Hello, friends!

Today is my last day at Medium.

As co-founder and editor-in-chief of OneZero, I want to say thank you to Medium CEO Ev Williams and VP of Editorial Siobhan O'Connor for giving my team an unparalleled opportunity to tell important, mind-expanding stories about technology and science. I am deeply grateful for our freelance and platform writers—including our columnists and other weekly contributors (especially long-timers Angela Lashbrook, Owen Williams, and Eric Ravenscraft)—who forged this publication into something unique and special. Thank you also to our staff writers Dave Gershgorn, Emily Mullin, Sarah Emerson, Drew Costley, and Will Oremus, and our audience development trio Nadia Rawls, Peter Slattery, and Nate Goldman. Most of all, I bow in gratitude to our readers, who kept us going day after day.

I wanted to offer, in one place, links to every month of coverage that I oversaw (along with interim/launch editor Bryan Walsh, executive editor Michael Zelenko, senior editors Yasmin Tayag, Sarah Kessler, and Brian Merchant, and senior platform editor Megan Morrone), plus a handful of highlights. This is a monument to two-plus years of hard work that made a difference in the world. Thank you for being a part of it.

—Damon Beres

February 2019 (Starting on Feb. 27)

Highlights:

• The Brain That Remade Itself
• Is the Universe Real?
• Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet
• The Ethically Questionable Math Game Taking Over U.S. Schools
• Why Apple’s Notification Bubbles Are so Stressful
• We’re Already Designing Babies
• We Can Learn to See Through ‘Deepfake’ Video Hoaxes
• The Internet Is Broken. Here’s Who Can Fix It.

March 2019

Highlights:

• Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders
• The Sharing Economy Was Always a Scam
• The Relentless Misery of Working Inside an Amazon Warehouse
• How Google Wiped a Neighborhood off the Map
• Meet the ‘Hillbilly Lawyer’ Fighting to Take Down Big Pharma
• How Air Purifiers Became the Newest Wellness Craze
• Computer-Generated Faces Are Getting Real
• This Company Wants to Help Women Hack Their Fertility
• Virtual Reality Is Helping Kids Cope With Pain
• Closing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap
• Can High Times Survive in the Age of Vaping?

April 2019

Highlights:

• Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers
• The Definitive Oral History of TiVo
• No One Knows How Dangerous Boeing’s 737 Max Actually Is
• Inside the Biotech Startup That Wants to Extend Your Life
• The Racist Origins of America’s Tech Industry
• When the Web Loses Its Memory
• The Machine Behind Twitter’s Strangest Promoted Tweets
• Google Could Get Tons of Data From Its Gaming Platform
• Your Smartphone Apps Are Filled With Trackers You Know Nothing About
• How Hedgehogs Became Instagram’s Most Miserable Celebrities
• Beyond Prime: Inside the Race to Deliver Packages to the Moon
• Tech Platforms Love Moving Fast — Except When Their Users Are in Trouble
• The Tyranny of Convenience

May 2019

Highlights:

• Warning Signs That a Bubble Is About to Burst
• The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
• The End of App Stores Is Rapidly Approaching
• What Really Happens to AirPods When They Die
• Your Dirty AirPods Are Grosser Than You Think
• A Disaster Is Unfolding in Consumer Tech
• How Satan Was Disappeared From Twitter
• Meet the World’s Most Bio-Tracked Man
• One Inventor’s Race to Manage His Parkinson’s Disease With an App
• This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers

June 2019

Highlights:

• Bullhead City, Arizona Was a Retiree Paradise. Then Came a Biblical Plague of Flies.
• Amazon Is Watching
• People Are Buying Fillers Online and Injecting Them Into Their Own Faces
• Don’t Be a Phonehead
• Congress Must Act on Regulating Deepfakes
• Building a Better Berry
• A Group of Microsoft Employees Is Fighting the Company’s Political Action Committee

July 2019

Highlights:

• Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design
• Do You Really Need Another Computer Monitor?
• The Dot-Com Don: Meet the Domain Prospector Turning Stray URLs Into Real Businesses
• How ‘Digital Nomads’ Game the System to Work in Paradise
• The Illinois Artist Behind Social Media’s Latest Big Idea
• Can Virtual Assistants Gain Real Intelligence?
• The Hidden History of How the Government Kick-Started Silicon Valley
• How the Internet Transformed the World of Custom Poetry
• Facebook’s Poker Bot Shows How A.I. Can Adapt to Liars
• Designers Are Imagining Video Games Without Guns
• Palmer Luckey Revolutionized VR. Now He’s Selling A.I. to the Marines.
• CRISPR Could Be the Future of Disease Diagnosis
• CRISPR Pioneer Jennifer Doudna on the Future of Disease Detection
• Why Do People Film Others in Distress Instead of Helping Them?

