Jon Evans, The Walrus

Jon Evans

The Walrus

Berkeley, CA, United States

Contact Jon

Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.

Start free trial

Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • The Walrus
  • TechCrunch
  • Quartz

Past articles by Jon:

All Aboard the Metaverse: Is the New Digital Frontier Unstoppable?

It may not exist yet, but no one in tech can risk ignoring Mark Zuckerberg’s next big thing → Read More

Our grimdark meathook cyberpunk now –

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Living and working in a worsening world Why are people who cite videos always wrong? Ten […] → Read More

Living and working in a worsening world –

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Why are people who cite videos always wrong? Seven viral futures Not long ago we lived […] → Read More

Why are people who cite videos always wrong? –

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Let housing rise from the empty offices and malls Magic Leap’s $2.6 billion bait and switch […] → Read More

Seven viral futures –

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Magic Leap’s $2.6 billion bait and switch How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos The […] → Read More

Let housing rise from the empty offices and malls –

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos What do we do with the positives? It’s […] → Read More

Magic Leap’s $2.6 billion bait and switch –

Two years ago I attended an “Innovation in Immersive Storytelling” event at Industrial Light & Magic, featuring the Chief Game Wizard of Magic Leap. I should have known then, from all the strained corporate sorcery in that sentence, that their demise was inevitable. But in fact I went into that talk a Magic Leap skeptic, […] → Read More

How to make sense of the coronavirus chaos –

We are beset on all sides, daily if not hourly, by COVID-19 data, hypotheses, speculation, and crackpot conspiracy theories. Even if armed with a mathematical mind, and some kind of grounding in critical thinking, how are we supposed to make sense of it all? Assuming you even want to make sense of the chaos; assuming […] → Read More

What do we do with the positives? –

Here come the blood tests, and it’s about time. Serosurveys, to determine what percentage of populations have already contracted COVID-19. And, individually, tests to indicate whether you, too, already caught it, but suffered only mild symptoms, or none at all. In America alone, millions will soon be recovered from COVID-19 infection. Half the people I […] → Read More

GrubHub/Seamless’s pandemic initiatives are predatory and exploitative, and it’s time to stop using them –

Times are exceptionally hard, especially for local restaurants, which were always in a precarious business even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But when times are hard, people pull together, right? Or at least they don’t take advantage of the suffering and desperate to exploit and profit from them. Right? We’d all like to think so, […] → Read More

Test and trace with Apple and Google –

After the shutdown, the testing and tracing. “Trace, test and treat is the mantra … no lockdowns, no roadblocks and no restriction on movement” in South Korea. “To suppress and control the epidemic, countries must isolate, test, treat and trace,” say WHO. But what does “tracing” look like exactly? In Singapore, they use a “TraceTogether” […] → Read More

Into and after the viral storm –

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the US. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it […] → Read More

Our infected machine –

We are handling the first real global crisis since the Cold War with staggering incompetence. People are already dying en masse. We all need to stay home and stay away from one another. If we wait until those who can’t do math see the awful consequences all too visible to those who can, things will […] → Read More

Burn the EARN IT Act –

I want to talk about malignant incompetence on the part of our elected officials, and this isn’t even about the pandemic. Rather, it’s about the spectacularly misguided, counterproductive, expensive, and overbearing approach to end-to-end encryption by the USA along with Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand — the so-called “Five Eyes.” Consider the TSA […] → Read More

May we live in interesting times –

It’s never a good sign when, in order to discuss the near future of technology, you first have to talk about epidemiology–but I’m afraid that’s where we’re at. A week ago I wrote “A pandemic is coming.” I am sorry to report, in case you hadn’t heard, events since have not exactly proved me wrong. […] → Read More

What happens if a pandemic hits? –

What happens if a Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic hits? It’s time to at least start asking that question. What will the repercussions be, if the virus spreads worldwide? How will it change how we live, work, socialize, and travel? Don’t get all disaster-movie here. Some people seem to have the notion that a pandemic will mean […] → Read More

DeFiance: billion-dollar finance, million-dollar hacks, and very little value –

Over the last year or so, much-to-most of the cryptocurrency world has pivoted from the failure of “fat tokens” and ICOs, and the faltering growth of “Layer 2” payments like Lightning and the late Plasma Network, to the new hotness known as “DeFi,” which this week was used to … hack? acquire? steal? It’s pretty […] → Read More

The war against space hackers: how the JPL works to secure its missions from nation-state adversaries –

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designs, builds, and operates billion-dollar spacecraft. That makes it a target. What the infosec world calls Advanced Persistent Threats — meaning, generally, nation-state adversaries — hover outside its online borders, constantly seeking access to its “ground data systems,” its networks on Earth, which in turn connect to the ground relay stations […] → Read More

Everyone loves the coronapocalypse –

The 2019-nCoV coronavirus is a global public health emergency of significant concern. It is also, simultaneously, a fount of misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, and both over- and under-reactions. Whose fault is this? So glad you asked. I happen to have a little list. Purveyors of misinformation. As archly observed by The Atlantic, that misleadingly-self-described Harvard […] → Read More

Technology is anthropology –

The interesting thing about the technology business is that, most of the time, it’s not the technology that matters. What matters is how people react to it, and what new social norms they form. This is especially true in today’s era, well past the midpoint of the deployment age of smartphones and the Internet. People […] → Read More