The Decade Tech Lost Its Way
An oral history of the 2010s
The Decade Tech Lost Its Way
An oral history of the 2010s
As told to The New York Times
When the decade began, tech meant promise — cars that could drive themselves, social networks that could take down dictators. It connected us in ways we could barely imagine. But somewhere along the way, the flaws of technology became abundantly clear. What happened?
The people who brought us this decade explain: Mark Zuckerberg, Edward Snowden, Ellen Pao, Phil Schiller, Kevin Systrom, Brianna Wu, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Mike Judge, Jonah Peretti, Diane von Furstenberg, Alex From Target — and many more. (People’s titles in the interviews below, which have been edited for clarity, reflect the roles they had at the time.)
As told to The New York Times
Design and development by Antonio de Luca and Gray Beltran. Additional design and production by Alana Celii, Dave Horn, Sam Manchester and Anushka Patil.
Credits: Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times; Andrew Kelly/Reuters; Photo by The Guardian via Getty Images; Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency; Jim Wilson/The New York Times; Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press; Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
Google pulls out of China
As told to Nicole Perlroth
A sophisticated Chinese cyberattack, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes, prompts the search giant to withdraw from the country. Google’s decision reshapes the global internet, with China developing its own closed-off version of the web.
Heather Adkins, Google’s director of security: We were not trained to think about spies. At first, we thought, “This is an employee gone rogue.” But the speed was the first tip-off. Whoever this was, they were clearly practiced.
Eric Grosse, Google’s director of information security engineering: Within 24 hours, this one little thread had turned into the fastest cyberattack we’d ever seen. We set up a war room in a small conference room, but then we had to open a second, and a third. Sergey Brin, our co-founder, was coming around constantly.
Ms. Adkins: It was clear we weren’t the only ones who were hit. We made hundreds of calls to warn the security teams at other companies.
Mr. Grosse: You could hear someone’s face going white across the phone line.
I always thought militaries were not allowed to hack civilians in peacetime. Or that they never would, because the backlash would be so severe. But it became the new international norm.
(These interviews were conducted in 2016.)
As told to Nicole Perlroth
Steve Jobs unveils the iPad
As told to Brian X. Chen
Following the iPhone’s success, Steve Jobs introduces Apple’s next mobile computing device: a touch-screen tablet.
Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing: It all stems back to Steve returning to Apple in 1997. Apple had a lot of stuff going on, and he refocused Apple on the Mac and tried to save Apple by doing great computers again.
The project started being about, “O.K., what is a future computer device that can be under $500, that is something we’d be proud of, that has Apple quality and an experience we’d love?” Very quickly, the team and Steve came to, “Well, if we’re going to get to a price point like that, we need to remove things aggressively.”
So no more clamshell, no more separate keyboard. Therefore you need to be able to type on the screen.
And so the team started working on multitouch technology. During that process, a human interface designer, Bas Ording, showed us this demo where he pretended to scroll and the whole screen moved up and down with realistic physics. It was one of those “holy crap” moments.
In parallel to all this, iPod had taken off. We knew there was risk that one day a cellphone could play music, that you wouldn’t carry two devices, you’d carry one. We wanted to take care of that ourselves and solve that. So we decided we needed to do a phone, a phone that could also replace iPod.
Somewhere around the time that we were doing the second-generation iPhone is when we said, “O.K., now iPhone’s up and running.”
When we got back to iPad, it was really easy to imagine what to take from iPhone and what needed to be different to create the product it would be. It really helped.
Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal:
It was just Steve and me in his living room. It was a large house, but it was not a mansion. You can imagine somebody with a lot less money owning that house.
We were sitting on the couch, and on the coffee table there was something covered in black cloth.
At some point he pulls the cloth off, and it’s the iPad. He pulled it off the stand and he lovingly started to show it to me. And eventually I got to hold it and play with it.
I try never to be positive or negative until I have actually tested something. But I was impressed. I was impressed with the thinness of it. In particular, he was careful to show me how it wasn’t just a big iPhone.
Then what really impressed me was the price. He asked me to guess. I guessed $999.
He gave me this wicked smile, and he said, “You’re going to be really amazed if that’s what you think. It’s way lower than that.”
I said, “Well, how much?” He wouldn’t tell me.
It was $499. I’m sure that it was also stunning to the competitors.
As told to Brian X. Chen
Social networks fuel the Arab Spring
As told to Nathaniel Popper
The Arab Spring is a high point in optimism about the organizing power of technology. A Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Said,” named for an Egyptian killed by the police, becomes an icon of the movement against the region’s autocratic governments.
Wael Ghonim, a Google executive in Dubai: I was in my study, and I saw a photo of a corpse. I just started crying.
I was the head of marketing for Google in the Middle East. I was thinking that the internet is a tool for empowering people. I thought, O.K., maybe create something that is as simple as “We’re just one.” Instead of “We’re going to have revenge,” it’s like, “We could be all in that same position.” On the first three days, the “We Are All Khaled Said” page had 100,000 likes.
The resignation of Tunisia’s president is a turning point in the Arab Spring. Shortly afterward, Mr. Ghonim travels to Egypt to join the street protests.
The best moment I had was his apology video. Oh, my God, I kept playing that video. Because it was the first time I’m seeing an Arab leader in fear of his own people.
I had to go to Egypt — there was a call for a revolution. I cannot be sitting at home in Dubai. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up. I went to meet a fellow Googler who was visiting, but after, people — I don’t know who — kidnapped me off the street. They took me out of my shirt, beat me up, covered my eyes and then I went blind. I was just thinking about my family and my daughter and my son.
The government closed Facebook for a couple of days. But they couldn’t afford to keep it closed, because of business. When you turn off the internet right now, you’re turning off the economy. There is no system that can survive anymore without the internet.
Hosni Mubarak — Egypt’s former president — was forced to step down. It was not his choice. And I was like, “Oh, my God, Facebook is changing the Middle East.”
Mr. Ghonim has since changed his mind about the utility of social networks.
I always thought that the tool could be used for bad, because I’m not that naïve.
The system of Facebook is a mobocratic system — if there is a mob of people and they are all organized around liking content, the content will get massive distribution. The editor became dumb software that just optimizes for whatever sells ads.
I’m still using it. I have started inviting those people who hate me to Facebook Live, and just have lovely discussions with them.
As told to Nathaniel Popper
Instagram explodes onto the scene
As told to Mike Isaac
Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs start a photo-sharing app that quickly becomes a sensation, spawning thousands of subcultures and Kardashian selfies.
Kevin Systrom, co-founder: I wanted to make a massive multiplayer game, where you would check in at a location around the city — at a cafe, a bar, a park, whatever. But as I started to show it to people, it was clear that they didn’t actually want it to be a game. They just wanted to check in and share what they were doing.
I stopped working on the game part, and it just became a check-in app. And that’s where Mike and I first connected.
Mike Krieger, co-founder: I got super into it because it wasn’t just “Oh, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” It was “I’m here, and here’s a photo.” And that sounds like a small detail, but actually it made the whole product way more interesting.
Mr. Systrom: Steve Anderson, the venture capitalist, said, “Hey, here’s $50,000 — except the only way I’m going to do this is if you find a technical co-founder.” And Mike was like, “Count me interested.”
Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger begin to work on an app called Burbn.
Mr. Krieger: We had the fateful Blue Bottle meeting. We had a coffee catch-up with Ronny Conway, another venture capitalist, showing him what we’d been working on. And it wasn’t anything he said — I think it was this look on his face. You could tell he felt we didn’t have a clear conviction on what we were building. We needed to make a major change.
Mr. Systrom: We sat down, and we were sulking. I said, “Let’s write out what people like most about the app.” I think plans were one of the features, and check-ins and photos. Then we crossed off check-ins and plans.
Mr. Krieger: We had a one-week break because Kev had his first vacation in I don’t know how many years.
Mr. Systrom: My wife and I went to Todos Santos, Mexico, which was the cheapest Mexican vacation we could find that was nice. We were walking on the beach, and I was asking her, “Hey, do you think you’re going to use this app?”
And she said, “Well, no, because all your friends take such good pictures.” I said something like, “That’s just because they filter their photos.” She said, “O.K., you should probably add filters, then.” And I was like, “Oh, my God.”
We launched in October. That first day, we had 25,000 people sign up.
Mr. Krieger: And it just started to grow.
Mr. Systrom: I just remember Mike struggling to keep the servers up. I think we spent the next year convinced we were going to go under.
Mr. Krieger: It’s not an experience that you ever would willingly sign up for, it was so intense. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The learning pace was absolutely unmatched — every single week we were learning something new about running a company or product design or infrastructure or raising money.
The crazy times are all tempered eventually. Your brain probably reprograms it. You look back on it fondly — but it was nutty.
As told to Mike Isaac
Self-driving cars hit the road
As told to John Markoff
Google announces that it is testing a fleet of autonomous vehicles.
Sebastian Thrun, director of Google’s “moonshot” division: The very first self-driving route was from Google to the Shoreline Amphitheater parking lot. We had begun self-driving in that parking lot, but we found that it was used by parents to give their teenagers driving lessons, and so we had to be careful to avoid them.
We hid from the authorities. In multiple instances, police actually pulled us over, and maybe we told them it was a self-driving car. They would stare and ask thousands of questions, but no one ever said, “Is there any issue with safety or legality?”
We didn’t celebrate after the first drive — we were totally heads down. We had signed up to drive 1,000 reference miles. Those were designed by Google leadership to be really, really hard.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders, spent many hours scoping out what looked like the most difficult places to drive on the planet. It was Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles; it was Lombard Street; it was Market Street; it was all the bay bridges; it was through Tiburon and around Lake Tahoe.
The very first course had probably every complication you could imagine. You are on a mountain road. You are driving very narrow lanes. You are driving in city traffic with stop signs and traffic lights and tunnels, and there’s everything. And we cleared it in the middle of the night.
