OneZero: The First 26 Months

Access every story published in the first era of Medium’s flagship technology and science publication

Hello, friends!

Today is my last day at Medium.

As co-founder and editor-in-chief of OneZero, I want to say thank you to Medium CEO Ev Williams and VP of Editorial Siobhan O'Connor for giving my team an unparalleled opportunity to tell important, mind-expanding stories about technology and science. I am deeply grateful for our freelance and platform writers—including our columnists and other weekly contributors (especially long-timers Angela Lashbrook, Owen Williams, and Eric Ravenscraft)—who forged this publication into something unique and special. Thank you also to our staff writers Dave Gershgorn, Emily Mullin, Sarah Emerson, Drew Costley, and Will Oremus, and our audience development trio Nadia Rawls, Peter Slattery, and Nate Goldman. Most of all, I bow in gratitude to our readers, who kept us going day after day.

I wanted to offer, in one place, links to every month of coverage that I oversaw (along with interim/launch editor Bryan Walsh, executive editor Michael Zelenko, senior editors Yasmin Tayag, Sarah Kessler, and Brian Merchant, and senior platform editor Megan Morrone), plus a handful of highlights. This is a monument to two-plus years of hard work that made a difference in the world. Thank you for being a part of it.

—Damon Beres

An incomplete look at team OneZero, from pre-pandemic times. From left: Nate Goldman, Will Oremus, Dave Gershgorn, Sarah Kessler, Emily Mullin, Megan Morrone, Sarah Emerson, Damon Beres, Drew Costley. Not pictured: Peter Slattery, Yasmin Tayag, Michael Zelenko, Bryan Walsh, Brian Merchant, Rachel Kalson.

February 2019 (Starting on Feb. 27)

Highlights:

The Brain That Remade Itself

Is the Universe Real?

Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet

The Ethically Questionable Math Game Taking Over U.S. Schools

Why Apple’s Notification Bubbles Are so Stressful

We’re Already Designing Babies

We Can Learn to See Through ‘Deepfake’ Video Hoaxes

The Internet Is Broken. Here’s Who Can Fix It.

March 2019

Highlights:

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

The Sharing Economy Was Always a Scam

The Relentless Misery of Working Inside an Amazon Warehouse

How Google Wiped a Neighborhood off the Map

Meet the ‘Hillbilly Lawyer’ Fighting to Take Down Big Pharma

How Air Purifiers Became the Newest Wellness Craze

Computer-Generated Faces Are Getting Real

This Company Wants to Help Women Hack Their Fertility

Virtual Reality Is Helping Kids Cope With Pain

Closing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap

Can High Times Survive in the Age of Vaping?

April 2019

Highlights:

Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

The Definitive Oral History of TiVo

No One Knows How Dangerous Boeing’s 737 Max Actually Is

Inside the Biotech Startup That Wants to Extend Your Life

The Racist Origins of America’s Tech Industry

When the Web Loses Its Memory

The Machine Behind Twitter’s Strangest Promoted Tweets

Google Could Get Tons of Data From Its Gaming Platform

Your Smartphone Apps Are Filled With Trackers You Know Nothing About

How Hedgehogs Became Instagram’s Most Miserable Celebrities

Beyond Prime: Inside the Race to Deliver Packages to the Moon

Tech Platforms Love Moving Fast — Except When Their Users Are in Trouble

The Tyranny of Convenience

May 2019

Highlights:

Warning Signs That a Bubble Is About to Burst

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

The End of App Stores Is Rapidly Approaching

What Really Happens to AirPods When They Die

Your Dirty AirPods Are Grosser Than You Think

A Disaster Is Unfolding in Consumer Tech

How Satan Was Disappeared From Twitter

Meet the World’s Most Bio-Tracked Man

One Inventor’s Race to Manage His Parkinson’s Disease With an App

This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers

June 2019

Highlights:

Bullhead City, Arizona Was a Retiree Paradise. Then Came a Biblical Plague of Flies.

