Letter From the Editor
OneZero Expands With New Publications on Consumer Tech and Science
Debugger and Future Human serve readers thoughtful stories on the forces shaping our future
Dear Readers,
The OneZero family is expanding. Today, we’re launching two new publications, Debugger and Future Human, to serve readers new perspectives on consumer technology and science.
Debugger explores how we use gadgets, apps, and services. Future Human is all about the science that will shape our survival as a species. And OneZero will continue to explore what we call the undercurrents of the future; technology topics like surveillance, automation, and platform moderation.
A publication can’t be all things to all people. Yet many try. Boxed in by the business imperatives of online advertising — how many pageviews, how many banner ads can fit next to the autoplay module — websites jockey for traffic on the same news hits. In some ways, the internet has started to feel like a Baskin-Robbins with 31 takes on vanilla. (Or, as the New Republic put it last week: “Variety was once the calling card of internet journalism, but now it is defined by a crushing sameness.”)
OneZero is in the fortunate position of serving Medium subscribers, who believe in the unique value of our platform and the journalism it delivers. We exist to tell great, impactful stories, like our exclusive investigation into the white supremacist past of an influential surveillance tech CEO; our exclusive dive into a dangerous social media cult; our exclusive scoop about facial recognition at the Rose Bowl; our exclusive series about life inside Amazon; our exclusive book from Cory Doctorow about tech monopolies; our exclusive features about what it means to be Black in the time of climate change; our exclusive online presentation of Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”; our exclusive reporting into what happens when AirPods die; our exclusive work tracking down the supply chain of sometimes volatile AmazonBasics batteries; our exclusive on living off homemade Soylent in the early days of the apocalypse, for crying out loud. Indeed, the word “exclusive” means quite a lot to us: OneZero is a distinct destination for stories about our future that you will not get elsewhere. We’re not vanilla.
To be candid, though, as OneZero has grown since its launch in February 2019, we’ve started to see opportunities for improvement on the “distinct” part. We’re dedicated to publishing stories about technology and science, but placing everything in one bucket has started to feel stifling: One publication can’t be everything for everyone, after all. So, we’re excited to create dedicated spaces for readers who are hungry for thoughtful stories about gadgets (that’s Debugger), readers who want to understand more about the science carrying us into tomorrow (that’s Future Human), and readers who want to go deep on the larger forces in technology — platforms, surveillance, and artificial intelligence — redefining how we live our lives (that’s OneZero).
Each publication in the OneZero family offers a distinct vantage point from which to view tomorrow. We’ll see you there.
Damon Beres
Editor-in-Chief, OneZero team at Medium
