Ian Bogost
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Tempe Police Department / AP Can You Sue a Robocar?
A pedestrian killed by a self-driving Uber in Tempe shows that the legal implications of autonomous cars are as important, if not more so, than the technology.
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Piaggio Fast Forward / NinaMalyna / Shutterstock / ... The Cute Robot That Follows You Around the City
Piaggio, the Italian company that makes Vespa scooters, is building cargo droids for city pedestrians.
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Minnesota Historical Society When Malls Saved the Suburbs From Despair
Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.
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Thanh Do / The Atlantic All Followers Are Fake Followers
A New York Times exposé of a “black market” for online fame diagnoses the symptom of social-media despair, but misses its cause.
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Thanh Do / The Atlantic Sorry, Alexa Is Not a Feminist
It’s disingenuous to celebrate building “feminism” into a product after giving a robot servant a woman’s voice.
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Kyla Gifford / U.S. Air Force / Reuters The Internet Broke Emergency Alerts
America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era.
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The Atlantic HQ Trivia Is a Harbinger of Dystopia
What do you get from a live game-show app?
a. Fun b. Money c. Social collapse -
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Baz Ratner / Reuters Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
The internet is as much the enemy as it is the hero of contemporary life.
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Bitstrips / Snap / Ian Bogost / The ... Social Apps Are Now a Commodity
Snapchat's redesign shows how communication services are becoming indistinguishable.
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Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters Network Neutrality Can't Fix the Internet
The FCC is poised to dismantle common carriage for broadband and wireless providers. That’s bad, but the internet itself is worse.
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Ian Bogost / The Atlantic How Driverless Cars Will Change the Feel of Cities
Autonomous vehicles promise safety and efficiency. But nobody knows what it will be like to live with them.
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Twitter Even Trump Is Vulnerable to Internet Chaos
In the same day, the president of the United States and many local journalists both suffered the precariousness of life online.
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Keith Homan / shutterstock / Katie Martin / ... Big Candy Bars Have No Place on Halloween
They ruin the “fun” of the fun-size treat.
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Nelson Cash Netflix’s 'Skip Intro' Button Makes TV Ever More Like an App
The option to bypass title sequences seems convenient, but it also tightens the bond between viewer and screen.
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Julian Bleecker Why Computers Should Be Hidden
A luxury bicycle computer forecasts a welcome future of humble, embedded systems.
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Olly / Santi S / Serg036 / Shutterstock ... You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Futurists predict a rapture of machines, but reality beat them to it by turning computing into a way of life.
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Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP The Empire of Apple
The company’s new iPhone and retail “town centers” presage a future of Apple as global infrastructure—one that may already have arrived.
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Dado Ruvic / Reuters The Banality of the Equifax Breach
With over half of the entire U.S. adult population potentially exposed, what’s left to do but shrug and sigh?
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Richard Carson / Reuters Houston's Flood Is a Design Problem
It’s not because the water comes in. It’s because it is forced to leave again.
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Christian Hartmann / Reuters A Googler's Would-Be Manifesto Reveals Tech's Rotten Core
Office culture is only part of the problem.
