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If it wasn't apparent that organic food had gone corporate, the sirens clearly sounded this year when the retail behemoth Amazon acquired Whole Foods, which itself had already become an icon of corporatized natural food.
The acquisitions of companies in the organic food business "took off in the '90s but now involve bigger and bigger companies," said Philip Howard, a professor at Michigan State University, who has tracked the consolidation of the industry over the decades.
In 2017, it's rare to find a well-known natural food brand that isn't owned by a huge corporation. J.M. Smucker acquired Santa Cruz Organic in 1989. General Mills bought Cascadian Farm in 1999. In 2011, Coca-Cola bought Honest Tea. And if PepsiCo buying a kombucha maker in 2016 wasn't enough, this past April, the French multinational food company Danone completed its acquisition of the vey company that popularized soy milk with Americans, WhiteWave Foods, aka the maker of Silk milks.
"It is without a doubt a different world," said Tim Sperry, a consultant to organic products companies who has worked in the industry since the 1970s, including several years at Whole Foods.
If the global takeover of soy milk didn't signal the end for the hippies, Whole Foods selling itself to Amazon almost certainly does. And it's just one of several changes shaking up the organic food business as we know it.
Philip Howard / Via philhoward.net
Organic food proponents "had a mission: that Americans would eat better food, would know where it came from, how it was grown, they’d have some assurances of quality food," Sperry said. "We succeeded, big time. More than any of us could have ever imagined." Now, as the folks who kicked off the movement decades ago approach retirement age, "It’s time for us to turn things over to a different [age] group," he said.
For better or worse, Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods means it is now a major player in the organic foods movement.
In truth, Whole Foods was never the brainchild of a stereotypical hippie, crunchy as its tofu ginger rice muffins and kale bouquets may be. The grocer was cofounded in 1980 by John Mackey, an anti-union libertarian who in 2012 voted for Mitt Romney. While Mackey may have a strong counterculture streak, do yoga, and eat vegan, his book Conscious Capitalism also celebrates the "heroic story of free-enterprise capitalism" while asking business leaders to find a higher purpose.
Over the decades, the consciously capitalistic grocer, which went public in 1992, expanded by acquiring local natural foods stores — the kind of activity that opens opportunities for some workers and displaces others. Later mocked as "Whole Paycheck" for its high prices, it eventually became associated more closely with yuppies than with hippies. Perhaps it was fated to join forces with a shrewd business like Amazon.
Whole Foods — despite its position on unions and some complaints that its wages are too low — has made Fortune's list of best employers for two decades straight. Workers are eligible for benefits if they work at least 20 hours per week. Fortune wrote this year, "'Respect' is one of the 'key ingredients' at this famously green grocery chain, which makes employees 'feel welcome,' 'appreciates' their contributions, and pays staffers in stores 'fairly' with gain sharing and bonuses when they come in under budget on labor costs."
Any of this could change under Amazon, whose "bruising workplace" was detailed in a New York Times article. According to former and current employees who spoke to the Times, Amazon's corporate employees battling health problems are put on performance improvement plans, it isn't unusual to see colleagues cry at their desks, and hostile language is a feature of the workplace. (Amazon criticized the Times' portrayal.) Other reporting has also described difficult working conditions at the company's warehouses. The automation-friendly retailer hasn't commented on future employment plans, but it said no layoffs would result from its merger with Whole Foods.
Aside from possible changes to Whole Foods' corporate ethos, Amazon has clear ambitions for food retail, and one area of focus will be lowering Whole Foods' famous prices.
In a statement, Whole Foods said, "Amazon and Whole Foods Market are working together to pursue the vision of making Whole Foods Market’s high-quality, natural and organic food affordable for everyone. Amazon and Whole Foods Market technology teams are working to integrate Amazon Prime into the Whole Foods Market point-of-sale system, and when this work is complete, Prime members will receive special savings and in-store benefits.”
Whole Foods, which has been struggling to compete against the quick spread of organic foods into every other grocery store in America, has picked a partner known for beating its competition on prices. Howard said that, since the acquisition, Whole Foods already has been dropping prices on loss leaders like chicken and avocados, following Amazon's pattern of pricing out competitors only to raise prices again once they're out.
"I don’t know what Amazon is going to do," said Dave Chapman, an organic tomato farmer in Vermont who sells to Whole Foods. "They wipe out a lot of good, smaller businesses because they’re cheaper, and we’re fighting that [trend] in food . . . It’s great that your food is affordable, but there’s always a tradeoff."
None of the locally grown, community-supported values that underpinned the organic food movement seem all that relevant in the matrix Amazon has engineered. A brand's "success or failure at Whole Foods will not necessarily translate to how you do on the internet," Sperry predicted.
And if Whole Foods soared on people's passion for high-quality food, it seems Amazon doesn't always offer the same in its grocery delivery, based on reviews of AmazonFresh, which noted broken eggs, snapped cucumbers, and slimy potatoes. (Amazon did not respond to an inquiry about how it would eventually handle grocery delivery for Whole Foods, which is still done by Instacart for now.) Whole Foods said it has no plans to change its values under its new owner.
And while the acquisition of such a quintessential chain may be symbolic of the evolving industry, the organic food world faces bigger, more troubling shifts yet.
Fraudulently labeled organic food has started cropping up in stores. The USDA inspector general in September said it found weaknesses in the oversight of imported organic produce, and that some may be treated with pesticides at the port of entry but still labeled organic.
And some argue that organic standards are getting watered down as mainstream companies with profit motives — like those that have been making investments in and acquiring organic food makers — become more involved and gain a stronger voice in the industry.
For instance, a brief victory for animal welfare advocates, who at the start of the year pushed through new rules requiring organic chickens to have more access to outdoor space, was halted this month when President Trump's new agriculture secretary proposed to withdraw the rule, due to concerns that it would "hamper market-driven innovation and evolution and impose unnecessary regulatory burdens."
Pioneers see other setbacks too. Some are concerned that this year's decision to permit organic labeling for hydroponically farmed products — meaning plants grown in a nutrient solution rather than old-fashioned soil — betrays the very essence of what organic farmers are meant to do: to work with and protect the soil that grows our food.
