Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats?

The Tech Industry Says It's Helping Us Shape the Future, But Our Clicks Could Entrap Us

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test …

Facebook Could Fix Our Local News Problem

The Media Behemoth Is Perfectly Positioned to Lead Investment in Civic-Minded Journalism

Facebook may not be quite ready to stand up and say the words, “My name is Facebook and I’m a media company.” But it has begun to accept that its …

This Isn’t a First Amendment Issue, Twitter

Just Because Governing Online Speech Is Hard Doesn’t Mean It’s Forbidden by the Constitution

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it would be using new tools to curb hate speech and harassment on its site. The news came on the heels of a …

Why It’s So Hard to Speak Silicon Valley

Rather Than Engage With California, Our Humorless Tech Overlords Hide Behind a Wall of Jargon

You can’t talk to people in Silicon Valley anymore. They don’t even speak our language.

By that, I’m not referencing Mark Zuckerberg’s mediocre Mandarin or the software code underlying so much …

Mourning Prince, Ziggy Stardust … and Oedipus

Social Media Brings an Ancient Greek Twist to a Previously Private American Ritual

After Prince died my Facebook news feed filled with mourning. My friends shared the time he sang “Starfish and Coffee” with the Muppets, told stories of going to concerts at …

Where Does FOMO Come From?

MIT’s Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, tells Zócalo Public Square Publisher Gregory Rodriguez how social media has heightened our fear of …