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Malcolm Harris, left, and the cover of his book "Palo Alto," right. (Photo by Julia Burke)

The Obscene Invention of California Capitalism

A new history examines Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast's settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.
by Malcolm Harris, Emma Hager via The Nation on March 15, 2023
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
Painting of a plantation.

The Old South Shall Rise Again

On the economic system of Silicon Valley.
by Victor Davis Hanson via The New Criterion on August 24, 2022
A picture of the author as a teenager with his parents, in his bedroom decorated with rock music posters.

My Dad and Kurt Cobain

When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on August 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
Servers at a Facebook data center

Build a Better Internet

An interview with Ben Tarnoff, the author of "Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future."
by Nick Serpe, Ben Tarnoff via Dissent on June 27, 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

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
People gathered around an electronic contraption with lightbulbs.

Ideas of the PMC

A review of three new books that in various ways track the rise of the "Professional Managerial Class."
by Michael J. Kramer via Society for U.S. Intellectual History on March 6, 2022
Machine in a wooden box with 40 dials: an electromechanical machine used in the 1890 U.S. census.

How the US Census Kick-Started America’s Computing Industry

As the country grew, each census required greater effort than the last. That problem led to the invention of the punched card – and the birth of an industry.
by David Lindsay Roberts via The Conversation on December 1, 2021
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
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

The Library of Possible Futures

Since the release of "Future Shock" 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.
by Samantha Culp via The Atlantic on February 1, 2021
partner

Trump and Biden Both Want to Repeal Section 230. Would That Wreck the Internet?

Today's heated political arguments over censorship and misinformation online are rooted in a 26-word snippet of a law that created the Internet as we know it.
via Retro Report on November 30, 2020
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
Abstract image of a wedge whose shading does not align with the shading in its context.

A Brief History of the Gig

The gig economy wasn’t built in a day.
by Veena Dubal via Logic on April 27, 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
High risk, high return investments in whaling ships, such as the New Bedford, Massachusetts, provided a model for modern venture capital. Courtesy New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Venture Capital Builds The Modern World

The American method of high-risk, potentially high-reward investments has fueled innovation from New England whaling ventures to Silicon Valley start-ups.
by Tom Nicholas via American Heritage on January 1, 2020
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

Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique

America has already witnessed the largest UBI experiment known to history — the postwar middle-class housewife. And she was utterly miserable.
by Amber A'Lee Frost via Jacobin on September 19, 2019

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
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
Illustrated figures sit inside a pink triangle embedded with gender markers.

An Oral History of the Early Trans Internet

Trans people have existed since the dawn of time. The internet has not.
by Henry Giardina via Gizmodo on July 9, 2019

Full Metal Racket

A history sheds light on venture capital’s ties to the military-industrial complex.
by Jamie Martin via Bookforum on June 1, 2019

Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy

On Ancestry's dangerous move to make it harder to discern which white families owned slaves.
by Adam H. Domby via Black Perspectives on May 10, 2019

The Definitive Oral History of TiVo

How the original DVR paved the way for Netflix and the cord-cutter movement.
by Tom Roston via OneZero on April 2, 2019

We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need to Burn It to the Ground.

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.
by Mike Monteiro via BuzzFeed News on March 31, 2019

Counter-Histories of the Internet

Our ethics and desires can shape digital networks at least as forcefully as those networks influence us.
by Marta Figlerowicz via Public Books on February 25, 2019

Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

In 1972, a photo of a Swedish Playboy model was used to create the JPEG. The model herself was mostly a mystery—until now.
by Linda Kinstler via Wired on January 31, 2019
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