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Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard

On Facebook's 15th anniversary, Harvard students and faculty reflect on being the first users of Earth's largest social network.
by Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic on February 4, 2019

Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebook’s Wild Early Days in Palo Alto

Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies built a corporate proto-culture that continues to influence the company today.
by Adam Fisher via Wired on July 10, 2018

The Dot-Coms Were Better Than Facebook

Twenty years ago, another high-profile tech executive testified before Congress. It was a more innocent time.
by Ian Bogost via The Atlantic on April 13, 2018

The Tools of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley’s sixty-year love affair with the word “tool.”
by Moira Weigel via The New Yorker on April 11, 2018

What Facebook Did to American Democracy

And why it was so hard to see it coming.
by Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic on October 12, 2017
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
Old computer with its mouse over the AOL logo.

America Online: A Cautionary Tale

On the rise and fall of the quintessential ’90s online service provider—and a warning about today’s social-media giants.
by Joanne McNeil via The Nation on December 15, 2022
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
Ralph Nader

The Myth of the “Pinto Memo” is Not a Hopeful Story for Our Time

Drawing analogies between industries can be instructive. But only if we do it right.
by Lee Vinsel via Medium on October 21, 2021
A tent with “the 99%” written on it

Occupy Wall Street at 10: What It Taught Us, and Why It Mattered

It basically started the wave of activism that revived the left—and taught people to get serious about power.
by Micah L. Sifry via The New Republic on September 17, 2021

How Silicon Valley Broke the Economy

The question of how to fix the tech industry is now inseparable from the question of how to fix late 20th century capitalism.
by Adrian Chen via The Nation on October 14, 2019
A clue and black clay figuring with a Sony Watchman attached as its "head."

Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick.

Our past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history.
by Tanner Howard via Lapham’s Quarterly on September 4, 2019

Does Journalism Have a Future?

In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on January 22, 2019

It Didn’t Start with Facebook: Surveillance and the Commercial Media

The era of audience exploitation began in earnest thanks in large part to the experiments of Dr. Frank Stanton in the 1930s.
by Michael J. Socolow via We're History on May 1, 2018

White Supremacy Is the Achilles Heel of American Democracy

Even in a high-tech era, fears about minority political agency are the most reliable way to destabilize the U.S. political system.
by Vann R. Newkirk II via The Atlantic on April 17, 2018

Future Historians Probably Won't Understand Our Internet, and That's Okay

Archivists are working to document our chaotic, opaque, algorithmically complex world—and in many cases, they simply can’t.
by Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic on December 6, 2017
original

America @ Worship

How social media is – and isn't – changing American religion.
by Sara Georgini on October 29, 2017

Commercial Surveillance State

Blame the marketers.
by Matthew Crain, Anthony Nadler via n+1 on September 27, 2017

The Fake-News Fallacy

Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet.
by Adrian Chen via The New Yorker on September 4, 2017
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

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.
by Ethan Zuckerman via New York Review of Books on May 19, 2022
Visitors browse newspaper front pages from the day after the 9/11 terror attacks at the Newseum in Washington, D,C., in 2016. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When History Is Lost in the Ether

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.
by Christian Schneider via The Dispatch on April 6, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, paying a visit to a hospital with wounded soldiers.

How Propaganda Became Entertaining

Ukraine’s wartime communications strategies have roots in World War II.
by Kathryn Cramer Brownell via The Atlantic on March 27, 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 of people wearing different historical/cultural hats, each in their own frame, with a keyboard & mouse

Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization”

How one video game tells the story of an industry.
by Neima Jahromi via The New Yorker on September 22, 2021
Glass with spilled rainbow alcohol

Chasing 'Phantoms of the Past': Gay & Lesbian Bar Archivists on Preserving LGBTQ+ Nightlife History

VinePair interviewed eight LGBTQ+ archivers around the country about documenting America’s gay and lesbian bars while they still can.
by Dave Infante via VinePair on June 15, 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
Daryl Michael Scott.

"Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth"

Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism.
by Daryl Michael Scott, Len Gutkin via The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 10, 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
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