Amazon Is Watching

People Are Buying Fillers Online and Injecting Them Into Their Own Faces

Don’t Be a Phonehead

Congress Must Act on Regulating Deepfakes

Building a Better Berry

A Group of Microsoft Employees Is Fighting the Company’s Political Action Committee

July 2019

Highlights:

Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

Do You Really Need Another Computer Monitor?

The Dot-Com Don: Meet the Domain Prospector Turning Stray URLs Into Real Businesses

How ‘Digital Nomads’ Game the System to Work in Paradise

The Illinois Artist Behind Social Media’s Latest Big Idea

Can Virtual Assistants Gain Real Intelligence?

The Hidden History of How the Government Kick-Started Silicon Valley

How the Internet Transformed the World of Custom Poetry

Facebook’s Poker Bot Shows How A.I. Can Adapt to Liars

Designers Are Imagining Video Games Without Guns

Palmer Luckey Revolutionized VR. Now He’s Selling A.I. to the Marines.

CRISPR Could Be the Future of Disease Diagnosis

CRISPR Pioneer Jennifer Doudna on the Future of Disease Detection

Why Do People Film Others in Distress Instead of Helping Them?

August 2019

Highlights:

How Ancestry.com’s Find A Grave Encourages Bad Actors and Bad Data

Will It Ever Be Possible to Understand the Human Brain?

California Police Are Sharing Facial Recognition Databases to ID Suspects

The League of Entropy Is Making Randomness Truly Random

Here’s What Those Phone Charging Lockers Are Doing With Your Personal Information

In Defense of The Small Social Network

Want to Know When You’ll Die? A New Blood Test May Hold the Answer

In a World of Smart Gadgets, Why Are Toilets Still so Dumb?

OpenAI Wants to Move Slow and Not Break Anything

Lab-Grown Mini Brains Have Human-Like Brain Activity

September 2019

Highlights:

Our Skulls Are Out-Evolving Us

Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation

Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken

Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On

The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

Being ‘Indistractable’ Will Be the Skill of the Future

Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley

Dog Poop DNA Tracking Introduces Spy Tech to Our Backyards

This Phone Will Change Your Life

The Apple Card Explains Everything You Need to Know About Apple Today

How Much Is Your Privacy Really Worth?

The Mystical Side of A.I.

The Healthy Way To Scroll Through Instagram

Inside ‘Proplifting,’ a Booming Digital Community Obsessed With Plant Clippings

Siri Is Too Important for Apple to Ignore

The Defense Department Plans to Build Radiation-proof CRISPR Soldiers

On Nextdoor, the Homeless Are the Enemy

October 2019

Highlights:

Unraveling the Secret Origins of an AmazonBasics Battery

Speaking Truth to Power: Reflections on a Career at Microsoft

How Spotify’s Algorithm Knows Exactly What You Want to Listen To

Computer Files Are Going Extinct

How Pinterest Built One of Silicon Valley’s Most Successful Algorithms

The Last True Sticker Factory in America

Kindle Hackers Are Disabling Tracking and Ads

This Brain Computer Uses Your Jugular Like a USB Cable

Robot Truckers Are Here — They Just Happen to Be Human

How Adobe InDesign Conquered the World of Graphic Design

What Happens When Your Tweet Becomes a Subway Ad

Domino’s Is Using A.I. Surveillance to Manage Store Performance

‘Managed Retreat’ From Climate Change Is Leaving the Most Vulnerable People Behind

How the App Store Ended a Golden Era of Software

Google’s A.I.-Powered Camera Was Destined to Fail

The Best Use of a Pot Breathalyzer Isn’t for Driving, It’s for Jobs

Synthetic Psychedelics May Soon Replace Your Shrooms

This Is What Would Happen If You Literally Ate Your Phone

Hospital Algorithms Are Biased Against Black Patients, New Research Shows

Amazon’s A.I. Emotion-Recognition Software Confuses Expressions for Feelings

Eating Roadkill Is Our Future, and That’s Okay

Florida Claims to be a Driverless Car Paradise. Critics Call It a Lawless Mess

Startup Molekule Is Using the California Wildfires to Sell Its Crummy Air Purifier

DeepMind’s StarCraft Bot Has a 191-Year Head Start on Humanity

Looking At Cute Animals Online Is Literally Good for Your Brain

People Are Killing Puppy Clones That Don’t Come Out “Perfect”

November 2019

Highlights:

A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades

EXCLUSIVE: This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works

The Magical Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes

This Science Vigilante Calls Out Bogus Results in Prestigious Journals

White Instagram Influencers Have Created a New Form of Blackface

Inside Discord’s Unmoderated, Potentially Dangerous Teen Dating Network

Why xHamster Is So Much Better at Content Moderation Than Facebook

What Happens When You Tweet a Death Threat to the President?

