Paranoids in the Age of Digital Surveillance

How Delusions Change With Technological Advancement

Do you ever get paranoid about a creep hacking your computer webcam? Or being monitored by some government agency, foreign or domestic? Having someone take a surreptitious photo of you in the locker room? Face it, there are a host of things that many of us are paranoid about these days.

I bet having your picture taken by someone with a bulky film camera is not on your list. Yet it might have been, if you lived 100 years ago. For back then “Kodak Fiends” prowled the land and—hold onto …

Are Replicas Changing the Way We Experience Art?

Precise Digital Reproductions Allow More People to Own and View Masterpieces, Minus the Work’s Soul

You are in the Chauvet cave, 35,000 years old. As you enter, the walkway you traverse winds around spot-lit, saber-toothed stalactites and stalagmites. The rough-skin texture of the stone walls …

How Yahoo Destroyed Its Value

The Internet Pioneer’s Long Journey to the Graveyard Was Shaped by Repeated Misjudgments in Mergers and Acquisitions

On July 25, Verizon announced plans to buy Yahoo’s internet assets plus some real estate for less than $5 billion in cash. Yahoo, which went public in 1996, had spent …

What Disappears When Ancient Documents Get Digitized?

The Osher Map Library’s Online Archive Is Astoundingly Detailed and Inherently Incomplete

The Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine is a treasure trove for the cartographically inclined. Its collection, which contains close to 450,000 items, spans the centuries, covering …

The Muddled Legacy of Alvin Toffler

He Was Right About “Future Shock” but Wrong About the Solution

Futurist Alvin Toffler’s death on June 27 at age 87 has brought out the usual obituaries, marveling at the way his self-educated intellect grappled with the complex intertwining of technological …

Can We Close the Empathy Gap?

Sixth Annual Zócalo Book Prize Winner Sherry Turkle Thinks We Can Learn How to Talk—and Connect—Again as Humans

Zócalo Publisher Gregory Rodriguez said he was terrified as he opened a discussion onstage at MOCA Grand Avenue with MIT’s Sherry Turkle.

It wasn’t, however, because he was moderating in front …