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VOL. 118 NO. 1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 $6.99
page 50
ADVENTURES IN TRACKING ONLINE ANONYMITY
troll hunters
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 118 | NO. 1
From the Editor
in “the troll hunters” (page 50),
Adrian Chen writes, “Old-school hate is
having a sort of renaissance online, and
in the countries thought to be furthest
beyond it. The anonymity provided by
the Internet fosters communities where
people can feed on each other’s hate.”
Chen reveals the scale of näthat
(“Net hate”) in Sweden, a country known
for its tolerance, where anonymous post-
ers to websites nonetheless rage against
immigrants who (racists believe) are
destroying “Swedish culture.” As in
the United States and elsewhere in the
world, Internet trolls in Sweden also
persecute women, often just for the
strange satisfaction of frightening them.
Trolls must be moved by bitter
resentments they cannot otherwise
express and liberated by the heady unac-
countability of anonymity. Harassing
comments found on websites are sincere
expressions of how a portion of human-
ity really feels. Some people hate other
people, and technology ampliies the
expression of views that (at least since
the end of World War II) were mostly
whispered in private or shouted at rallies
of inefectual political movements (see
“Free Speech in the Era of Its Technolog-
ical Ampliication,” March/April 2013).
But what can be done about trolling
in open societies like Sweden and the
United States is a vexed question about
which citizens ardently disagree.
Both the United States and Swe-
den have set high bars for criminaliz-
ing speech: speech is presumptively free
unless it violates the “harm principle.”
In America, speech can be banned if it is
a “real threat,” either because it consti-
tutes an incitement to hurt someone or
(as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote
in 2003) to protect people “from the fear
of violence” and “from the disruption
that fear engenders.” Citizens who value
free speech and believe it necessary for
democracy, individual expression, and
a marketplace of ideas are mostly com-
fortable with such a limited constraint.
But others are not so comfort-
able (see “Q&A: Shanley Kane,” page
26). Threats are seldom prosecuted,
because words are slippery things and
anonymous trolls cannot be found eas-
ily. More, the harm principle is not
simply extended to harassing speech
that seeks to oppress or silence minori-
ties and women. Activists would like to
see a wider legal deinition of harm, or
broader intolerance for harassment.
Chen’s feature describes one con-
troversial approach in Sweden, where
“a group of volunteer researchers called
Researchgruppen, or Research Group,
has pioneered a form of activist jour-
nalism based on following the crumbs
of data anonymous Internet trolls leave
behind and unmasking them.” Research
Group scraped the comments of a
right-wing publication named Avpix-
lat, and matched the encrypted e-mail
addresses of commenters against a data-
base of publicly available addresses. The
researchers gave the names of many of
Avpixlat’s most proliic commenters to
Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, which
then reported that dozens of prominent
Swedes, including politicians from the
far-right Sweden Democrats, had posted
racist and sexist comments. Some politi-
cians and oicials resigned.
Research Group’s public shaming
of trolls was controversial in Sweden.
MIT Technology Review readers may
also feel troubled: they might want to
distinguish between real threats to indi-
viduals and the expression of views that,
however reprehensible, have a tenuous
connection to immediate harm. But the
data journalists of Research Group were
responsible for an innovation: they put
a cost to trolling. By stripping away the
cloak of anonymity, they demonstrated
that while speech is free, it is not always
without consequences. GU
IDO
VIT
TI
Who will make “searching for a signal” a thing of the past?
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increasing standards and help usher in the next generation of 5G technology, NI offers fast,
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©2014 National Instruments. All rights reserved. LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI, and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments.
Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies. 18586
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 118 | NO. 1
28 | Can Japan Recapture Its Solar Power?
A lesson in the political vulnerability of renewable energy.
By Peter Fairley
36 | Solving the Autism Puzzle
A new approach to finding the genes behind autism
shows promise. By Stephen S. Hall
44 | Desalination out of Desperation
Severe droughts are making researchers rethink how we
can get fresh water. By David Talbot
50 | The Troll Hunters
Exposing thugs, bullies, and racists on the Internet seems
like a good thing. Can it go too far? By Adrian Chen
Front
2 From the Editor
8 Feedback
VIEWS
10 MOOCs’ Teachable Moment
How online education can help
erase the skills gap.
