Snowden Updates

A Web Guerrilla Breaking News From the Jungle: Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Mountaintop Home Office by David Carr at the NYTimes “On approaching Glenn Greenwald’s home office high in the jungle-encrusted mountains above Rio de Janeiro, all is tranquil, bucolic even. A gurgling stream at the entrance frames the idyll. And then the dogs notice the incursion. […]

Loneliness vs. Electric Shock. Who wins?

Blaise Pascal famously wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” and now science shows us a deeper truth: that we would rather administer electric shocks to ourselves than sit quietly in a room alone. Read on below. The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders […]

Reading List: Thinkfluence, E-books, and How God Turned into Money

Does social media really help us socialize, or are they really more about attention grabbing and thinkfluence? We’ve got some insights on the social media trends of 2014, an excellent longform examination of the digital publishing world and what we gain and what experiences we still miss from our e-books, an interview with Giorgio Agamben […]

Reading List: Snowden in Russia, Tech Cultists, and the Lottocracy

Happy Monday! If you enjoyed our brief treatment of tech cultism last week, you’ll love the Verge’s long read on fanboys. We’ve also got some updates on Snowden staying in Russia, social media guidelines from the Church of England, and a proposal that we replace our elections with a lottery. Fanboys – The Verge “I’m […]

Reading List: NSA Reform, Activists, and Cars that Watch You

Happy Monday! Here’s a good mix of articles on everything from social media creditworthiness, cars that watch you, NSA reform, and an untold story of an FBI burglary. We also hope you enjoy Michael Toy’s take on Present Shock and Paul. If you want a brief overview of Rushkoff’s Present Shock, watch this. Trial of […]

Reading List: Snowden and Surveillance

For our reading list this week, we’ve got all the best Snowden, NSA and surveillance coverage we could find, starting with a video of the message he released on Christmas day. Enjoy!   Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower – NY Times A quick and dirty overview of the entire Snowden story to get you up to speed. […]

Snowden: The Mission’s Already Accomplished

While it’s common to see news articles, TV shows, pundits, editorials, blogs, tweets and books discussing what limits we should or should not put on technology, Edward Snowden is one our few public figures who saw what was going on internally at the NSA and decided that our technological progress needed limits. Contrary to those […]

Online Privacy: How Did We Get Here?

From the description: As technology has evolved over the past two centuries, so have our expectations about privacy. This new digital world allows us to connect with each other with increasing ease, but it has also left our personal information readily available, and our privacy vulnerable. Cultural norms have pushed us all online, seemingly at […]

McLuhan on Snowden…in 1972

An interview of Marshall McLuhan in 1972 recently surfaced and is published in full by Maclean’s. Many of McLuhan’s insights are more relevant than ever, particularly his comments on surveillance and espionage with electric media. The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance. CIA-style espionage is now the total human activity. Whether […]

NSA Spying: Just the Basics

Edward Snowden, a former worker for the CIA and NSA, has leaked top secret government documents that seem to show that the US government collects large swaths of electronic data of its citizens, including data about phone calls, emails, Internet usage, etc. He is now hiding in Hong Kong. Read the original exclusive from The […]

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