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The Future of the Map Isn’t a Map at All - It’s Information - 18 décembre 2020
Google’s vision for geospatial information : "We don’t want a monoculture where there is just one map of the world. There never has been ; there never will be."
Google Maps can be beautiful, interesting, and, of course, useful, but there are a lot of questions we address to maps — and these days, Google Maps (...)
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How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - 18 décembre 2020
An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world’s best accurate maps
Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places : their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits (...)
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Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - 17 décembre 2020
The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.
The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this : Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that (...)
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How Donald Trump Changed the Internet - 1er novembre 2020
How the president changed life online—for better and for worse
Being online has changed Donald Trump. He was the internet’s candidate in 2016—he appears in Urban Dictionary’s definition of meme god—and his campaign leveraged the power of Facebook advertising to beat Hillary Clinton. Since then, he’s become even more (...)
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America’s Toxic Love Affair With Technology - 26 octobre 2020
Major inventions cause major upheaval. Why don’t we take precautions ?
America has long carried on a great love affair with technological progress. But the truth is that really big inventions—the printing press, the internal-combustion engine, the internet—have both upsides and downsides. They make new things (...)
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The Pandemic Is No Excuse for Colleges to Surveil Students - 8 septembre 2020
Trying to do so is all but useless.
In Michigan, a small liberal-arts college is requiring students to install an app called Aura, which tracks their location in real time, before they come to campus. Oakland University, also in Michigan, announced a mandatory wearable that would track symptoms, but, facing a (...)
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The Wikipedia War Over Kamala Harris’s Race - 18 août 2020
An editing battle over Kamala Harris’s race is a sign of what’s to come.
At 4:14 p.m. Delaware time Tuesday, Joe Biden’s campaign sent out a mass text message announcing the presumptive Democratic nominee’s choice for vice president : Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Four minutes later, a user named Zvikorn (...)
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The Constant Risk of a Consolidated Internet - 30 juillet 2020
A recent Twitter hack probably didn’t scare you. Here’s why it should.
Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama were all feeling generous on the evening of July 16, according to their Twitter accounts, which offered to double any payments sent to them in bitcoin. Not really, of course ; they’d been (...)
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Defund Facial Recognition Before It’s Too Late - 11 juillet 2020
I’m a second-generation Black activist, and I’m tired of being spied on by the police.
Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Tony McDade. George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks. Oluwatoyin Salau. Robert Forbes. As each story has emerged of a Black life violently ended by law enforcement, white nationalists, or other forms of (...)
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American Boogaloo : Meme or Terrorist Movement ? - 10 juillet 2020
What happens when a meme becomes a terrorist movement ?
On May 29, two federal security officers guarding a courthouse in Oakland, California, were ambushed by machine-gun fire as elsewhere in the city demonstrators marched peacefully to protest the killing of George Floyd. One of the guards, David Patrick (...)
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How Facebook’s Ad Technology Helps Trump Win - The Atlantic - 19 avril 2020
Donald Trump won the presidency by using the social network’s advertising machinery in exactly the way the company wanted. He’s poised to do it again.
Look at a thousand of the millions of Facebook ads Donald Trump has run, and it’s hard to believe that they represent a winning strategy. They recycle the same imagery (...)
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When Disease Comes, Rulers Grab More Power - The Atlantic - 25 mars 2020
On March 13—Friday the 13th, as it happened—my husband was driving down a Polish highway when he turned on the news and learned that the country’s borders would shut down in 24 hours. He pulled over and called me. I bought a ticket from London to Warsaw minutes later. I don’t live there all of the time, but my husband (...)
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Coronavirus Outbreak : What Happens to the Gig Economy ? - The Atlantic - 7 mars 2020
The shadow of the new coronavirus finally reached American shores this week, as markets jittered downward and new cases crept up. The scope of any outbreak here is not clear, but experts suspect that the virus will become widespread. While the disease, known as COVID-19, is a global phenomenon, the response to it (...)
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The Software to Write Every Possible Melody - The Atlantic - 3 mars 2020
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-re, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-mi … you get the picture.
In an era when millions of songwriters upload music to the internet—and just about any song can be plucked from obscurity by TikTok teens—it seems inevitable that the same melodies end up in different songs. There have (...)
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Coronavirus and the Blindness of Authoritarianism - The Atlantic - 25 février 2020
China’s use of surveillance and censorship makes it harder for Xi Jinping to know what’s going on in his own country.
China is in the grip of a momentous crisis. The novel coronavirus that emerged late last year has already claimed three times more lives than the SARS outbreak in 2003, and it is still spreading. (...)
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The Future of Politics Is Bots Drowning Out Humans - The Atlantic - 21 février 2020
They’re mouthpieces for foreign actors, domestic political groups, even the candidates themselves. And soon you won’t be able to tell they’re bots.
Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping (...)
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The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - 21 février 2020
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. (...)
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ICE Contract With GitHub Sparks Developer Protests - The Atlantic - 16 février 2020
Developers are protesting after revelations that the source-code repository GitHub contracted with ICE. But if you restrict access to open-source code, is it still open ?
For the past two years, software engineers and systems administrators from San Jose to Seattle have engaged in the tech industry’s latest rite of (...)
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The Iowa Caucus : More Than an App and Tech Problem - The Atlantic - 10 février 2020
Its app didn’t solve much, but it did reveal a lot.
It’s all fun and games until someone’s app messes up the Democratic Iowa caucus.
Before yesterday’s debacle, “Shadow” was merely a playful name. A small team of political technologists had given it to their company when it launched early last year, largely as a (...)
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Why Do People Still Love Consumer Tech ? - The Atlantic - 19 janvier 2020
Everywhere I turned, there were signs that I didn’t totally understand. “Can textiles empower mothers to share their personal experience of pregnancy ?” one big, blue banner asked, fighting for attention among hundreds of others in a cavernous exhibition hall. “Shop with your DNA,” implored another. Just around the (...)
