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

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

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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

“It is just incredibly frustrating to see human life be valued so little,” he says with a disdain that I’ve come to see as pretty typical for him, particularly when he’s talking about Big Tech. “And to see that repeated over and over, this prioritization of profit over humanity … it is just incredibly frustrating and maddening.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am fearful of a Facebook-like algorithm that chokes my podcast off from those who subscribed to it. Just as I sometimes get nostalgic about the old school blogosphere from a decade ago, I’ll no doubt look back at the open podcast ecosystem and miss parts of it. And I’m not super excited about a future where I have to toggle be... See more