The amount of money that is about to be thrown at modernizing government legacy systems is staggering. The rescue package alone allocates several billion dollars to it, and that’s on top of what’s been spent over the past year trying to make systems at the federal, state, and local levels rise to the pandemic occasion. Philanthropy is opening its pocketbooks as well. For those who’ve been wishing for this for years, we are in a big “be careful what you wish for” moment. So, folks, what’s the plan?
Top of the list will be state unemployment insurance systems. And as…
Over the last year I got back into various little programming projects. Most of it was fixes and tending to projects, from updating little apps to migrating my server, and some of it was trying out new tools. Most recently, it was some data manipulation in python, which I hadn’t really done since I was a researcher.
Usually, it begins with some task I need to do. Some feature I’d like to have or some error that I want to fix. I’ll google for that feature or I’ll copy/paste the error that shows up in the console into a google…
Two years ago, I walked into my job at a local bookstore shaking with anxiety. I kept checking my phone, watching my notifications explode. Before I arrived at work, I had spent the morning locking down my Facebook account and scrounging my internet presence for any personal details that might jeopardize my safety.
Overnight, a controversial tweet I had written in response to legislature pushing back against abortion access completely blew up. As a young feminist writer, the attention to my work seemed like a dream come true. I was going viral. Who wouldn’t want that?
Instead of celebrating, I…
Well over a decade’s worth of posts, photos, likes, groups, and comments. That’s my Facebook data, which, as of today, I have even more options for collecting and transferring to other platforms.
I imagine myself downloading it all, piling it onto a rickety wooden cart, hitching it to my trusty donkey IO, and then pulling it across the digital terrain to Google Docs. Once there, I dump it all in, and then, taking one rueful look back at the massive, disorganized pile, I slam the shed doors on it and walk away.
Facebook’s acceleration of data transfer tools and options…
Over the next few weeks, the biggest tech story will be the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on Donald Trump. Facebook suspended Trump indefinitely following the Capitol Riots earlier this year. And now the board — a 19-member body that can review and overturn Facebook’s content decisions — is about to decide whether to bring him back.
As we enter a frenzied news cycle over the board’s decision, the key question underlying it all will be whether we can trust this new entity, which Facebook set up last year.
Some call the board a necessary, Supreme Court-style institution that brings the…
Welcome to part eight of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the imagination and attention of the internet for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times, and what they told us about the internet, and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at Keyboard Cat. This week: The Numa Numa Guy.
Date: 2004.
The story: In 2004, Gary Brolsma was an 18-year-old kid playing around on a video-sharing website called Newgrounds.com. He used…
What do bicycles and social media have in common? Soon after being adopted, each of these technologies brought on a tsunami of unjustified moral panic. Let’s start with bikes.
When bicycles burst onto the Victorian scene in the 1800s, they were a big deal. This cool contraption made it possible to travel much further and faster than you could ever go on foot. Better yet, bikes were a lot cheaper than horses (not to mention simpler to maintain).
Soon enough, bicycles gained popularity with a group whose transportation options had historically been limited: women. At that time, if women wanted…
The question isn’t what’s going to get automated. It’s what’s going to get automated last.
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As I wrote Always Day One, my book about tech giant culture, I learned of a massive automation program inside Amazon’s corporate offices called Hands…
Welcome to part seven of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the imagination and attention of the internet for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times, and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at Peanut Butter Jelly Time. This week: Keyboard Cat.
Date: 2009
The story: The cat in the original Keyboard Cat video was captured by a camcorder in 1984. The cat’s owner…
In his new book, Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis writes of an Amazon distribution center in Sparrows Point, Maryland that sits on land once occupied by a Bethlehem Steel plant. The story underscores how dramatically the U.S. economy has transformed in recent years. Instead of making things, many of our biggest companies now distribute things made elsewhere. We’ve moved from an economy of production to one of dispersion.
The shift from factory to fulfillment work is core to the American story right now. For the American worker, a factory job like one at Bethlehem Steel was dangerous, but it paid $30 to…