Business / Tech Culture

People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t…

Lauren Goode: Zoë, you had vegan pizza the other night. You said it was pretty good.Zoë Schiffer: I did. I did, and I read a really, really scary article written by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic about dairy farming, and it radicalized me for…

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed…

The most raucous cheers of the night were prompted by Trump’s promise to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto businesses under the Biden…

On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the…

Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail”…

Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His…

Over the past year, Cisco publicly looked like one of the few tech companies that had avoided internal backlash over its response to the war in Gaza. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the Silicon Valley giant known for its routers, cybersecurity…

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless…

As I leave my house on an overcast Tuesday morning to walk the dog, I’m accosted by a neighbor who cheerily calls down the street: “I hear you have an OnlyFans now!” I start to wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake.OnlyFans has—how shall I…