EXCLUSIVE: Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business

The High-Stakes Race to Breed Cannabis With 0% THC

Here’s How Knightscope’s Security Robots Surveil the Public

Reddit’s r/SkincareAddiction Community Has a Dark Side

Transcription Site Rev Leaves Customer Data Out in the Open

Experts Say Your Fingers Can Type 24/7, Forever, Until You Die

Nazis Got Me Kicked Off of Twitter

Apple Has Been Gaslighting Us for Years

A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye

The Utah Statement: Reviving Antimonopoly Traditions for the Era of Big Tech

The Rape Kit Is Horribly Outdated

Our Emojis Need to Represent Everyone

Plastic Surgeons Are Using A.I. to Determine Beauty

‘I Can Hear the Suffering’: Rev Exposes Freelance Transcribers to Violent, Disturbing Content

There Still Aren’t Any Rules Preventing Scientists From Making Gene-Edited Babies

Here’s a Kinda Genius, Kinda Evil Way People Are Gaming Spotify Playlists

Android Becomes Basically Unusable If You Turn Off All of Google’s Tracking

Amazon Finally Reveals Who Makes Its Branded Products

December 2019

Highlights:

The Influencer and the Hit Man: How a Years-Long Domain Name Feud Ended in a Bloody Shootout

Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity

The Forgotten Pixel Art Masterpieces of the PlayStation 1 Era

Amazon and Google Are Practically Giving Away Smart Speakers. Here’s Why.

Inside Discord’s Thriving Black Market for Stolen Credit Cards and Gift Cards

How to Totally Escape Ad Tracking at Home

Authoritarian Nations Are Turning the Internet Into a Weapon

‘Everything That Promised Glory Became Gory’: Exclusive Excerpt

Chicago Cops Use Social Media to Track Grieving Families of Gunshot Victims

Plastic Surgeons Are Using Eye-Tracking Tech to Make Better Breasts

A Googler Explains Exactly How the Pixel 4 Captures the Night Sky

Uber Delivery Workers in Mexico Are Tracking Thieves Through Google Maps and WhatsApp Networks

The Blackest City in the U.S. Is Facing an Environmental Justice Nightmare

When DNA Testing Gives You a Past and Threatens Your Future

Airports Are Normalizing Facial Recognition in the United States

January 2020

Highlights:

Alien Nations: Why Life on Other Planets Will Resemble Ours

We Finally Figured Out Who Makes wikiHow’s Bizarre Art

Reaction GIFs of Black People Are More Problematic Than You Think

Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own A Home

How Science Fiction Imagined the 2020s

Why You Don’t Need an Advanced Mathematics Degree to Be a Programmer

The Pinched Fingers Emoji’s Creator Explains Its Meaning

A ‘SexTech Revolution’ Could Smash the Internet of Men

Why Recipe Bloggers Make You Scroll so Far to Read the Recipe

The U.S. Government’s Mass Collection of Immigrant DNA Hints at Surveillance Future

We Feared Deepfakes. Then Tech Monetized Them.

