Over the past few years, a specific type of gathering has increased in frequency in Sand Hill Road conference rooms. A familiar-looking person enters, most likely a publicist who is waiting in the car outside, and they are not come to make a movie pitch. They are there to discuss conditions of the contract. The venture investors seated on the other side of the table have discovered—sometimes the hard way—that they should not be written off. Celebrities have always made investments in technology. The scale and intensity of it are novel. People treated Ashton Kutcher’s early involvement with this as…
Author: Sam Allcock
Since the late 1970s, a low buzzing tone has been transmitting nearly constantly somewhere in the shortwave band, at about 4625 kHz. Officially designated UVB-76, it is known colloquially as “The Buzzer.” For decades, it mostly droned on without attracting much attention outside of a small group of radio enthusiasts who tracked it compulsively. Then, at sporadic intervals—typically at times of increased Russian military activity—a voice emerges from the static and reads a series of names and numbers. There is no further explanation. The tone returns. After a momentary outburst, the internet settles down. The news about that station is…
The majority of people who use Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called by the time you read this, have never considered the significance of the number 160. The engineers who created the SMS standard decided that a single message could only include 160 characters in the early days of cell phone text messaging. Nobody decided on a major strategic course of action. They just calculated what would fit into the available data structure and arrived at that conclusion. One of the most important communication platforms of the past 20 years was shaped by that technical mishap, which was manufactured…
Epidemiologists spend a large amount of their working hours seeing graphs that the majority of the public will never see at a monitoring center that falls halfway between a typical university computer lab and something that belongs in a government building. Hospital occupancy rates and patient counts are too late. These researchers monitor signs, such as search query numbers in areas with historically inadequate disease reporting infrastructure, wastewater virus concentrations from cities across three nations, and genomic sequencing data indicating which viral mutations are increasing and in which direction. The graphs that move two months before anything appears in a…
In late September 2023, the WGA’s 148-day strike came to an end with an accord that writers’ advocates hailed as a major win. The studios had agreed to certain safeguards regarding AI, such as not requiring writers to utilize generative AI tools, not allowing AI-generated content to be submitted as a writing credit, and not lowering writer compensation for work that included AI support. The authors who had been fighting for those provisions for five months had good cause to believe they had made progress as they walked the picket lines outside the studio gates on Melrose Avenue and at…
In 2013, Tristan Harris, who worked for Google as a Design Ethicist—a relatively odd term for a tech company—was seated at a workstation when he created a slide show that he had no intention of sharing widely. It was made up of 144 slides and presented an argument that most of his colleagues probably understood in theory but hadn’t seen put together quite so clearly: the products they were developing were made at every level of the interface to draw and hold users’ attention in ways that they hadn’t selected and might not want if they fully understood what was…
It’s simple to locate the picture from the 2001 Oscars that keeps making the rounds. When Julia Roberts accepted the Best Actress award for Erin Brockovich, she wore a black-and-white strapless Valentino gown with her arm lifted. The dress did exactly what formal evening gowns are meant to accomplish when a renowned person wears them in such bright light. The fact that the dress was nine years old is something that most viewers of the picture fail to notice right away. In 1992, Valentino made it. Roberts made one of the most significant fashion statements of the decade by selecting…
Watch what shows up on your home screen when you open Netflix tonight. Very little of it is editorially curated in any meaningful human sense, including the shows in the top row, the arrangement of the thumbnails, and the particular image used for something you nearly watched last week. You are viewing a prediction about yourself that was created in the seconds that passed between opening the application and the site loading. Millions of users who pause at the same times, skip the same scenes, and stop watching the same kinds of episodes at around the same point in episode…
A former TD capital markets analyst is talking about what ultimately caused her to leave on a Tuesday afternoon in a coffee shop on King Street West, which is close enough to view the Bay Street skyscrapers from the window but far enough away to feel like a different planet. She claims that it wasn’t the hours. Actually, it wasn’t the money. She spent three hours arguing to a risk committee why a specific data strategy was sound, even tho she knew the decision would be no before she entered the room. Three months later, she joined an AI business…
Between about 1998 and 2012, there was a certain type of Saturday afternoon that has no clean substitute now. The previous evening, you had seen the movie. You replaced the disk, went to the special features menu, and chose “Director’s Commentary.” For the next two hours, you sat with your laptop closed and listened to an explanation of what you had been watching from a filmmaker, an editor, the entire cast, or occasionally just a producer and cinematographer who kept talking over each other. Citizen Kane by Roger Ebert. Fight Club with David Fincher. Ridley Scott on any Blade Runner…