An Update to Your Motherboard

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Tech

An Update to Your Motherboard

Motherboard is under new management.

I can't stop thinking about what happened when Uber and Lyft left Austin. Ridesharing didn't just cease to exist: Within hours, Facebook groups called Arcade City and Austin Underground Rideshare Community popped up, connecting thousands of drivers and riders in the city. Within weeks, new rideshare apps created by small startups and nonprofits had entirely replaced the two tech giants.

The story is about two Silicon Valley heavyweights leaving town after their attempts to influence local politics thousands of miles from their headquarters. But more importantly, it's about the people who banded together to make sure that technology is working for and helping the masses, not just lining the pockets of some venture capitalists.

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I like Austin's ridesharing story so much because it gets to the core of what Motherboard is about: The rich and their robots may be growing ever powerful, but we're not going to sit idly by and wait for our obsolescence.

As a reporter at Motherboard for the last four years, I've always tried to highlight these sorts of movements: The small towns building their own fiber internet networks when huge ISPs pass them by. The fixers ignoring "Warranty Void if Removed" labels to repair their own gadgets. The farmers hacking their tractors because John Deere won't allow them to replace their transmissions. The Angolans hiding files in Wikipedia and Facebook to create a surreptitious, free file sharing network. The academics racing to save government science data before it was deleted by the Trump administration.

Having the chance to do those kinds of stories was what attracted me to Motherboard in the first place, and I'm thrilled to announce that it's now my job to make sure all of us keep doing that work: Starting today, I'm taking over the keys to this website as its new editor-in-chief. To set a course for the future of the site, I sat down with Derek Mead—who had been running Motherboard for the last four years—to record a podcast about where we're going as a media outlet and where humanity is going, more generally.

Motherboard has always been at its best when we're talking about utopias and dystopias, both prospective and the ones we're currently living in.

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Biohacking, genetic engineering, and transhumanism promise us a future as more efficient, disease free, and ageless humans—but what unintended consequences will there be, who will have access to these technologies, and what happens to the rest of us?

Automation will make dangerous and tedious jobs obsolete and will bring about a new era of efficiency, but how do we take care of the people who lose their jobs, what is the future of work, and how do we prevent a select few from leaving the rest of us behind?

Climate change is an existential crisis, but there are people devising methods of geoengineering the atmosphere to reverse it. Could that technology work?

Why are 4 billion people around the world still offline, how do we get them connected, and how do we make sure there's a level playing field when they do?

From our offices around the world, we will tell the stories of those who are making sure technology works for people, not against them. We will use this website, suite of podcasts, short-form and feature documentaries, and every storytelling method we can come up with to elevate the people who are building us a brighter future and to doggedly report on those who threaten it.

Motherboard's unofficial tagline has always been "The future is wonderful, the future is terrifying." I think it still fits. The future can be terrifying. It's our job to fight to make sure it's wonderful.

We always want to hear from you. Tell us what scares you, tell us what you're excited about, tell us what you're working on. I'm at jason.koebler@vice.com and the rest of our editors can be reached at editors@motherboard.tv.