As told to John Markoff
Tech companies get off easy after privacy violations
As told to Natasha Singer
Google agrees to settle federal charges that it used deceptive practices in the rollout of a social network called Buzz. Later that year, Facebook agrees to settle wider charges that it also deceived users.
David C. Vladeck, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission: In 2010, in an effort to directly compete with Facebook, Google tried to roll out Buzz. They made some serious mistakes. Google users who had signed in were basically encouraged to go to Buzz, and if they went to Buzz, things like their contacts would be disclosed. So if you were a psychiatrist and had a bunch of patients on your contact list, that well may have been shared.
Google did a good job deflecting it by being contrite. But there were a lot of people whose lives were seriously impacted.
What Google did was really bad. But in some ways, what Facebook did was even worse.
Facebook was all about sharing information and allowing third-party apps to have access to its site, to make it more interesting and promote growth. And they were very successful. The problem was the user was told that the app would only be harvesting data needed for the functionality of the app. But the apps would be taking lots of personal information.
Facebook was acutely aware of what was going on. There were records.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, came in and tried to basically say: “We care about privacy. We think we’re protecting privacy. We think we’re doing a good job.” That may well have been Facebook’s perception. It was just completely at odds with what we thought.
The consent decree was constructed to send a signal to Facebook that it really had to clamp down. Obviously, the company didn’t take that very seriously.
I regret not having done things differently. We struggled with the reporting provisions of both consent decrees. This may have been a failure of our imagination. The idea of privacy audits was floating around, but there were no templates. There was no model to use.
We did what we could, with biannual privacy assessments. But they turned out to be wholly insufficient. And in hindsight, that to me is the Achilles’ heel.
As told to Natasha Singer
Siri says hello (and much more)
As told to John Markoff
Apple introduces a new way to control iPhones with speech.
Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri, a start-up acquired by Apple: When it came out, I went with a group of Siri employees to an Apple store to see what the vibe was. They had set up this plasma display on the front wall, just to the right of the door, showing Siri. I got these chills down my spine.
Usage started going viral — I think it was two orders of magnitude more than marketing had predicted. I mean, every late-night TV host was having a segment about Siri.
The usage spikes were overwhelming because speech recognition is a challenge. You know, there’s only so much you can do when you get a million simultaneous requests. We were literally sleeping on army cots in the hallways of Apple trying to keep everything stable and scaled.
Ultimately, I think we showed the world two things that they didn’t know before: One is that it was possible. The challenge of being able to understand speech — I don’t think most companies at the time, Google and others, thought you could really do it at that scale. It’s like a diver in the Olympics who does the first quadruple flip. The second thing we showed was that users would like it, that this was an appealing interface concept.
Many times Steve Jobs is attributed with having reinvigorated or reinvented fields, like Pixar with movies and computing itself with the graphical interface. Well, you can also say that Steve Jobs reinvigorated the field of artificial intelligence. Steve was the first to go out and put A.I. back in the marketplace.
As told to John Markoff
The Tim Cook era begins at Apple
As told to John Markoff
Steve Jobs, the company’s visionary co-founder, dies at age 56 of complications from pancreatic cancer. His longtime No. 2 becomes the public face of the company.
Regis McKenna, who was involved in Apple’s creation in 1976: Steve’s death was the moment the Tim Cook era began. It was a really rough beginning, because Tim had no credibility in the community or the public. There was a lot of noise out there that Tim wasn’t a product guy — he was a process guy — and that he just didn’t have the creativity that Steve had.
Tim’s response was, “I’m not Steve Jobs. I’m not going to try to be Steve Jobs. I’m going to be me.”
When you sat in a meeting with Steve, he dominated, and he would tell you to shut up and let someone he wanted to hear from talk. Tim was completely the opposite. He listened to everybody no matter what you had to say, and he would come back to challenge them on things. There was a lot more openness and freedom to bring new ideas to the surface.
As told to John Markoff
Lyft grows a mustache
As told to Kate Conger
Drivers for the ride-hailing start-up place pink, furry facial hair on their cars. In cities across the country, they become a conspicuous symbol of the arrival of the gig economy.
John Zimmer, co-founder and president of Lyft: People are normalized to get into a car that is yellow or black because that’s been known to have some sort of regulation behind it. So we needed to create a Lyft. And that was the mustache.
I just thought it was funny. There were a lot of logistics in the early days — getting enough mustaches. We would drop-ship them to other cities.
It was meant to be a few weeks of a launch tactic. And it lasted probably a little over three years. The thing that has remained is the color. The logo was originally green, so when the mustache was retired, the color pink lived on — and it does today.
The original tagline for Lyft was “Your friend with a car.” Now, here we are billions of rides later. You know, 10 years ago, no one believed this was going to happen.
As told to Kate Conger
Facebook goes public
As told to Erin Griffith
Eight years after its birth in a Harvard University dormitory, the social network raises $16 billion in an initial public offering.
Paul Madera of Meritech Capital, an early Facebook investor: Mark Zuckerberg did want to wait to go public. Facebook didn’t really need the notoriety and the validation that going public adds. It was already a household name. Users certainly knew it. There wasn’t going to be a coming-out party in the way that other companies get when they go public.
But there was still tremendous naïveté on the part of the company. Part of that was fueled by adulation in the press and adulation from users and the expectation that Facebook could do everything right.
A few days before the I.P.O., this concern over the move to mobile had come out. It was not clear that Facebook had yet figured out the optimal product to offer on mobile.
On the eve of the offering, Facebook employees hold a hackathon at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The next morning, Mr. Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq’s opening bell from the Facebook campus.
The sun had just come up. Thousands of Facebook employees gathered around the senior team, along with the head of the Nasdaq. This big Nasdaq button was right on the stage. There was tremendous excitement.
I remember walking through, shaking hands, lots of congratulations around the campus and then leaving to come back to the office and sitting down — and recognizing that the stock still had not started trading. As the day went on and it took longer, I’m starting to wonder what had happened.
Nasdaq had a trading glitch. That caused the panic. And that generated more fear. We priced it at $38, and it immediately dived. The banking team misread the demand.
As told to Erin Griffith
Google Glass walks the runway
As told to Vanessa Friedman
The designer Diane von Furstenberg’s spring-summer fashion show features models in a special accessory: futuristic spectacles that can record video and display data. The devices are a pet project of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Ms. von Furstenberg: In July 2012, I was at Sun Valley at the Herb Allen conference and I saw Sergey, and he was wearing these funny glasses.
At some point in the conference, Sergey called me behind a screen and showed me these glasses and explained that they were like a little video camera. And I said, “Oh, that’s really wonderful.” And he said, “But you can’t tell anyone.”
Then I invited him and Anne Wojcicki, who was his wife then, to come to my fashion show, because they had never been to a fashion week. The next month I got a call, and it was Sergey, and he said, “How about if we show Google Glass for the first time on the runway?”
I thought that was a really cool idea. Then I had to sell it to my team, who weren’t convinced. They said, “What do you mean? I don’t like it. I wouldn’t wear those.” But I said, “Don’t you understand? This is technology. You can’t look at them as glasses.”
We ended up putting them on a few of the models, on a makeup artist, on a few people backstage, and I wore them, and my head designer wore them.
To tell the truth, I was a little concerned about having the battery pack on my temple because it was very close to the brain, but I was also super excited. It was a big deal for me: I was doing a collaboration with Sergey Brin.
When we came out to take the bow, Sergey was in the front row, so I just pulled him up to join us, and we walked the show together.
As told to Vanessa Friedman
Edward Snowden blows the whistle on the N.S.A.
As told to Nicole Perlroth
The Guardian newspaper begins to publish articles revealing secret government surveillance programs, based on classified documents stolen from the National Security Agency. The source, Edward J. Snowden, is a former government contractor.
Mr. Snowden: I discovered that during my time in government, the abuse of secrecy privileges was corrupting the incentives that were meant to ensure fair play by those who wielded the most power in society.
In the absence of public scrutiny, because no one knew what was going on, institutions — both governmental and corporate — realized that even the gravest forms of misconduct had few consequences.
I ended up being one of the few people who really saw how everything fit together into a larger machine. And ultimately I found myself directing the use of that machine. I sat at a terminal, from which I had practically unlimited access to every man, woman and child on earth. Among these people were 323 million of my fellow American citizens.
I had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution as a condition of my employment with the government. So I felt obligated to do what I could to reveal it. But because the problem was broader than one single particular surveillance program, this meant that I’d also have to be blowing the whistle on the larger system of secrecy.
My hope wasn’t to change the government, or industry, or anything else, but to help the public to understand what was going on. It was about democracy. It was about how the public lost their seat at the table of government because they were not permitted to know.
As told to Nicole Perlroth
Protesters block the Google bus
As told to Nellie Bowles
Frustrated with big tech companies’ domination of San Francisco’s economy and culture, activists obstruct the charter buses that shuttle workers from the city to Silicon Valley.
Leslie Dreyer, organizer: Rents kept going up. People kept getting evicted. It was really every party you would go to — at every event, people would be talking about folks they know losing their housing. And the most visible thing on the streets was the Google bus, which was using all of our public bus stops.
We set up a fake city agency, the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency, sort of mocking what the city should be doing — suggesting that the buses should follow the law and that the city should ticket them every time they stopped in a bus zone.
It’s a tactic that worked. It was open for anyone to do. These tech campuses — most of them are an hour, an hour and a half away, so the buses were the one thing in our city that we have access to that we can physically take action and block. That’s why it worked so well.
As told to Nellie Bowles
Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post
As told to Karen Weise
The founder and chief executive of Amazon, buys the newspaper for $250 million — giving one of the country’s richest people a powerful perch at the top of traditional media.
Erik Wemple, Post media critic: My family had a cottage on a lake in the southern Adirondacks. I got an email saying there’s an important company announcement. So I get on this call, and there’s Don Graham, the owner, saying, “I’ve sold The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos.” And all I remember is, “Whaaaaah” — this huge gasp in the room.
