Technology

Friday

Ben Sixsmith

The techlash has well and truly begun

Given the immense power that it wields, ‘Big Tech’ has ridden a gentle wave of goodwill. Steve Jobs was beloved, Elon Musk is admired and Mark Zuckerberg is generally seen as a well-meaning oddball. A 2018 study found that Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the US, behind only the military. How much that trust is based on knowledge of its procedures and how much on the relatively swift arrival of its packages is another question. That goodwill is fast dissipating. Across, the political spectrum people are beginning to resent the internet giants. This week, a leftist campaign in New York managed to stop Amazon from building a second headquarters in Long Island, Queens.

techlash

Monday

Will Lloyd

Black Mirror politics is coming to the midterms

Black Mirror politics is coming to America, courtesy of a new Democratic initiative called Citizen Strong. Announcing their existence in Bloomberg this week, Citizen Strong claims to have assembled an army of 17,000 amateur secret police who have spent months looking for damaging material on dozens of vulnerable Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. The information - presumably embarrassing at least, career ending at worst - will be unleashed on them just in time for the midterms. Though this kind of dirt-digging is as old as politics itself, the direction the Democrats are taking opposition research through Citizen Strong reveals how it has been re-energised and refashioned by the communications technology of the early 21st century.

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Thursday

Tom Ball

Amateur porn is not empowering

If ever you find yourself bored and with 15 minutes to spare, I recommend looking up Pornhub’s annual report, the closest thing you will get to a statistical breakdown of the planet’s libido. Here you will discover that the average visit to Pornhub lasts nine minutes 59 seconds; that the most popular time to watch porn is a Sunday evening; and that sexual tastes for the most part tend to follow cultural lines, with English-speakers prizing lesbian material most highly, and eastern Europeans on the whole preferring anal. There’s nothing new about porn, and humans have been trying to get their hands on it pretty much since they left the primordial soup. The novelty is in the rate of change.