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Lead Developer Quits Bitcoin Saying It ‘Has Failed’ - Jemima Kelly (Reuters)
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Al Jazeera America: Was the TV News Network Cursed from the Start? - Paul Farhi (Washington Post)
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The Brilliant Critic Evgeny Morozov on Uber’s Disruptive, Libertarian Lie - John Summers (Salon)
Lead Developer Quits Bitcoin Saying It ‘Has Failed’
By Jemima Kelly
January 16, 2016
Bitcoin slid by 10 percent on Friday after one of its lead developers, Mike Hearn, said in a blogpost that he was ending his involvement with the cryptocurrency and selling all of his remaining holdings because it had “failed”.
“What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions’ and ‘too big to fail’ has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people,” he wrote.
In GOP State of the Union Responses, Different Messages in English and Spanish on Immigration
By Patricia Mazzei
January 12, 2016
The Republican Party's immigration split was reflected Tuesday in the two responses hand-picked party members gave -- one in English, one in Spanish -- to President Obama's final State of the Union address. The Spanish version, offered by a Cuban-American congressman from Miami, was decidedly softer.
There were other differences in the speeches as well. Haley and Diaz-Balart each briefly mentioned their personal backgrounds, which are obviously not the same. Haley spoke about the Charleston shooting and removal of the Confederate flag (which she referred to only as a "symbol that was being used to divide us") while Diaz-Balart spoke more generally about "tragedies" in South Carolina and California. Diaz-Balart didn't make veiled references to presidential front-runner Donald Trump, while Haley warned against the "noise" in politics.
Al Jazeera America: Was the TV News Network Cursed from the Start?
By Paul Farhi
January 13, 2016
From the start, people at the Al Jazeera America cable-news network knew they faced an uphill battle for ratings and acceptance.
It wasn’t just that they were taking on entrenched competitors such as CNN and Fox News with an unfamiliar, foreign brand name. Insiders knew that it would take ample distribution, lots of promotion, and audience goodwill to establish a foothold.
On Wednesday, Al Jazeera America’s owners acknowledged they had achieved none of those things. In an unexpected move that surprised even its journalists, the network’s Qatar-based parent said it would pull the plug on April 30, shutting down the channel less than three years after it started.
By Amanda Hess
The Sony hack hit employees in the place where they spend most of their waking hours and expend most of their mental and physical energy, and not necessarily because they’re super passionate about filing paperwork for Adam Sandler movies. The leak of information threatened their personal financial futures, and the destruction of property threatened their livelihoods. As one employee put it: “Everything we had to do to make a living became such a chore.”
While outsiders viewed the hack as a dishy celebrity soap opera or exciting international spy saga, inside the writers rooms and the HR department and the IT offices, it wasn’t very sexy at all. It was a lot of extra hours on the job, and a lot of hard work. Several people I spoke to left Sony in the months after the hack. Others are finally readjusting. To them, the Sony hack was less of a geopolitical thriller and more of a workplace drama that ran too long.
The Brilliant Critic Evgeny Morozov on Uber’s Disruptive, Libertarian Lie
By John Summers
December 26, 2015
A little while ago, director Dan Davies of Banyak Films in London materialized in The Baffler’s editorial HQ in Harvard Square with contributing editor Evgeny Morozov in tow.The resulting conversation touches on Evgeny’s enemies in Silicon Valley, the contours of acceptable debate in the United States, and the missing tradition of tech criticism, as measured against global social movements. Human persons and their emotional intuitions may yet prevail over knowledge-based “solutions” from Silicon Valley’s cheerless robots.
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