10 Fixing Autism Research
For starters, we can stop
searching for a “cure.”
11 The World Needs Anonymity
It’s not always a bad idea to
keep your identity to yourself.
12 On Creativity
A newly unearthed, previously
unpublished essay by science
iction great Isaac Asimov.
UPFRONT
15 An End-Around for
Consumer Genetics
The FDA has stymied
23andMe, but tests live on.
20 The Mystery of Autism
One problem: nobody agrees
on how to diagnose it.
21 Voice Recognition for the
Internet of Things
Getting your thermostat to
recognize your voice.
22 Ultrasound Gets Small
How a new chip could upend
diagnostics.
24 Will a Breakthrough Solar
Technology See Daylight?
A startup’s record-breaking
cells meet economic reality.
Q+A
26 Shanley Kane
Is Silicon Valley hopelessly
sexist?
Back
BUSINESS REPORT
59 Cities Get Smarter
How technology can make
urban centers more eicient,
better places to live.
REVIEWS
68 Do MOOCs Actually Work?
College survived. But online
courses are still worthwhile.
By Justin Pope
72 The Aura Apps
Do digital ilters change the
meaning of the “past”?
By A. D. Coleman
79 Google Glass Is Dead
This wearable computer isn’t a
hit, but the vision lives on.
By Rachel Metz
DEMO
84 Coal Plant Buries Its Own
Greenhouse Gases
Showing that carbon
sequestration can be done.
By Peter Fairley
45 YEARS AGO
88 Education by Machine
When the teacher is a
computer, learning can get
personalized.
ON THE COVER
Illustration by R. Sikoryak
based on Tintin in Tibet,
by Hergé, 1960
PH
OT
OG
RA
PH
BY
JE
NN
AC
KE
RM
AN
AN
D T
IM G
RU
BE
R
Contents
January / February 2015
Can coal be clean?
p. 84
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Feedback
Five Most Popular Stories
MIT Technology Review
Volume 117, Number 6
Technology and Inequality
MIT economist David Autor
is quoted as saying we
would be hard pressed
to fi nd a robot today. The
self-serve gas pump,
the answering machine,
the word processor, the
self-checkout in the gro-
cery store, and the auto-
mated door opener are
the “robots” that Autor is
not seeing. Each of these
devices represents an
entry-level job that no lon-
ger exists.
—dennis.drew.737
The Right Way to Fix the Internet
Big telecom argues that
their monopoly should be
strengthened, which will
then give them the secu-
rity to make infrastructure
improvements. Mean-
while, they lobby behind
the scenes to make it
illegal for cities to install
their own fi ber networks.
Clearly their interests are
not aligned with consumer
interests. —SneedUrn
Net neutrality is not about
fairness to corporations or
startups. It is about letting
users have full control over
what they want to access
via the Internet. —gubrud
Confessional in the Palm of Your Hand
Being anonymous doesn’t
equal being honest. So
besides the haters, trolls,
and scammers, you’re
reading the online equiv-
alent of the National
Enquirer. —rykk.dekk
Ten years ago, we were
afraid of losing our online
privacy when our real
names became attached
to our comments on Face-
book. Now we’re seeing
companies created to
bring that anonymity back,
and with that comes free-
dom of expression, creativ-
ity, and honesty. That’s why
I’m all for companies like
Whisper and Secret.
—lamoore
Fun with Food
I’m by no means a foodie,
but I thought Corby
Kummer’s article on food
experimentation was one
of the best I have read in
MIT Technology Review.
Ironic, though, that it
comes in the context of
the “Inequality” issue.
Still, kudos to Denmark
that it can maintain a still-
generous social welfare
net and nurture world-
beating designers and
scientists, in which group
I’d gladly include Noma’s
Redzepi. —Cenk Sumen
Good story to read if
you’re on a diet.