Swarms of Teeny Robo-Tractors Will Outmaneuver Tesla’s Driverless Cars

The Military Is Building Long-Range Facial Recognition That Works in the Dark

It’s No Surprise That 23andMe Created a Drug From Customers’ Genetic Data

15 Years After Katrina, a Fight Against ‘the Jim Crow of Climate Change’ Rages on in the Gulf Coast

How to Keep Child Predators Out of Virtual Playgrounds Like ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Minecraft’

A Viral Tweet Sent Me Searching for My Dead Mom on Google Street View

An Exclusive Excerpt From William Gibson’s New Novel, ‘Agency’

Why Google Gets Away With So Much

Scientists Are Ready to Move Beyond ‘Screen Time’

The Future Doesn’t Last

Here’s What Happened to the Theranos Headquarters

How Instagram’s Viral Face Filters Work

Smart Toilets Are Revealing the Health Data That Wearables Can’t

Health Care Is the Next Battleground for Big Tech

How Google Earth Mapped 98% of the World

The Scientist Who Got a Brain Implant to Cure His Alcoholism

February 2020

Highlights:

How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables

Inside a Secretive $250 Million Private Transit System Just for Techies

Apple’s Secret Monopoly

Rising Seas May Force U.S. Climate Refugees to the Same 5 Cities

This Super-Clean Smart Screen Puts a Newspaper on Your Wall

Exclusive Survey Reveals Discrimination Against Visa Workers at Tech’s Biggest Companies

The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups

The Future of Coding Is ‘No Code’

‘Brand Blockers’ Are Trying to Scrub Their Feeds Clean of Every Advertiser on Twitter

Clearview AI’s Surveillance Dystopia Isn’t New for People of Color

A Smear of DNA Can Hold 10,000 Gigabytes of Data

Twitter Rallied to Find a Missing Woman — And Then Turned On Her

TikTok’s Digital Blackface Problem

NEC Is the Most Important Facial Recognition Company You’ve Never Heard Of

The Price of DNA Sequencing Dropped From $2.7 Billion to $300 in Less Than 20 Years

The U.S. Could Run Out of Metals That Are Crucial to Tech

Google Engineers, Uber Drivers, and the Voices of a New Tech Labor Revolution

Silicon Valley’s Spandexed Biker Bros Are Going Extinct

An Exclusive Club of Black Women Is Disrupting Silicon Valley

This Filter Makes Your Photos Invisible to Facial Recognition

The Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed and Also It Sucks

The Internet of Things Almost Starved My Cat

Tech Can’t Handle Criticism: A Conversation with Anna Wiener and Jessica Powell

The Birthplace of the Hard Drive is Now an AutoZone Parking Lot

The Definitive Ranking of Silicon Valley Shoes

Silicon Valley Destroyed Everything. Or Maybe Not.

March 2020

Highlights:

I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out

My Summer Internship at Google Turned Me Off Silicon Valley Forever

Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music

Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Self-Isolating Future

How to Build the Speedy Home Wi-Fi Network of Your Dreams

A Battery Breakthrough Could End Lithium-Ion’s Reign

The Simplest Way to Spot Coronavirus Misinformation on Social Media

The Untold Story of the Man That Made Mainstream Encryption Possible

Argentina Police Are Arresting Innocent People Based on Facial Recognition

Clothes-Fitting Technology Could Save Online Shopping

Clearview AI: We Are ‘Working to Acquire All U.S. Mugshots’ From Past 15 Years

Amazon, Uber, and Lyft Pressure Drivers Amid Coronavirus Fears

How I Survived Nearly 40 Years in Silicon Valley as a Woman in Tech

How a Crisis Researcher Makes Sense of Covid-19 Misinformation

Your DNA Test Could Crack a Cold Case

This Is the Ad Clearview AI Used to Sell Your Face to Police

OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?

I Did a 24-Hour Dopamine Fast and I Felt Everything, Not Nothing

Why the Web Isn’t Working for Women and Girls

It’s Time to Resurrect the Airship Hospitals

The Community Labs Built on Silicon Valley’s Junk

Inside the Democratic Candidates’ War for Your Inbox

The Tamagotchi Hacking Community’s Quest to Cheat Death

Gig Workers Can’t Go on Unemployment — So They’re Turning to GoFundMe

How to Mass Manufacture Humanoid Robots

Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet

Why Slack Isn’t Winning the Remote-Work Revolution — Yet

Facial Recognition Companies See the Coronavirus as a Business Opportunity

Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals

‘These People Are Evil’: Drivers Speak Out Against Uber’s New Coronavirus Sick Leave Fund

Grocery Runs, Donations, and Memes: Inside the Rise of Neighborhood Slack Groups During the…

