Opinion

You’d think everybody would want to fly. It’s been a universal human dream since the first cave person saw the first pterodactyl¹. You’d think better technology, greater demand, eco

Western airstrikes on the Middle East: déjà vu all over again. Twenty years ago, the USA attacked Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Two days ago, the USA attacked Syria with &#823

You may not be aware that the rough consensus in the tech community is that Cambridge Analytica were almost certainly bullshit artists. Oh, don’t get me wrong, what they tried to do, and/or clai

Generals are famously always “studying how to fight the last war,” with the last war’s technology, while dismissing how the world and its tech have changed in the interim. This is tr

These kinds of leaks didn’t happen when I started reporting on Facebook eight years ago. It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone, but with the discipline of a milit

You know what tech startups hate? Complicated legal compliance. The problem is, Facebook isn’t a startup any more, but its competitors are. There have been plenty of calls from congress and critics

Dear blockchain people: this is your hour. Abandon your transparently greedy get-rich-quick schemes, turn away from your casinos of de-facto modern-day penny stocks, and focus your decentralized atten

Facebook is at the center of a dozen controversies and outrage is peaking. The social network has failed again and again at expanding beyond a handful of core features. Doubts of its usefulness, and a

Facebook has naively put its faith in humanity and repeatedly been abused, exploited, and proven either negligent or complicit. The company routinely ignores or downplays the worst-case scenarios, ide

Todd Pierce Contributor Todd Pierce is the former chief digital officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and former executive vice president of operations and mobility for Salesforce.com. S

"Timing," Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said cryptically when asked what the greatest threat was for Snap Inc. "I think the big risks are always the really big product ideas that we're investing in that a

The secret to Spotify's public market debut is actually an acquisition it made in 2014. The Echo Nest was powering music recommendations for Beats Music, Rdio, Vevo and iHeartRadio before Spotify pull

An interesting report on the Facebook ad machinery in play during the election highlighted an issue that I hadn't considered: Facebook's ad marketplace gave a huge pricing advantage to one candidate o

Contributor Contributor More posts by this contributor The dinner that destroyed Gawker Author Ryan Holiday on “the nature of world-altering success” It could be said that the first few ye

I’ve been CTO of HappyFunCorp since last year, and it has been a deeply edifying experience. Everything people told me was mostly true: I write less code; I go to more meetings, and turn up in m

There's beauty in the double-blind opt-in. That's the way you match with someone on Tinder. You like them, they like you, you both find out and get connected. But to date, the feature's largely been t

Tony La Russa is a member of the MLB Hall of Fame as a manager. The man helped introduce video study and analytics to the game of baseball when he was manager of the great Oakland A's teams in the lat

Google just announced a plan to "modernize" email, allowing "engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences." Does that sound like a terrible idea to anyone else? It sure sounds like a terrib

I watched the Falcon Heavy launch this week. Not as an accredited journalist, from an observation tower, but as one of the masses on Alan Shepard Beach twelve miles south. Watched it arc across the sk

Let’s talk about the side effects of the creeping apotheosis of solar power. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re a ways away yet — but we’re definitely heading in that dire