Chapman, who lobbied against allowing hydroponics into the organic system, recently said, "It's the corporate takeover of the national organic program that we’re trying to bring attention to, and to stop.”
Right now, it looks like it may already be too late — but the battle isn't over quite yet.
When Twitter debuted its timeline algorithm in February 2016 — which inserts older tweets into your timeline that Twitter thinks you'll like — it promised users the feature would be optional, telling them they could "easily turn it off in settings."
But nearly two years later, it's still impossible to get old tweets off the top of your timeline.
Here's why: While Twitter built an opt-out toggle — available in settings under "Show the best Tweets first" — you'll still see plenty of old tweets in the "In case you missed it" box, which you cannot turn off. Also, old tweets still appear at the top of your timeline when people you follow like them.
In addition to being unpopular with some users, the insertion of old tweets into a timeline can disrupt the fast flow of information that makes Twitter a critical tool during breaking news events and disasters.
Examples of algorithmically inserted tweets that still show up even when "show the best tweets first" is turned off.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It has previously stated its new timeline algorithm is working, citing it as a reason for revenue and engagement growth, and noting that less than 2% of people have opted out.
Still, there's a vocal group of Twitter users who prefer to see the newest tweets up top, and can't stand the fact that Twitter won't let them ignore outdated but popular tweets.
BuzzFeed News was alerted to this frustration after publishing a story about an algorithm test that inserted very old tweets into people's timelines. That story noted the existence of an opt-out option, but users responded saying they'd ticked it off with no success.
Twitter says little about how frequently it inserts algorithmically selected tweets into its timeline, making it difficult to determine if these features are appearing more often.
All the innovations, apps, hacks, habits, gadgets, and robovacuums that made our lives a little better this year.
A few months ago, my girlfriend bought us a Roomba. Well not a Roomba, but the Deebot N79, the robot vacuum that the Wirecutter recommends. My fantasy was that it would be my dog's best friend. I imagined King, who is a 20-pound dachshund mix, going for rides on the Deebot around our small apartment; napping next to it as it charged; nosing it away from hazards. Instead, when we turned the machine on for the first time, King barked at it and ran away. Alas.
What the Deebot is very good for is sucking up King's fur, which is short, black, and gets freaking everywhere. We run it a few times a week, it rarely gets stuck, and while it occasionally forms strange obsessions with certain hyperspecific locations in our bedroom, like a deranged Ouija planchette, most often it gets the job done. This has made my girlfriend less ornery and me less defensive. It has had no effect on my dog. Still, tech in 2017 that makes life a little bit better instead of cataclysmically worse: What a relief!
—Joseph Bernstein
When I was twelve, I asked for a drum kit for Christmas. I didn't get it. Instead, my parents gave me a small rubber pad about the size of a Pop-Tart and a pair of drum sticks that looked like they'd been borrowed from a Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Drum. It was a ferocious disappointment. The next day I destroyed my sad little kit Keith Moon-style as a finale to a bootlegged version of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." I've been a frustrated drummer ever since. Which is why Freedrum is among the best things that happened to me this past year, and easily my favorite tech of 2017. It's an invisible drumkit, and it is fucking awesome. With 4 wireless sensors — one on each drum stick and one on each foot — it realistically emulates a 7-piece drum kit. It does it with pretty much imperceptible latency. Now, hitting the air is obviously not nearly as fun as hitting the skins, but for those of us who've been air-drumming with imaginary drums for years it is plenty fun; Certainly, it beats banging on a toilet paper box in your basement.
—John Paczkowski
Whenever people see my glorious PopSocket, they have the exact same list of questions. So I will answer them for you:
What is that?
Thanks for asking! It’s a PopSocket, my friend. It sticks onto your phone case and makes it easier to hold.
Why do you have it?
At the end of 2016, I got an iPhone 7 Plus (the big one) because I wanted the portrait mode camera. I actually grew to like the bigger size, especially for reading articles or watching videos. But I did find it slightly more difficult to hold.
The PopSocket makes holding a big phone much more secure – I never worry about dropping it while holding the subway pole or onto my face while using it in bed. Best of all, it eliminates finger cramping and “smartphone pinkie”. Your hands don’t hurt from using your phone for hours on end all day long!
Plus, you can use it as a stand to prop up your phone and watch videos (to be honest I don’t do this often, but it’s cool).
But how do you put it in your back pocket?
Don’t worry! It pops back down flat. See?
Hmm that’s not totally flat, does it fit in your pocket like that?
My dude, how tight are you pants? It’s like half a centimeter, it definitely still fits in my pockets. Seriously, it’s not an issue.
Where can I get one?
You have to order directly from the company's website, PopSocket.com.
Isn’t it annoying that you can’t type on the phone while it’s lying down flat on the table?
A little bit. Sure, there are some downsides to the PopSocket. But the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Treat yourself. Your fingers deserve a break. Get the PopSocket. Just trust me.
–Katie Notopoulos
If there was one tech product I couldn't live without in 2017, it was Ativan.
When you wake up in the morning in California, Trump has already been awake for four or more hours, tweeting, and the news is in *full effect.* And in the year of our lord 2017, the news is never, ever good.
Nazis on Twitter! Russians on Facebook! Terrorists in Times Square! Men behaving horribly, everywhere! Good God, we're moving our embassy to Jerusalem? Well I'm sure that will go great... 2017 is basically one long, anxiety-inducing, pertinacious breaking news event.
There was this moment in August, when I was sitting in the Amtrak station with my wife as we prepared to set off for a week in the mountains, when we watched a bellicose Trump on cable TV, saying of North Korea that maybe he wasn't harsh enough. And it just nearly fucking broke me. I'm a genXer, who grew up on The Day After and On The Beach and Alas, Babylon. Not long before that speech, I'd been in Seattle, where the newspaper had a picture of North Korean nukes on the front page. In San Francisco, the parlor game du jour is calculating whether or not you have enough time to across the Bay Bridge and over the hills after a launch is detected but before impact. (Spoiler: no one does.) Shit is existential on the west coast. I watched Trump on TV, looked out the window at the robin's egg blue sky, and imagined as intently as I could what an inbound missile would look like. This was not a healthy thought.
