The first time The New Yorker used the rubric “Annals of Technology” was in 1994, in an essay by Nicholson Baker about nail clippers. The piece was informative, historical, poetic—and a touch skeptical. “The market for clippers is apparently unsaturable,” Baker wrote. “This year, millions of men will buy one, as they have for decades, despite the fact that these maintenance tools almost never wear out and are entirely unnecessary.”
Since then, as you may have heard, technology has become an even bigger part of our lives. And the magazine’s coverage of the area has expanded commensurately. There have been major profiles, special issues, and a dedicated blog. The tone of the coverage and the conversation has been inquisitive and healthy skepticism, as opposed to, say, chest-thumpery. How can we understand what’s happening to our world, and how are we supposed to live inside it now? Are the machines that people say matter really the ones that matter? Do we need to disrupt nail clippers? In 2011, George Packer wrote a profile of the venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, which begins with the subject pulling out his iPhone. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he declares. “Compare this with the Apollo Space Program.”
And so, this year, we’re introducing something big: an independent conference, the New Yorker TechFest, where New Yorker editors and writers will talk to the smartest people in tech about what matters in the field. Thiel, who may be the most interesting man in Silicon Valley, will be there to talk again with George Packer. Also appearing will be Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, a company that uses roughly a third of all the bandwidth in the United States during peak hours. They’ll be joined by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, behavioral economist, and author Daniel Kahneman; Tan Le, the C.E.O. of Emotiv, who has built a device to measure your brain waves; and Sean Rad, the C.E.O. of Tinder, a simple but brilliant app for the thing to which we dedicate the most brain waves.
So please join us on October 7th. The conversations will be deep and meaningful, and there will be extensive audience participation. David Remnick will host, and the future will be better for it. The hashtag is #TNYtechfest.
