Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to understand the principles that determine how tech affects our lives.
12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps…
Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Technology is just another human creation—like religion or government or sports or money. It's not perfect, and it never will be. But it's still a miracle.
12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
🧩 Don't make Tech your entire personality.
This is one of those articles that I wanted to write for many days, but I kept delaying it until, a...
Tech for... what, exactly?
How ‘tech for good’ launders the expertise, interests, and beliefs of technologists.
What Is a Tech Company?
The question of “What is a tech company” comes down to how much software and its unique characteristics affects the company’s core business.
Appropriate Measures — Real Life
Changing the tech we use is not enough to mitigate the environmental and social harm of mass technology
Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design
We fail to take tech seriously when we do not grasp its full impact on humans
Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work
Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace.
Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work
Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
A People’s History of Tech
A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.
Tech’s Two Philosophies
Google and Facebook represent one philosophy, and Microsoft and Apple represent another; tech needs both, but ultimately platforms are more important than aggregators.
The idea of a "tech industry" has always relied on "computer" being a special kind of medium, akin to alchemy. And if tech demands to be king, AI hype has now elevated LLMs to a king of kings. But the solipsism has hit a dead end. The only way forward is to recognize that computers are not special.
LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.
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