Silicon Valley’s Most Prescient Tech Critic

When Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows in 2010, many were skeptical of his claims that the internet was changing the way our brains work. Twelve years later, it’s clear he was right. In this most recent episode of the Big Tech podcast, host Taylor Owen sat down with Carr to figure out how he saw everything so clearly — and where we’re headed.

In the past two years, people worldwide have seen their governments wrestle with the myriad aspects of the global pandemic. The poorest countries, already experiencing hardship, have received the least access to vaccines, the least economic investment, the least help with liquidity.

In this opinion piece first published on TVO.org, Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, calls for more solidarity and “a deeper understanding of what it means to live on a single planet, to share a single atmosphere and to live in a world that is shrinking. … our global institutions have to be strengthened, not weakened, and our words must be matched by our deeds.”

Wherever users move online, industries follow. Computational propagandists and professional trolls, who try to manipulate public opinion through the use of social media, are no exception. This year a torrent of course-changing elections are set to take place around the globe, and political operatives will be sharpening their knives, write Martin J. Riedl, Inga Trauthig and Samuel Woolley.

John Lillywhite asks us to imagine a power-boosting beverage that exists only as a series of zeroes and ones in computer code. The drink offers no obvious utility and has no promotional value, aesthetic or brand identity, yet, as he explains, already has significant economic value. Converging technologies in cryptography, decentralized finance and computer processing power have led to the introduction of a new historical asset class: the virtual asset.