How we became nostalgic for Minecraft | Continue reading
No goods or services are stand-alone | Continue reading
Sports video games don’t simulate sports so much as the thrill of building a brand | Continue reading
It’s not enough to make facial recognition illegal when its infrastructural legacy remains | Continue reading
Digital alarm systems increase homeowners’ sense of security by fomenting fear | Continue reading
The datafication of affect in the call-center industry | Continue reading
Even through a screen, machines can read our body language | Continue reading
Algorithms update bureaucracy’s long-standing strategy for evasion | Continue reading
As society becomes more gamified, games like Fortnite can become sources of noncompetitive solace | Continue reading
Startups are importing and imposing AI systems founded on individualistic and capitalist drives | Continue reading
Is 5G solving real, pressing problems or merely creating new ones? | Continue reading
How the pursuit of convenience produces new forms of inconvenience | Continue reading
Dietary metaphors for internet use blame individuals for systemic hazards | Continue reading
What does a platform want you to remember? | Continue reading
Wireless headphones are augmented reality devices | Continue reading
The industry-wide turn toward ethics obscures tech’s allergy to politics | Continue reading
Real Life is a magazine about living with technology. The emphasis is more on living. We publish one piece a day—essays, features, uncategorizable—four or five days a week. We launched with funding from Snapchat, but we operate with editorial independence and without ads. | Continue reading
How “People You May Know” has made the Stranger much stranger | Continue reading
Data science reduces people to subjects that can be mined for truth | Continue reading
Many instances of “artificial intelligence” are artificial displays of its power and potential | Continue reading
Why data science is a profound threat for queer people | Continue reading
Video games are teaching users how to enjoy perpetually renting consumer goods rather than owning them | Continue reading
Amazon’s mission is to make customer identity more primary than citizenship | Continue reading
I’ve come to view the internet as the intelligence that watches me — and watches with me — until it suddenly doesn’t | Continue reading
Close relationships are a kind of collective subjectivity. Social media is a crude separation | Continue reading
Wi-fi is outdated and makes users vulnerable to data capture. Why do we still depend on it? | Continue reading
Corporate metrics want to extract productivity from everything — even your dreams | Continue reading
The ability to ruin a stranger’s life is a feature, not a bug of consumer rating systems | Continue reading
What is lost when we “watch Netflix” rather than shows and “listen to Spotify” rather than songs? | Continue reading
Why pretend that machines can be creative? | Continue reading
Why are we so ready to believe that truth is over? | Continue reading
A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it | Continue reading
Video games reproduce the worker’s capacity to continue working | Continue reading
Streaming capitalizes on the utopian hopes attached to the mp3 | Continue reading
The plagues we pretend to want are coming for us anyway | Continue reading
Amazon’s mission is to make customer identity more primary than citizenship | Continue reading
Instead of selling albums, the music industry today sells fandom | Continue reading
Algorithms alone can’t meaningfully hold other algorithms accountable | Continue reading
Many instances of “artificial intelligence” are artificial displays of its power and potential | Continue reading
Minimalist social media posts are extravagant in their austerity | Continue reading
Debating won’t bring us closer to truth | Continue reading
If consciousness is inseparable from how we’re embodied, we’ll never know | Continue reading