Piaggio, the Italian company that makes Vespa scooters, is building cargo droids for city pedestrians.
“This is gita.” Jeffrey Schnapp pronounces the “T” in the crisp, Italian way—near the teeth rather than the soft palate—which makes me feel like I should have worn more expensive shoes to the meeting. Gita is a bulbous lozenge of a robot, about two feet tall, with rubber tires at its edges so it can spin around within its own… read more
Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.
“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms… read more
A New York Times exposé of a “black market” for online fame diagnoses the symptom of social-media despair, but misses its cause.
In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?”… read more
It’s disingenuous to celebrate building “feminism” into a product after giving a robot servant a woman’s voice.
If you ask Alexa, the voice-assistant software in Amazon Echo devices, if it’s a feminist, it will respond in the affirmative. “I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society,” it continues. At Quartz, Leah Fessler recently noted that it’s a vast improvement over just a year ago, when Alexa… read more
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.
It’s hard to imagine a worse way to be awoken on a Saturday morning in paradise than with a blaring Klaxon accompanying a government alert about an inbound ballistic-missile attack. But that’s exactly what happened to more than 1.5 million people in Hawaii this morning. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the emergency alert read, in all caps, on smartphones.… read more
A series at The Atlantic on how technology is transforming cities, for better and worse
Starting in early 2018, I’ve been editing a special project on how technology is changing cities, for better and worse. The series addresses urbanism, transit, computation, policing, inequality, climate change, commerce, development, and many more topics, through a lens that’s somewhat different from what you’ll find in publications focusing on technology alone, or architecture alone, or planning alone, or politics… read more
What do you get from a live game-show app? a. Fun b. Money c. Social collapse
Twice a day, HQ Trivia players tune in to a smartphone game-show app, where an emcee poses 12 wholesome questions, each with three possible answers. Players who answer all of them correctly split a cash prize. The winnings started at a few hundred bucks when the app launched in the summer, and now average around $1,500. But they go up… read more
The internet is as much the enemy as it is the hero of contemporary life.
Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, opens a bag of Cheetos with his teeth, dumps them onto a hipster food-court lunch bowl, and slathers it in Sriracha sauce. He snaps a pic for social media. It’s a scene from a video, “Seven Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality,” shot by the conservative… read more
Snapchat's redesign shows how communication services are becoming indistinguishable.
I am very old. As in, my age begins with a four, a profoundly uncool number for an age to start with. Which is to say, too old to use Snapchat, the image-messaging social-network app. Founded in 2011, it’s most popular among young people, who spurned Facebook and even Instagram for it. Why? For one part, it’s because we olds… read more
The FCC is poised to dismantle common carriage for broadband and wireless providers. That’s bad, but the internet itself is worse.
In a new video advocating for network neutrality—a name for regulating internet providers like public utilities—the American Civil Liberties Union declares that “giant internet companies shouldn’t have the power to mess with what we read, watch, and explore online.” The ACLU is referring to broadband and wireless carriers like Comcast and AT&T, who would have the power to throttle, charge… read more