Society

How we went from B.F. Skinner to China's social credit system.

The phrase “surveillance capitalism” has become an organizing idea for many critics of Big Tech. That phrase overstates the power dynamics at play in commercial collection and use of personal information, but valid concerns with the present-day information economy do exist.

The content on sites like Facebook and Google is supposedly free of charge. But what are the hidden costs to unsuspecting users? Shoshana Zuboff warns of an information coup, with the foundations of American democracy placed under threat by the tech giants’ clandestine data collection process. She speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about the dangers of “surveillance capitalism.”

Who decided that nothing should be something?

We should probably be talking more about the way religion plays into American and Western extremism.

The world that gave us Star Trek is looking more and more progressive than the one we are currently in.

Rarely seen items show the process and relationship at the heart of the work by Christo and his partner, Jeanne-Claude.

Tech:NYC is the industry association for NY’s tech sector. They play a number of important roles and one of them is to educate and inform about the impact of the tech sector in NY. To that end, they launched a valuable resource last month called Innovation Indicators. Innovation Indicators is a dashboard that shows the […]

Should we be worried? Well, size isn't everything

From the Israel Museum in Jerusalem’s 2013 exhibition White Gold  [Originally published at Bullionstar.] For several years Brits have been ...

The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?

Which they did on Tuesday, when the NLRB and the Justice Department announced a joint effort to go after monopsonistic violators of workers’ rights

CSIRO has released a once-in-a-decade report which identifies and details seven global megatrends.

Why do major blockbuster effects look so shaky? And why are so many VFX artists overworked and miserable? Here's the answer.

'I think it's the content boom, and the pressure to produce high-quality work at a low cost in short time, that is an industry-wide issue.'

Publishers are suing the Internet Archive over an online book lending program. But the case could limit the ways libraries lend books online.

Our current model of collective bargaining leaves millions of workers out in the cold. Sectoral bargaining could change all that—and, just maybe, rebuild our shrunken middle class.

Workers (and their families) are stressed by the long hours they have to put in. It’s past time to cut those hours.

A method that fights the problem of adverse selection in markets with asymmetric information.

When Frederic Taylor brought the world Scientific Management a hundred years ago, it changed what it meant to run a factory. Stopwatches and assembly lines dramatically outperformed the traditional…