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Ten years ago, most of what we were interested in was on the open web. It was at the other end of a URL. Even if it was on a private website, you could scrape it - and you could worry later about whether you were violating the terms of service.

That's not the world we live in now. Stuff is insid…

Still, something was lost with the rise of personal computing. One clue comes from a 1978 article by the leftist tech activist group Boston Computer Collective. Writing in the radical science magazine Science for the People, they took aim at the hollowness of the personal computing revolution, re…

The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives techno…

Jefferson gilded chains by making them hard to see. Slaves (“members of the slave community” as the video awkwardly dubs them) cooked hot food and put it on shelves, making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic. The same hidden hands whisked away dirty plates just as quickly…

If what we encounter on Facebook, OkCupid, and other online platforms is generally “safe for work,” it is not because algorithms have sorted through the mess and hid some of it from view. Rather, we take non-nauseating dips in the digital stream thanks to the labor of real-live human beings who sit…