And so we're all dealing, in whatever ways we can. For example, my wife gave me two days alone in a cabin in the woods to chill out and think and relax. No phone. No internet. No TV. No nothing but me and my thoughts. And so I basically spent 48 hours having a massive anxiety attack, then came home and bought a 9 millimeter handgun, and a fuckton of hollow-point bullets.
I used to have a lot more faith in society's ability to come together in the face of a crisis. But that was in, like, 2015.
And of course, the handgun didn't help. At all. But what did was a trip to see my doctor, who put me on anti-anxiety medication. And, boy, has that been nice. Ativan can grab you by the collar and shake you and tell you that it's going to be okay, man, even if just for the next couple of hours. We focus so much on hardware and software. But modern medicine is amazing, the things it can do to your brain are amazing. And we're just getting started.
Sometimes I fantasize about having a bunker, and land far from a major city, with well-water drawn up deep from the earth. I think about fishing and trapping and raising livestock. Grain stores for the year to come. It seems like a nice life, in the post-apocalypse, if you do it right. In the meantime, there is Ativan.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata, motherfucker.
—Mat Honan
The best gadgets are the ones you use the most but think about the least, because they just get out of the way — and Apple’s AirPods, which I’ve jammed into my ears pretty much all day every day since February, when I got them, are a great gadget. They looks like my iPhone earbuds melted down my ears; they sound…OKish; and they’re still the reason why people stare at me in public (I think). But God do I love them. You pop them into your ears, and hit the play button on your iPhone, Apple Watch, MacBook or iPad and…that’s it. You pop one out to pause playback. And when they do run out of battery, you juice them up by letting them sit in that smooth AF case for just a few minutes.
They’re also seemingly invincible: I’ve worn them in the shower (don’t try this at home), in the gym, on the treadmill, in a standing room-only train compartment, and on a motorbike zooming down a highway at 50 miles an hour, and they’ve never stopped working or fallen out. If this is how magical Apple’s first ear-puters are, imagine how they will be a few years down the road. My ears are ready.
—Pranav Dixit
I ran into dockless bike share in Berlin this summer, where at first I marveled at how trusting people were to just leave their rented bikes at the entrances to parks and on street corners. My son then downloaded the NextBike app and found us a pair of bikes a block away, which we left a short cab ride from the airport. When I got back to New York, CitiBike seemed incredibly clumsy — the equivalent of a phone that plugs into the wall.
—Ben Smith
All things considered, 2017 was a pretty great year for me.
Just kidding, it fucking blew! My job thrust me into the anxious, sweaty center of an unceasingly bonkers news cycle. I took on the kind of debt that keeps a person up at night. A close family member got cancer. I slept less and drank more than I ever have before. I started dreaming about nuclear war.
And when it all became too much, I’d grant myself the gift of 15 uninterrupted minutes for a geography quiz on the trivia site Sporcle — mostly countries of the world, but I fuck with flags, capitals, and the United States as well. This meant 15 minutes when I couldn’t think about anything but the task in front of me, when North Korea was just one of 197 names to retain and regurgitate, when my biggest challenge was remembering where East Timor is, and when finally doing so after like 400 tries could fill me with a pure, dumb joy that was otherwise pretty hard for me to find in 2017. Clicking around a pixelated world map, typing what I know into a tiny box, letting rote memory take over: It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to meditating. And now I know where East Timor is!
—Ellen Cushing
Two weeks before Thanksgiving last year, my dad was driving me to the airport. As I got out of the car and walked around to say goodbye, he passed out in the driver’s seat. It was cardiac arrest and, like many heart failures, it came out of nowhere. My dad was saved that day by a few quick-thinking people, including an ER doctor who happened to be exiting the terminal at that exact time, but there’s been plenty of issues since, and over the last 12 months, he’s been in and out of the operating room.
A few days after being released the first time, he was terrified it would happen again. He confined himself to an arm chair in our living room and tried to do very little. He said he was recovering, but after a certain point, it wasn’t just that.
So for Christmas last year, my brother and I brought him an Apple Watch. It was a pretty thoughtless decision — we were perusing the aisles of Target on the 24th without a clue of what to get a hard-to-please man — but we were drawn in by the device’s heart rate monitor. So we pulled the trigger. Dad opened it on Christmas day, showing little interest in the thing before putting it aside to sit back down in his armchair.
When I came back to visit every so often, I noticed that he began wearing it. And then one day he showed me his heart rate. Dad was walking outside again and playing with the dog, and he wouldn’t go anywhere without that damn watch. He loved being able to monitor his heart in real time, and that freed his mind to focus on other things. A 63-year-old man’s security blanket.
It feels odd writing that technology can “comfort” people, but for my dad, a $200 device did just that. The watch didn’t keep him out of hospitals and it didn't make him healthy, but it did give him the ability to stop worrying.
Apple’s new Series 3 watch is testing the ability to monitor users’ hearts and track arrhythmias, the abnormal rhythms that can signal impending heart failures. If those tests prove to work, a lot of folks could avoid, or at least better prepare, for what happened to my dad. Those people may never have to worry, and fewer of them will have to spend their weeks inside emergency rooms. That’s comforting.
—Ryan Mac
Halfway into Murder on the Orient Express, I realized I was watching a pretty boring and unnecessary adaptation of one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels. Normally I would’ve been annoyed that I’d paid to see this in a theater, since the price of admission is higher than ever. But MoviePass erases all those worries by letting you watch unlimited movies in 4,000 participating theaters for just $9.99 a month. (OK, you can’t watch 3D movies, buy tickets a day in advance, or watch more than one film a day. But otherwise, unlimited!)
You pick a showing on the MoviePass app while standing in the theater, and a physical card auto-loads with money that you use to buy a ticket. Clunky, yes, but it pays for itself with just one movie a month. “How does this company stay in business?” you may ask. Honestly, it’s unclear: MoviePass has in the past cost much more, from $14.95 to nearly $50, and executives say they plan to make money by selling users’ data. Who knows how long this will last — so get in while you can.