—Ken Stailey
Q+A: Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel thinks incre-
mentalism can’t lead
to anything revolution-
ary. But di� erent people
doing incremental things
may very well be what is
needed. The Apollo pro-
gram would not have been
possible without incre-
mental developments that
happened decades ear-
lier. The same is true of the
Manhattan Project and his
other examples. —acowan
Tech feeds the lowest
common denominator
because that’s where the
money is. “Get in, make
$10 million, get out again.”
Isn’t that the dream of
every Silicon Valley twenty-
something? —anonymole
1 2 3 4 5
53
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
The disparity between the
rich and everyone else is
larger than ever in the United
States and increasing
in much of Europe. Why?
By David Rotman
Technology and Inequality
Illustration by Javier Jaén
78
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
“I want to quit Google,” the message on
my iPhone read. “It’s boring here.”
Posted by an anonymous user in
San Francisco to the confessional app
Secret, the message quickly gained atten-
tion; after four days, it had received 78
comments, ranging from “just means
you’re not on the right project” to “I quit
Google, and it was one of the best deci-
sions of my life.” At times, the original
poster chimed in, saying things like: “I’ve
been there a long time. Many jobs. The
company no longer values initiative, and
promotion is very slow.”
Many of us are addicted to sharing
status updates on Facebook, photos on
Instagram, and thoughts on Twitter. But
real, raw honesty is tricky online. It’s hard
to say what you really think when your
true identity is attached, especially if
REVIEWS
your post could get you in trouble, either
now or years down the line. That bored
Googler on Secret wouldn’t be likely to
voice those thoughts online under his or
her real name—even if doing so could
be therapeutic or even lead to other
job options.
That’s why anonymous social apps like
Whisper and Secret come as a relief. Yes,
anonymity and self-disguise have always
been available on the Web, from early chat
rooms to newspaper and blog comment
sections to the darkest corners of 4chan.
And yes, commenters have often used that
cloak of anonymity to say things that are
meaner than anything they’d have the guts
to say to someone’s face.
Here, though, the combination of
anonymity, the simplicity of a focused
app, and the intimacy of a smartphone
screen makes sharing your deepest, dark-
est thoughts and commenting on others’
strangely satisfying. The more I used these
apps to conide, the more it felt like hav-
ing a tiny confessional in the palm of my
hand. Occasional trolls be damned, I got
hooked on the rush of comments and likes
that came with a juicy confession. Even if
the people on the other end didn’t really
know me, I felt that I could be honest with
them and get real sympathy.
Drinking with Strangers With Whisper, sharing is easy: you type
whatever you want and the app suggests
a photo based on your message—often one
that doesn’t quite match the topic. Other
people’s posts show up with several lines
of bold text and an image, risking sensory
overload. Scrolling through Whisper is
like looking at snippets from countless
strangers’ diary entries, only here you’re
encouraged to respond.
Posts are visible to anyone using the
app, and many of the more popular ones
are searingly honest. On a recent day, a
quick look yielded “I just found out my
boyfriend was born a girl”; “My son is oi- MA
XIM
ILIA
N B
OD
E
Confessional in
the Palm of Your Hand
Sure, people say some nasty things in anonymous
apps, but the good far outweighs the bad.
By Rachel Metz
2524
TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
You claim that we haven’t had signiicant
technological progress since around
1970. What about computing?
Progress in computers and the Inter-
net helps with communications, and it’s
enabled us to make things far more ei-
cient. On the other hand, most other ields
of engineering have been bad things to go
into since the 1970s: nuclear engineer-
ing, aero- and astronautical engineering,
chemical engineering, mechanical engi-
neering, even electrical engineering. We
are living in a material world, so that’s
pretty big to miss out on. I don’t think
we’re living in an incredibly fast techno-
logical age.
The Founders Fund’s slogan takes a
swipe at Twitter: “We wanted lying cars;
instead we got 140 characters.” Haven’t
things like iPhones and online social net-
works improved our quality of life?
Some. Just not enough. That line is not
meant to be a critique of Twitter as a busi-
ness. I think the company will eventually
become proitable; the 2,000 people who
work there will be gainfully employed for
decades to come. But its speciic success
may be symptomatic of a general failure.
Even though it improves our lives in cer-
tain ways, it is not enough to take our civi-
lization to the next level.
