Liberty Machines and Dark Tech
An interview with Evgeny Morozov on The Santiago Boys, a podcast about a project inside the Allende government that tried to use cybernetics to manage an economy under assault.
Winter 2024
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The Zealot
Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern broods, like horsemen of the apocalypse, ride through his books heralding various endings: of eras, of bygone mores, of novels themselves.
How Corporations Turned Prison Tablets Into a Predatory Scheme
“Prison iPads” became a lifeline during the pandemic. They also became a new way to squeeze money out of the incarcerated and their families.
Inequalities on the Digital Campus
Class and race have shaped the realities of online learning in deep, sometimes unexpected ways.
All Work and No Play
Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.
Content Control
An interview with Jillian C. York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism.
A World Without Work?
Contemporary automation discourse responds to a real, global trend: there are too few jobs for too many people. But it ignores the actual sources of this trend: deindustrialization, depressed investment, and ultra-wealthy elites who stand in the way of a post-scarcity society.
“What’s Actually Going on in Our Nursing Homes”: An Interview with Shantonia Jackson
The structural conditions shaping care work are highly exploitative—and are profoundly linked to the high degree of COVID-19’s spread within both long-term care facilities and the communities that supply their labor force.
Essential and Untrusted
The pandemic has exacerbated an existing child care crisis. Platforms like Care.com are growing, while exposing care workers to new forms of surveillance and discrimination.
Digital Piecework
Homework and piece pay in the garment industry were largely abolished by the global labor struggles that preceded the New Deal. Silicon Valley capitalists have brought the model back.
The Hustle Economy
Today, inequality—especially racial inequality—is not only produced through the job market but through people’s ability to hustle.
Bodies on the Line
Introducing our Fall 2020 special section, “Technology and the Crisis of Work.”
Belabored Stories: Education at a Distance
If anything good can come of this massive experiment in remote teaching, a New York City teacher says, it should be “an end to the Silicon Valley fantasy that this is what school can be in the future.”
Stopping Homelessness before It Starts
Could a new social services model prevent a temporary housing crisis from becoming a persistent condition?
Privacy Settings
Today, we are watched as never before, through surreptitious governmental data collection and through corporate profiles of our desires and habits. Yet we also divulge private matters aggressively, seeking freedom through publicity.
