Brian Merchant is the Los Angeles Times’ technology columnist. He’s the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the forthcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.” Merchant is the co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and the co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.” Previously, he was a senior editor at Motherboard, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.
Latest From This Author
The story of how the internet was made doesn’t begin and end with Silicon Valley. It runs right through Hollywood.
Oct. 6, 2023
Medical device entrepreneur Joe Kiani is on a mission to stop Apple from crushing smaller competitors. His lawsuit could get the Apple Watch banned from being imported into the U.S.
Oct. 5, 2023
At a moment when the prospect of executives and managers using software automation to undermine work in professions everywhere loomed large, the WGA strike took on major symbolic weight.
Sept. 25, 2023
Fifty years ago, a violent coup cut short one of the boldest tech experiments in history: the attempt to run the entire economy of Chile from a single computer.
Sept. 21, 2023
Call it the ‘Isaacson Accord’: the agreement behind Walter Isaacson biographies, including ‘Elon Musk,’ to leave the assumption of difficult genius untouched.
Sept. 11, 2023
Is it foolish to believe that authors should resist having their works used to train AI without getting paid for it? Stephen King thinks so, but he misunderstands some important history.
Aug. 31, 2023
Apple, a potent foe of legislation backing consumers’ right to fix their gadgets, is suddenly an ally: It has come out in favor of California’s SB 244.
Aug. 25, 2023
If you post images or words to a public-facing platform or website, chances are that information will be scraped by a system crawling the internet for AI firms.
Aug. 16, 2023
Social media is dying after the implosion of Twitter. Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are trying to replace X but are coming up short. Maybe that’s OK.
Aug. 7, 2023
The bizarre renaming of Twitter is the latest and most pointed example of how Silicon Valley is losing touch with reality.
July 26, 2023