August 2019

Highlights:

• How Ancestry.com’s Find A Grave Encourages Bad Actors and Bad Data
• Will It Ever Be Possible to Understand the Human Brain?
• California Police Are Sharing Facial Recognition Databases to ID Suspects
• The League of Entropy Is Making Randomness Truly Random
• Here’s What Those Phone Charging Lockers Are Doing With Your Personal Information
• In Defense of The Small Social Network
• Want to Know When You’ll Die? A New Blood Test May Hold the Answer
• In a World of Smart Gadgets, Why Are Toilets Still so Dumb?
• OpenAI Wants to Move Slow and Not Break Anything
• Lab-Grown Mini Brains Have Human-Like Brain Activity

September 2019

Highlights:

• Our Skulls Are Out-Evolving Us
• Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation
• Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken
• Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On
• The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
• Being ‘Indistractable’ Will Be the Skill of the Future
• Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
• Dog Poop DNA Tracking Introduces Spy Tech to Our Backyards
• This Phone Will Change Your Life
• The Apple Card Explains Everything You Need to Know About Apple Today
• How Much Is Your Privacy Really Worth?
• The Mystical Side of A.I.
• The Healthy Way To Scroll Through Instagram
• Inside ‘Proplifting,’ a Booming Digital Community Obsessed With Plant Clippings
• Siri Is Too Important for Apple to Ignore
• The Defense Department Plans to Build Radiation-proof CRISPR Soldiers
• On Nextdoor, the Homeless Are the Enemy

October 2019

Highlights:

• Unraveling the Secret Origins of an AmazonBasics Battery
• Speaking Truth to Power: Reflections on a Career at Microsoft
• How Spotify’s Algorithm Knows Exactly What You Want to Listen To
• Computer Files Are Going Extinct
• How Pinterest Built One of Silicon Valley’s Most Successful Algorithms
• The Last True Sticker Factory in America
• Kindle Hackers Are Disabling Tracking and Ads
• This Brain Computer Uses Your Jugular Like a USB Cable
• Robot Truckers Are Here — They Just Happen to Be Human
• How Adobe InDesign Conquered the World of Graphic Design
• What Happens When Your Tweet Becomes a Subway Ad
• Domino’s Is Using A.I. Surveillance to Manage Store Performance
• ‘Managed Retreat’ From Climate Change Is Leaving the Most Vulnerable People Behind
• How the App Store Ended a Golden Era of Software
• Google’s A.I.-Powered Camera Was Destined to Fail
• The Best Use of a Pot Breathalyzer Isn’t for Driving, It’s for Jobs
• Synthetic Psychedelics May Soon Replace Your Shrooms
• This Is What Would Happen If You Literally Ate Your Phone
• Hospital Algorithms Are Biased Against Black Patients, New Research Shows
• Amazon’s A.I. Emotion-Recognition Software Confuses Expressions for Feelings
• Eating Roadkill Is Our Future, and That’s Okay
• Florida Claims to be a Driverless Car Paradise. Critics Call It a Lawless Mess
• Startup Molekule Is Using the California Wildfires to Sell Its Crummy Air Purifier
• DeepMind’s StarCraft Bot Has a 191-Year Head Start on Humanity
• Looking At Cute Animals Online Is Literally Good for Your Brain
• People Are Killing Puppy Clones That Don’t Come Out “Perfect”

November 2019

Highlights:

• A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades
• EXCLUSIVE: This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works
• The Magical Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes
• This Science Vigilante Calls Out Bogus Results in Prestigious Journals
• White Instagram Influencers Have Created a New Form of Blackface
• Inside Discord’s Unmoderated, Potentially Dangerous Teen Dating Network
• Why xHamster Is So Much Better at Content Moderation Than Facebook
• What Happens When You Tweet a Death Threat to the President?
• EXCLUSIVE: Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business
• The High-Stakes Race to Breed Cannabis With 0% THC
• Here’s How Knightscope’s Security Robots Surveil the Public
• Reddit’s r/SkincareAddiction Community Has a Dark Side
• Transcription Site Rev Leaves Customer Data Out in the Open
• Experts Say Your Fingers Can Type 24/7, Forever, Until You Die
• Nazis Got Me Kicked Off of Twitter
• Apple Has Been Gaslighting Us for Years
• A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye
• The Utah Statement: Reviving Antimonopoly Traditions for the Era of Big Tech
• The Rape Kit Is Horribly Outdated
• Our Emojis Need to Represent Everyone
• Plastic Surgeons Are Using A.I. to Determine Beauty
• ‘I Can Hear the Suffering’: Rev Exposes Freelance Transcribers to Violent, Disturbing Content
• There Still Aren’t Any Rules Preventing Scientists From Making Gene-Edited Babies
• Here’s a Kinda Genius, Kinda Evil Way People Are Gaming Spotify Playlists
• Android Becomes Basically Unusable If You Turn Off All of Google’s Tracking
• Amazon Finally Reveals Who Makes Its Branded Products