There was this space we had our town hall meetings in, and it had this carpet and was kind of dingy. It was like a sensory deprivation chamber. There were no windows. It was the perfect place for a gasp to take over. It was as if this entire work force had been punched in the gut. It was unthinkable that Don Graham would ever sell The Washington Post, period. On some level, I was like, Yes, this makes sense. This is an owner’s act of love.
Bezos buying The Post is a public service. The history of media is filled with billionaires and titans and industrialists who — at least with respect to newspapers in the 20th century — were in it for the business, in it for the buck, but also to curry favor too, to run an editorial page that would align with its business interest. When the internet came, it became a much less optimal business.
I don’t recall ever having extensive discussions about Jeff Bezos with anybody at The Post prior to the sale. There was a journalistic thirst to get this fellow in front of us and ask him questions. He came to Washington a month later and appeared in the same place.
I asked him why Amazon was stonewalling journalists. He said, “I’ve always felt that the most powerful minds in the world can hold powerful inconsistencies.”
As told to Karen Weise
Red-hot start-ups get a nickname: Unicorns
As told to Erin Griffith
Aileen Lee, a tech investor at Cowboy Ventures, coins a term with a blog post titled “Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups.”
Ms. Lee: At the time, most people were not being very analytical about the venture industry. I had a new fund and no portfolio companies. So I felt like, O.K., I’ve got an open dance card. Let me see if I can do some analysis.
I was writing a blog post about public or private companies that were less than 10 years old, that had been venture-backed and that were worth over $1 billion. It’s just a really long phrase. I guess “unicorn” is a really convenient term, right?
Alfred Lin, venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital: It was stunning to me how quickly some companies’ equity valuations climbed to that level.
Scott Sandell, venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates: We invested aggressively at that time. There were groupings of companies that were growing astronomically in every way that matters. We weren’t the only ones — lots of people saw it.
Mr. Lin: The psychology of being a unicorn had power. It was easier to market the company to recruits, business partners and new investors. Even if you were rational about your valuation, you couldn’t ignore market forces and how your competitors were operating. Founders and investors started to believe the last valuation of the company was its real valuation.
Mr. Sandell: In some cases, the private market valuations got ahead of the public market valuations.
Mr. Lin: When Aileen came up with the term, there were only about 40 unicorns, so the term seemed appropriate at the time. Today, there are over 500, so the term seems less pertinent. It gave some founders something to strive for, but in retrospect, it’s a vanity term and a vanity metric.
Ms. Lee: It’s wrong to pursue as an end goal. Being called a unicorn is just one part of your job. But it’s not your job.
As told to Erin Griffith
TikTok plays its first notes
As told to Raymond Zhong and Paul Mozur
A lip-syncing app called Musical.ly debuts, quickly attracting a huge and youthful audience. The app is later bought by the Chinese social giant ByteDance and becomes known as TikTok.
Alex Zhu, co-founder of Musical.ly: Initially, the company had nothing to do with music and entertainment. We built the company to do something revolutionary for education: “Let’s make an online course as short as possible. Three to four minutes.” It turned out to be an absolute failure. No retention, no downloads.
The failure told us several things. To build a community where users are generating the content, three to four minutes is not short enough. It has to be seconds.
Maria Shabalin, a teenager with more than two million TikTok fans: I started on Musical.ly at the end of the summer before I started eighth grade. And by the time I was two weeks into eighth grade, I already had a video that went viral in a couple of hours.
I don’t remember the song exactly. But I remember I was singing with my cat and my dog. I had a guitar. I was lip-syncing, and they made cameos.
After that, I just started posting more and more. Definitely multiple videos per week or even per day, sometimes two per day.
Mr. Zhu: We spent a lot of time studying Instagram, because the logic is very similar in several ways. For Musical.ly, it’s kind of like making music as a filter. Everyone can create interesting enough content based on music, just like everyone can post interesting enough photos using filters.
Ms. Shabalin: After I had hundreds of thousands of followers, people would recognize me on the street. But as it turned out, it became such a big part of my identity that I lost myself a little bit on the way. There was a part of the app, like a chart that would rank the influencers. And I remember checking it and thinking, “Why am I not on the top? What do I have to do to get to the top?”
By the middle or the end of ninth grade, I sort of, in a way, broke down. I kind of lost what I believe I previously had — that energy that people enjoyed. And one day, it just clicked: Maybe I should be spending less time on the app and more time in the real world.
(The interview with Mr. Zhu took place in 2016.)
As told to Raymond Zhong and Paul Mozur
‘Silicon Valley’ premieres in Silicon Valley
As told to Nellie Bowles
A biting satire of the technology industry debuts on HBO.
Mike Judge, co-creator: I think the very first time we played in front of an audience was in Redwood City, Calif.
Alec Berg, showrunner: I don’t think anybody booed.
Mr. Judge: Elon Musk was kind of glaring at me afterward, but then later he came around to liking the show.
Mr. Berg: I remember one of the early episodes airing and Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, started tweeting quotes from it for like an entire day. I think we were all a little bit in shock that somebody who was actually in the business wasn’t tearing it down as an absolute laughable farce.
Like, we went to a bunch of companies after Season 1 and had a bunch of executives say, “We love that thing, how you’re saying on the show that everybody only says, ‘We’re making the world a better place.’ That’s so funny. But we actually are making the world a better place.” They had no awareness.
As told to Nellie Bowles
The ‘right to be forgotten’ becomes law
As told to Adam Satariano
Europe’s highest court rules that people in the region can demand that Google delete search results about them if those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”
Joaquín Muñoz, a lawyer who filed the original “right to be forgotten” case for a Spanish citizen, Mario Costeja: In those years, there was no certainty about what a citizen had to do if he or she found information on the internet about himself or herself that was harmful, or not true, or obsolete. This led me to write an article on my blog, “How to Delete Personal Data From Google.” It was read by hundreds of people — among them Mario.
When Mario brought his case to my law firm, we went to both Google and the newspaper that had published an item that he wanted removed. Both replied that they didn’t consider themselves responsible. So we requested the protection of the Spanish Data Protection Agency, the A.E.P.D. They ruled, then came the appeals, and then the final procedure before the European Court of Justice.
Mario Costeja: I was surprised to beat a company like Google. I had mixed feelings after so many years of struggle. Joy, of course, but at the same time, vertigo for what was coming.
Mr. Muñoz: I found out on the phone thanks to a journalist who was in the chamber while the ruling was read. After this, a crazy number of calls from journalists was unleashed. I realized then the real impact that the case was having all over the world, and the next day, it was on the front page of almost all the newspapers and all over the TV news.
Mr. Costeja: Thanks to this ruling, there is now the right to be forgotten included in the General Data Protection Regulation, with common rules for 747 million people all over Europe.
Mr. Muñoz: I believe that the average citizen is becoming more and more aware of the value of their data and the benefit that large companies make of the information they generate on the internet or social media. Our ruling was one of the first to set limits on a large technology company, which seemed untouchable at the time.
As told to Adam Satariano
Alibaba goes public
As told to Li Yuan
The Chinese e-commerce giant lists its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in one of the biggest-ever initial public offerings, signaling the rise of China’s internet companies.
Duncan Clark, an early adviser to Alibaba and the author of “Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built”: A few days before Alibaba’s I.P.O., I wandered by the Waldorf Astoria in New York to witness the caravan of limos pulling up outside the hotel and this very long line of people snaking up the steps into the elevators to go up to the upper rooms where Jack Ma, the co-founder, and others were making their pitch. It was quite a sight.
I can remember late August in 1999, when I went to the apartment where Alibaba was founded. It was in a new complex in Hangzhou. When you walked into this little apartment, all the shoes were lined up at the door and people were crammed in. Jack had told people he didn’t want them living more than five to 10 minutes away from that apartment.
The internet was pretty new, so it was a really tough slog early on. Jack wasn’t blessed with connections or height or money. But there’s something about his unbelievable determination in the face of crazy odds.
On the day of the I.P.O., Jack was at the New York Stock Exchange at the market open. But he didn’t ring the opening bell. Eight customers of Alibaba rang the bell on the company’s behalf. He’s always been focused on customer first.
As the I.P.O. unfolded, I had the palpable sense of this consumer juggernaut that was being unlocked. 2014 was a very good time for Alibaba to go public — it was two years before the election of the current president of the United States, and only two years into President Xi Jinping’s rule. Looking back, it does seem a little bit like it was a Gilded Age.
As told to Li Yuan
Gamergate shows the internet’s dark side
As told to Kashmir Hill
An amorphous online movement called Gamergate, which ostensibly is about protecting “the historic culture of video games,” takes a disturbing turn. After Brianna Wu, a developer, posts a series of mocking tweets, she is subjected to a terrifying harassment campaign.
Ms. Wu: In July, I had just shipped my studio’s first game, Revolution 60, in which woman characters were heroes the way men usually are. We got rave reviews for a studio of mostly women shipping a very complicated game. And I wrote a piece in Polygon called “No Skin Thick Enough” about what it was like to be a woman in the video game industry and to get nonstop harassment.
Gamergate eventually went after me for standing up for the women who work in games. I got rape and death threats. They threatened to kill my husband, my dog. They did cyberattacks on my company. They ran me out of my home. It was total warfare on my mental health, my reputation and my ability to make a living. The police got involved and eventually the F.B.I. They based a “Law and Order” episode on the death threats I got.
There is an entire generation of people who base their identity on games. People who wear T-shirts with a Nintendo or an Xbox or an NES controller on them. It’s like tribal markings.
When women come into this equation and say, “You need to start thinking about how women are treated in these games, and change that and include us” — for a certain amount of the population, that is incredibly threatening. We are saying that we are going to take away their culture and change it.
To me, it’s very similar to growing up in Mississippi and seeing Confederate flags on people’s trucks. They have that because they’re proud of that culture. Asking people to be more inclusive is a real affront to a certain kind of person.
In the aftermath of Gamergate, there was no shortage of people and institutions swearing up and down that things were going to change. I had two calls with the Obama White House. I said to them and to the F.B.I., “If you don’t act, this playbook is going to catch on fire and it is going to become normalized.”