— Stephanie M. Lee
My favorite app of the year delivered me out of range of cell service. The day after I finished covering the special election in Montana — the one where Greg Gianforte allegedly body slammed a reporter and won anyway — I had to get away from push alerts. But I’m also trash with directions and didn’t know the area. Alltrails, which helps you find nearby hiking trails and download maps of them, brought me to a hike out of cell range that turned out to be breathtaking, ass-kicking, and just what I needed to decompress. Alltrails is my anti-Twitter: Restorative in a year when technology felt addictive, aggressive, and draining.
—Blake Montgomery
I don’t love Apple’s algorithmically generated “Memories” videos — which set curated photos and videos from my camera roll to music — because they’re good. In fact, I kind of like them because of how bad they are.
It was only in the last year that I started getting push alerts from my Photos app, telling me there was a new Memory ready for me to view. These Memories, for those who aren’t iPhone users or wisely choose to ignore their phone’s Black MIrror-esque salutations, are framed around a date or a place where you took a lot of pictures, or a person of whom you take a lot of pictures. So, for example, when I took my dad on a trip to Point Reyes National Seashore, my iPhone made me a Memory called “At The Beach.” It also made one called “Together” that is exclusively pictures of me and my boyfriend. Creepy.
But the thing about these videos is that, while they are cool in an oh-my-god-how-does-it-know way, they are not actually cool. At best, they aspire to the kind of nostalgic schmaltz typically associated with a slideshow prepared for retirement party or fiftieth wedding anniversary. But the execution is typically closer to the expected output of a high school iMovie video editing class.
For example, the Memory called “Home” that dates to December 25, 2016 includes some heart warming photos of my stepdad in an oversize bathrobe and my mom hugging Santa, but also many, many nearly identical selfies that I apparently sent to friends and loved ones on Christmas Day. The Memory called “Longmont,” which is where my boyfriend’s sister got married in August, contains photographs of my sister and her boyfriend, neither of whom live in this country, because I received WhatsApp photos of them the same day as the wedding that were automatically saved to my photo roll. There’s also nothing stopping your phone from interpreting, say, a last minute trip to attend the funeral of a loved one as a fun vacation, or from incorporating anything from the banal to the explicit in an otherwise charming slideshow from Valentine’s Day.
But in their inaccuracy and uncanniness, my artificially aided Memories are endlessly entertaining. I can set photos of my friend’s summer wedding in a Boulder park to club music; I can send my mom a cloyingly deranged montage of photographs of myself when she asks me how I’m doing. There’s some comfort in the knowledge that, as advanced and intelligent as the machines have become, they still aren’t people. They don’t own my memories. They aren’t anywhere close.
—Caroline O'Donovan
My iPhone’s internal battery is my least favorite tech of the year. The 6S I had from January to March would die whenever the temperature dropped below 60 degrees, no matter how charged the phone actually was. The phone I have now isn’t much better, because iOS 11 drains it like a swere and because I use the damn thing more than ever. By noon every day I’m out of juice. So my massive EC Tech battery has become less of an accessory than a new permanent limb of my phone. I check for the battery every morning when I make sure I have my wallet, phone, and keys. It’s saved me in hundreds of situations, both dire (filming at a violent protest) and casual (getting directions home from a bar I’ve never been to). A dead phone makes me panic, and I resent that I’m so dependent on it, but I do savor the relief an on-hand external battery can give.
—Blake Montgomery
Early this fall I decided — on a whim — to buy a little bit of Bitcoin. It was on a tear when I found myself on Coinbase, the Bitcoin marketplace where any rube with a bank account can purchase some of the enigmatic digital currency. Despite the sinking feeling that I was likely coming in at the peak of some kind of bubble — and the fact that I possess hardly any knowledge of financial markets, currency trading, or Bitcoin itself — I was too fascinated by the phenomenon not to put a little skin in the game myself.
I bought just enough for it to feel meaningful — an amount small enough that I'd be just fine losing it all, but large enough to give the investment some actual stakes. And then I sat back and did...nothing as Bitcoin's price climbed steadily, then rapidly. My modest investment has now more than doubled, which rules and — should this batshit run continue at a similar pace, which it most assuredly won't — I'll be well on my way to purchasing my first blogger's yacht.
And while making some money off mysterious market forces I don't fully understand is exciting and all, it's not what I love about dipping my toe into cryptocurrency's murky waters. By throwing some of my own cash into Bitcoin, I gave myself a reason to care — even if just a little — about the phenomenon. After refreshing Coinbase's app during idle moments, I'll inevitably end up doing some reading to try to wrap my head around Bitcoin's meteoric rise. My investment has led me to peruse semi-obscure, yet impressive publications like Coindesk; read and poke fun at a slew of obsessive analysts and overzealous analysts and blockchain evangelists; and watch as smart financial humans and outlets are forced to confront Bitcoin and all its questions. Why is the price soaring through the roof? Is this a bubble? How much of a bubble is it? What happens if you become a bitcoin billionaire? When am I going to lose everything?
I often think the best way to report on new and obscure technology is to throw yourself into it in an exaggerated way. By jumping in aggressively or taking a piece of technology to the furthest extreme, often you get a better sense of the benefits, shortcomings, and limitations of that thing. And while I wouldn't call my investment in Bitcoin extreme by any measure, it's forced me to care more than I ever would have. And the new yacht doesn't hurt either.
—Charlie Warzel
This morning, I woke up to the sound of my cat knocking a water glass off my kitchen table, shattering it into a million pieces. (I was not pleased with Laser Beam, who is now definitely going to be shipped off to boarding school for this transgression.) It was the day after our office holiday party and I was hungover, already an hour behind schedule due to my hitting the snooze button ten times that morning, and had a mess of glass shards to clean up. Most people would be in a pretty bad mood at this point, but I had Eufy.
Yeah, yeah, I know that robovacuum cleaners are expensive. I know they can get stuck under the refrigerator and in weird corners, so it’s not totally hands-off. But if your tech philosophy is to just let gadgets enable your laziness and have less in life to do — as mine is — then I highly recommend the robovacuum cleaner.
