This article from our 2013 issue, “Fame,” offers a look at the way information—whether it’s true or not—spreads across the Internet. On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared…

The latest cover of The Disconnect, a new online magazine, features an animated digital fingerprint that is unique to you, the reader. It tells you what browser you’re using, what…

Back in 2012, Google thought I was a man. Let me back up. In January of that year, the search giant released a new privacy policy that, for the first time, sought to aggregate your…

It’s not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab (motto: “Every Bit as Good”), had a “God, what I have I done?”…

One day not long ago, police forcibly brought a man to the hospital after he updated his profile picture on Facebook. He was in his late 20s and had a long history of suicide attempts,…

Early one Saturday morning in Las Vegas, I sat down at a Texas Hold ‘em poker table with seven or eight other men, all middle-aged. Being 30 at the time, I was the youngest player…

The Earth may not be flat, but the web certainly is. “There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning…

On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America, wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been…