The lines separating humans and technology are blurring. Should we embrace it? Since 2017, I have been a walking cyborg. No, not the Hollywood type (looking at you Terminator and RoboCop), but instead, a “vanilla” cyborg, if such a concept exists. Put simply, I have a microchip the size of a grain of rice in… Read more »
1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an imperfect solution to an impossible problem. On October 20, popular gaming and video streaming service Twitch started permanently deleting a large number of user videos. Certain streamers received notice that their content was subject to one or more DMCA takedown notifications and that these videos would be removed…. Read more »
I swipe up. A pudgy boy— maybe 13— wearing a ball-cap, graphic tee, and athletic shorts, strolls into a Starbucks. “Do you guys have cakes?” he asks, outlining the shape of a cake with an exaggerated hand gesture. “Well you do now!” he exclaims before the employee has a chance to reply. In one rehearsed… Read more »
When Anonymous hacked the US State Department website on February 17th 2013, they declared, “Aaron Swartz this is for you.” Just a month before, Swartz, faced with relentless hounding from federal prosecutors and up to 35 years in prison, took his own life. Swartz was a wunderkind of his generation. RSS, Markdown and the widely-used… Read more »
“We are TikTok famous!” These are the infamous words our generation longs to proclaim, the very words my roommate came into the room saying one day after practice. It was still early fall and her team had yet to take press photos for the school. One of our friends decided to make a TikTok of… Read more »
Partway through my semester abroad, I came to a classic millennial (or Generation Z) conclusion: I was forsaking real, fascinating experiences in order to scroll mindlessly through my Instagram feed or look at memes on Facebook. I realized that when I needed to translate words into Russian for homework, I would forget why I opened… Read more »
The phrase ‘media without borders’ describes the environment of the web as a place with poor distinctions between media, entertainment, and thought-provoking work, a situation which produces personal and societal downsides. This is not by accident. To quote author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “Google is a shape-shifter, but each… Read more »
Last month, I received a funny and unexpected Instagram Direct Message. One of my friends sent me the link to an account titled @world_record_egg. At the time, the account had only one picture, a single brown egg with a white background. The caption below the picture reads: “Let’s set a world record together and get… Read more »
Introduction: To many, the words “Silicon Valley” might conjure up an image of a utopian society light years ahead of the rest of the world, where robotic technology controls daily life and the lavish campuses at Google and Facebook are the industry norm. The techie enclave — a conglomeration of cities mainly in San Mateo… Read more »
Recently, when a good friend of mine, Milo, told me that he needed to sell stock to get a haircut, I was intrigued. Upon asking Milo why, I found out that he had invested almost the entirety of his savings into an app on his iPhone. Although he had kept some money in his bank… Read more »