The future's pretty dumb

There are many, many things to be said about Prince, and many, many people are saying them now. I will leave those tributes to the experts, of course, but plz allow me a brief ode to the man's Instagram account. Consistently original and rarely coherent, PRINCESTAGRAM was a weird Internet gem. Seriously, take a scroll through it. Seems a good/sad requiem.

1. Facebook recently discussed "stopping Trump" -- apparently unaware that they started him. The shallow, kneejerk world Silicon Valley made is also one that guys like Trump thrive in. We can't turn back from that, exactly, but we should think through what it means. We've handed a lot of unseen civic control to Silicon Valley.

2. Amazon says it doesn't care about race, but maybe it should. A new analysis finds that the site's same-day delivery is mysteriously unavailable in many black neighborhoods. That might have to do with income or crime, or concentrations of Prime subscriptions. Whatever the reason, the block-by-block map is raising some suspicions.

3. What our chatbots say about us. Glitchy, unimaginative, often obsessed with selling stuff: If these bots are the future, the future's pretty dumb.

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Postscripts: Crap traps. Manologues. "Rainbow-colored nightmares." The running man challenge is a v. strange affair. How to lobby on Facebook and why e-voting's bad. RIP Cheezburger, mid-aughts feline fad. Wikipedia's dark side; Hollywood's headless women. I don't want a migraine in VR, but ty, Excedrin. Inside Twitter's secret ~social media cabal~ and up close with tech's only girls' club. Last but not lease, this Japanese show will show you the future ... or at least keep you up.

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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