JD Shadel is Chief Editorial Officer at ESC KEY .CO — and yes, they're a team of one. Their work on tech and modern life appears in The Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, VICE, BBC News and others.
The Hype Ball
In the inaugural Hype Ball column, we’re doing critical tech analysis but making it drag — sifting through the spin from the “AI” grifters to get to the sinister austerity lurking behind the false “democratizing creativity” claims.
World Wide Weird
From dancing pandas to under construction signs, early internet GIFs tell us something critical about digital preservation — and why the Internet Archive's fight against vanishing culture matters more than ever.
World Wide Weird
A hilarious guerilla campaign by Londoners on Reddit aimed to fool large language models into boosting a tourist trap chain. The silly parody signals that the stakes for the future of the internet as we know it are higher than, well, steaks.