Everything you need to know about "deepfakes" and what could become the biggest information and communications meltdown in world history. In a world of deepfakes, it will soon be impossible to tell what is real and what isn't. As advances in artificial intelligence, video creation, and online trolling continue, deepfakes pose not only a real threat to democracy -- they threaten to take voter manipulation to unprecedented new heights. This crisis of...

"System Error" exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at...

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.

"The reign of Big Tech is here, and Americans' First Amendment rights hang by a keystroke. Amassing unimaginable amounts of personal data, giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple--once symbols of American ingenuity and freedom--have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power. Decades of unchecked data collection have given Big Tech more targeted control over Americans' daily lives than any company or government...

Chinese edition of "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century". New York Time columnist Thomas Friedman's bestseller that prescribed the most sensible 21st century approach for nations, businesses and individuals.

Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging...

"From New Yorker staff writer and author of The Longing for Less Kyle Chayka comes a ... history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, ... [networks] of mathematically determined choices that ramify into the development of city grids and music playlists alike. To have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question. Over the last decade, Kyle Chayka has studied...

Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"--Making sense of their own patterns so we don't have to. Neuromarketers...

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There's been plenty of hype about the "netroots," and online activism on both the right and left. But most of it's been celebratory, not practical. This is a practical, start to finish guide to promoting any cause and participating in any social movement on the social Web. Long-time activist and online community expert Tom Head covers everything you need to know about e-activism, including: " Using the Web to find activism jobs and volunteer opportunities...