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Issue 4

Scale

What new kinds of scale does technology enable and demand? Why is scale such an important concept for the tech industry? What kinds of problems and possibilities do big tech, big data, big everything create? How do we govern, mobilize, moderate, democratize at scale?

editorial

Go Ask Alice

The Editors

Technology shrinks to grow, and grows to shrink.

chatlogs

Don’t Read the Comments: Caroline Sinders on Online Harassment

A design researcher at Wikimedia discusses how to define online harassment—and how to stop it.

Mining the Sky: Meehan Crist, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, and Denton Ebel on Astrocapitalism

American entrepreneurs are teaming up with one of the world’s smallest countries to make outer space safe for extractive capitalism.

Do It Yourself: Matt Bruenig on Using the Internet to Build a Think Tank

A conversation about building political alternatives with the internet.

features

The Internet of Women

Moira Weigel

A reflection on #MeToo, the death of print media, and the structure of the internet.

The New Octopus

K. Sabeel Rahman

An anatomy of today’s tech monopolies, and a proposal for how to tame them.

The Data Is Ours!

Ben Tarnoff

A radical blueprint for data democracy.

The Unicorn Hunters

Kim-Mai Cutler

The past, present, and future of Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry.

"The Scale Is Just Unfathomable"

Tarleton Gillespie

An inquiry into how social media platforms moderate content at an industrial scale.

See No Evil

Miriam Posner

An investigation into how software wires global supply chains, and what code conceals.

The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative

Jonathon Keats

The world’s first program dedicated to systematically adapting human technologies to benefit other organisms.

patches

Words Are Weapons

Marc DaCosta

How do we talk about technology in a way that helps us transform it?

The Factory Is Alive

Christina Agapakis, Natsai Audrey Chieza

Living within our means might require making our technology come alive.

Shapeshifters

Alexandra Pettet

A report on how digital technology has revolutionized gerrymandering.

Crawling the City

Will Payne

Apps like Yelp and Foursquare don’t just map the city. They gentrify it.

Cyborg Tongues

Ross Perlin

What happens when small languages collide with smartphones and the internet?

Farms Race

Nina Sparling

What the hell is open-source agriculture?

Letter from Shenzhen

Xiaowei R. Wang

A dispatch from the Other Bay Area.

First edition of Issue 4: Scale released April 01, 2018.