The Rip Current is a weekly look at the big, hidden forces at work in tech, politics, greed, beauty, culture, and human weirdness. The currents are strong, but together we can see and get across them. Sometimes we can even ride them.
The newsletter posts every Monday, with content for paying subscribers scattered throughout the week. The Rip Current is published by me, Jacob Ward. I’ve covered technology, science, design, architecture, and politics for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and I spent 15 years as a writer and editor for magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Wired, and many others. When I’m not posting here I’m for some reason mostly on TikTok. My Instagram and BlueSky are also worth a follow.
Technology used to be considered something of a niche beat, and folks in my job were supposed to be upbeat nerds with a huge enthusiasm for CEO drama and gadgets and test drives. I was never that guy — although I am something of an upbeat nerd — and my anti-establishment upbringing prepared me instead to spend my time looking at what technology is trying to tell us about ourselves. I’ve done it for years, and now I find that the folks I covered all this time are running the world. They seem to believe that democracy — which we’ve barely figured out anyway — is due to be upgraded to their specific brand of techno-utopian, pro-market libertarianism.
At the same time, I’ve been watching the thesis of my 2022 book The Loop, about the mania that I predicted AI would bring about in all of us, acted out in real time. I thought I was forecasting a world in which we’d mistakenly hand the most important human decisions and capabilities to AI in perhaps five, maybe even 10 years. Turns out I was only about 10 months ahead of it.
So I’m working to cover all of this as an independent journalist, in a weekly mix of reporting and analysis. I take what I do seriously, and you can read the standards I’ve been trained to bring to this work in my ethics statement.
Please consider subscribing now to get full access to The Rip Current, special members-only benefits, and the archives. Thanks for being with me.
