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Meet the Man With a Radical Plan for Blockchain Voting
Siri grew up in Argentina, where he saw the effects of corruption on democracy first hand. The vision is a radical departure from the one-person, one-vote, once-every-year-or-two trip to the ballot box we are familiar with—and by which, in Siri’s view, we are so ill-served. Users of Democracy.Earth’s one-size-fits-all governance platform—code-named Sovereign—would have infinite flexibility […]
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Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebooks Wild Early Days
Everyone who has seen The Social Network knows the story of Facebook’s founding. It was at Harvard in the spring semester of 2004. What people tend to forget, however, is that Facebook was only based in Cambridge for a few short months. Back then it was called TheFacebook.com, and it was a college-specific carbon copy […]
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The Mission to Build the Ultimate Burger Bot
Brian Finke Angelo Vardakostas sailed into Los Angeles on a Greek commercial ship in 1955. Greeks were opening diners across the country at the time—mom-and-pop analogs to the McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., and Kentucky Fried Chicken chains that were multiplying in the postwar sprawl—and Angelo hopped off at the port and started looking for a job. […]
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Inside Palmer Luckeys Bid to Build a Border Wall
Benjamin Rasmussen Luckey grew up in Long Beach, California; his dad was a car salesman, and his mother homeschooled him and his three sisters. “I was a PC gamer,” he told me in 2015, “and I was always upgrading my PC, getting the best monitors, the newest graphics cards.” He wanted to feel as if he […]
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AI Chatbots Try to Schedule MeetingsWithout Enraging Us
OK, that’s peevish. However trivial it may sound, creating an AI program to successfully schedule meetings is a monstrously difficult challenge, and the people who are trying to perfect Andrew Ingram—the 53 full-time employees of X.ai—are some of the most dedicated nerds you’ll ever meet. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, they bustle about their Manhattan […]
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This Is Ajit Pai, Nemesis of Net Neutrality
In March, Ajit Pai, the 45-year-old chair of the Federal Communications Commission, took to the internet—a community he joyfully inhabits and grudgingly regulates—to pay tribute to his favorite movie. “It’s not just, like, my opinion, man: 20 years ago today, #TheBigLebowski—the greatest film in the history of cinema—was released,” Pai wrote on Twitter. “Decades on, […]