It’s also doubly convenient for picking up pet hair off the floor, and it’s fun to drive it around with a stuffed animal riding on top, and confuse the living lights out of your cats.
—Davey Alba
Twitter is a platform meant for predicting the future and getting it horribly wrong, among other uses. But for far too long, people who tweeted absolutely, bafflingly inaccurate hot takes had no place that would highlight their work. That's where @OldtTakesExposed comes in. The account regularly retweets predictions gone wrong, often months after the fact. You'll like it if you like bad sports predictions being held to account and other life-comes-at-you-fast moments. @OldTakesExposed is a rare ray of light in a pool of Twitter darkness. It's a glorious shrine to takes that age like roast beef left out of the fridge for weeks. It's exactly what we all need.
—Alex Kantrowitz
Hackers, reporters, and people who think the word "encrypted" sounds cool were using Signal to send secure messages before Trump was elected, no question. But afterward, even regular people started looking for more secure options. Signal makes it possible (or so we hope!) to talk to people who want to protect their identities without having to, you know, call them. Which is great for millennials. But now, a lot of my friends have Signal set as their default messaging app, which means the bulk of their communications are encrypted. Signal makes people feel safe, which means they feel comfortable, which means they open up to you — and that’s a great thing.
—Caroline O'Donovan
I couldn't tell you how to use layers in Photoshop or even really how to use Photoshop at all, and I've worked in digital media for over 10 years. This is embarrassing! But sometimes you just want to be able to put some text on an image collage and not have to stress about it! And then someone told me about Canva and my life hasn't been the same. Canva — which launched in the summer of 2016 — is an Australian design app and website that allows even the most design-challenged among us (ahem, me) to make images that actually look presentable. The app has templates for a variety of different social media posts — including Instagram (and a separate one for Stories), Pinterest, a Twitter header, and Snapchat Geofilter — as well as more general designs like logos, posters, flyers, invitations, and even album covers. No one's going to mistake my Canva designs for fine art, but for my purposes, they're more than enough.
—Doree Shafrir
File this away in: “buying only the gadgets that enable your doing as little as humanly possible.” The Joule was one of my pricier purchases last year, but also one of my most used ones. Like, pretty much every day kind of use.
For the uninitiated, sous vide gadgets heat up a pot of water to a very precise temperature, and hold it there. That means you can cook fairly tricky food, like steak, which I now cook at least once a week, perfectly — every single time. You just season the meat with a little salt and pepper, add herbs, plop it into a gallon-size ziplock bag, and sprinkle in a dash of olive oil. Cook times are about an hour or so. Theoretically, that gives me enough time to go for a run or do something active while waiting for my food to finish cooking, but usually I just lean into the laziness by watching an hour-long episode of whatever’s on my TV at the time. But hey, doing nothing: mission accomplished, again.
—Davey Alba
Meet the plebes among us who did something that changed the tech industry, spoke truth to power in a remarkable way that effected real change, or just made the world a little more interesting.
If you want to know which CEOs, founders, or celebrities are the most important people in tech this year, there are plenty of lists for you. And they’re great! No shade! But what about the plebes among us, the non-C-suite people who did something that changed the industry, spoke truth to power in a remarkable way that effected real change, or just made the world a little more interesting? This is them.
In February, ex-Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote a detailed blog post that alleged her former employer had a problem with systemic sexual harassment and discrimination. In it, she alleged that Uber's HR failed to deal with or reprimand sexual harassers, and that the company's culture routinely devalued and mistreated women. The post went viral, and it seemed to embolden others to speak out about harassment in the tech industry and hold powerful figures accountable. It was also undoubtedly one of the things that led to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's resignation a few months later. The 26-year-old started a reckoning in tech that a thousand Lean In groups could have never done. Fowler now works as editor-in-chief of Increment, a digital magazine about technology, and is working on a memoir for Viking Books.
Shalon van Tine
Bridle wasn’t the first person to point out that there are some fucked up videos on YouTube aimed at kids – The Outline had written about deranged ripoffs of popular characters, and just a week before Bridle’s Medium post in November, the New York Times wrote about YouTube’s lack of moderation for its kids’ app. But Bridle, who is not a typical tech journalist, described the problem in a riveting and compelling way that grabbed people’s attention and went viral. BuzzFeed News followed up on his story with our own reporting, and YouTube quickly announced changes, including banning certain top accounts and hiring more moderators. There’s still more work to do; BuzzFeed learned that some top creators of exploitative content for kids were making as much as $100,000 a month before getting their accounts demonetized in the last few weeks.
Courtesy of the British Council
Many people have called for a shutdown of Trump’s twitter account, but one man dared do something about it. Duysak was a contractor on his last day at Twitter. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said that when someone reported Trump’s account, he went into the customer service dashboard and started the deactivation process. The account only disappeared for 11 minutes, but in that short time, a contract worker managed to silence the preferred mouthpiece of the most powerful person in the free world. Some hailed Duysak as a hero; others derided him as an enemy of free speech or a degenerate — though of course most responses seemed to hinge on how people felt about Trump.
Screenshot from deleted YouTube
In 2017 we needed a true hero, something to distract us from the clobbering news cycle and divisive mood of the country. We found that in an Australian cat whose attractive owners take him swimming at the beach. If seeing a cat happily swim in the ocean doesn’t warm your heart, I’m sorry: You’re too far gone.
Instagram: @nathan_thebeachcat
Wagner’s popular Tumblr, which featured scathing and informed reviews of McMansions she found on Zillow, delighted architecture fans. Then Zillow sent her a cease and desist, saying she couldn't use the photos that realtors had uploaded. Wagner, 23, deleted her blog, sparking an outcry from fans who found Zillow’s tactics unfair. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took up her cause and wrote a letter to Zillow stating Wagner’s case for why her blog isn’t violating copyright. Zillow relented, and her blog is back up.
These two celebrity gossip sites that specialize in “blind items” have been around for years. The stories seem sometimes dubious, and often it’s impossible to tell who they’re about. But occasionally, official news comes out that validates older blind items’ truth – which makes all the other blinds seem more credible. After 2017's revelations about the abuse and harassment by Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and more, there was a flood of “blind items revealed” that confirmed some older stories.