Lemons for Yeast for Flour: The Bartering Economy Explodes on Nextdoor

Coronavirus Is Bringing Back the Forgotten Tech Trends of 2012

Jealousy, Rumors, and Suspicion: How Facebook Disaster Groups Turn On Themselves

April 2020

Highlights:

CEO of Surveillance Firm Banjo Once Helped KKK Leader Shoot Up a Synagogue

Banjo’s Surveillance Systems Grind to a Halt After CEO’s KKK Past Revealed

Banjo Suspends All Operations in Utah Following OneZero Investigation

This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 Viewed Video

Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It's Falling Apart

We Mapped How the Coronavirus Is Driving New Surveillance Programs Around the World

The Pandemic Has Ended the Amazon Debate

‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege

Instagram Turned a User’s Tweet Into a Feature Overnight

I Lived Off Homemade Soylent for a Week During a Global Crisis

Data Thieves Are Targeting Dead People’s Social Media Accounts

The Big Business (and Cheap Thrill) of Personal Carbon Credits

Online Learning Was Supposed to Democratize Education. Coronavirus Shows It Hasn’t.

Coronavirus Will Destroy Years of Scientific Progress

An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams

The World’s Smartphones Are Filled With Gold. That’s a Problem.

Amazon Is at War With Its Workers

Scientists Are Racing to Get Us Faster, Simpler Coronavirus Tests

Why Solarpunk, Not Cyberpunk, Is the Future We Need Right Now

Medical Researchers Worry Silicon Valley Could Screw Up Psychedelics

How Bias Ruins A.I.

The Real Reason Apple Made the iPhone SE So Cheap

May 2020

Highlights:

Banjo CEO Resigns Following Revelation of KKK Ties

The Future of Movie Theaters Might Look a Lot Like an Apple Store

Inside Twitter’s Decision to Fact-Check Trump’s Tweets

Deepfake Music Is So Good It Might Be Illegal

What Facebook’s Remote Work Policy Means for the Future of Tech Salaries Everywhere

The Future of Code Is in Your Browser

We Already Have a Blueprint for What Comes Next

A New Zealand Startup Is Using Microbes to Suck Solid Gold Out of E-Waste

The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry

Two Book Startups Compete Where Amazon Won’t

Why I’m Joining Facebook’s Oversight Board

I Joined Uber 11 Years Ago. I Quit Last Week, Again.

The Case for Stanislaw Lem, One of Science Fiction’s Unsung Giants

Tech Union Leaders Are Dodging Surveillance on Platforms Like Facebook and Zoom

Amazon Is Quietly Fighting Against a Sweeping Facial Recognition Ban in Portland

Training a Neural Network Can Emit More Than 600,000 Pounds of CO2. But Not for Long.

Google Says It Will Not Build Custom A.I. for Oil and Gas Extraction

Now Is the Time for Nationwide Free Internet

How Google Killed My Content Farm

Peter W. Singer Explains Why His “Robot Revolution” Is Inevitable

What to Do When Your Video Game Gets Co-opted by Neo-Nazis

‘We Were the Petri Dish’: Facebook’s Shift to Remote Work Leaves Neighbors in a Lurch

Is the Coronavirus Really Having a Positive Impact on Our Atmosphere?

Remote Work Isn’t the End of Silicon Valley, but It Is the End of Something

How Apple Decides Which Products Are ‘Vintage’ and ‘Obsolete’

The Future of Gaming Is on Your Face, on Instagram

Vietnam’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Zero. The Cost? Total Surveillance.