December 2019

Highlights:

• The Influencer and the Hit Man: How a Years-Long Domain Name Feud Ended in a Bloody Shootout
• Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity
• The Forgotten Pixel Art Masterpieces of the PlayStation 1 Era
• Amazon and Google Are Practically Giving Away Smart Speakers. Here’s Why.
• Inside Discord’s Thriving Black Market for Stolen Credit Cards and Gift Cards
• How to Totally Escape Ad Tracking at Home
• Authoritarian Nations Are Turning the Internet Into a Weapon
• ‘Everything That Promised Glory Became Gory’: Exclusive Excerpt
• Chicago Cops Use Social Media to Track Grieving Families of Gunshot Victims
• Plastic Surgeons Are Using Eye-Tracking Tech to Make Better Breasts
• A Googler Explains Exactly How the Pixel 4 Captures the Night Sky
• Uber Delivery Workers in Mexico Are Tracking Thieves Through Google Maps and WhatsApp Networks
• The Blackest City in the U.S. Is Facing an Environmental Justice Nightmare
• When DNA Testing Gives You a Past and Threatens Your Future
• Airports Are Normalizing Facial Recognition in the United States

January 2020

Highlights:

• Alien Nations: Why Life on Other Planets Will Resemble Ours
• We Finally Figured Out Who Makes wikiHow’s Bizarre Art
• Reaction GIFs of Black People Are More Problematic Than You Think
• Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own A Home
• How Science Fiction Imagined the 2020s
• Why You Don’t Need an Advanced Mathematics Degree to Be a Programmer
• The Pinched Fingers Emoji’s Creator Explains Its Meaning
• A ‘SexTech Revolution’ Could Smash the Internet of Men
• Why Recipe Bloggers Make You Scroll so Far to Read the Recipe
• The U.S. Government’s Mass Collection of Immigrant DNA Hints at Surveillance Future
• We Feared Deepfakes. Then Tech Monetized Them.
• Swarms of Teeny Robo-Tractors Will Outmaneuver Tesla’s Driverless Cars
• The Military Is Building Long-Range Facial Recognition That Works in the Dark
• It’s No Surprise That 23andMe Created a Drug From Customers’ Genetic Data
• 15 Years After Katrina, a Fight Against ‘the Jim Crow of Climate Change’ Rages on in the Gulf Coast
• How to Keep Child Predators Out of Virtual Playgrounds Like ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Minecraft’
• A Viral Tweet Sent Me Searching for My Dead Mom on Google Street View
• An Exclusive Excerpt From William Gibson’s New Novel, ‘Agency’
• Why Google Gets Away With So Much
• Scientists Are Ready to Move Beyond ‘Screen Time’
• The Future Doesn’t Last
• Here’s What Happened to the Theranos Headquarters
• How Instagram’s Viral Face Filters Work
• Smart Toilets Are Revealing the Health Data That Wearables Can’t
• Health Care Is the Next Battleground for Big Tech
• How Google Earth Mapped 98% of the World
• The Scientist Who Got a Brain Implant to Cure His Alcoholism

February 2020

Highlights:

