Is the Tech Press Bad? With The Verge's Casey Newton

“We're basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that's not really how people are made to interact. A lot of the meetings that we have today, you're looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That's not how we process things, either.”

Media corporations should be scrutinized as much as tech companies for their incentive structure.

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more

Tech’s Yin and YangThat there are two philosophies does not necessarily mean that one is right and one is wrong: the reality is we need both. Some problems are best solved by human ingenuity, enabled by the likes of Microsoft and Apple; others by collective action. That, though, gets at why Google and Facebook are fundamentally more dangerous: coll... See more

His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.

“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper ask

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A great current example is Apple vs. Facebook. The narrative around Apple is that it’s a world-class design-and-privacy-first company whose products say something good about the people who own them. Facebook’s narrative was formed in articles about its brash and awkward founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in the film The Social Network, in the company’s old ... See more