“Add little to little and there will be a big pile.” —Ovid When we build complex technologies, despite our best efforts and our desire for clean logic, they often end up being far messier than we intend. They often end up kluges: inelegant solutions that work just well enough. And a reason they end up being […]

Tommy George and the Agents of SHIELD shot a Nerf ball and erased a whiteboard.

Condemned as a capitalist tool, the computer would help expose the USSR’s weakness.

If you ask Anthony Weiner, digital records—especially those on the Internet—can seem impossibly hard to get rid of. When a picture or document is reduced to a series of 1s and 0s, it becomes transmissible, reproducible, downloadable, and storable. You can’t burn digital books, and ideas like cloud computing make it possible to back up […]

Let’s consider the fear that once surrounded another powerful technology: recombinant DNA.