The simple fact is, if you go on the internet today and you threaten to murder or rape someone, nothing is going to happen. Until we introduce consequences into the equation, the situation is not going to get better.
As told to Kashmir Hill
#Alexfromtarget shoots to stardom
As told to Davey Alba
Alex Lee, 16, is at work at the Eldorado Parkway SuperTarget in Frisco, Texas, when an admirer snaps his photo and posts it online. It immediately takes off and becomes a huge meme.
Mr. Lee: My phone was dead that day. I was working a closing shift at Target, a normal shift, but then one of my friends came up to my cash register and asked for a picture with me. Later, I had another person from my school come and take a picture with me, and that’s when I started to get a little concerned. They were like, “Have you seen what’s going on?” And they showed me Twitter. The original #alexfromtarget picture had maybe 3,000 retweets.
I eventually got my phone charged. It froze as soon as it came on. I had to use my mom’s phone to see what was going on. At that point, I had 200,000 followers from Twitter. Thirty minutes after I got home, Ellen DeGeneres’s team had reached out to my parents to ask me to come film for their show. I wasn’t into TV a whole lot, so I didn’t even know who Ellen was.
I was flying back and forth between Texas and Los Angeles for the whole Ellen thing and afterward as well, for a few interviews. Eventually I had to switch over to home schooling.
I didn’t know that social media influencers were really a thing. And then we had a ton of people coming to us with business ideas to take advantage of the followers — like, making a career out of it.
They were like, “How about you go on DigiTour?” They told me it was a tour where a bunch of social media influencers do meet-and-greets, and do skits onstage. I was terrified to go onstage for the first two shows. We went to a ton of cities; we usually went from West Coast to East Coast. Whenever they would ask me to take a picture to post, they would Photoshop the crap out of it. And I didn’t like it, because that’s not what I look like. So I just never really thought it was authentic.
I had multiple experiences with management teams that just weren’t very positive. I realized I wanted to get away from it shortly after it happened, probably about six months after. I realized it wasn’t for me, but I didn’t want to disappoint the people around me that were saying I should pursue it. And everybody was saying I should continue with it. Then I just woke up one day and said, “This is it. I’m getting off all my social media.”
I don’t know how, but yes, I still get recognized. It happens every few days.
I’m trying to figure out my plans for the future. I’m about to go back to school. I got my E.M.T. certification and personal training certification. But specifically, right now, I’m pursuing personal training. Hopefully, the fire department eventually.
As told to Davey Alba
North Korea hacks Sony Pictures
As told to Nicole Perlroth
The movie studio’s system is penetrated by a group that American officials conclude is a front for Kim Jong-un’s regime. The country appears to be retaliating for “The Interview,” a Sony comedy about an assassination attempt against the dictator.
Michael Lynton, chief executive and chairman of Sony Entertainment: We understood fairly early on — within the first 24 hours — that this was a significant event. The damage was extensive: 70 percent of our computers were down and destroyed, and our email and other information had been stolen. Very quickly, we moved to pen and paper and set up a text chain tree because it was the only way we could run the company.
It brought to public light what a major cyberattack could look like. At the time, we were accused of being lax this and lax that, but soon after, a number of other companies and government agencies were hacked. We were no longer an outlier.
In a first, and very harsh, way, it also demonstrated the capabilities of the North Koreans. It also put a spotlight on what should or should not be on a company’s network, whether it’s health care data or emails.
The attack went off in a big way, and yet we got no support from our fellow movie studios, no support from the mayor of Los Angeles, no support from then-Attorney General Kamala Harris. In a funny way, I don’t blame them because, from a distance, no one really understood how damaging or difficult the situation was.
The attack had eerie similarities to the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. It demonstrated that all you have to do is throw a chair through a window or crack open the safe and the media will do the rest — with all due respect. The looters were waiting with pen and paper in hand.
As told to Nicole Perlroth
Ellen Pao loses her suit against Kleiner Perkins
As told to David Streitfeld
A jury in San Francisco rejects gender discrimination claims made by Ellen Pao, a junior partner at Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capital firm. Prefiguring the #MeToo movement, the case draws attention to the lack of gender diversity in tech.
Ms. Pao: At least until recently, the venture capital industry had a lot of good will. The story was always about how it was trying to change the world for the better, and about it being a meritocracy. That was the narrative in 2012 when I sued.
I wanted the institution to change. It wasn’t “I want more money” or “I deserve a promotion.” It was seeing this happen to all the women on the team. Seeing that nobody was going to get promoted made me realize this is a much bigger thing than me.
The hardest part of the trial was the loneliness. There was a lack of empathy from the industry. I understand why it happened — Kleiner had a huge P.R. team; this was the first time people were really talking about a lot of these issues in tech; there was a lot of skepticism. But the idea you had to take down the person telling the story, the person who was trying to call attention to the problem, was really hurtful.
All that made me unwilling to settle, made me feel I had to move forward. I had to tell the story, because there weren’t many other people in a position to do it.
If I knew going in I was going to lose, I would have taken more risks. I would have brought up the racial issues. But I wasn’t sure some things would resonate. There are small things that happened that aren’t on their own particularly terrible, but the pattern was death by a million cuts — constantly being asked to do the menial tasks, constantly being talked over, constantly being interrupted, constantly having your ideas taken without credit. I see now that this has happened to so many other people — it happens to women as a class, to people of color as a class.
Nearly five years after the trial, I don’t see much change in the venture world. V.C. funding to woman-led companies increased in 2019 to a paltry 2.8 percent. Only 12 percent of V.C. investing partners are women. Less than 5 percent of V.C. investing partners are black or Latinx.
At Kleiner, the publicity from the case damaged the facade of meritocracy, and it changed the perception of their contribution. But they’re still able to raise boatloads of money.
As told to David Streitfeld
Google tags black people as ‘gorillas’
As told to Kashmir Hill
Jacky Alciné, a software engineer in Brooklyn, uploads pictures of himself and a friend — who are both black — to Google’s new service for storing photos and videos. The software labels the images “gorillas.”
Mr. Alciné: I did what I always do when something happens. I put it on Twitter, the world’s largest cafeteria room. And a Google Plus community outreach person reached out right away, asking for access to my account. As far as I know, they wanted to take that set of information to say, “Bad computer. Don’t do that again.” But as I understand it, they just eliminated the tag “gorillas” entirely.
It’s hard to undo data. There is input from a bunch of sources, and you don’t know how the bad data got in, so you’d have to do a lot of tracing and auditing and rolling back. For Google, it’s not cost efficient, I guess, to do all that for one person complaining.
They could have handled it a lot better. Beyond a passive apology, they could have captured more photos of people who look like me.
The labeling technology is ridiculously amazing, at the component level. But at the macro level, this wasn’t acceptable. It was like a 3-year-old made waffles for breakfast, which is amazing, but they burned down the kitchen while they did it, which isn’t great.
As told to Kashmir Hill
Amazon invents a shopping holiday
As told to Karen Weise
Amazon begins Prime Day, a shopping holiday geared toward its members, during the summer sales lull, reshaping the retail calendar.
Jeff Wilke, head of Amazon’s consumer business: In October 2014, Jeff Bezos sent me an email that basically said, “How can we have a big annual sale called Prime Day, and only Prime members would be eligible?”
We gave it a project code name, as we often do. This one was called Project Piñata. Few things bring as much joy as a piñata.
We have a process to crystallize any new thing that we’re inventing, where we write a press release that you think you would show the world on the day of launch, and then you work backward from that press release. Around the middle of November, in 2014, I had a consumer leadership team meeting to review the press release that describes what we expected to launch as Prime Day, seven months in the future. In this case Project Piñata was a deal day and would be timed with our 20th birthday.
The first concern I had was whether we would be able to source enough inventory and deals in July. Vendors and manufacturers are all keyed up to source terrific deals in November and December. But it’s a different story to do a sale where there hasn’t been one before in July.
And I was worried about the technology behind the website. We knew we would get pounded with traffic in a successful sale, and it had to work.
Fast forward to January. We had our first meeting with Jeff Bezos. His feedback was, “Don’t make this convoluted. Prime Day needs to mean one thing, and we have to do it really well.”
In a box in an appendix, we said we want to have the largest selection of deals, more deals than Black Friday, which meant more than 10,000 deals. And he had boxed that in on his copy of the press release and said, “We have to do that.”
On the day itself, we watched the events circle the globe. We started in Japan, and we ended in the U.S. We knew fairly early on, especially with the response we got in Japan, that Prime Day was going to be very successful.
I gave a pep talk in this command center that we had, and I told them, “Twenty years from now, you guys will be reflecting back on this and realize you changed the course of retail.”
As told to Karen Weise
Theranos begins to unravel
As told to Natasha Singer
The Wall Street Journal publishes an exposé of the medical start-up. Founded by Elizabeth Holmes, it claimed to have developed technology that could run more than 200 different diagnostic blood tests using a few drops of blood.
John Carreyrou, Journal reporter: In early 2015, I didn’t understand everything yet. But I already understood, after a first phone call with a source, that the Theranos machine didn’t work.
That’s one reveal. The second reveal is that the machine wasn’t even being used by Theranos, except for about six tests. And No. 3, for many of the other tests, they were using a conventional blood-testing machine that they had hacked — a machine made by the German conglomerate Siemens that you find in many labs throughout the world. One of the main modifications they had made is that they diluted the blood to create more volume so that the Siemens machine would accept it.
It dawned on me that this wasn’t just a young entrepreneur who would lie to investors and her board about where she was with her technology. It was a medical fraud. This was a company that had gone out and put public health in jeopardy.
Ana Arriola, Theranos executive: Our mechanical engineer told us he had been trying to get information to the company’s leadership that the device we had embedded in University of Tennessee oncology blood trials was defective.
So I went to Elizabeth. She basically turned to me and said, “You don’t understand. We’re on the precipice of becoming incredibly disruptive within this industry. We have every biopharmaceutical manufacturer in the world on board to use this in their pharmaceutical trials. We cannot disrupt this right now.”