• How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables
• Inside a Secretive $250 Million Private Transit System Just for Techies
• Apple’s Secret Monopoly
• Rising Seas May Force U.S. Climate Refugees to the Same 5 Cities
• This Super-Clean Smart Screen Puts a Newspaper on Your Wall
• Exclusive Survey Reveals Discrimination Against Visa Workers at Tech’s Biggest Companies
• The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups
• The Future of Coding Is ‘No Code’
• ‘Brand Blockers’ Are Trying to Scrub Their Feeds Clean of Every Advertiser on Twitter
• Clearview AI’s Surveillance Dystopia Isn’t New for People of Color
• A Smear of DNA Can Hold 10,000 Gigabytes of Data
• Twitter Rallied to Find a Missing Woman — And Then Turned On Her
• TikTok’s Digital Blackface Problem
• NEC Is the Most Important Facial Recognition Company You’ve Never Heard Of
• The Price of DNA Sequencing Dropped From $2.7 Billion to $300 in Less Than 20 Years
• The U.S. Could Run Out of Metals That Are Crucial to Tech
• Google Engineers, Uber Drivers, and the Voices of a New Tech Labor Revolution
• Silicon Valley’s Spandexed Biker Bros Are Going Extinct
• An Exclusive Club of Black Women Is Disrupting Silicon Valley
• This Filter Makes Your Photos Invisible to Facial Recognition
• The Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed and Also It Sucks
• The Internet of Things Almost Starved My Cat
• Tech Can’t Handle Criticism: A Conversation with Anna Wiener and Jessica Powell
• The Birthplace of the Hard Drive is Now an AutoZone Parking Lot
• The Definitive Ranking of Silicon Valley Shoes
• Silicon Valley Destroyed Everything. Or Maybe Not.

March 2020

Highlights:

• I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out
• My Summer Internship at Google Turned Me Off Silicon Valley Forever
• Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music
• Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Self-Isolating Future
• How to Build the Speedy Home Wi-Fi Network of Your Dreams
• A Battery Breakthrough Could End Lithium-Ion’s Reign
• The Simplest Way to Spot Coronavirus Misinformation on Social Media
• The Untold Story of the Man That Made Mainstream Encryption Possible
• Argentina Police Are Arresting Innocent People Based on Facial Recognition
• Clothes-Fitting Technology Could Save Online Shopping
• Clearview AI: We Are ‘Working to Acquire All U.S. Mugshots’ From Past 15 Years
• Amazon, Uber, and Lyft Pressure Drivers Amid Coronavirus Fears
• How I Survived Nearly 40 Years in Silicon Valley as a Woman in Tech
• How a Crisis Researcher Makes Sense of Covid-19 Misinformation
• Your DNA Test Could Crack a Cold Case
• This Is the Ad Clearview AI Used to Sell Your Face to Police
• OK Google, Black History Month Is Over. What Now?
• I Did a 24-Hour Dopamine Fast and I Felt Everything, Not Nothing
• Why the Web Isn’t Working for Women and Girls
• It’s Time to Resurrect the Airship Hospitals
• The Community Labs Built on Silicon Valley’s Junk
• Inside the Democratic Candidates’ War for Your Inbox
• The Tamagotchi Hacking Community’s Quest to Cheat Death
• Gig Workers Can’t Go on Unemployment — So They’re Turning to GoFundMe
• How to Mass Manufacture Humanoid Robots
• Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet
• Why Slack Isn’t Winning the Remote-Work Revolution — Yet
• Facial Recognition Companies See the Coronavirus as a Business Opportunity
• Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals
• ‘These People Are Evil’: Drivers Speak Out Against Uber’s New Coronavirus Sick Leave Fund
• Grocery Runs, Donations, and Memes: Inside the Rise of Neighborhood Slack Groups During the…
• Lemons for Yeast for Flour: The Bartering Economy Explodes on Nextdoor
• Coronavirus Is Bringing Back the Forgotten Tech Trends of 2012
• Jealousy, Rumors, and Suspicion: How Facebook Disaster Groups Turn On Themselves

April 2020

Highlights:

• CEO of Surveillance Firm Banjo Once Helped KKK Leader Shoot Up a Synagogue
• Banjo’s Surveillance Systems Grind to a Halt After CEO’s KKK Past Revealed
• Banjo Suspends All Operations in Utah Following OneZero Investigation
• This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 Viewed Video
• Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It's Falling Apart
• We Mapped How the Coronavirus Is Driving New Surveillance Programs Around the World
• The Pandemic Has Ended the Amazon Debate
• ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege
• Instagram Turned a User’s Tweet Into a Feature Overnight
• I Lived Off Homemade Soylent for a Week During a Global Crisis
• Data Thieves Are Targeting Dead People’s Social Media Accounts
• The Big Business (and Cheap Thrill) of Personal Carbon Credits
• Online Learning Was Supposed to Democratize Education. Coronavirus Shows It Hasn’t.
• Coronavirus Will Destroy Years of Scientific Progress
• An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams
• The World’s Smartphones Are Filled With Gold. That’s a Problem.
• Amazon Is at War With Its Workers
• Scientists Are Racing to Get Us Faster, Simpler Coronavirus Tests
• Why Solarpunk, Not Cyberpunk, Is the Future We Need Right Now
• Medical Researchers Worry Silicon Valley Could Screw Up Psychedelics
• How Bias Ruins A.I.
• The Real Reason Apple Made the iPhone SE So Cheap