The reveal of long-simmering blind items gave a unique vantage point into how these “open secrets” in Hollywood worked – clearly plenty of people knew, but they couldn’t name names. That's finally starting to change.
There have only been a few truly viral Facebook Live events – BuzzFeed exploding a watermelon, Chewbacca mom, and the long wait for a pregnant giraffe to give birth. When Facebook live first started, Facebook pushed it hard, giving live streams extra weight in the algorithm to push the content format in front of people. But in 2017, the only memorable Facebook Live event was people watching a zoo live cam, a format that’s been around on the internet for years. Congrats to April and her baby Tajiri.
Animal Adventure Park
When Uber’s then-CEO Travis Kalanick got into a car with two women in early February, the driver was recording a video. Kalanick shimmied to music in the backseat, to everyone’s cringe, and when his friends left the car, the driver confronted him about changes to the system that didn’t favor drivers. Kalanick did not take the criticism graciously. His parting words to Kamel were, “some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!” When the video leaked to Bloomberg, Kalanick issued an apology and promised to seek leadership help. Kamel’s video was one of several revelations, along with Susan Fowler’s viral blog post detailing an allegedly toxic workplace at Uber and a lawsuit accusing Uber of stealing trade secrets from a self-driving car competitor, that ultimately led to Kalanick resigning as CEO.
The comedian is the main host of the viral quiz app, and he’s amassed such a devoted and loyal audience of fans that it’s become hard to tell if people love the app because trivia quizzes are fun, or because Rogowsky is entertaining to watch. On days when other hosts fill in, the chat clamors for him, and people tweet their laments that an inferior host is on. It seems like the founders of HQ might also be worried that Rogowsky is more important to the app than the format – when the Daily Beast asked the app founder for comment about a profile they were writing on Rogowsky, the founder exploded in rage, mentioning that Rogowsky was in the midst of contract negotiations. With rumors that HQ is having trouble fundraising due to bad behavior at their previous gig, it seems that Scott “quiz daddy” Rogowsky might be HQ’s best asset.
Taylor Miller / BuzzFeed
UBER's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi
Sergio Lima / AFP / Getty Images
Uber closed a multibillion dollar deal led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank on Thursday, allowing some of the company’s largest shareholders to divest. It marks the first significant piece of business for new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who is now preparing the embattled ride-hailing company to go public by 2019.
In a process known as a tender offer, which allows outsiders to buy shares in a private company at a mutually agreed upon price, some Uber employees, executives and early investors sold off what amounted to a little more than a 17% stake in the company to a consortium of investors led by SoftBank, according to a source familiar with the transaction. The Japanese telecommunications giant acquired about 15% of the company in the deal, which valued the the company at $48 billion and included an additional $1.25 billion to buy shares directly from the company. Other investors including Dragoneer Investment Group scooped up the remaining 2%.
The tender offer valued Uber at about 30% less than the $69 billion it was pegged at in June 2016, after the company sold a chunk of shares to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund for $3.5 billion. Since then, Uber, which has yet to turn an annual profit, has endured scandal after scandal, changing how investors and the general public view the company.
The completion of the deal is the first significant achievement for Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over in August after an ugly year at the company defined by sexual harassment and discrimination allegations, executive misbehavior, lawsuits, and plenty of finger-pointing within the company’s board room. With this tender offer, Khosrowshahi was able convince some of the company’s early powerbrokers, including venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, to whittle down their stakes in the company to bring on what he believes will be a stabilizing force in SoftBank.
“We look forward to working with the purchasers to close the overall transaction, which we expect to support our technology investments, fuel our growth, and strengthen our corporate governance,” said in Uber spokesperson in a statement.
The deal is expected to close at the beginning of 2018.
As part of the agreement, SoftBank will obtain two seats on Uber’s expanded 17-person board, which still includes former CEO Travis Kalanick. The closing of the deal will also mark the end of the company’s supervoting share structure, moving the company to a “one share, one vote” system that further weakens the influence of early executives and shareholders.
A spokesperson for Kalanick did not return a request for comment.
SoftBank, which has made investments around the world in ride-hailing companies like China’s Didi Chuxing and India’s Ola, also agreed invest $1.25 billion to buy shares from Uber at the previous $69 billion valuation, a move that was seen as a concession to some shareholders who hoped to maintain the company’s previous high-water mark as it now readies itself for an initial public offering. In a recent board agreement, Uber’s directors said they expected the company to begin the IPO process by 2019.
Getting the company ready to go public will be Khosrowshahi’s ultimate goal over the next year, though it won’t be easy. The company still faces numerous legal challenges, including a massive trade secrets lawsuit with Alphabet’s self-driving car unit Waymo and multiple government investigations into potentially illegal business practices.
A man searches on YouTube.
Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images
Earlier this month, after a public outcry over disturbing and potentially exploitative YouTube content involving children, CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company would increase its number of human moderators to more than 10,000 in 2018, in an attempt to rein in unsavory content on the web’s biggest video platform.
But guidelines and screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with 10 current and former “raters” — contract workers who train YouTube’s search algorithms — offer insight into the flaws in YouTube’s system. These documents and interviews reveal a confusing and sometimes contradictory set of guidelines, according to raters, that asks them to promote “high quality” videos based largely on production values, even when the content is disturbing. This not only allows thousands of potentially exploitative kids’ videos to remain online, but could also be algorithmically amplifying their reach.
Raters told BuzzFeed News that in the past 10 days or so, they were assigned over a hundred tasks asking them to make granular assessments about whether YouTube videos aimed at children were safe. “Yesterday alone, I did 50-plus tasks on YouTube regarding kids — about seven hours’ worth,” said one rater, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with BuzzFeed News about this work.
“As a parent, what upsets me a lot is that these videos aimed at kids are not really for kids,” the rater continued. “Content creators make these cartoons with fake versions of characters kids like, such as Paw Patrol, and then as you watch, they start using foul language, making sex jokes, hurting each other, and more. As so many children watch YouTube unsupervised, that kind of thing can be really scarring.”
