Startup “Cults” — Real Life

Calling tech companies “cults” distracts from the social and economic conditions that empower them

Fake Fans

into the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste

» A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit The Digital Antiquarian

There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.

(Working Paper) Good Faith Design: Religion as a Resource for Technologists

Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.

Techno-optimism as digital eugenics

A tech CEO shares his vision for the "marginal returns to intelligence"

Marketing Is an Argument - A Manifesto

A manifesto on human dignity in marketing. Against the Great Human Flattening.

The Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion (Published 2025)

The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.

The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate

Are those calling to slow down the development of artificial intelligence in a “doomsday cult,” as some critics say? Our reporter explains.

Loper OS » No Formats, no Format Wars.

Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold "old wine in new bottles," bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small.  Why?  Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers.  Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively.  The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from experience.  And it seems that meaningfully learning from our mistakes is a foreign concept to us.  Nay, it is anathema.  The darkest heresy imaginable.  Something no one would bring up in polite company.  Something only spoken of by rabid crackpots, on their lunatic-fringe blogs, during full moon.

Controversial ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ billboard campaign takes to the skies over SF

(KRON) — Anyone glancing upward while walking around San Francisco in the past few days might have noticed a now-familiar three-word marketing tagline circling overhead. On several days this …

The Problem With Promoting ‘Gold Standard Science’

Opinion | Branding scientific research with a simplified label risks misleading the public and harming scientific literacy.