May 2020

Highlights:

• Banjo CEO Resigns Following Revelation of KKK Ties
• The Future of Movie Theaters Might Look a Lot Like an Apple Store
• Inside Twitter’s Decision to Fact-Check Trump’s Tweets
• Deepfake Music Is So Good It Might Be Illegal
• What Facebook’s Remote Work Policy Means for the Future of Tech Salaries Everywhere
• The Future of Code Is in Your Browser
• We Already Have a Blueprint for What Comes Next
• A New Zealand Startup Is Using Microbes to Suck Solid Gold Out of E-Waste
• The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry
• Two Book Startups Compete Where Amazon Won’t
• Why I’m Joining Facebook’s Oversight Board
• I Joined Uber 11 Years Ago. I Quit Last Week, Again.
• The Case for Stanislaw Lem, One of Science Fiction’s Unsung Giants
• Tech Union Leaders Are Dodging Surveillance on Platforms Like Facebook and Zoom
• Amazon Is Quietly Fighting Against a Sweeping Facial Recognition Ban in Portland
• Training a Neural Network Can Emit More Than 600,000 Pounds of CO2. But Not for Long.
• Google Says It Will Not Build Custom A.I. for Oil and Gas Extraction
• Now Is the Time for Nationwide Free Internet
• How Google Killed My Content Farm
• Peter W. Singer Explains Why His “Robot Revolution” Is Inevitable
• What to Do When Your Video Game Gets Co-opted by Neo-Nazis
• ‘We Were the Petri Dish’: Facebook’s Shift to Remote Work Leaves Neighbors in a Lurch
• Is the Coronavirus Really Having a Positive Impact on Our Atmosphere?
• Remote Work Isn’t the End of Silicon Valley, but It Is the End of Something
• How Apple Decides Which Products Are ‘Vintage’ and ‘Obsolete’
• The Future of Gaming Is on Your Face, on Instagram
• Vietnam’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Zero. The Cost? Total Surveillance.

June 2020

Highlights:

• A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast
• Inside the Social Media Cult That Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything
• 30,000 Unsuspecting Rose Bowl Attendees Were Scooped Up in a Facial Recognition Test
• Scientists Edited Human Embryos in the Lab, and It Was a Disaster
• Apple’s Brilliant Plan to Dominate Without Intel Processors
• How Facebook Can Fix Itself
• Our Ability to Process Information Is Reaching a Critical Limit
• This $35 Keyboard for Children Transformed Me Into a Novelist
• The Segway’s Inventor Has a New Project: Manufacturing Human Organs
• A Break-up Letter with Astronomy, From a Young Black Woman
• Scammers Are Gaming Spotify by Faking Collaborations With Famous Artists
• The Emptiness of Blackout Tuesday
• From RealPlayer to Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush
• The Police Are Watching on Nextdoor
• The Hidden Costs of Deploying Tear Gas at Protests
• We Must Fight Face Surveillance to Protect Black Lives
• Facial Recognition Is Law Enforcement’s Newest Weapon Against Protesters
• Amazon Is Really Interested in the Blood of Covid-19 Patients
• Amazon Program Raises Money for Police Departments While the Company Says ‘Black Lives Matter’
• The Protests Remind Us Why Social Media Is Worth Fixing
• It’s Not Just You: Websites Really Do All Look the Same Now
• This Simple Facial Recognition Search Engine Can Track You Down Across the Internet
• 250 Microsoft Employees Call on CEO to Cancel Police Contracts and Support Defunding Seattle PD
• The Viral ‘Breaking911’ Twitter Account Is Not a Trustworthy Source, Experts Say
• Facebook Deplatforms Hundreds of Anti-Racist Skinheads and Musicians
• BLM Activists Devised a Brilliant Way to Raise Money From YouTube’s AdSense
• The Digital Archives of the Oldest Black Newspaper in America Show a Long Struggle for Justice
• Here’s How Easy It Is for Cops to Get Your Facebook Data
• Gamers Are Using A.I. to Completely Remake Old-School Graphics
• Defunding the Police Is an Environmental Justice Issue
• America Has Always Been a Dystopia
• The U.S. Rubber-Stamps Facial Recognition Systems Used to Round Up Uighurs in China
• The Right’s New Favorite Social Media Platform Parler Is Just as Restrictive as Twitter
• 5 Ideas to Make Silicon Valley Less Racist
• The Tech Elite Are Selling Job Referrals to Facebook, Google, and Amazon

July 2020

Highlights:

