand species of animals and plants. They planned to remain inside for two…

Indigenous communities are building drones to make their own maps — and using them to fight erasure and exploitation at the hands of the state and capital — By Clayton Aldern Before the first drone came, the most unusual thing the birds of South Rupununi would glimpse above the canopy could have been mistaken for a lone, tough fruit. It was a transient thing: bobbing up, then pausing, then dipping back into the forest, only to rise again…

A design researcher at Wikimedia discusses how to define online harassment — and how to stop it — Online harassment is pervasive, but platforms generally do a terrible job defending their users from it. Our techniques, our tools, and even our definitions of harassment are woefully inadequate. How do we get better? Caroline Sinders is a design researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation, and previously designed machine learning systems…

Building a better story about the internet — By Ben Tarnoff For a long time, a certain set of assumptions dominated our digital imagination. These assumptions should be familiar enough. Information wants to be free. Anything that connects people is good. The government is bad. The internet is another world, where the old rules don’t apply. …

Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all — By Zero Cool I remember being nervous when I flew into Atyrau, Kazakhstan. Before boarding the flight, one of the business managers who organized the trip sent me a message with precise instructions on how to navigate the local airport: Once you land, get into the bus on the right…