We have to think about why people are so angry in the first place — Last week, The Atlantic published “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jon Haidt, the NYU professor and author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt has perfected the art of “Get Off of My Lawn-ism,” or finding ways to rationalize and codify…

Algorithms and worker power — In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate…

Saying ‘le dollar bean’ instead of ‘lesbian’ so you don’t get demonetized — In China, people often speak in code online. Why? To evade the Chinese government’s filters. The authorities don’t want conversations they don’t like — most notably criticisms of major officials. So they run software to autodetect banned keywords on the major Chinese social networks. As a result, Chinese Internet users…

Reading between the headlines to get the real story on Elon’s Twitter bid — On Thursday, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter. He proposed buying the company’s shares at $54.20 each, a $9 per-share premium, presenting its board with a tough decision. Musk is a brilliant businessman. He founded one company that sends rockets to space and another that popularized electric vehicles…

I thought it was nothing more than a fun gimmick. I was wrong. — I was skeptical of virtual reality. For the past few years, I’ve been reading articles and watching videos about the technology as it has rapidly risen in popularity, but I wasn’t so impressed by what I saw. VR looked fun. I’m a lifelong science-fiction reader, and it was certainly cool…

Why aren’t there more Wikipedia-scale successes online? — On Monday night, I participated in a class session of Technology, Media & Democracy, a partnership of five academic institutions in New York City, co-taught by Justin Hendrix, combining two classes he runs at NYU and Cornell Tech, David Carroll at The New School, Douglas Rushkoff at CUNY Queens College…

A practical blueprint for assessing the value, limitations and quality of new technologies for ourselves and our families — Our modern digital society has us switching amongst a series of technologies/apps throughout our day. We’ve become conditioned to reach for the laptop or mobile device to find answers to our questions, connect with family and friends, stream your favorite shows, or droomscroll on social media. Over past few years…

As content moderation continually shifts, we should scrutinize what tech is doing to our language — From txtspk to l33tsp34k to emojis to memes, we’ve been encoding language based on both our technology’s capabilities and our ability to find ways to communicate effectively on digital platforms. Recently, however, the rise of “algospeak” has emerged to show us we’ll create new speech to hide from the systems…