Kevin Roose

For years, the self-appointed leaders of Silicon Valley were young people — mostly men — with age-appropriate behavior. Their successes were cheered, and their sins were shrugged off as the cost of innovation. There’s a lot of growing up happening in today’s tech industry, where former whiz kids made their fortunes and are now settling down, starting families and starting to think about their legacies. 

Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, posted a series of messages on Twitter that were meant to clear up misconceptions about Facebook’s role in the election. Instead, he plunged the company deeper into controversy. “Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election,” Goldman tweeted.

[Commentary] If you’ve lost sleep worrying about the growing power of the alt-right — that shadowy coalition that includes white nationalists, anti-feminists, far-right reactionaries and meme-sharing trolls — I may have found a cure for your anxiety. Just try using its websites. What I found on these sites was more pitiful than fear-inspiring. Sure, some alt-tech platforms were filled with upsetting examples of Nazi imagery and bigoted garbage. But most were ghost towns, with few active users and no obvious supervision.

[Commentary] When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to a Seattle stage to announce a new smartphone called the Amazon Fire, he spent an hour and a half describing feature after feature: unlimited photo storage, 24/7 video support, 13-megapixel camera, a 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" display, a visual-recognition shopping button called Firefly, and dozens more bells and whistles. But there was one question Bezos left unanswered about his new device's feature set. Namely: Could it, you know, make phone calls?

“I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” Bezos said. “But I know people still make phone calls.”

Not so much. In fact, the use of voice calls -- which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone -- has fallen off a cliff lately. As of 2013, cell providers in the US are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The US is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point -- it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.)

A recent survey of 7,000 US high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day -- far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and more on new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.