• The Gig Economy Is Failing. Say Hello to the Hustle Economy.
• Tiny Weed-Killing Robots Could Make Pesticides Obsolete
• This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest Cave
• My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire
• ‘A Permanent Nightmare’: Pinterest Moderators Fight to Keep Horrifying Content Off the Platform
• Pinterest Hosts Sexual Images of Young Girls, Anti-Vax Memes Despite Moderation Efforts
• Gaming During the Pandemic Is Starting to Feel Like Work
• I Got a Job at an Amazon Warehouse Without Talking to a Single Human
• The Amazon Effect Is Making Customer Service Reps’ Lives Hell
• Can Silicon Valley Be Fixed — Or Should We Burn It All Down?
• What a Better Social Network Would Look Like
• What I Learned From My Engineering Interview With Amazon
• Yes, Adults Are Still Renting $2,000 Co-Living Dorm Rooms During the Pandemic
• I Chatted With a Therapy Bot to Ease My Covid Fears. It Was Bizarre.
• Facebook Cannot Separate Itself from the Hate It Spreads
• The Pandemic Makes It Clear: We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism
• How Amazon Lures ‘Artisanal’ Sellers and Hangs Them Out to Dry
• The Enduring Anti-Black Racism of Google Search
• Inside a Facebook ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ for Cat Drugs
• The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality
• Inside Randonautica, the App Leading Zoomers to Discover Rainbows, Dead Bodies, and Hidden…
• Don’t Get Distracted by the Spectacle of Tech’s Big Antitrust Hearing
• A Year After an HR Crisis, Microsoft Employees Say They’re Still Waiting for Change
• Companies Are Using Employee Survey Data to Predict — and Squash — Union Organizing
• What Big Tobacco’s Fall Tells Us About Big Tech’s Future
• You Will Never Leave

August 2020

Highlights:

• How to Destroy ‘Surveillance Capitalism’
• How a Band of Activists — and One Tech Billionaire — Beat Alphabet’s ‘Smart City’
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
• Uber and Lyft’s Business Model May Be Dead. Good.
• Here’s What It’s Like to Work in an Amazon Warehouse Right Now
• GPT-3 Is an Amazing Research Tool. But OpenAI Isn’t Sharing the Code.
• Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point
• Here’s How Professional Union Busters Talk About ‘Woke’ Tech Organizers
• The Dream of a Global Internet Is Dead
• An A.I. Training Tool Has Been Passing Its Bias to Algorithms for Almost Two Decades
• A.I. Can Make Music, Screenplays, and Poetry. What About a Movie?
• The Future of Uber and Lyft Might Look a Lot Like FedEx
• Facebook’s Technocratic Reports Hide Its Failures on Abuse
• How ‘Breaking Up’ Apple and Amazon Might Actually Work

September 2020

Highlights:

• OneZero Expands With New Publications on Gadgets and Science
• The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods
• Leaked Salary Spreadsheet Reveals Microsoft Employee Earnings for a Second Year
• Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists Like ‘White Noise Baby Sleep’
• Inside the Tech Industry’s Decades-Long Failure to Reckon with Risk
• The Newly Legal Process for Turning Human Corpses to Soil
• Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme
• Casey Newton on Leaving ‘The Verge’ for Substack and the Future of Tech Journalism
• Our Emergency Alert Systems Rely on an Overlapping Mess of Privatized Services
• Border Patrol Used Facial Recognition to Scan More Than 16 Million Fliers — and Caught 7 Imposters
• The Privatized Internet Is Failing Our Kids
• Uber and Lyft’s California Proposal Is a Mishmash of Old Ideas for Fixing the Gig Economy
• The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History
• Virtual Learning Is Helping Indigenous Languages Fight off Extinction
• Amazon Uses Automation to Hide a Disastrous Record of Workplace Injuries

October 2020

Highlights:

• I Watched My Friend Dying on Facebook. But It Was All a GoFundMe Scam.
• Clear Conquered U.S. Airports. Now It Wants to Own Your Entire Digital Identity.
• Bloodchild
• A Popular Online Learning Platform Was Actually Created by an Underground Religious ‘Cult’
• The Philosophy That Explains Why So Many Silicon Valley CEOs Are Always Playing Victim
• The Zoom Signal Protecting Domestic Violence Survivors
• The Overlooked Conservative Case for Reining in Big Tech
• An Inside Look at How Badly the Pandemic Hit Clear at the Start of 2020
• Hawai’i Set to Drop Acellus Remote Learning Platform Following Allegations of Abuse Against Creator
• Pinterest Is Still Hosting QAnon Content Despite Ban
• To Understand Facebook Today, Read Its Earliest Critics
• To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First
• Eight Works of Visionary Fiction That Help Us Imagine — and Realize — Better Futures
• The Battle That Will Define Big Tech for Decades
• Banished From Facebook, Far-Right Militias Prepare for the Election on Zello and MeWe
• The Future of Decent Work Depends on the Failure of Prop 22

