Google — Bunk History

Prehistoric mounds on the campus of Louisiana State University.

Googling for Oldest Structure in the Americas Leads to Heaps of Debate

The straightforward way in which Google answers this query is a case study in how new science becomes accepted as fact in the modern era of rapid communication.

by Jordan P. Hickey via Washington Post on August 28, 2023

How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.

by Shoshana Zuboff via Longreads on September 5, 2019

“Google Was Not a Normal Place”

A behind-the-scenes account of the most important company on the Internet, from grad-school all-nighters to extraordinary global power.

by Adam Fisher via The Hive on July 10, 2018

Kara Swisher wearing headphones and writing in a notebook near a computer.

Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media

A front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe. How tech both helps and hurts our world.

by Kara Swisher via Intelligencer on February 7, 2024

Wikimedia Foundation servers.

Dead Links

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.

by Tamara Kneese via Public Books on October 31, 2023

AI-generated illustration of a blue neural network, surrounded by code and data graphics, against dark background.

How Machines Came to Speak (and How to Shut Them Up)

On the intertwined history of free speech law and media technology.

by Alex Sayf Cummings via Society for U.S. Intellectual History on September 24, 2023

Person using SUPARS system on old computer

The 1970s Librarians Who Revolutionised the Challenge of Search

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.

by Monica Westin via Aeon on June 5, 2023

“Linen” postcard, depicting cars parked along a city street, in front of "Chop Suey" building, where people are standing outside.

Street Views

Photographs of empty city streets went out of fashion, but lately are coming back again. What's lost in these images of vacant streets?

by Kim Beil via Cabinet on October 14, 2021

Picture of a computer.

The Internet Is Rotting

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

by Jonathan Zittrain via The Atlantic on June 30, 2021

a blurry image of yahoo.com's home page

Should the National Register of Historic Places Apply to Websites?

Corporate motivation isn’t enough when it comes to digital preservation. Here’s a case for creating a National Register of Historic Places for websites.

by Ernie Smith via Tedium on October 17, 2019

Collage of children in school and historic and patriotic images.

Amid the Online Glut of Facts and Fake News, We’re Teaching History Wrong

This is even trickier now that the language of critical thinking has been appropriated by the alt-right.

by Rebecca Onion, Sam Wineburg via Slate on September 18, 2018

Designers On Acid: The Tripping Californians Who Paved The Way To Our Touchscreen World

Ever wondered why email, trash cans, Google Docs and desktops look the way they do? The answer lies in 1960s hippie culture.

by Oliver Wainwright via The Guardian on May 11, 2017

Skyscraper construction workers at lunch photo, but sitting atop a web search bar.

Social Media Is Not What Killed the Web

Better browsers made things worse.

by Ian Bogost via The Atlantic on March 25, 2024

Elon Musk.

How Corporate America’s Obsession With Creativity Wrecked the World and Brought Us Elon Musk

Samuel W. Franklin’s latest book explains how we sold ourselves out to a fake virtue.

by Timothy Noah via The New Republic on December 30, 2023

Signage for Hachette Book Group is displayed at BookExpo America in New York.

When You Buy a Book, You Can Loan It to Anyone. This Judge Says Libraries Can’t. Why Not?

The lawsuit against Controlled Digital Lending is about giving corporations—rather than readers, buyers, borrowers, or authors—control over content.

by Michelle M. Wu via The Nation on April 20, 2023

Technology and California graphic.

Blame Palo Alto

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.

by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on February 6, 2023

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on stage giving a presentation below a screen showing pictures of people connected by the Facebook network.

How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today's regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

by Matthew Crain via Boston Review on August 3, 2022

Colorful bar graph.

‘Wallets and Eyeballs’: How eBay Turned the Internet Into a Marketplace

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conqueror.

by Ben Tarnoff via The Guardian on June 16, 2022

Handwritten magazine index

‘Index, A History of the’ Review: List-O-Mania

At the back of the book, the index provides a space for reference—and sometimes revenge.

by Ben Yagoda via The Wall Street Journal on February 11, 2022

Split image - half a 1980s computer, other half a modern laptop; on the screen for both, an hourglass icon that symbolizes loading.

54 Years Ago, a Computer Programmer Fixed a Massive Bug — and Created an Existential Crisis

A blinking cursor follows us everywhere in the digital world, but who invented it and why?

by Sarah Wells via Inverse on December 3, 2021

Illustration from the 1919 catalogue of the Library Bureau depicting women working at desks and filing cabinets.

The Filing Cabinet

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems.

by Craig Robertson via Places Journal on May 1, 2021

Photo of the 1870 U.S. Census, with lines highlighted in orange, yellow, and green

The Strange Case of Booker T. Washington's Birthday

If Booker T. Washington never knew when he was born, how are we so sure about it now?

by Bill Black via Contingent on April 5, 2021

A boy surfs on a computer keyboard surrounded by details from earlier internet eras.

You Probably Don’t Remember the Internet

How do we memorialize life online when it’s constantly disappearing?

by Kaitlyn Tiffany via The Atlantic on March 22, 2021

A shoe stepping on money.

Islands in the Stream

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.

by David Dayen via The American Prospect on March 22, 2021

An illustration of a skeleton apparition.

A History of Presence

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.

by Brooke Belisle via Art In America on January 25, 2021

"The Wikipedia Story"

An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia

The definitive story of Wikipedia on its 20th anniversary.

by Tom Roston via OneZero on January 14, 2021

Elegant Boardroom

The Limits of Telecommuting

Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.

by Margaret O'Mara via Public Books on November 18, 2020

Jill Lepore and the cover of her Book "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future"

“We Don’t Want the Program”: On How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy

“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”

by Jill Lepore, Danah Boyd via Public Books on November 2, 2020

The 100-Year History of Self-Driving Vehicles

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future.

by Anthony Townsend via OneZero on August 3, 2020

Screen shot of early YouTube interface.

Here's What People Thought of YouTube When It First Launched in the Mid-2000s

It took a while for pundits and other observers to truly understand the power of the new platform.

by Matt Novak via Paleofuture on February 14, 2020

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