June 2020

Highlights:

A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast

Inside the Social Media Cult That Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything

30,000 Unsuspecting Rose Bowl Attendees Were Scooped Up in a Facial Recognition Test

Scientists Edited Human Embryos in the Lab, and It Was a Disaster

Apple’s Brilliant Plan to Dominate Without Intel Processors

How Facebook Can Fix Itself

Our Ability to Process Information Is Reaching a Critical Limit

This $35 Keyboard for Children Transformed Me Into a Novelist

The Segway’s Inventor Has a New Project: Manufacturing Human Organs

A Break-up Letter with Astronomy, From a Young Black Woman

Scammers Are Gaming Spotify by Faking Collaborations With Famous Artists

The Emptiness of Blackout Tuesday

From RealPlayer to Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush

The Police Are Watching on Nextdoor

The Hidden Costs of Deploying Tear Gas at Protests

We Must Fight Face Surveillance to Protect Black Lives

Facial Recognition Is Law Enforcement’s Newest Weapon Against Protesters

Amazon Is Really Interested in the Blood of Covid-19 Patients

Amazon Program Raises Money for Police Departments While the Company Says ‘Black Lives Matter’

The Protests Remind Us Why Social Media Is Worth Fixing

It’s Not Just You: Websites Really Do All Look the Same Now

This Simple Facial Recognition Search Engine Can Track You Down Across the Internet

250 Microsoft Employees Call on CEO to Cancel Police Contracts and Support Defunding Seattle PD

The Viral ‘Breaking911’ Twitter Account Is Not a Trustworthy Source, Experts Say

Facebook Deplatforms Hundreds of Anti-Racist Skinheads and Musicians

BLM Activists Devised a Brilliant Way to Raise Money From YouTube’s AdSense

The Digital Archives of the Oldest Black Newspaper in America Show a Long Struggle for Justice

Here’s How Easy It Is for Cops to Get Your Facebook Data

Gamers Are Using A.I. to Completely Remake Old-School Graphics

Defunding the Police Is an Environmental Justice Issue

America Has Always Been a Dystopia

The U.S. Rubber-Stamps Facial Recognition Systems Used to Round Up Uighurs in China

The Right’s New Favorite Social Media Platform Parler Is Just as Restrictive as Twitter

5 Ideas to Make Silicon Valley Less Racist

The Tech Elite Are Selling Job Referrals to Facebook, Google, and Amazon

July 2020

Highlights:

The Gig Economy Is Failing. Say Hello to the Hustle Economy.

Tiny Weed-Killing Robots Could Make Pesticides Obsolete

This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave

My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

‘A Permanent Nightmare’: Pinterest Moderators Fight to Keep Horrifying Content Off the Platform

Pinterest Hosts Sexual Images of Young Girls, Anti-Vax Memes Despite Moderation Efforts

Gaming During the Pandemic Is Starting to Feel Like Work

I Got a Job at an Amazon Warehouse Without Talking to a Single Human

The Amazon Effect Is Making Customer Service Reps’ Lives Hell

Can Silicon Valley Be Fixed — Or Should We Burn It All Down?

What a Better Social Network Would Look Like

What I Learned From My Engineering Interview With Amazon

Yes, Adults Are Still Renting $2,000 Co-Living Dorm Rooms During the Pandemic

I Chatted With a Therapy Bot to Ease My Covid Fears. It Was Bizarre.

Facebook Cannot Separate Itself from the Hate It Spreads

The Pandemic Makes It Clear: We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism

How Amazon Lures ‘Artisanal’ Sellers and Hangs Them Out to Dry

The Enduring Anti-Black Racism of Google Search

Inside a Facebook ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ for Cat Drugs

The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality

Inside Randonautica, the App Leading Zoomers to Discover Rainbows, Dead Bodies, and Hidden…

Don’t Get Distracted by the Spectacle of Tech’s Big Antitrust Hearing

A Year After an HR Crisis, Microsoft Employees Say They’re Still Waiting for Change

Companies Are Using Employee Survey Data to Predict — and Squash — Union Organizing

What Big Tobacco’s Fall Tells Us About Big Tech’s Future

You Will Never Leave

August 2020

Highlights:

How to Destroy ‘Surveillance Capitalism’

How a Band of Activists — and One Tech Billionaire — Beat Alphabet’s ‘Smart City’

Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

Uber and Lyft’s Business Model May Be Dead. Good.

Here’s What It’s Like to Work in an Amazon Warehouse Right Now

GPT-3 Is an Amazing Research Tool. But OpenAI Isn’t Sharing the Code.

Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point

Here’s How Professional Union Busters Talk About ‘Woke’ Tech Organizers

The Dream of a Global Internet Is Dead

An A.I. Training Tool Has Been Passing Its Bias to Algorithms for Almost Two Decades

A.I. Can Make Music, Screenplays, and Poetry. What About a Movie?