November 2020

Highlights:

• The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
• ‘Like Being Grilled Alive’: The Fear of Living With a Hackable Heart
• The Social Media Managers Are Not Okay
• The Ad-Based Internet Is About to Collapse. What Comes Next?
• Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group
• Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
• ‘Their Loads Are Garbage’: Drivers Say Uber’s Trucking Business Is Making a Tough Job Worse
• What Happens When You Actually DM a ‘DM to Collab’ Instagram Scammer
• Facebook Is the ‘Mainstream Media’ Now
• Neighborhood Watch Has a New Tool: License-Plate Readers
• Welcome Back to the Office. Please Wear This Tracking Device.
• God Mode Activated: Meet the Gamers Bringing Jesus to Twitch
• How Twitter Is Redefining Itself for a Post-Trump Future
• The Delicate Art of Making Robots That Don’t Creep People Out

December 2020

Highlights:

• The Giving Apps: How Venmo and Cash App Upended a Century-Old Charity Model
• How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever
• An ‘Ethical’ Instacart Alternative Is Now Facing Its Own Worker Backlash
• Amazon’s Plague Year
• Experimenting With GPT-3 Felt Like Witnessing a Technological Revolution
• Parler Users Are Gathering on Facebook to Complain About Parler
• The Best Tech Books of 2020 Are All About Giving Power to the User
• Dr. Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, Deborah Raji — an Enduring Sisterhood of Face Queens
• Becoming a Monopoly Was Always Facebook’s Goal
• 2020 Was a Disastrous Year for Uber Drivers
• Covid-19 Ushered in a New Era of Government Surveillance

January 2021

Highlights:

• Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper
• An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia
• Recent Grads Are Being Lured Into ‘Indentured Servitude’ by a Coding Bootcamp
• Larry Farwell Claims His Lie Detector System Can Read Your Mind. Is He a Scam Artist, or a Genius?
• Inside the Surprisingly Big Business of Spotify’s Secretive White-Noise Spammers
• MeWe Sold Itself on Privacy. Then the Radical Right Arrived.
• YouTube’s Spammy Sex Bots Make a Ton of Money
• The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse
• How Lulz Took Down Wall Street
• GPT-3 Contains Disturbing Bias Against Muslims
• After a TikTok Craze, Pet Owners Are Trying (and Often Failing) to Get Their Own Animals to Talk
• Claims Antifa Embedded in Capitol Riots Come From a Deeply Unreliable Facial Recognition Company
• Facebook Chucked Its Own Rulebook to Ban Trump
• Twitter’s Trump Ban Will Mark a New Era for ‘Free Speech’ Social Media Platforms
• The End of Social Media’s ‘View From Nowhere’
• ‘I Am Not Sad. I Am Really Not Sad’: Trump’s Twitter Reply Guys Reckon With a Post-Trump Era
• How the Pandemic Turned Refugees Into ‘Guinea Pigs’ for Surveillance Tech
• Men Wear Suits, Women Wear Bikinis: Image Generating Algorithms Learn Biases ‘Automatically’
• Black-Box Algorithms Shouldn’t Decide Who Gets a Vaccine

February 2021

Highlights:

• Families Torn Apart by Decades of War Are Finally Finding Each Other on Facebook
• Hex Factor: Inside the Group Offering $250,000 for Proof of Superpowers
• Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists
• 3G Could End This Year. For People Who Rely on Basic Phones, That’s a Big Problem.
• Technology Disrupts at Two Different Speeds
• The New Era of Social Media Isn’t About Feeds
• How Amazon Swindled Its Own Drivers, Got Caught, and Ended Up Richer
• Amazon’s New CEO Is Shaping How the Military Uses Killer Robots
• Note to Reporters: If Surveillance Data Shouldn’t Exist, Then Don’t Use It
• Facebook Vaccine Information Groups Find Themselves in Moderation Gray Area
• Banjo Quietly Rebranded Itself Following Report on Former CEO’s KKK Past
• Employer-Tied Health Care Is Also a Tech Accountability Issue
• The A.I. Industry Is Exploiting Gig Workers Around the World — Sometimes for Just $8 a Day
• What Really Caused the Supply Chain Mess Over PPE Last Year
• I’m a High School Student. I Don’t Want Online Learning to End.
• ‘People in My Group Are So White’: Facebook Vaccine Hunter Groups Underscore Inequity of Rollout

