Science & Technology Archives - Page 5 of 9

Politics

Social Media Faces a Reckoning

Power online resides in the wrong hands

January 20, 2021 • by Marshall Auerback

JANUARY 13—Tech companies, such as Twitter, Apple, and Facebook have been de-platforming President Donald Trump and his supporters at a rapid pace since the January 6th attack on the Capitol Building, much to the approval of the Democrats and much to the chagrin of the GOP (even though more than a ...

Past Present

A Possible Coronavirus Vaccine

Past Present Podcast, Episode 255

November 18, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has announced a promising new coronavirus vaccine. Niki referred to historian Joanna Radin’s Washington Post piece on the connections between cattle breeding and vaccine distribution and political scientist Dan Drezner’s article about the Trump administration’s cavalier approach ...

Capitalism

Why Google Is Facing Serious Accusations of Monopoly Practices

The tech monopolies are increasingly being acknowledged as a danger to people, other companies, and even to democracy

November 10, 2020 • by Prabir Purkayastha

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google-Alphabet (Google’s parent company) on October 20 for a range of anti-competitive practices, including its monopoly power in the search market. It is the only major action in the U.S. against tech monopolies in recent years, the last one being the 1998 action against ...

Why Google Is Facing Serious Accusations of Monopoly Practices

Capitalism

Can We Trust Monopolies to Play Fair?

Current debates on Big Tech and antitrust law lack a clear definition of “competition”

October 19, 2020 • by Sandeep Vaheesan

----- For the anti-monopoly movement, the past three months have been exciting but sobering. In late July, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a landmark hearing at which members of Congress forced the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to admit to business practices they would rather have stayed private. Amazon ...

Capitalism

Big Tech May Be Closer to Home Than You Know

How digital behemoths create economically vulnerable communities — and then prey on them

October 1, 2020 • by Pat Garofalo

----- In May, 2020, the city of Gallatin, Tennessee, voted to provide nearly $20 million in tax breaks to an entity called “Project Woolhawk” that proposed building a data center in the area. Local economic development officials refused to confirm who or what was behind that name, only that it was ...

Big Tech May Be Closer to Home Than You Know

Democracy

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

October 1, 2020 • by Vince Carducci

————— Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in ...

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Democracy

Digital Authoritarianism and Trolling in Turkey

September 22, 2020 • by Funda Başaran

In 2007, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) had its second election victory, increasing its vote share to 47,8 and consolidating power. In the same year, it imposed important regulations to ‘clean’ the Internet of undesirable content. Law 5651, On Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Combating Crimes committed ...

Digital Authoritarianism and Trolling in Turkey

Politics

Is the TikTok Deal Another Level of Trumpian Corruption?

Threatening China’s ByteDance may have forced a deal that benefits a campaign donor

September 15, 2020 • by David Lieberman

----- Here’s one more chore that Joe Biden should add to his Day One presidential to-do list: launch an investigation into whether the Trump administration improperly steered the U.S. operations of the world’s hottest new social media platform, TikTok, into the hands of one of his most important supporters, Oracle co-founder ...

Is the TikTok Deal Another Level of Trumpian Corruption?

Democracy

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Privacy and democracy in the age of pandemics

July 20, 2020 • by Jo Guldi and Macabe Keliher

Americans are scared about encroachments on their data privacy, and rightly so. Prior to 9/11, most advocated limiting the government’s ability to gather and access data in the name of civil liberties. Faced with the threat of terror, however, citizens resigned themselves to encroachments on privacy made in the name ...

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Activism

Wired Politics

Social media is crucial to organizing modern protests: It is also a vulnerability

June 4, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Nowadays, I try not to watch the cable news shows. There are other ways to get information about the demonstrations engulfing the United States, and my neighborhood in Manhattan, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. I text friends in the community for updates ...

Public Health

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Human beings forget that they will always share the planet with microbes

May 21, 2020 • by Joshua Lederberg

Pasteur and Darwin Charles Darwin’s role in nineteenth-century thought, how that shapes our own thinking about man’s place in Nature, is too well-known and oft-discussed to bear extensive elaboration on my part. His contemporary, Louis Pasteur, is a culture hero, world-renowned for the human benefits of his germ theory of disease: the ...

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Public Health

A Spiritual Month in the Cloud

Virtual Seder, makeshift matzoh, and finding joy amidst grief

May 1, 2020 • by Carol Edelstein

The Cloud this April hums with virtual Seders, virtual Easters, virtual gatherings for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Jews world over subtract from their full glass of wine the ritual drops signifying the ten plagues suffered by the Egyptians when they would not release us from servitude. Dom: water becomes blood Tzfardeyah: frogs overrun ...