Erika Cheung, Theranos lab assistant and whistle-blower: I was in charge of validating the Edison device, which was Theranos’s proprietary medical device and diagnostic unit, to make sure that it had good accuracy and very good precision. They were tampering with the data to have us get as good a precision on the Theranos device as we would have seen on an F.D.A.-approved machine.
After the article is published, Ms. Holmes denies wrongdoing.
Mr. Carreyrou: Elizabeth came out swinging, and she was incredibly confident and assertive. And so there was a period of weeks, if not months, where some people weren’t sure what to believe.
It took the actions of the two main health regulators to make people realize that we had indeed gotten our facts right. The F.D.A. and C.M.S. — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — both launched inspections of the company’s facilities. Their findings showed that basically, this was all one big lie.
Ms. Arriola: It wasn’t until that article came out that I felt vindicated and we, as a collective team, felt like we could start the real transition through dealing with the trauma. A lot of us are actually still processing this.
Ms. Cheung: For me, the biggest thing was when C.M.S. came in. They did an investigation, and they were able to uncover all the deficiencies and put a halt to Theranos processing the patient samples. Once that happened, I was like, “O.K., your job’s done here. You can go to bed at night and sleep.”
As told to Natasha Singer
India bans Facebook’s free apps
As told to Vindu Goel
Regulators block the social network’s Free Basics program, a suite of apps that Facebook had hoped would expand internet access in the country and establish the company as a dominant platform.
Nikhil Pahwa, journalist and activist: For us, this was a fight for freedom: Why should Facebook decide what people can and cannot see?
We worked with a comedy troupe called All India Bakchod to simplify the concepts with a video. We positioned Free Basics as one entity that was impacting the freedom of the internet, and most importantly, calling it the internet when it wasn’t the internet.
We set up a site, SavetheInternet.in, which the video directed people toward, to send comments to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The video just went viral. We were quite enthused about how many people seemed to care about an issue that they had no clue about.
This was the first pushback against a Facebook product anywhere in the world at this scale. This was also Facebook’s first global public policy loss, where they went up against citizens.
What we did has been vindicated by, for example, what we’ve seen subsequently in Myanmar and Philippines — where for most people, Facebook is the internet and its algorithms end up prioritizing content. That is not necessarily good for democracy.
As told to Vindu Goel
A court orders Apple to unlock an iPhone
As told to Jack Nicas
The Justice Department asks a federal court to order Apple to help unlock the encrypted iPhone of the gunman in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., setting off a battle of privacy versus security.
David Bowdich, head of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles office: We received reports of an active shooter, so I went immediately to San Bernardino. There was a device that was found, an Apple phone, and it belonged to the County of San Bernardino. The county said, “You do whatever you need to do with it.”
Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel: We have a hotline that law enforcement can call and say, “We have a phone; what should we do with it?” The first call came in about 3 a.m. the day after the massacre. They said, “What can you do to help us?”
The F.B.I. had allowed the phone to power down and had tried to reset the Apple ID. Both made it almost impossible for any kind of easy access to the data. It was clear there wasn’t going to be any way short of creating a back door.
Mr. Bowdich: We were told, “We’re only going to do what the law requires us to do.”
Mr. Sewell: We’ve been working with the F.B.I. for a long time, and it had always been incredibly civil. But it became clear that this one was different.
The standoff leads to the court order.
Kiran Raj, senior counsel for the deputy attorney general: The F.B.I. had found on the gunman’s Facebook page pledges to Al Qaeda and ISIS. It was an intense investigation.
The shooting took place Dec. 2, 2015. About two and a half months later, the U.S. attorney’s office filed to get the judge to order Apple to unlock the phone.
Mr. Sewell: What the government did was file a very aggressive complaint. It essentially said: Apple is in cahoots with terrorists because they will not help us. It was a smart move by the government, but it was really aggressive.
As soon as we received that, we knew that immediately we needed to start communicating our message. We worked through the night on the statement.
In its statement, Apple says the court order would set a dangerous precedent and put the public’s privacy at risk.
Mr. Sewell: The entire company’s brand was on the line. We had people like Trump standing up on the stump saying, “Let’s boycott Apple phones.” We had people saying Apple’s a non-American company. I was getting calls at my house with people going, “How dare you do this?”
Mr. Bowdich: There are victims on the other end. So I was surprised that we did not receive more cooperation.
On the eve of a March hearing in the case, things turn.
Mr. Sewell: The teams on both sides had moved to the trial site. Then at about 5 o’clock, we got a call from the U.S. attorney saying they had asked to postpone the hearing. They thought they had a way of accessing the phone.
Mr. Bowdich: A company came with a solution. The techs looked at it and said, “You know what? This one works.”
Mr. Raj: The encryption issue is much more nuanced and more complicated than it has been portrayed. Unfortunately, with this particular case, people felt like they had to choose a side.
As told to Jack Nicas
A.I. beats a champion at Go
As told to Cade Metz
DeepMind, an artificial intelligence lab owned by Google, puts AlphaGo, a machine it developed to play the ancient and complex game of Go, up against Lee Se-dol, the best Go player of the decade.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind: At the time we announced we were going to play Lee Se-dol, we were definitely nowhere near strong enough to beat him.
So we were relying on the power of extrapolation and statistics to get us there. We could see the performance curve improving. But you don’t know, right? It was quite a risky thing for us to try. That’s actually why Lee Se-dol wasn’t so worried about it.
The matches are played in South Korea.
I don’t think we quite understood, actually, how big it was going to be in Korea. We knew it was going to be big, and we knew Lee Se-dol was a legend, and I knew that Go was huge there, and I knew they loved A.I. and technology. But we didn’t quite expect it to bring the country to a standstill, which it almost did. Or it felt like it did.
When I got off the plane, there were like 20 reporters waiting for me, as if I was David Beckham or something.
And then there was all the top brass there from Google. We were still quite new to Google at that point. Barely two years in, and we were promising pretty crazy stuff like beating the world champion at Go.
I met Lee Se-dol for dinner with his family on the day before the match started. He’s got this incredible nobility and elegance about him as a human being and as someone who’s mastered an art.
AlphaGo wins the first three games. Mr. Lee wins the fourth and AlphaGo the fifth.
I really felt for him. I felt it would be appropriate if he won a game — for his soul and for the soul of the game. Fortunately, he was able to — and I’m really pleased that it was due to some brilliance from him.
As told to Cade Metz
BuzzFeed blows up a watermelon
As told to Kevin Roose
The website posts a Facebook Live video called “Watch Us Explode This Watermelon One Rubber Band at a Time!” The 45-minute video, featuring two BuzzFeed staff members in hazmat suits stretching 682 rubber bands around a watermelon until it bursts, is a viral sensation with nearly one million simultaneous viewers at its peak.
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s chief executive: The watermelon wasn’t just a weird lark. We built our way toward the watermelon.
The first experiment was when one of our executives was in a meeting, and someone who worked for him put a family of goats in his office, and then started broadcasting on Facebook Live. We saw the number of concurrent viewers go up and up and up and up while people were waiting for the boss to come back. We had this theory that people anticipating something and sharing something together is the thing that was working.
And so the watermelon was designed as a way of testing that theory.
Chelsea Marshall, a BuzzFeed senior writer: At the time, I was writing for the site, and that day, my co-worker was like, “Do you want to explode a watermelon?” I was just, “Yeah, sure, it will probably take like five minutes.” So James and I went and started putting rubber bands on the watermelon.
Mr. Peretti: There was a giddy feeling in the office. All the way up on the 15th floor, you could hear laughing in the canteen a few floors down.
Ms. Marshall: In the middle of it, someone was like, “How many people do you think are watching this?” And I was like, “I don’t know, two? Our moms?” There hadn’t been a huge thing on Facebook Live yet.
Mr. Peretti: They were running around at Facebook trying to make sure they could keep the feed up, because at that point they had never had a live stream with that many concurrents.
Ms. Marshall: We had our hazmat suits on, and goggles, because I had personally never exploded a watermelon before. There were crowds forming around us in the office, but it didn’t really occur to me or James that it was going viral while we were doing it.
It just kept going so much longer than either James or I thought it would. Right before, I think I could tell, “Oh, it’s going to blow up really soon.” And then obviously it exploded everywhere.
Mr. Peretti: It was a more utopian time where people were more optimistic about the future and change, and the world transforming for the better. People coming together to share a moment that was completely nonpolitical, silly, fun, lighthearted — that was pretty typical of the time.
Ms. Marshall: Afterward, my husband had to put Band-Aids on my fingers for me because I couldn’t even bend them. So, I guess if anyone does that again, wear gloves.
As told to Kevin Roose
Moore’s Law ends
As told to Cade Metz
The principle, which refers to a prediction made in 1965 that engineers would pack twice as many transistors onto a computer chip every 18 months, slows. The end comes when Google starts building its own computer chip, called the TPU, because standard chips can no longer keep pace with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who coined Moore’s Law: We ran out of gas sometime during the last decade. We couldn’t continue to shrink things anymore. I have been amazed that the engineers have been able to keep it moving as long as they have.
All of a sudden, the barriers that we were tackling were coming to a fundamental limit. They had to live with the fact that transistors are made of atoms.
That was a prediction that Stephen Hawking made during one of his visits to Silicon Valley. Somebody asked him what the fundamental limits would be. He said the velocity of light and the atomic nature of matter, both of which are fundamental.
John Hennessy, board member of Google: We’re probably about seven to 10 years into a slowdown on Moore’s Law. We’ve strayed away from Gordon’s original prediction. And we’re beginning to see the effects of this.
One complication is energy efficiency. If you think about an Intel microprocessor, it currently generates, let’s say, 135 watts. Imagine something, some tiny object that is about a centimeter and a half on a side, that’s generating more heat than a 100-watt light bulb.
You have to get the electricity in, and then you have to get the heat out. That’s become a major limitation in our ability to build chips, particularly in the mobile space, because you care about battery life. You also don’t want your phone to be so hot that it’s burning holes in your pocket.
