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Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP
30 Aug

Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

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This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.Specifically, he said that in…
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Crypto’s Shiny New Political Machine
23 Aug

Crypto’s Shiny New Political Machine

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Amongst the sea of American flags and ubiquitous blue signs at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week prowled Jonathan Padilla, the “crypto guy.”Wearing a baseball cap and conspicuous pineapple-print shirt, Padilla tramped the halls of the convention, talking crypto policy with anyone who would listen. In a selfie posted on Facebook, he posed with his arm around Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. “Senator Coons now knows about crypto,” reads the caption.Padilla is delighted with his new “crypto guy” moniker, assigned by fellow DNC delegates, which he sees as implicit recognition that cryptocurrency has arrived on the political agenda.…
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Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero
16 Aug

Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

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WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X earlier this week, may just have been what Musk didn’t say.It happened around the 50-minute mark, during a very Trumpian discussion of gas and electricity prices. They were up nationally, Trump said, but “when that comes down and [sic] we’re going to drill, baby, drill.”The siren song of the oil…
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Google’s Rise Was Inevitable. So Was Its Antitrust Ruling
09 Aug

Google’s Rise Was Inevitable. So Was Its Antitrust Ruling

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin never liked hanging with reporters. “Larry can be a very sensitive and good person, but he has major trust issues and few social graces,” a former Google PR person once told me. “Sergey has social graces but doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach his level of intelligence.”Still, in the fall of 1999 their new communications person urged the Google cofounders to visit the East Coast for a modest press tour. Barely a year old, Google was still under the radar for most people, and few knew its compelling story: Page put the whole…
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Trump’s Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin
02 Aug

Trump’s Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin

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Donald Trump is an unlikely crypto ally. The power of bitcoin, embodied in Satoshi Nakamoto’s founding document, is that it frees participants from murky assessments of trust, instead relying on the bedrock of proof.Bitcoin is truth. So it was cosmically weird last week to hear the attendees of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville enthusiastically hailing a former president who, by one painstakingly compiled count, lied 390,573 times in his single term in office. The believers of a mathematically indisputable blockchain poured on the hosannas as Donald Trump delivered a speech bulging with falsehoods, fabrications, and fantasies. They hooted with…
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Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It’s Calling Again
26 Jul

Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It’s Calling Again

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Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.“How many of you…
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Donald Trump and Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Elegy
19 Jul

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Elegy

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Andreessen talks about the proposal as if it were Putin himself invading Atherton, California, the elite zip code where he resided until recently. If this tax is imposed, he says, investors will exit the market and innovations won’t be funded. “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry, essentially,” he says. “Number two, you kill the California tax base—California is done!”But the carnage doesn’t stop there, says Andreessen. Once the government gets a taste of this new tax on the rich, it will want more, more, more, until eventually this endangered class of…
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At 25, Metafilter Feels Like a Time Capsule From Another Internet
13 Jul

At 25, Metafilter Feels Like a Time Capsule From Another Internet

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Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time…
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