Sarah Owen

A high-tech neighborhood that was slated to rise along Toronto’s waterfront, Quayside was the brainchild of Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Google parent company Alphabet. Projected to create 44,000 jobs and $14.2 billion annually in GDP for Canada, the interconnected smart city would’ve housed residents in 12 timber high-rises designed... See more

“In actual fact, [BeReal] is trapping us in an endless, 24-hour cycle – one in which every user knows that everyone else is carefully curating their casualness”

Known as Colour Alchemy, the dye has a formula is that it allows it to react directly to temperature and use different wavelengths of light to emphasize the color. Each color is described by the brand as “holographic” because microprisms in the formula shrink and expand to produce the different shades.

The social app might position itself as the anti-Instagram, but it’s really just another avenue for us to pretend our lives are a highlight reel.

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And... See more

This coercion to extend every adventure as long as possible — the nostalgia continuum — is the connective tissue fastening past experiences to the logic of the “feed,” which cuts the flow of experience down into atomized parts that are readable to tech platforms, enshrines chapters in life to make them rankable, interactable, and presentable to you... See more

Patricia de Vries, a research professor at Gerrit Rietveld Academie who has written about algorithmic anxiety, told me, “Just as the fear of heights is not about heights, algorithmic anxiety is not simply about algorithms.”