Imagine you’re only a little bit behind on Moore’s Law. What would you do? You put more transistors on — perhaps not twice as many as you had in the previous generation, but perhaps 1.5 times as many — and then you’d try to figure out how to use those transistors to make the CPU faster.
The problem is, if you put transistors on that chip and you activate them, you’re going to burn up too much power. You’re not going to be able to get the power out. We have already reached this regime where these things are limiting the ability to use even what remains of Moore’s Law.
Artificial intelligence is also speeding the end of Moore’s Law.
Mr. Hennessy: Why do computers need to be fast? The answer to that is the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Your home speaker, whether it’s a Google Home or an Alexa or whatever, offers speech recognition. The best speech recognition in the world is based on machine learning.
When Google adopted its “A.I. first” strategy, which was probably seven, eight years ago, we quickly did a computation that said that if we were going to use conventional, general-purpose processors, two things would happen. One was: We couldn’t afford the energy. And we probably couldn’t afford to buy all the processors that we would need to do everything we needed to do.
That’s what motivated our thinking with the TPU. We had to think about really trying to improve efficiency dramatically. The result is, you can get about a factor of 100 in terms of computational power per watt of power. That’s like giving you an extra seven years on Moore’s Law.
As told to Cade Metz
Pokemon Go makes the real world a game
As told to David Streitfeld
The app is an instant global hit. In an update of the old-fashioned scavenger hunt, players use augmented reality to capture creatures from the Pokemon video game franchise in the physical world.
John Hanke, chief executive of Niantic, the game’s developer: I grew up loving board games, outside games like tag and cops and robbers, video games like Pong, and everything that came later. I was attracted to the idea of making games as well as playing them. I worked at Google on Google Maps and Google Earth, so I had an opportunity to bring together the map of the world and game playing.
I was also thinking about technology that would be directly beneficial to me and my family. Rather than camping out in front of the TV with my oldest son, I wanted to marry my interest in getting him outside, exploring the places where we lived and at the same time play a game.
Our business plan with Pokemon Go was to slowly ramp up over a period of six months. We immediately surpassed that goal.
The full impact of the game’s popularity hit me when I was on a trip to Japan. I took my oldest son with me. We went to the bamboo forest in Kyoto, a very tranquil place.
Then I got a call from my wife in Oakland, who said, “You don’t understand what is going on with this game. Packs of kids are roaming through the town. All the parks are full.”
Pokemon Go was the first digital game of any kind of scale that brought people together in the real world. It was self-propelling. As people came out to play and saw other people playing, they got even more excited. It was a kind of real-world virality.
As told to David Streitfeld
India gets $2-a-month mobile internet access
As told to Vindu Goel
Reliance Jio, a mobile carrier created by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, begins offering free calls and 1.5 gigabytes of wireless data a day for $2 a month, opening the internet to hundreds of millions of Indians.
Mathew Oommen, executive at Reliance Jio: We sincerely believed India needed a digital revolution and not just another carrier. All the incumbents were quite happy with the high margins from delivering vanilla voice with very high data rates.
We looked at not voice, not just connectivity, but data as the fundamental building block to the new economy. And that’s what got ignored by the incumbents.
One pundit made a statement in June 2016: “There are 25 million 4G phones in India. How does Mr. Ambani plan to reach 100 million subscribers in one year?”
We looked at this and said this was not a lack of demand. This is absolutely a lack of affordable and quality supply.
Jio spent six years building a 4G wireless network, including writing new apps, installing towers in rural areas and designing inexpensive new phones that worked with its technology.
We were doing over 700 towers a day. We introduced the JioPhone. It was a $22 device, but we gave it for $10.
From 2011 to launch, we built connectivity, we built content, we built apps, we built devices, we built programmability with intelligence, because all of these were fundamental building blocks to our platform.
In 171 days, we had over 100 million subscribers — the fastest-growing company in any sector across any technology company anywhere in the world.
As told to Vindu Goel
Facebook helps sway the 2016 election
As told to Sheera Frenkel
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, says the notion that the social network played a role in putting Donald J. Trump in the White House is “a pretty crazy idea.” Russian agents are later found to have used Facebook to spread inflammatory posts.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer: I saw a clip of Mark having that conversation, and it became clear to me that the work that we were doing in the run-up to the vote, and the internal briefings that we were giving a number of executives at the company about what we had found around Russian activity, had not made it up to him.
Zeynep Tufekci, professor of information science at the University of North Carolina: I saw the remark and immediately thought that it didn’t make sense. If you were actually using Facebook at the time, you knew there was a lot of false political stories on it and a lot of misinformation.
Mr. Stamos: At that time, we had a dedicated threat intelligence team whose job it was to track government activity on the platform meant to cause harm. We did not have a team in 2016 dedicated to disinformation, and I’m pretty sure no other tech company had one. And I’m pretty sure that the American intelligence community didn’t either.
Dr. Tufekci: Social media was drowning in these conspiracies. Some of it was just for ad money; some of it we later learned was Russia; some of it were just domestic people doing it for the LOLs.
Mr. Stamos: Mark’s statement set the expectation with the world that Facebook just didn’t care, which is just not true.
Dr. Tufekci: People saw his statement and saw that one of the richest people on earth was trying to wriggle out of his responsibility by making this claim that contradicted everything his company had previously said to politicians, advertisers and businesses about their ability to reach and sway people through Facebook.
As told to Sheera Frenkel
YouTube has a 1-billion-hour day
As told to Jack Nicas
YouTube announces a milestone: People watched more than one billion hours of YouTube videos in a single day.
Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer: Setting a goal of watch time was really around user satisfaction.
Up until then, the visible currency of YouTube was views. That’s how creators measured consumption of their videos. It’s how users understood the popularity of a video. So the shift from views to watch time was really around: How do we move away from something that could create incentives like clickbaity thumbnails to something that was about satisfying our users?
Once the goal was set, it was figuring out a way for our systems to deliver.
Guillaume Chaslot, a Google engineer who worked on YouTube’s video recommendation engine: Basically, we were computing which recommendations people should see. There was a previous algorithm, and we were introducing a new algorithm. In the end, the metric that mattered was total watch time.
Let’s say you like football and you like pizza; then the algorithm is going to infer that you like beer, too. It worked a bit, but the thing that seemed to work the best is to just push in one direction. So if you like video games, you click on another video game video, and we’ll show you more video game videos. But if you don’t like video games, or for some reason you’re not in the mood for watching video games, you have no way of giving the signal to the algorithm.
Mr. Mohan: It became clear that we were moving toward this goal of one billion hours and that we would hit it in a matter of a few weeks. We definitely recognized the milestone. It was something that a lot of people who had been here for years felt proud of achieving.
Mr. Chaslot: We had a huge impact on the world by pushing people in some directions. What seems crazy is that we didn’t even care where we were pushing them because we were just monitoring the watch times.
Some filter bubbles got really toxic. We saw, in particular, conspiracy theories; when you start watching a video telling you the earth is flat, YouTube was recommending hundreds of videos telling you the same thing.
Mr. Mohan: What this milestone, to me, represents is a step along the way, where YouTube has gone from that village to this major metropolis, where not only is it a reflection of what’s happening in the world, it also has this influence on the world. One of the challenges my teams have been working on is how does YouTube live up to that responsibility.
Mr. Chaslot: They’ve changed a bunch of things. In January, they said that they would decrease the promotion of conspiracy theories. That’s a really great improvement, but it’s still far from being enough.
The problem is that the recommendation engine that handles 70 percent of views on YouTube is flawed by design. If the recommendation engine is not even able to understand that the earth is not flat, it’s 2,000 years backward. So why would we want this algorithm to handle all of our political information?
As told to Jack Nicas
Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor calls out Facebook
As told to Nellie Bowles
Roger McNamee, a onetime mentor to Facebook’s chief executive, publicly denounces the social network in an opinion article in USA Today for hurting democracy and spreading misinformation.
Mr. McNamee: I never expected to become an activist. I began my career as a technology investor in 1982. I spent 34 years as a true believer in what technology could do to make the world a better place.
In January 2016, I see things going on in the Democratic primary on Facebook — in Facebook groups notionally associated with Bernie Sanders — that appeared really inauthentic. And then I saw a series of civil rights things starting with Black Lives Matter in March 2016.
Then Brexit hits in June. And that’s when I first realized, “Oh, my God,” the same advertising tools that make marketers so successful on Facebook can be used to affect the outcome of an election, and that’s when I freaked out.
Mr. McNamee is invited by the technology journalist Walt Mossberg to write an opinion article for the tech news site Recode.
Instead of publishing the op-ed, I sent it to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. That’s Oct. 30 of 2016. So that’s when I go to them and say I’ve written this draft op-ed that basically says I believe that the algorithms and business model of Facebook, as well as the culture, are allowing bad actors to harm innocent people.
I spent three months pleading with them to do everything in their power to protect users from this. And I failed.
I might have said it was somebody else’s problem. But for whatever reason, I chose to look at it a different way. I had helped Mark keep the company independent, and I’d helped to bring Sheryl in. And for three years I advised them. My firm had profited from it.
I never expected to become an activist, and the experience itself has been depressing in the extreme. I’ve worked with most of the companies that I’m now criticizing. I know a lot of the people who work there. I do not think they are bad people, but they have come to believe things that I do not understand.
As told to Nellie Bowles
Fortnite sweeps the world
As told to Kevin Roose
Epic Games releases the free-to-play Fortnite Battle Royale, an online video game in which 100 players compete to be the last one standing. It becomes a global phenomenon.
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a gamer who live-streams himself playing Fortnite: My first game, I was terrible. I didn’t know what I was doing. But it felt like a different, super-unique game right from the start. And as a streamer and a gamer and a YouTuber, when you’re enjoying a game that you’re playing, it really shows.
Once I started averaging like 20,000 viewers on Fortnite, that was when I was like, “O.K., this game is popping off.”