What kinds of technologies might
do that?
There are all these areas where there
could be enormous innovation. We could
be inding cures to cancer or Alzheimer’s.
I’m quite interested in enabling people
to live much longer. There’s an infor-
mation technology approach, where we
optimize your nutrition and give instant
feedback using mobile device technology.
But I suspect that there are entire new
classes of drugs or processes that could
rejuvenate body parts. I also think that
tenfold improvements might be possible
in nuclear power. There are miniaturiza-
tion technologies where you have much
smaller containment structures, and tech-
nologies for disposing of and reprocessing
fuel that have been underexplored.
What are you doing to create this kind of
technology?
Well, we invested in SpaceX [the private
rocket company that has taken over some
launches for NASA] in 2008 after the irst
rockets had blown up. The next one did
work. We invested in a few biotech com-
panies, and we’ve been looking at medical
devices. These sectors where it’s a multi-
year commitment are wildly out of fashion
among investors. At the same time, I do
think that there will continue to be inno-
vation in information technology in the
decades ahead. About two-thirds of our
work is there.
What companies would you say are
taking on big problems?
Tesla is a really interesting example. Most
of the components didn’t involve really
great breakthroughs, but there was this
ability to combine them. I think we’re
generally too drawn to incremental point
solutions and very scared of complex
operational problems like that.
The paradigmatic example for a large
company is Google. Within large compa-
nies, you often run into internal bureau-
cracy and the need to meet the quarterly
results cycle. Google has done much less
of that than other large companies. It
looks like they’re making good progress
Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded
PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook and
LinkedIn. But he’s convinced that technological progress has been
stagnant for decades. According to Thiel, developments in computers
and the Internet haven’t signiicantly improved our quality of life. In a new
book, he warns entrepreneurs that conventional business wisdom is
preventing them and society as a whole from making major advances in
energy, health, and other areas where technology could make the world
a better place—though he doesn’t ofer detailed answers about how we
might unlock such breakthroughs. (For a review of the book, see page 81.)
Thiel spoke to MIT Technology Review’s San Francisco bureau chief, Tom
Simonite, at the oices of his venture capital irm, Founders Fund.
Q+A
Peter Thiel
AN
DR
EA
S L
AS
ZL
O K
ON
RA
TH
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
Mummified deer leg,
sealed in beeswax.
Reviews
Ever since cooks began
playing with the equip-
ment of the food indus-
tr y, chefs have fe l t
compelled to join one
of two camps. The first
believes any kitchen is
incomplete without a centrifuge, com-
bination steam-convection oven, and
$6,000 vacuum-seal machine and immer-
sion circulator to cook 22-hour eggs sous
vide. The second camp takes pride in tell-
ing you that all these gadgets, and ingre-
dients like hydrocolloids and calcium
baths, are outlawed in their kitchens—
because gadgets and industrial powders
have nothing to do with cooking. But now
that the equipment, ideas, and techniques
of modernist cuisine have been around
more than a decade, a new generation of
chefs declines to declare loyalty to either
camp. To me, the most interesting cooks
today are not on the barricades but those
eager to discover new lavors. They use
low-tech means like fermentation and
cook over a stove.
The really ambitious cooks—those
who aspire to a place on the world culi-
nary map—create those novel lavors at
food labs.
Until now, the two chefs most associ-
ated with labs are linked to modernist cui-
sine: Heston Blumenthal, at the Fat Duck,
in Berkshire, England, and Ferran Adrià,
who was chef at the most famous modern-
ist restaurant of all, El Bulli in Catalonia,
Spain, and who chaired the advisory board
of the Basque Culinary Center. Both labs
were something more than test kitchens:
they were places to try new techniques.
The results found their way into new res-
taurants, books, and a study center and (in
the case of the Basque Culinary Center)
were shared with the industrial clients that
subsidized the enterprise.