The Future of Uber and Lyft Might Look a Lot Like FedEx

Facebook’s Technocratic Reports Hide Its Failures on Abuse

How ‘Breaking Up’ Apple and Amazon Might Actually Work

September 2020

Highlights:

OneZero Expands With New Publications on Gadgets and Science

The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods

Leaked Salary Spreadsheet Reveals Microsoft Employee Earnings for a Second Year

Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists Like ‘White Noise Baby Sleep’

Inside the Tech Industry’s Decades-Long Failure to Reckon with Risk

The Newly Legal Process for Turning Human Corpses to Soil

Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme

Casey Newton on Leaving ‘The Verge’ for Substack and the Future of Tech Journalism

Our Emergency Alert Systems Rely on an Overlapping Mess of Privatized Services

Border Patrol Used Facial Recognition to Scan More Than 16 Million Fliers — and Caught 7 Imposters

The Privatized Internet Is Failing Our Kids

Uber and Lyft’s California Proposal Is a Mishmash of Old Ideas for Fixing the Gig Economy

The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History

Virtual Learning Is Helping Indigenous Languages Fight off Extinction

Amazon Uses Automation to Hide a Disastrous Record of Workplace Injuries

October 2020

Highlights:

I Watched My Friend Dying on Facebook. But It Was All a GoFundMe Scam.

Clear Conquered U.S. Airports. Now It Wants to Own Your Entire Digital Identity.

Bloodchild

A Popular Online Learning Platform Was Actually Created by an Underground Religious ‘Cult’

The Philosophy That Explains Why So Many Silicon Valley CEOs Are Always Playing Victim

The Zoom Signal Protecting Domestic Violence Survivors

The Overlooked Conservative Case for Reining in Big Tech

An Inside Look at How Badly the Pandemic Hit Clear at the Start of 2020

Hawai’i Set to Drop Acellus Remote Learning Platform Following Allegations of Abuse Against Creator

Pinterest Is Still Hosting QAnon Content Despite Ban

To Understand Facebook Today, Read Its Earliest Critics

To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First

Eight Works of Visionary Fiction That Help Us Imagine — and Realize — Better Futures

The Battle That Will Define Big Tech for Decades

Banished From Facebook, Far-Right Militias Prepare for the Election on Zello and MeWe

The Future of Decent Work Depends on the Failure of Prop 22

November 2020

Highlights:

The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand

‘Like Being Grilled Alive’: The Fear of Living With a Hackable Heart

The Social Media Managers Are Not Okay

The Ad-Based Internet Is About to Collapse. What Comes Next?

Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group

Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech

‘Their Loads Are Garbage’: Drivers Say Uber’s Trucking Business Is Making a Tough Job Worse

What Happens When You Actually DM a ‘DM to Collab’ Instagram Scammer

Facebook Is the ‘Mainstream Media’ Now

Neighborhood Watch Has a New Tool: License-Plate Readers

Welcome Back to the Office. Please Wear This Tracking Device.

God Mode Activated: Meet the Gamers Bringing Jesus to Twitch

How Twitter Is Redefining Itself for a Post-Trump Future

The Delicate Art of Making Robots That Don’t Creep People Out

December 2020

Highlights:

The Giving Apps: How Venmo and Cash App Upended a Century-Old Charity Model

How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever

An ‘Ethical’ Instacart Alternative Is Now Facing Its Own Worker Backlash

Amazon’s Plague Year

Experimenting With GPT-3 Felt Like Witnessing a Technological Revolution

Parler Users Are Gathering on Facebook to Complain About Parler

The Best Tech Books of 2020 Are All About Giving Power to the User

Dr. Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, Deborah Raji — an Enduring Sisterhood of Face Queens

Becoming a Monopoly Was Always Facebook’s Goal

2020 Was a Disastrous Year for Uber Drivers

Covid-19 Ushered in a New Era of Government Surveillance

January 2021

Highlights:

Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper

An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia

Recent Grads Are Being Lured Into ‘Indentured Servitude’ by a Coding Bootcamp

Larry Farwell Claims His Lie Detector System Can Read Your Mind. Is He a Scam Artist, or a Genius?