Mr. Blevins learns that the rapper Drake is following him on Instagram.
He followed me on Instagram as @champagnepapi, and I had no idea that it was him. I woke up one morning and started streaming, and my chat was freaking out, like “Drake followed you on Instagram.”
I was like, “All right guys, I’m sure he didn’t.” And I checked, and he did. And I followed him back right away, and I was freaking out. I ran upstairs. I was like, “Jess, Jess, Jess, Jess, Jess, what do I do?”
Jess is his wife.
Do I ask him to play? I’m like, no, I can’t. I have to wait. I’m going to let him message me. And then like two days later he messaged me and was like, “Hey man, you want to play?”
More than 600,000 people watch their game simultaneously.
I really do think it encouraged a lot of athletes and other artists to admit and show their love for gaming. A lot of them started to stream and play with other streamers.
Before Fortnite, gaming was a multibillion-dollar industry, and it’s always been really weird that it was a subculture. But over the last 10 years, especially with Fortnite, it’s just made it so it’s O.K. to be a gamer, right? I mean, everyone games. It’s freaking great, man.
As told to Kevin Roose
Deepfakes stun the internet
As told to Cade Metz
News breaks of a video circulating on the internet that shows the “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother. The video is not real; someone had used artificial intelligence to superimpose Ms. Gadot’s face on the body of a pornographic actress.
Phillip Isola, one of the A.I. researchers who pioneered the techniques used to create deepfakes: In 2011, 2012, deep learning started taking off. The big event was, deep nets could recognize animals in photos.
It took a few years until people started to make systems that could do the opposite: not take an image and recognize that it was a cat, but take the label “cat” and synthesize an image that looks like a cat — the inverse problem. You could make photos of really low-resolution faces.
Very rapidly after that, people were able to use these things for face-swapping and deepfakes and all of that.
The sudden attention catches researchers by surprise.
The technology advanced so quickly right around those years. It went from “O.K., this is a really interesting academic problem, but you can’t possibly use this to make fake news. It’s just going to produce a little blurry object” to “Oh, you can actually make photo-realistic faces.”
It was quite a complicated pipeline to get it to work in that era. But it was really the release of an easy-to-use piece of code that made it so that the internet went wild with it.
Dr. Isola wrestles with the implications.
It definitely raised some concerns, because you get into a lot of difficult problems like “What is our ownership over our public image?” And there’s also the issue that people are not calibrated to know what is real and what is not.
But if we restrict ourselves from working on these tools, we also take away all the positive usages.
As told to Cade Metz
Bitcoin’s spike sets off a frenzy
As told to Nathaniel Popper
The price of the cryptocurrency skyrockets to more than $20,000 on some exchanges — before coming down to earth a few months later.
Brian Armstrong, co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase, an exchange company in San Francisco: The vibe in the office — it was palpable. You didn’t want to even go to the bathroom or go home because you might miss something historic.
There was a day where we had like 50,000 people sign up. That was the highest we’d ever seen sign up in a day at that time. I was trying to get a visual of what that even would look like. The Giants’ stadium in San Francisco holds about 50,000 people, and so I sent a photo of that to the team.
Then a week went by — and then we had a day where 500,000 people signed up in one day.
It was literally just like wartime. You try to make the best decisions you can. You catch a few hours of sleep and come back.
He worries that many people are risking too much on cryptocurrencies.
The prices were kind of getting so it felt like irrational exuberance, like a bubble.
Somebody came to my apartment to deliver a package. And the guy was like, “Sir, I have a question for you. I know that you run this company. Should I be buying Bitcoin right now?” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is super uncomfortable.”
He writes a blog post encouraging people not to get caught up in the hype.
It’s sort of like a love-hate relationship with these kinds of trading things. On the one hand, it’s a huge gift. Because every time it happens, it gets another order of magnitude of people into the crypto ecosystem.
But on the other hand, it’s a little bit of a distraction from the overall potential of what this can really be. It’s much more than just trading some new asset class.
As told to Nathaniel Popper
Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks
As told to Matthew Rosenberg
The New York Times and The Guardian publish articles about how the political data firm with links to Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had harvested personal information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million people.
Aleksandr Kogan, an academic who used a personality quiz to harvest Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica: We were doing the project, collecting the data, and the idea was that there was basically a model where we could pass people’s Facebook data — their pages, “likes” — through and generate predictions about their personalities and their politics.
But along the way we discovered that a lot of this data was not really useful as far as predictive accuracy. Even after delivering the data, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out if there is a way to make it better. We came to the conclusion that the answer is no.
In March 2018, The Times approaches Facebook after reviewing a copy of the data gathered by Cambridge Analytica and documents that showed the social network had sought to ensure the information was erased by Mr. Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie, one of the firm’s co-founders. Facebook had until that point declined to acknowledge that Cambridge Analytica had collected the data.
The Times and The Guardian ran the story on Saturday. But my phone started to blow up Friday night. And the reason was that on Friday morning, Facebook took away my account. I just got logged out.
I asked my wife, “Can you, like, find me?” And she could not find me on Facebook. I was wiped off the planet. We had no idea why.
Then Friday evening, Facebook put out a press release saying it had banned Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Wylie. They said we’d lied and engaged in fraud. So this was Facebook trying to pre-empt the articles The New York Times and The Guardian were about to run. And that opened up the floodgates.
At the time, Mr. Kogan believes that the revelations will not make a ripple.
I thought this was going to come and go: Who’s going to really care? I completely made a mistake. Within a day, I was under siege. I was getting hundreds of emails from pretty much every media outlet in the world.
An old girlfriend of mine recently told me that when this all went down, her friends were coming to her and asking if she realized her ex-boyfriend had taken down the free world.
Tech giants had been running rampant for a decade, two decades, and now folks for the first time really cared. And that’s what I think is the incredible, powerful legacy of Cambridge Analytica. It couldn’t do anything useful with the data it collected. But because of the Trump connection, it did capture people’s imagination.
As told to Matthew Rosenberg
Congress grills Mark Zuckerberg
As told to David McCabe
Facebook’s chief executive testifies before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees about revelations that Cambridge Analytica had improperly used personal data from users’ profiles. It foreshadows other questioning of tech executives.
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, chairman of the Commerce Committee: He came in the day before the hearing. Of course he was very professional, had his team with him and talked a lot about, “We get it. We know we screwed up here and we want to fix it, and we’re going to be a more responsible actor in the space.”
It was just, sort of, to set the stage for what he said the next day.
He’s not a real small-talk kind of guy. We joked a little bit because he was wearing a suit and tie. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in a suit and tie before, so we made some observations about that. He kind of smiled and laughed and said it wasn’t the first time he’d worn a suit and tie, or something to that effect. It was like, “So, where’s the hoodie?”
At the public hearing on April 10, Mr. Zuckerberg says Facebook takes responsibility for its mistakes and will fix its problems.
We’re not exactly sure what he meant by all that, because this is still an evolving story and there’s still a lot of hands to play here. But I think he — at least in that meeting and at the subsequent hearing — was, I thought, very direct, very transparent, and genuinely sorrowful about what had happened and wanted to make it right.
On April 11, Mr. Zuckerberg testifies in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee: We do what we normally do doing these investigations. You send a letter, you ask specific questions, you set a deadline. And like some groups try to do, they send in staff or attorneys. And in this case, they send in staff or attorneys who said, “Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t there then. Oh, I can’t answer that. Yeah, I wasn’t there then.”
They didn’t answer any of them. Because they couldn’t, they said. Because they weren’t there when X happened or Y happened. Well, that just made the case that we better know who was there. And who was in charge. And that’d be Mark Zuckerberg.
After the first break, I went back with him, and we were talking, and he was astonished at some of the comments and opening statements by the Democrats.
Just, “Are they always that way?” Kind of partisan. I said, “Yeah.” It was one of those epiphany moments, I think, for him about where this could all head.
As told to David McCabe
Europe shields personal data
As told to Adam Satariano
The European Union enacts the General Data Protection Regulation, which provides sweeping new rights to keep companies from collecting and sharing personal data without an individual’s consent.
Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data commissioner: We’d had a European-wide data protection law since 1995, but that was before the internet took off, pre the smartphone and pre many of the major apps and platforms that were to come in the 10 to 20 years that followed.
It didn’t address social media and platforms. It was a law that required upgrading so that it could better regulate Big Tech.
Vera Jourova, European commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, and a politician from the Czech Republic: My impression as somebody who lived half of their life in a totalitarian regime was that, in digital, the rights of the individual, and their ability to have under control their privacy, is very limited. I felt like people moved their lives to the digital sphere, but they didn’t bring their rights with them.
With G.D.P.R., I knew we’re doing something really big and something revolutionary. There must be respect of every individual that he or she must have the possibility to be the master of his or her privacy.
Ms. Dixon: In March 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica story broke, it really opened up the minds of the public, politicians and others to the clear dangers of the misuse of personal data. That was a real turning point.
Ms. Jourova: G.D.P.R. is an exercise of rebalancing power. I see it not only in terms of data protection, but also when we speak about the harmful content of the digital industry — distributing terrorist content or child pornography or hate speech or disinformation that has the potential to distract societies and do public harm.
Ms. Dixon: We said you had to really roll back here and start looking at the user at the center of this and what their rights are. It was being taken seriously from the perspective of defending against enforcement action and avoiding fines, as opposed to going back to first principles of protecting user privacy.
Ms. Jourova: We are working intensively on exporting G.D.P.R. We have a deal with Japan now. We are advanced in negotiations with Korea. I was in Latin America some months ago. In Argentina and Chile, they are taking G.D.P.R. as a reference point. I am in intensive talks with some United States partners.
As told to Adam Satariano
Google employees walk out
As told to Kate Conger
About 20,000 Google workers stage protests over how the company has given multimillion-dollar payouts to a former top executive, Andy Rubin, and other senior employees accused of sexual harassment.
Claire Stapleton, a marketing manager at YouTube and protest organizer: The curious effect of the Andy Rubin story was that people started sharing stories of their own disillusionment or difficult experiences that they had had at Google. It was a huge conversation at Google that erupted.
