I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information product on a daily basis somehow makes you thoughtful and informed in a way that benefits society. But I still…

Estonian translation courtesy of Karolin Lohmus How a nosy bureaucrat accidentally created the first social networking and blogging service Les Earnest (les at cs.stanford.edu), former Executive Offic

Transcript – Episode 79: The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow: Geometry hates cars. You know, if you multiply—I mean, I don’t have to tell The War on Cars this, but if you multiply, you know, all of the journeys by the space that the car occupies in the road, by the amount of road that…

The first time I heard about Flat Earthers, I thought the idea was a joke. Surely nobody would believe something so crazy. I didn’t think about it again for a while. Until I started seeing celebrities, including famous basketball players, claiming the world is flat The rise of this phenomenon…

Republik. Neonazis, wohin man blickt: Seit dem Sommer spielen Rechts­extreme bei Demonstrationen gegen die Corona-Politik des Bundesrats eine immer grössere Rolle. Am vergangenen Wochen­ende füllten sie in Bern ein Macht­vakuum in der Szene der Massnahmen­kritiker. In den einschlägigen Chats wurde…

So NFTs are kind of a weird hype for the unscrupulous currently but that fad will at some point (hopefully soon) die. But even when things die, they leave traces in their environment. And when it’s about digital environments it makes a lot of sense to talk about video games. The video games industry…

I've just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) -- and he showed me (and a couple of other…