Will Rinehart

Regulation of big tech arrived in 2020.

In all of the blowback with the Harper’s Magazine letter on free speech last year, no one pointed out the deep irony that Noam Chomsky was a signatory.

A lot happened in tech the last two weeks.

A brilliant quote from Protagoras: “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.”

If there were to be a nutgraf for the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, it comes near the beginning when Justin Rosenstein observes that there is no single succinct problem with tech and social media.

What should Russia be called?

On Reddit, it was asked, what’s a relatively unknown technological invention that will have a huge impact on the future?

A conversation today reminded me of the old Mark Weiser piece, which begins, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”

From Gwern: In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code.

This morning my friends Angel and Joseph asked for my help in arbitrating a dispute over a part of Michael Lind’s new book.

A vital question of our time springs from the noosphere: Who knows of the sincerity of the post, but that’s Breezewood, PA.

To understand why content moderation and algorithmic choices at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are so loathed, it is important to understand a little psychology first.

Shoshana Zuboff’s book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” set a new tone in tech analysis since it was published in January of 2019.

Eric Weinstein’s recent conversation with Balaji Srinivasan reminded me of today’s auspicious anniversary.

From last year, a Politico long read on the difficulties in building a new Penn Station: “In the first decade of the 20th century, it had taken New York a mere four years and seven months to build the first leg of the subway, running from City Hall to upp…

Back in 2017, Jonathan Taplin, made his case in the New York Times for breaking up Google by relating the early history of telephony: Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.

More on tacit knowledge, this time from Samo Burja: “Before video became available at scale [through YouTube], tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skil…

[Extended Abstract: November 1, 2019] The mundane world of antitrust economics has been transformed in the last decade, driven by a recorded rise in economic concentration.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato has a full spread in the Wired UK humbling suggesting that she “has a plan to fix capitalism.”

Jaron Lanier was featured in a recent New York Times op-ed explaining why people should get paid for their data.

Will Oremus dissects that often repeated phrase, if you aren’t paying, you’re the product.

When I read through Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s article in The Atlantic calling for a new science of progress that studies “successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures,” my first reaction was, yes of course, that needs to…

The Domain Of The Critique If you follow the major tech publications, you would think that the advertising of today is a powerful new weapon that desperately needs to be reigned in.

I’m a couple of chapters into reading Re-Engineering Humanity from Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, which includes a discussion of the effects of GPS.

The newspaper business has become far more competitive in recent years, but not too long ago, most newspapers were flush with cash: “So flush,” John Podhoretz told the Shorenstein Center, describing what it was like to work for Time in the 1980s, “that the

This document is really just a proof of concept, but the basic idea is simple.

When it comes to the threat of automation, I agree with Ryan Khurana: “From self-driving car crashes to failed workplace algorithms, many AI tools fail to perform simple tasks humans excel at, let alone far surpass us in every way.”

Cato Unbound is taking on the issue of tech expertise this month and the lead essay came from Kevin Kosar, who argues for the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment.

Many have likened efforts to build out rural broadband today to the accomplishments of rural electrification in the 1930s.

After reading LM Sacasas’ recent piece on moral communities, I couldn’t help but wonder if the piece was written in the esoteric mode.

Catchy headlines like “Heavy Social Media Use Linked With Mental Health Issues In Teens” and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

It is now been a year since network neutrality rules supported by Title II were officially repealed, marking the end of the Obama-era legislation.

Contemporary tech criticism displays an anti-nostalgia.

Recently, Noah Smith explored an emerging question in tech.

To read Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction is to experience another in a line of progressive pugilists of the technological age.

National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H.

Many are understandably pessimistic about platforms and technology.

Last week, I had the honor of being a panelist at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s event on the future of privacy regulation.

Privacy is an essentially contested concept.

Dan Wang has a new post titled “How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)” and it is characteristically good.

A curious thing happened last week.

In cleaning up my desk this weekend, I chanced upon an old notebook and like many times before I began to transcribe the notes.

The Supreme Court is winding down for the year and last week put out a much awaited decision in Ohio v.

Two years ago, ProPublica initiated a conversation over the use of risk assessment algorithms when they concluded that a widely used “score proved remarkably unreliable in forecasting violent crime” in Florida.

Pitchfork has a great article on the consumer prices of music over the last century.

In response to the new Tyler Cowen and Alex Alex Tabarrok piece on information asymmetry, Arnold Kling wonders if: It becomes harder for new entrants to break into a market governed by reputation than one governed by regulation.

One part of this intriguing interview with the creator of the Medieval Reactions Twitter account really caught my eye: I saw a couple and I googled medieval pictures and there were already pictures flying around on the internet, but the real hard part was…

After finishing ITIF’s new report on technopopulism, I couldn’t help but think, isn’t this missing a couple of pages, about, you know, the Internet?

This month’s Jacobin Magazine tackles the subject of technology, and in it, one article titled “Red Innovation” was an interesting read, but it displays the countless pitfalls of thinkers who are not trained in economics but proffer on capitalism.

This headline came across my Twitter feed today: “As Fairfax grows more diverse, candidates for office mostly don’t.”