Zero Sum Games: When Computers Cut Off Your Pennies, Your Power, and Your Penis

I once knew a self-employed person who was delighted to receive a letter from HMRC, the British equivalent of the IRS, informing him he owed them £0 in tax for that year. Excellent news, he thought. Then he began getting a further series of legally intimidatory letters from the taxman, threatening to take him to court for nonpayment of this very same impossible sum. Contacting a helpline, he was told not to worry, it was just some silly administrative error “to do with computers” which would all soon be sorted out. And yet still the legal letters kept coming. In desperation, he did the ...

A Question of Intelligence

Were it not for my age, I’d be worried, but at this stage of the game I couldn’t give a flying you-know-what. Mind you, I have two children—a daughter and a son—both in ...

Auto Focus

If I were a Marxist, I might be tempted to say that the obligatory switch to electric cars is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor to enslave them yet further. (By the poor, ...

Joe Biden

Big Tech Protects Joe Biden

Big Tech wants to protect Joe Biden, so it censored the New York Post’s exposé on the corrupt dealings of his son Hunter. Users of Facebook and Twitter were frustrated by their ...

Digital Dum-dums

From the 19th century up through the early part of the 20th century, European intellectuals such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Nietzsche, and José Ortega y Gasset ...

The Trillion-Dollar Question

Back in March, I asked in my Taki’s Magazine column “Diversity Versus Debate”: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? ...

Mark Zuckerberg wax figure at Madame Tussaud's

Smartphone Slavery

President Mark Zuckerberg. Your lips better get used to mouthing that name. The King of Facebook has been traveling across the country, visiting quaint locals, quietly laying the ...

Facebook Is Not Watching You

Following every national crisis, the Internet serves as a community bulletin board where anyone feels free to tack on his inane beliefs. Regarding Michael Brown, millions of ...

Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler

Robot Hookers of the Near Future

Jean Harlow’s final, deliciously pre-Code exchange with matronly Marie Dressler in 1933’s Dinner at Eight endures as one of cinema’s choicest comedy ...

U.S. Department of Defense

Pay Attention and Think Fast

I recently found in The American Conservative a piece called "€œ40 Years of the "€˜Fighter Mafia,"€™"€ this mafia being a subset of the "€œMilitary Reformers"€ who ...

F22 Raptor

An Inside Look at the Defense Industry

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against al-Qaeda, the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the front-line fighter plane of the United States, ...

Curse of the Nerd Dildo

When I was a larval nerdling in graduate school, I allowed myself to be seen in public places with a ridiculous pocket computer in a hip holster. It was a tremendously useful ...

Shutterstock

Is Our Guardian Angel Big Brother?

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” said Secretary of State Henry Stimson of his 1929 decision to shut down “The Black Chamber” that decoded ...

Google Goggles

As if smart phones weren’t irritating enough, by the end of the year people will be wearing them on their faces. Google Glasses will finally allow trendy transhumanists to ...


Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!