Inside the Surprisingly Big Business of Spotify’s Secretive White-Noise Spammers

MeWe Sold Itself on Privacy. Then the Radical Right Arrived.

YouTube’s Spammy Sex Bots Make a Ton of Money

The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse

How Lulz Took Down Wall Street

GPT-3 Contains Disturbing Bias Against Muslims

After a TikTok Craze, Pet Owners Are Trying (and Often Failing) to Get Their Own Animals to Talk

Claims Antifa Embedded in Capitol Riots Come From a Deeply Unreliable Facial Recognition Company

Facebook Chucked Its Own Rulebook to Ban Trump

Twitter’s Trump Ban Will Mark a New Era for ‘Free Speech’ Social Media Platforms

The End of Social Media’s ‘View From Nowhere’

‘I Am Not Sad. I Am Really Not Sad’: Trump’s Twitter Reply Guys Reckon With a Post-Trump Era

How the Pandemic Turned Refugees Into ‘Guinea Pigs’ for Surveillance Tech

Men Wear Suits, Women Wear Bikinis: Image Generating Algorithms Learn Biases ‘Automatically’

Black-Box Algorithms Shouldn’t Decide Who Gets a Vaccine

February 2021

Highlights:

Families Torn Apart by Decades of War Are Finally Finding Each Other on Facebook

Hex Factor: Inside the Group Offering $250,000 for Proof of Superpowers

Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists

3G Could End This Year. For People Who Rely on Basic Phones, That’s a Big Problem.

Technology Disrupts at Two Different Speeds

The New Era of Social Media Isn’t About Feeds

How Amazon Swindled Its Own Drivers, Got Caught, and Ended Up Richer

Amazon’s New CEO Is Shaping How the Military Uses Killer Robots

Note to Reporters: If Surveillance Data Shouldn’t Exist, Then Don’t Use It

Facebook Vaccine Information Groups Find Themselves in Moderation Gray Area

Banjo Quietly Rebranded Itself Following Report on Former CEO’s KKK Past

Employer-Tied Health Care Is Also a Tech Accountability Issue

The A.I. Industry Is Exploiting Gig Workers Around the World — Sometimes for Just $8 a Day

What Really Caused the Supply Chain Mess Over PPE Last Year

I’m a High School Student. I Don’t Want Online Learning to End.

‘People in My Group Are So White’: Facebook Vaccine Hunter Groups Underscore Inequity of Rollout

March 2021

Highlights:

China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space

Girl & Computer

Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I. — But Spared European Users

Why Machines Will Never Feel Empathy: A Q&A With MIT’s Sherry Turkle

I Broke Amazon’s API to Make Alexa Start a Conversation You’d Never Want to Have

YouTube Explains Why a Racist Video Didn’t Violate Its Hate Speech Rules

Clubhouse Is Disrupting Another Industry: Charity Telethons

Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries

How Google Will Target Ads Without Singling Users Out

Google’s ‘Privacy-First Web’ Is Really a Google-First Web

Anti-Vax Groups Still Thrive on Facebook, Despite Content Ban

Apple and Google Won’t Save Online Privacy. Take It From a Former DoubleClick Executive.

The Algorithmic Auditing Trap

I Confronted Instagram Scammers About Their Plot to Steal Blue-Check Accounts

A.I.’s Most Important Dataset Gets a Privacy Overhaul, a Decade Too Late

Moving the Big Boat Did Not Magically Fix the Global Economy

How Journalists and Academics Hold Tech Accountable

April 2021

Highlights:

Homeless in the Shadow of Apple’s $5 Billion Campus

Oklahoma Quietly Launched a Mass Surveillance Program to Track Uninsured Drivers

People Are Betting Big on Risky Crypto ‘Crash’ Games

The Prototype for Clubhouse Is 40 Years Old, and It Was Built by Phone Hackers

The Real Moms of TikTok

Texting Through a Pandemic With Obama and J.Lo

A.I. Can’t Detect Our Emotions