March 2021

Highlights:

• China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space
• Girl & Computer
• Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I. — But Spared European Users
• Why Machines Will Never Feel Empathy: A Q&A With MIT’s Sherry Turkle
• I Broke Amazon’s API to Make Alexa Start a Conversation You’d Never Want to Have
• YouTube Explains Why a Racist Video Didn’t Violate Its Hate Speech Rules
• Clubhouse Is Disrupting Another Industry: Charity Telethons
• Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries
• How Google Will Target Ads Without Singling Users Out
• Google’s ‘Privacy-First Web’ Is Really a Google-First Web
• Anti-Vax Groups Still Thrive on Facebook, Despite Content Ban
• Apple and Google Won’t Save Online Privacy. Take It From a Former DoubleClick Executive.
• The Algorithmic Auditing Trap
• I Confronted Instagram Scammers About Their Plot to Steal Blue-Check Accounts
• A.I.’s Most Important Dataset Gets a Privacy Overhaul, a Decade Too Late
• Moving the Big Boat Did Not Magically Fix the Global Economy
• How Journalists and Academics Hold Tech Accountable

April 2021

Highlights:

• Homeless in the Shadow of Apple’s $5 Billion Campus
• Oklahoma Quietly Launched a Mass Surveillance Program to Track Uninsured Drivers
• People Are Betting Big on Risky Crypto ‘Crash’ Games
• The Prototype for Clubhouse Is 40 Years Old, and It Was Built by Phone Hackers
• The Real Moms of TikTok
• Texting Through a Pandemic With Obama and J.Lo
• A.I. Can’t Detect Our Emotions

Which is why Medium is launching Index, a new publication about work.

As Index editor Jean-Luc Bouchard puts it in their welcome letter:

Jobs have increasingly become decentralized, with millions stringing together gig and contract roles as millions more have been thrust into remote work this past year due to forces well beyond their control. There has never been an easier time to pursue entrepreneurial instincts and ambitions, whether it’s launching a startup or monetizing side projects, but these ventures can also be a test of longevity and perseverance and, for some, an uphill battle against gender or racial bias. Entirely new jobs in brand-new fields seem to emerge faster than ever, even as many workplaces, institutions, and industries still struggle or refuse to adapt to meet the economic and social needs of their employees. In short, forging a career and finding meaningful, substantive work are, at best, complicated endeavors.

…

At Index, we’ll be digging into the most pressing issues surrounding modern work, including identity, representation, and support in the workplace, as well as remote work, the future of work, leadership, work culture, entrepreneurship, work-life tension, and navigating an ever-shifting economic landscape.

Be one of the first people to support the new publication: Head over to Index and smash that Follow button.

Don’t Miss Index, Medium’s New Publication About Work was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Warzel and Thompson obtained a file from an unnamed source containing location data tied to “thousands of Trump supporters, rioters, and passers-by in Washington, D.C.” on the date of the insurrection at the Capitol. This data was generated by smartphone apps for the sake of digital advertising, and although it is supposed to be anonymized, Warzel and Thompson demonstrate how easily it can be pinned to individuals.

For example, they were able to use the data to track pest exterminator Ronnie Vincent’s path from Kentucky to the Capitol. “ ‘There is no way that my phone shows me in there,’ he said. Yet it did.”

“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence, as happened in cities across America last summer… None of this data should ever have been collected,” the authors conclude.

Anyone with a smartphone should read the full article, which is also filled with striking visualizations, by following the link below:

Opinion | They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them.

For more on the topics of tracking and surveillance capitalism, I also recommend these stories from OneZero:

• IRL Ads Are Taking Scary Inspiration From Social Media
• How to Destroy ‘Surveillance Capitalism’
• Amazon Is Watching
• Your Smartphone Apps Are Filled With Trackers You Know Nothing About

‘We traced a phone inside the Capitol to Mr. Vincent’s home in Kentucky.’ was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“There are those who would want you to believe that organizing in the tech industry is completely impossible… If you don’t have unions in the tech industry, what does that mean for our country?” Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America, the larger union that Google’s will be affiliated with, told the Times.

The Alphabet Workers Union will be able to include contractors—a huge portion of the workforce at Google and in tech more generally. Last year, OneZero’s Sarah Kessler reported on union-busting efforts in the tech industry that specifically cited solidarity between employees and independent contractors as a growing concern.

Read the New York Times’ full report via Medium:

Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism

“If you don’t have unions in the tech industry, what does that mean for our country?” was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.