Last week, while some commentators mused on the possibility of Pope Francis and Xi Jinping bumping into each other during their dueling high-profile U.S. tours, I pondered instead what two much younger men would say if they ran into each …
Proponents of geoengineering imagine that technology can operate in a political void. It’s a dangerous illusion.
Writers Guild of America East is the union behind recent public organizing campaigns at two digital media outlets—Gawker Media and Salon.com. We talked to their director of organizing, Justin Molito.
The museum world’s fad for “urban labs” shows the limits of design thinking.
Will tech billionaires overwhelm the city’s resurgent progressive tradition?
For Dissentniks, 2014 was a year of small miracles and stubborn injustices. Thousands of workers demonstrated for a $15-an-hour wage, but a party that hopes to destroy unions won control of both houses of Congress. Marriage equality became law in a …
Airbnb’s announcement of its new #branding struck the tech community on a lot of levels, not least of which were the many genitalia-related ways in which the logo can be interpreted. What I find most interesting in the new branding, …
Last month, Dissent hosted two panels at Left Forum in New York City, moderated by Belabored co-hosts Michelle Chen and Sarah Jaffe. Listen to both panels below. We apologize for any glitches in audio quality. Cloud Labor: Working in the …
There is nothing novel about the impact of technology on labor markets. So why do so many pundits insist on blaming computers and robots for today’s inequality?
In the castle-like San Francisco Armory, the Internet porn production company Kink.com hosts live-streamed sex parties where unpaid “guests” are invited to perform S&M scenes for the camera. What happens when performances that once commanded a fee are done for free—and even the producers regard them not as work, but as sexual expression?
“In sub-Saharan Africa,” a video at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show announces, “there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals.” Tech giants including Intel and Apple are now working with NGOs to clean up their supply chains and help promote peace in the region. But will their proposed solutions challenge the deeper patterns of exploitation plaguing the DRC?
Twenty-four hours a day, across more than sixty free product “platforms,” Google is storing, indexing, and cross-referencing information about the activities of a billion people. What are the 30,000 prodigies at Google, Inc. doing with all that data?
When government officials exert their most coercive powers, the logic behind their actions should be obvious. Only autocratic states deprive people of their liberty without an explicit rationale, and this country’s political forebears took pains to circumscribe the government’s legal …
The new media gurus claim that everybody can remix and peer produce their way to a networked, cultural cornucopia. But thankfully, as sugar-coated paeans to the power of tech have proliferated, so have sharp, critical accounts. Astra Taylor’s new book, The People’s Platform, rises to the top of this list.
“Is there racism against drones?” asked an audience member at the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York City last autumn. Drone hobbyists are seeking to divorce their toys from images of war and bloodshed. But even hobbyist drones are the product of extremely powerful institutions with a keen interest in maintaining that power.
