For most of the internet’s history, the question of whether the entity on the other end of a conversation was human answered itself. A comment on a forum, a message in a chat room, a review left on a shopping site: these were, almost by default, produced by a person sitting somewhere typing, because nothing…
Read MoreVideo games occupy a strange and precarious place among the cultural works of the last half century. A film from the 1970s can usually be found and watched, a novel from the 1950s can be pulled from a library shelf, and a song from any era is a search away, but a video game from…
Read MoreA government agency sends a legal notice to a hosting company. A court orders a domain registrar to suspend a name. A platform’s trust and safety team flips a switch and a page that existed a moment ago simply stops resolving. For most of the internet’s history, this has been the anatomy of a takedown,…
Read MoreThe idea that a person could be paid simply for walking, running, or exercising has an immediate and almost irresistible appeal, because it promises to turn an activity that many people struggle to do enough of, physical movement, into a source of financial reward, aligning the pursuit of health with the pursuit of money in…
Read MoreWhen a traveler books a hotel room or a vacation rental through one of the familiar booking websites, the price that appears on the screen feels like the cost of the room, a number set by the hotel and paid by the guest, with the website serving as a convenient place to find and reserve…
Read MoreFor most of the brief history of artificial intelligence in everyday life, the technology has been something people talk to, a clever assistant that answers questions, drafts text, and offers suggestions but ultimately hands every consequential decision back to a human, who must be the one to click the button, enter the payment, and complete…
Read MoreThe rise of ride-hailing apps transformed urban transportation with remarkable speed, summoning a car to almost any street corner with a few taps and creating flexible earning opportunities for millions of drivers, yet beneath the convenience that riders enjoy lies a persistent grievance among the people who actually do the driving. The drivers who provide…
Read MoreFor as long as professional sports have existed, the relationship between a club and its supporters has carried a peculiar imbalance, since the fans provide the passion, the atmosphere, the loyalty across generations, and a great deal of the money that sustains the enterprise, yet they almost never have any say in how the club…
Read MoreAlmost everyone who uses the internet has an email address and a handful of messaging accounts, and almost no one actually owns them, because the address that identifies a person online, along with the entire history of their correspondence, belongs not to the user but to the company that provides the service, which can suspend…
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