Future Tense ASU New America Slate

Just Because the RNC Says It Wasn’t Hacked Doesn’t Change Reality

When a Party Leader Implausibly Denies a Data Breach, We All Lose

By Josephine Wolff

Cybersecurity professionals are fond of saying that there are two kinds of companies: those that have been hacked and those that don’t yet know they’ve been hacked. Right now, the Republican National Committee appears to fall into a new category: an organization that refuses to acknowledge that it’s even vulnerable.

The CIA, in reporting on Russia’s intervention in the presidential election, determined that the RNC had been breached by Russian hackers during the election, but none of the information stolen from the party had …

The Hackers Could Be Coming For This Election

Our Local Government Cybersecurity—and Votes—May Be At Risk

By Brian Nussbaum

There’s something particularly unusual about the recent revelations that foreign hackers successfully breached voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois.

It’s not just the intriguing possibility of Russian involvement. Nor is it that FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials took the notable step of confirming the penetration and warning state election boards to conduct vulnerability scans.

It’s that the targets of the hacks—state and local election data—don’t …

What Will We Archive in the Future?

For a Glimpse of Library Collections to Come, Check Out the Fascinating Project to Document Born-Digital Material on Global Health Events

By Rebecca Onion

Apple and the Demise of Cyberpunk

Without Cords and Jacks to Unplug, How Will Our Fictional Heroes Rebel Now?

By Joseph Brogan

Rightly or wrongly, we tend to speak of science fiction authors as prophets: We’re delighted to find that Philip K. Dick inveighed against the internet of things half a century ago and terrified to learn that Octavia Butler somehow anticipated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 1998. The richer stories, however, are often visions of the future that don’t quite come to fruition, especially when they go awry in unexpected ways. It’s all the more striking when the authors themselves are in a position to watch their own dreams dissolve. …

Crowdsourcing in the Name of Science

Citizen Scientists Are Great for Data Collection and So Much More

By Jason Lloyd

The earthquake near Washington, D.C., five years ago in August 2011—the one that damaged the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral but had little other noticeable impact—caught me by surprise. Sitting in an office on the 12th floor of a building downtown, I thought it might have been an improbably large truck on the street below, until a co-worker suggested we probably ought to leave the building. We spent the rest of that sunny afternoon milling around with other …

Frankenstein Is a Story About Climate Change’s Horrors

How a Massive Volcanic Eruption Spun the World Into Chaos and Helped Inspire the Famous Novel

By Kent Linthicum

Two hundred years ago this June, during a dreadfully cold and wet summer, Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Since then Frankenstein has become iconic, spawning a legion of adaptations and reinterpretations. The Oxford English Dictionary even includes entries for the verb “to frankenstein,” which means to stitch something together in a grotesque fashion, and the prefix “franken-,” which means to make anything monstrous. …