The closest counterpart to these men
in the United States is David Chang, a
hero to younger American cooks. His
Momofuku Group of restaurants subsi-
dizes a separately stafed “culinary lab,”
whose goal is to discover new compo-
nents. Chang and his cooks collaborate
with mycobiologists and engi-
neers at MIT, Harvard, and Yale;
the purpose of that collabora-
tion, in the words of Ryan Miller,
product development chef at the
lab, is to bridge the gap between
“the way a cook learns something,
which is visual and tactile,” and
a “conceptual understanding” of, say, the
enzymatic microbial processes that make
soy sauce or miso.
Non-Nomative cookingThen there is the Nordic Food Lab,
which can be found in a houseboat on
a Copenhagen canal, a short walk down
a cobbled lane from a restaurant called
Noma. The lab is the brainchild of Rene
Redzepi, whose quest at Noma for new
lavors, whether from plants, fungi, lichen,
or animal by-products, has given rise to an
international obsession with foraging for
new, questionably edible ingredients. It’s
easy to parody the results. But up close, in
the sweeping, palatial kitchens of Noma,
a loor above the restaurant, the patience,
attention, and meticulous care with which
gnarled and ancient vegetables or half-
rotten weeds are treated is impressive,
as is the dedication of the international
cast of apprentices who vie for a spot to
stage. A typical late afternoon might ind
stagiaires carefully lifting the skin of a
highly concentrated duck stock—ordinar-
ily a bubbly gray-white scum, but here a
shimmering golden-brown sheet, gleam-
ing like mica—and topping it with home-
pickled beech leaves, to be seasoned with
a lacto- fermented plum.
The lab is more freewheeling and less
quiet. It, too, attracts young people from
around the world. But music blares as
they work at laptops on one of two trestle
tables, or at the counters and stove.
(Unlike other labs, which often have only
induction burners, this one includes an
actual, working stove.) The young people
are as likely to hold advanced degrees in
biomedical science, lavor chem-
istry, and geography as they are
to be cooks. They want to make
and grind koji, the fermented-
rice base of sake, to use as a choc-
olate surrogate for a cake; or
anaerobically ferment plums
individually encased in a lus-
trous, thick shell of beeswax; or mummify
a deer leg to see if it will taste like Parma
ham; or ferment grasshoppers into a ver-
sion of garum, the gamy ish sauce of the
ancients; or whip pig’s blood to mimic the
foam structure of egg yolks for an ice
cream that looks and tastes like chocolate
(blood cooks to the same shade of brown).
Nordic
Food Lab
Noma
Copenhagen,
Denmark
Fun with Food
Playful new cooking based on traditional methods
and weird ingredients will supplant the industrial
techniques that dominated modernist cuisine.
By Corby Kummer
CO
UR
TE
SY
OF
CH
RIS
TO
NN
EN
SE
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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. 117 | NO. 6
By George Anders
If you’re like most people, your monthly smartphone bill is steep enough to make
you shudder. As consumers’ appetite for connectivity keeps growing, the price
of wireless service in the United States tops $130 a month in many households.
Two years ago Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton,
believed he could give customers more control. One simple adjustment would clear
the way for lots of mobile-phone users to get as much data as they already did, and
in some cases even more, on cheaper terms. Carriers could win, too, by nudging custom-
ers to reduce peak-period traic, making some costly network upgrades unnecessary.
“We thought we could increase the beneits for everyone,” Chiang recalls.
Chiang’s plan called for the wireless industry to ofer its customers the same types
of variable pricing that have brought new eiciencies to transportation and utilities.
Rates increase during peak periods, when congestion is at its worst; they decrease dur-
ing slack periods. In the pre-smartphone era, it would have been impossible to advise
users ahead of time about a zig or zag in their connectivity charges. Now, it would be
straightforward to vary the price of online access depending on congestion and build an
app that let bargain hunters shift their activities to cheaper periods, even on a minute-
by-minute basis. When prices were high, consumers could put of non-urgent tasks
like downloading Facebook posts to read later. Careful users could save a lot of money.
Excited about the prospects, Chiang patented his key concepts. He dubbed his new
service GreenByte and formed a company, now known as DataMi, to build the neces-
to Fix
the Internet
The
Right Way
Letting go of an obsession with net neutrality could free technologists to make online services even better.
Illustration by M
att Dorfman
