WeChat: From Medium to Mediator

China’s omnipresent app regulates much of society. Will it be a blueprint or cautionary tale?

By Chris Neels | January 22, 2020 | Culture, Economics, Government, Media, Policing, Privacy, Society | Beijing, Cashless, Censorship, China, Cybernetics, Dissent, Economics, Free Speech, Freedom, Information, Mediation, Metadata, News, QR Codes, Ride Hailing, surveillance, Tracking, Virtualization, WeChat

Read more  

Undoing Dystopia: a Review of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human

A review of tech and social critic Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, Team Human.

By Geoffrey Dutton | April 25, 2019 | Automation, Community, Culture, Economics, Philosophy, Relationships, Society | Algorithms, Amazon, Boston, Capitalism, Civilization, Convenience, Corporations, Douglas Rushkoff, Economics, Efficiency, Enrico Moretti, Environment, Ethics, Evolution, Extraction, Human Nature, Mechanomorphism, Neutrality, New York, Silicon Valley, Socialism, Team Human, Technologists, Venture Capital, Wages

Read more  

A Message From the Publisher

It’s our 2nd birthday! Publisher Mo Lotman shares a few thoughts about where we’ve come and where The Technoskeptic is going.

By Mo Lotman | February 28, 2018 | Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Community, Economics, Ethics, Government, Media, Philosophy, Privacy, Relationships, Society, Well-Being | Addiction, Amazon, Anxiety, Apple, Attention, Business, Center for Humane Technology, Community, Depression, Disconnection, Economics, Ethics, Facebook, Farhad Manjoo, Google, Microsoft, Opioids, Reality, Roger McNamee, smart phones, Specialization, Suicide, Tristan Harris

Read more  

The Problems of Prediction, Part 2

Our overconfidence in our predictive abilities can be traced to the simple fact that the universe is infinitely complex.

By David A. J. Reynolds | February 21, 2018 | Cognition, Economics, Government, Philosophy, Prediction, Society | Brexit, Britain, Certainty, Comprehension, Cosmology, Data, Economics, Elections, Error, Forecasting, Foresight, Freakonomics, Genetic Engineering, Hanna Arendt, Hubris, Ignorance, Infinity, Information, Knowledge, Limitations, Manipulations, Models, Neuroscience, Over-confidence, Philip Tetlock, Polling, Prediction, Reality, Statistics, Stephen Dubner, The Brain, The Universe, Truth, UK, Understanding, Unknowns, Unpredictability, US

Read more