The URL to a video that should be considered "Not OK," according to recent task instructions for search raters evaluating videos on YouTube. "Many visually OK cartoons should be rated "Not OK" for language, like this Peppa Pig video," the task instructions say.
The contractors who spoke to BuzzFeed News are search quality raters, who help train Google’s systems to surface the best search results for queries. Google uses a combination of algorithms and human reviewers like these raters to analyze content across its vast suite of products. “We use search raters to sample and evaluate the quality of search results on YouTube and ensure the most relevant videos are served across different search queries,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News. “These raters, however, do not determine where content on YouTube is ranked in search results, whether content violates our community guidelines and is removed, age-restricted, or made ineligible for ads.”
YouTube says those content moderation responsibilities fall to other groups working across Google and YouTube. But according to Bart Selman, a Cornell University professor of artificial intelligence, although these reviewers do not directly determine what is allowed or not on YouTube, they still have considerable impact on the content users see. “Since the raters [make assessments about quality], they effectively change the ‘algorithmic reach’ of the videos,” he told BuzzFeed News.
"Even if a video is disturbing or violent, we can flag it but still have to say it’s high quality.”
“It is well-known that users rarely look beyond the first few search results and almost never look at the next page of search results,” Selman continued. “By giving a low rating to a video, a rater is effectively ‘blocking’ the video.”
“Think of it this way,” said Jana Eggers, CEO of the AI startup Nara Logics. “If a search result exists, but no one sees it, does it still exist? It's today's Schrödinger's cat. … [Ratings] impact the sort order, and that impacts how many people will see the video.”
YouTube did not respond to two follow-up inquiries about how a search rater’s evaluation of a video as highly relevant would affect its ranking. But according to task screenshots and a copy of the guidelines used to evaluate YouTube videos reviewed by BuzzFeed News, raters make direct assessments about the utility, quality, and appropriateness of videos. From time to time, they are also asked to determine whether videos are offensive, upsetting, or sexual in nature. And all these assessments, along other input, build out the trove of data used by YouTube’s AI systems to do the same work, with and without human help.
Though YouTube said search raters don’t determine whether content violates its community guidelines, just this week, it assigned a task — a screenshot of which was provided to BuzzFeed News — asking raters to decide whether YouTube videos are suitable for nine- to 12-year-olds to watch on YouTube Kids unsupervised. “A video is OK if most parents of kids in the 9-12 age group would be comfortable exposing their children to it; otherwise it is NOT OK,” the instructions read. The raters are also instructed to classify why a video would be considered “not OK”: if the video contained sexuality, violence, strong crude language, drugs, or imitation (that is, encouraging bad behavior, like dangerous pranks). The rater who provided the screenshot said they had not seen such a task before the recent wave of criticism against YouTube for child-exploitative content. They have been a rater for five years.
The rater also said the more specific examples for “OK” and “Not OK” that YouTube provided were unclear. For instance, according to the instructions reviewed by BuzzFeed News, an example of a violent video that is “not OK” is Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” music video. Other examples that should be considered “not OK” under the instructions include the cinnamon challenge (for imitation), and John Legend’s “All of Me” music video (considered “not OK” under sexuality). But “light to moderate human or animal violence,” including contact sports, daily accidents, play fighting, moderate animal violence and a “light display of blood or injury” are considered OK.
“I thought this rating made sense until I got into the examples,” the rater told BuzzFeed News. ”I don't usually try to internalize the actual examples because they don't make sense and aren't consistent — I just decide if I want my child to see the video or not.”
Last month, one creator making money off disturbing kids’ videos told BuzzFeed News, “honestly, the algorithm is the thing we had a relationship with since the beginning.” The raters’ guidelines that BuzzFeed News obtained offer insight into the data that trains YouTube’s algorithms, and how it might encourage the continued creation of such videos.
The guidelines are dated April 26, 2017, labeled version 1.2, and are 64 pages long. A rater told BuzzFeed News that they downloaded the file on December 19, meaning it is in current use in spite of the months-old date on the document.
One section covers quality, or “how much effort or skill was required to produce a video or collection of videos,” according to the guidelines. When raters assign quality ratings, these are used “to provide a video that users will want to watch” and “help decide what video to watch next.”
A portion of YouTube's guidelines for search quality raters covering the purpose of "quality rating," reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
Selman said this is how “quality ratings” could be used in an algorithmic system like YouTube’s. “The raters will have a significant impact on what users will get to see.”
The guidelines instruct raters to assign videos a high level of effort and skill if they have post-processing, video editing, or sound mixing — all familiar characteristics in the hundreds of thousands of questionable and exploitative kids’ videos uncovered on the platform so far. Often, creators of such “family-friendly” content, which in some cases earned tens of thousands of dollars a month, use original animation or their real kids as actors.
A portion of YouTube's guidelines for search quality raters covering "quality rating," reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
Positive indicators of effort and skill, according to YouTube's guidelines for its search quality raters.
Positive indicators of effort and skill, according to YouTube's guidelines for its search quality raters.
One example in YouTube’s search rating guidelines uses a video with “a moaning ‘ahhh’ noise set to jarring music and disturbing images” as an example. The guidelines instruct raters to rate the video with the highest possible quality because: “The author seems to have animated this video and made the soundtrack on his own. This required effort and care,” and “The author is an authority or expert for this video because he has built a brand around this type of content, including a channel of similar videos and an online store. His Twitter feed says, ‘I write songs that drive you insane.’”
An example of how to apply a "quality rating," according to YouTube's guidelines for its search quality raters.
An example of how to apply a "quality rating," according to YouTube's guidelines for its search quality raters.
These guidelines indicate how a YouTube channel like ToyFreaks, whose videos were shot and edited "with effort and care" that reflected a "brand" of content and often depicted the creator's children in potentially child-endangering situations, could have accumulated tens of millions of views and 8 million followers on the platform. YouTube shut down ToyFreaks last month during the public backlash over exploitative videos on its platform.
"YouTube is like a hydra, you cut off one upsetting channel, and five more have sprung up by breakfast."