I was closely following how the management responded to it, and I don’t think that they met the sort of primal scream from the employee base with the accountability and urgency that we were asking for. So, I figured, you know what? Let’s just make our voices a little bit louder, and even if we get 200 people to walk out, that would still make a statement.
That Friday night in the office, I sent an email to a group of moms at the company who had been sharing stories, with a link to a Google group for people who wanted to protest. When I woke up on Saturday morning, a couple hundred people had joined.
The idea of the walkout goes global.
Each office had their own rally, their own sort of way of going about it. In Singapore, they met in the cafe; in New York, we met in a nearby park. Mountain View, Calif., the site of Google’s headquarters, was obviously the biggest one, and that was on campus. It happened at 11 a.m. local time, no matter what city or office you were in.
We were waiting in the park there. The park filled up. We had bullhorns, but they were so insufficient to project to the amount of people who came. People were shouting, “Time’s up.” People had signs.
It didn’t necessarily feel like we were burning the place down from the inside. It felt like we were helping the company evolve.
As told to Kate Conger
Meng Wanzhou is detained
As told to Kate Conger
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of its founder, is arrested in Vancouver, British Columbia, while in transit at the airport. Her arrest by the Canadian authorities at the behest of the United States kicks off a tech Cold War with China. Few principals are willing to discuss so sensitive a topic on the record, but the event can be reconstructed from court documents from Canadian immigration officials and law enforcement.
11:10 a.m.: During the disembarkation process border services officer Katragadda intercepted a female Hong Kong passenger Meng, Wanzhou.
He had concerns in regards to her admissibility to Canada. He conducted follow-up questions with her just outside the entry of the jetway.
(Sworn declaration of Officer Scott Kirkland, Canada Border Services Agency.)
1 p.m.: The subject was seeking entry to transit onward to Mexico City. The subject repeatedly asked why she had been selected for secondary inspection, and on this occasion, she had posed the same question to myself.
I asked Ms. Meng what she did for work. The subject stated that she was the chief financial officer (C.F.O.) of Huawei Technologies. The subject stated her father was the founder and current C.E.O. of the company. The subject went on to state that the company sold products in several countries around the world.
I asked the subject if her company sold products in the United States. The subject stated, “No we do not.”
(Sworn declaration of Sanjit Dhillon, acting superintendent, Canada Border Services Agency.)
1:15 p.m.: Ms. Meng tells me she was stopped by U.S. immigration officials in New York four years ago. According to Ms. Meng the immigration officials told her she might have an issue with her visa. The officials took her to an interview room, and looked at her electronics.
(Sworn declaration of Officer Kirkland.)
2:04 p.m.: I have Ms. Meng provide me with the phone numbers for her cellphones.
She provides the PIN number for both phones as well.
(Sworn declaration of Officer Kirkland.)
2:12 p.m.: Talking to Meng in CBSA secondary room.
(Handwritten notes of Constable Dawn But, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.)
2:14 p.m.: So because in the United States, uh, you have committed fraud, uh, we’re arresting you and then you will be sent back to the United States. Right, you.
(Constable But, in a transcript of an interview with Ms. Meng.)
2:21 p.m.: “You’re saying, because of my company, you’re arresting me,” Meng Wanzhou said.
(Constable But, in a transcript of an interview with Ms. Meng)
3:04 p.m.: Cst. Dhaliwal seized (1) Huawei cellphone, (1) iPhone, (1) iPad/white rose gold, (1) pink MacBook, (1) Cruzer Glide 3.0 256 GB.
(Handwritten notes of Constable Gurvinder Dhaliwal, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.)
3:27 p.m.: Talked to company lawyer. Will find her a lawyer.
(Handwritten notes of Constable But.)
As told to Kate Conger
Uber goes public
As told to Erin Griffith
The ride-hailing giant’s initial public offering goes awry when its shares plunge on its first day of trading.
Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures, an Uber investor: Standing on the trading floor, everyone recognized the world-changing impact of Uber. There was a huge feeling of accomplishment. And it was emotional to be standing among many of the people who had worked to get us there.
It was a bit disappointing to open a bit down from the I.P.O. price, in large part because you want to see the new buyers of the stock benefit. You want them to be proud shareholders who feel lucky to be invested. It’s unfortunate they weren’t rewarded in the short term.
I felt relief it was done, joy for what an amazing company Uber had become, gratitude for the whole Uber team. It was an important financing, providing cash for Uber to fund their still-big plans.
Uber’s I.P.O. did affect the other unicorn I.P.O.s this year. It was a reminder to all: Public market investors care about good unit economics and a path to profitability.
As told to Erin Griffith
Antitrust regulators target Big Tech
As told to Steve Lohr
News breaks that the Department of Justice is scrutinizing Google and whether it has used its power in anticompetitive ways, foreshadowing antitrust investigations against Big Tech companies by the Federal Trade Commission, dozens of states and Congress.
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor: We’re witnessing the end of the long antitrust winter. After years of discussing and agonizing and asking whether Big Tech has gotten too powerful, things reached a breaking point this year.
You saw the first official action by federal and state agencies. And the beginning of a national conversation, which is what antitrust does at its best, as to whether Big Tech is too powerful.
There are many historical analogies. Antitrust is one way in which America has conversations about economic power and the size of individual companies. The original conversation on this topic surrounded Standard Oil in the 1870s through the 1890s, and that led to the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The first great trustbusting exercise, which was roughly the first 15 years of the 20th century, was much more extensive than what we’re talking about now. The Gilded Age concern was that nearly every industry had been monopolized. They went after almost every monopoly in the country, and they broke up many of them.
Today, there is a lot of market concentration in industries generally. So why focus on Big Tech in particular?
I think there’s two things. First of all, they’re very visible monopolies and dominant firms. You touch and feel and sense them every day. And second, just like Standard Oil, there’s a sense they have a power beyond our imagination and beyond our tolerance.
It comes not just from market power, but a power over the distribution of information. And from that, some apparent power over elections and how elections are contested. They’re places where people share information, but also political advertising platforms. They know more about you than anyone, including the federal government.
So they have a particularly personal kind of power that I think people feel very sensitive to. It’s almost unprecedented other than in totalitarian societies.
Mr. Wu works on a joint proposal with Scott Hemphill of New York University and Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, to break up the social network. They present it to regulators.
I’ve always felt that Facebook’s acquisitions of its main competitors were exceptionally vulnerable to an antitrust challenge. Standard Oil was broken up because of its campaign to acquire its competitors. So if we wanted to revitalize the law, it struck me that easiest place to start was with Facebook.
The barriers to revitalizing antitrust are inertia and old habits and some degree of fear on the part of government that it will overextend itself. It was not exactly routine, but it was normal for the government to break up concentrated companies for much of its history.
As told to Steve Lohr
Google reaches ‘quantum supremacy’
As told to Cade Metz
The company achieves a technological feat that could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with conventional equipment.
Hartmut Neven, founder of Google’s quantum computing lab: An abacus and a modern digital computer are the same kind of machine. If you have a computational task — let’s say multiplying — they both solve the task with the same steps.
A quantum computer is a different beast. It can solve certain tasks with fewer steps — sometimes exponentially fewer steps.
Sergio Boixo, Google quantum computing researcher: We thought we had achieved quantum supremacy with a data set measured on April 22. The calibration had been steadily improving.
During May, we were performing extensive simulations to check the data. On May 31, a Friday, we got the first results. I was quite dismayed.
By June 13, the preliminary checks looked better than in any previous experiment, so at that point we were pretty sure that we had achieved quantum supremacy. But we couldn’t really rest until we got that email confirming we had new experimental data.
We got an email from a researcher in the quantum lab at 2 p.m. I was elated.
I thought of the time when I first learned about quantum computing in college. I was mesmerized by the possibility that there existed a more efficient way to do computations than what humanity had been doing for more than 2,000 years, since the invention of the abacus. At the time, it was only a theoretical possibility. I thought I wouldn’t see it realized in my lifetime.
As told to Cade Metz
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t fact-check political ads
As told to Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang
In a speech at Georgetown University, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, says his social network stands for free expression and that he will not fact-check for truth in political ads. Mo Elleithee of Georgetown interviews Mr. Zuckerberg after the speech.
Mr. Zuckerberg: Over the last few years, we’ve had to deal with all of these different issues around content and voice, and I realized I never wrote out a full articulation of how I think about this stuff.
Mr. Elleithee, founding executive director of the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service: We were interested in doing a series of conversations on democracy in the digital age. We began soft outreach, and in the course of conversations with Facebook, we got a call from them saying, “We may have something that fits.”
From the second that they told us it was Mark Zuckerberg, we knew this was going to be a big moment.
Mr. Zuckerberg: So basically, the speech kind of breaks out into three sections, and it’s comprehensive. That might just be another word for saying it’s long.
Mr. Elleithee: I met him for the first time the night before the speech, when he came with his team to check out the venue and did a run-through. He gave me a brief overview of what he planned to say to help me think through the Q. and A.
Mr. Zuckerberg: I hope that this is a moment to put our place in history, in perspective, but also to put some perspective around the individual decisions that we make on different types of harm and risks that come up.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on everything.
Mr. Elleithee: The speech was at 1 p.m. the next day, and when I showed up on campus at 8 a.m. there was already a line out the door of students waiting to get in. There were clearly students who had slept there.
Just before Zuckerberg got onstage, I did a walk-through of the room, and I could tell from the beginning that he was going to walk into a room full of skeptics. The room was totally focused on him. You could hear a pin drop.
You could tell he was nervous in the beginning. But as the speech progressed, he got more comfortable.
The students asked tough questions. We must have had 15 cards that wanted to know, from an ethical perspective, how the company saw its responsibility when bad actors used Facebook for genocide. I don’t think he was comfortable with every question, and he didn’t have a good answer to that one.
(Mr. Zuckerberg was interviewed two days before the speech.)
As told to Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang