At the corner of East Homestead and North Wolfe Road in Cupertino, California, stands a large oak tree planted by one of the most successful companies in history — Apple. The tree is a landmark at the entrance to Apple Park, the company’s $5 billion spaceship-of-a-campus, which surrounds a circular headquarters set in an entire city block, not unlike the home button in the rectangle of an early-model iPhone. At least three or four stories tall, the oak is one of the larger specimens among the 9,000 trees planted in this 175-acre Garden of Eden. …

“I’ve kind of developed a problem,” J.J. tells me over Discord voice chat.

In his early teens, his dad won $50,000 on a scratch-off lotto ticket, dramatically improving the family’s living situation almost overnight. “That helped us not be poor,” he said. But the windfall also colored his views of gambling in ways that didn’t become evident until recently. …

Open Dialogue

This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.

I’m thrilled to talk with Mary Berk. Mary has a PhD in philosophy, a degree that includes a specialization in ethics, but spent her career working in Silicon Valley. Most recently, Mary was a product manager at Facebook and Instagram. Previously, Mary worked at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, eBay. Given Mary’s many years of experience and her disposition for critical thinking, she’s the perfect person to discuss whether Big Tech can care about ethics.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Evan: What got you interested…

Open Dialogue

This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.

I’m Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. One of my favorite activities is talking with smart and engaging people who think deeply about responsibility and the paths for creating a better future. In the “Open Dialogue” series, I’ll reach out to academics, journalists, activists, tech workers, and scientists to explore how to better understand controversies, more thoughtfully analyze innovation, and critically determine which leading ideas and behaviors need to change.

I’m excited to talk this week with Clive Thompson about how the…

Big Technology

OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BuzzFeed News Executive Editor Mat Honan has long covered the way society interacts with technology. He joins Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss the “Zoom Class,” the rise of NFTs, and how San Francisco may change after the pandemic.

…

In a new piece on Debugger, OneZero’s consumer tech publication, our columnist Owen Williams writes about his decision to buy a GPS tracker that attaches to his dog’s collar: “Honestly, I felt silly buying a GPS tracker at first, given I’d have reservations about attaching it to a child if I had one. But the peace of mind with a young dog has been worth it.”

It’s a great story that speaks to a very simple trade-off many of us make all the time: privacy for safety and convenience. Owen doesn’t think he’d attach a tracker to a human child…

“Measure what matters and what you measure matters.” There are any number of similar quotations that talk about how the very act of tracking a KPI in an organization causes people to focus on it more, let alone if you’re linking an explicit incentive structure to goals. It’s why, for example, if boards care about ideals like diversity and culture, they should work with CEOs to make sure those stats are first-class citizens on the company dashboards alongside revenue and profit.

It’s even harder when you can’t agree what the right metric should be. As I’ve written before, one of…

From critically acclaimed live performances of The Lion King to Beat Battle rooms where 21 Savage, Wiz Khalifa, and Drake judged work from fledgling producers, Clubhouse owes its “unicorn” status and social clout to its Black users, Keith Nelson Jr writes in LEVEL.

“For Black celebrities who are often used for the clout of their popularity and rarely the nuance of their personality, Clubhouse offered a rare gift: the power to choose who to engage with, and about what,” Nelson writes.

But now the platform has a choice to make. Will it recognize how important Black users are to its…