“It’s an example of what I call ‘value misalignment,’ which we are seeing all over the content distribution platforms,” Selman told BuzzFeed News. “It's a value misalignment in terms of what is best for the revenue of the company versus what is best the broader social good of society. Controversial and extreme content — either video, text, or news — spreads better and therefore leads to more views, more use of the platform, and increased revenue.”
Another section in the guidelines instructs raters on “evaluating raciness of YouTube results (if requested)” and uses three categories: porn, racy but not porn, and sexually safe. In some cases, the guidelines can appear contradictory.
A portion of YouTube's guidelines for search quality raters covering the raciness of videos, reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
A portion of YouTube's guidelines for search quality raters covering the raciness of videos.
“The [YouTube video] has no sexual content,” the description for Sexually Safe reads. “In other words, both the thumbnail and the content of the video result indicate something that you would be comfortable watching with your family.”
An example of how to evaluate a video for "raciness," according to YouTube's guidelines for its search quality raters.
One example of “sexually safe” material, according to the YouTube guidelines, would be a video called “Six Things You Need To Know Before Oral Sex,” because it “discusses a sexual act in an informative and sexually safe manner.”
Meanwhile, a video called “Blind Date Foot Fetish” was also marked “sexually safe,” with the explanation, “Content does not depict sexual behavior, and most users would not consider it racy or sexually suggestive.” It shows a pair of zoomed in women’s feet being rubbed and tickled with a brush.
But in spite of being considered “sexually safe,” according to YouTube’s search rater guidelines, the foot fetish video today shows an interstitial notice before playing. “This video may be inappropriate for some users,” the message says, and prompts the user to click through to continue viewing the video.
Even though search raters are not the primary group tasked with flagging content for removal on YouTube, they expressed frustration at some of the strict limitations on the steps they can take. “Even if a video is disturbing or violent, we can flag it but still have to say it’s high quality [if the task calls for it],” one rater told BuzzFeed News. “Another issue is that we have a lot of tasks that ask us to rate the sexual content of videos with no corresponding tasks for violence. A lot of us feel weird marking videos as ‘sexually safe’ that are still filled with graphic violence.”
There is often no “official” way to report disturbing content on the job — apart from child pornography — if the task doesn’t explicitly call for it, two raters told BuzzFeed News. One rater said they once encountered a disturbing video and flagged it as unsafe, but they could not flag the disturbing host channel as a rater. They had to report it to YouTube as a regular user.
“I did so, and got a blanket ‘Thanks, we’ll look into it’ from YouTube,” the rater said. “I don’t know if the channel was taken down, but YouTube is like a hydra: You cut off one upsetting channel, and five more have sprung up by breakfast.”
Raters also described how YouTube puts severe time limits on tasks, which makes assessing sensitive video content more difficult. “We definitely don’t have time to go through longer videos with any detail, so some of them are closer to snap judgments,” one rater said. “I’d say one minute per video is generous.” Some videos that raters review are hours-long.
"We definitely don’t have time to go through longer videos with any detail, so some of them are closer to snap judgments."
If raters take too long on the tasks, the contractor company may impose penalties, according to three raters who spoke with BuzzFeed News. “Received another email telling me my rate per hour was too low,” one rater wrote in a public message board where raters gather to exchange tips and tricks. “Tonight … I just randomly assigned ratings without much thought into them. YouTube videos? Yep, not watching those — just putting down ratings.”
Raters are given the choice to skip tasks if they’re uncomfortable watching offensive content — or even opt out of disturbing content completely. They can also skip tasks if, say, the video did not load, the query is unclear, the video is in a foreign language, or the rater doesn’t have enough time. But multiple raters told BuzzFeed News they feared facing hidden penalties, such as being locked out of work, if they chose this option too often. “It’s not clear which reasons [to skip tasks] are legitimate and how many is too many released tasks,” a rater told BuzzFeed News.
Complicating matters for this system is the inherent instability of the jobs of raters, which takes its toll on workers. Nearly all of the raters BuzzFeed spoke to for this piece are employed part-time by the contracting company Raterlabs, which works with Google. (RaterLabs limits workers’ hours to 26 a week.) The raters do not receive raises or paid time off, and they have to sign a confidentiality agreement that continues even after their employment ends. There is no shortage of anecdotes among these workers about finding themselves dismissed suddenly via a brief email, without warning and without an explanation.
And the field is consolidating, with a few companies dominating the space and possibly driving wages down.
In late November, the rater contractor Leapforce was bought out by a competing company called Appen. Appen is known among raters to have one of the lowest hourly rates in the business — as low as $10 per hour, compared to rates that go up to $17 per hour for other contractors. Leapforce owns Raterlabs.
“The work [Appen does] for our customers is project-based and starts and stops depending upon customer requirements,” an Appen spokesperson said in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News. “This means that there are times when projects end with very little notice, so the work we assign people ends quickly. The variable nature of this work is similar to any part-time, contract or gig work.”
In August, three months after Wired published a report on the employment conditions at ZeroChaos, one of the major companies contracted by Google for ad quality rating work, Google abruptly ended its contract with them — even though ZeroChaos had promised some of its contractors work lasting until 2019. Possibly tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
“It feels like the articles are resulting in worse conditions or job loss,” a rater told BuzzFeed News. “That’s why some raters have reacted negatively to seeing [our work described] in the press.” Several workers declined to speak to BuzzFeed News for this story, citing a fear of being fired from their jobs in retaliation.
YouTube, for its part, said in a statement that it strives to work with vendors that have a strong track record of good working conditions. “When issues come to our attention, we alert these vendors about their employees' concerns and work with them to address any issues,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News.
Since the public backlash against YouTube over unacceptable children’s content on its platform, the company has taken steps to combat the problem. It said it would soon publish a report sharing aggregated data about the actions it took to remove videos and comments that violate its policies. The company also promised to apply its “cutting-edge machine learning” that it already uses on violent extremist content to trickier areas like child safety, and, of course, that it plans to have more than 10,000 human reviewers evaluating videos on the platform in 2018. But YouTube did not comment on how it plans to revise its evaluation guidelines for its expanded workforce. ●
