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The Best Technology Writing 2010

Nick Bilton

@nickbilton

The proliferation of disinformation online has seeped into all aspects of life. Elections, the pandemic, and now, a war are all targets of organized campaigns to obfuscate or even rewrite truth and facts. At the same time, censorship of vulnerable populations is on the rise, only further restricting the flow of information.

Money Reimagined • Wielding Blockchain Technology Against Disinformation

"His fundamental insight was to see merit in deliberately abusing keys, thereby attempting to destroy every vestige of structure"

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum • Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press)

If the Internet levels the battlefield to the benefit of America’s enemies, the only recourse, it seems, may be to destroy the battlefield.

Nicholas Carr • The Big Switch

Thielverse—

Max Chafkin • The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

Proprietary Technology

Peter Thiel, Blake Masters • Zero to One

I once met a disgruntled former employee of a company that competed against UberMedia and PlaceIQ. He had absconded with several gigabytes of data from his former company. It was only a small sampling of data, but it represented the comprehensive movements of tens of thousands of people for a few weeks. Lots of those people could be traced back to

Byron Tau • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

In 2010, Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA, made a darkly prescient point in a keynote at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, speaking to a crowd of programmers, security engineers, and hackers. “You guys made the cyber domain look like the north German plain. Then you bitch and moan when you get invaded,” he said.