Candice Delmas (Northeastern): Is Hacktivism the New Civil Disobedience? Inside Google’s shadow workforce: About half of Google’s workers are contractors who don’t receive the same benefits as direct employees. Jacob Weisberg reviews Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble and Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks. From Vice, where are the radical politics of cyberpunk? The aesthetics and politics of the genre shadow a harsh reality — there might not have been all that much “punk” there to begin with. Nitasha Tiku on why tech employees are rebelling against their bosses.
Silicon Valley engineers fear they’ve created a monster. Going to work in mommy’s basement: From laundry to meal prep, apps tend to mimic maternal care — is this good for women? Justin Tyler Clark reviews Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein (and more and more). Trump stokes outrage in Silicon Valley — but it’s selective.
