The Curious Engineer

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Creative Good

creativegood.com/blog

Mark Hurst writes about how technology is affecting us, and what we can do about it. Also: Updates about the Gel conference (Oct 2-3, 2026), hosted by Mark. The Creative Good newsletter, begun in 1998, is one of the longest running email newsletters in the world.

Tech news / industrySociety / politics / economyEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
260 from 14 Feb 2013 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (31 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://buttondown.com/creativegood/rss

2026 31

  1. AI bots have begun showing their contempt for humans
  2. New GEL video: Janet Vertesi on opting out of Big Tech
  3. Reflections on GEL 2026
  4. Heading into GEL
  5. Ghost in the Machine shows what we're fighting against
  6. The best thing ever written about GEL
  7. The end of the world and our chance to stop it
  8. The sound of data centers
  9. You need a todo list
  10. Big Tech predicts the future, to our detriment
  11. My reading odyssey – with Odysseus
  12. AI and being "left behind"
  13. A conversation with Gerry McGovern
  14. Maybe we should all go offline
  15. The pope and the machine god
  16. When is it OK to use AI?
  17. Protecting kids from Big Tech
  18. Big announcement: Gel 2026 conference
  19. Space junk and our mom-and-pop data center
  20. In praise of moving slow
  21. Good news in the fight against Big Tech
  22. The first step toward getting off Google
  23. Finding hope at the repair cafe
  24. The forgotten superpower of listening to customers
  25. AI and the illegal war
  26. Zuck in the dock
  27. It's time to get rid of networked cameras
  28. How the powerful want us to see AI
  29. Where AI doesn't belong
  30. What we get from paying attention
  31. On leaving it all behind

2024 17

  1. Protecting elders and kids from predatory tech
  2. The garbage on our screens
  3. How it’s going in tech – without ethics
  4. AI isn’t meant for us
  5. Starlink bestows, or forces, the digital age on an Amazonian tribe
  6. Microsoft Recall should make you consider Linux
  7. Google goes bananums for AI
  8. Apple made a terrible mistake: it told the truth
  9. To resist the robots, get a typewriter
  10. Big Tech’s corruption was 25 years in the making
  11. China and TikTok
  12. Surviving the customer experience winter
  13. The gaping void in San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge
  14. Vision Pro, unscrambled, is “I Poison VR”
  15. Resisting Silicon Valley’s cult of “more”
  16. The airplane blowout came from our rotten Big Tech economy
  17. Instagram’s unmentionable problem

2023 32

  1. Marc Andreessen is right – love doesn’t scale
  2. Facial recognition and the end of privacy – with Kashmir Hill
  3. The Luddites warned us about Google
  4. Celebrating 25 years of this newsletter – and an announcement
  5. Surveillance spreading
  6. Creative Good services
  7. Disaster alerts reveal a better way to design tech
  8. Don’t throw technology at it
  9. AI is spackle
  10. Hacks of the ultra-rich, as revealed by Bruce Schneier and Josh O’Kane
  11. Why car companies (still) ignore customers
  12. A walk around the world raises questions about tech
  13. Three things you should listen to
  14. An addiction machine for our age
  15. Rejecting the Apple Vision Pro
  16. What you missed about Google and Amazon
  17. Why customers don’t want chat bots
  18. The giant brain suck of 2023
  19. My 26-hour delay on Delta Air Lines
  20. Is AI a demon or what
  21. AI plus whatever
  22. ChatGPT’s dangers are starting to show
  23. A Simple Desultory Techtonic
  24. A picture of the future
  25. Where are the customers’ chats?
  26. Sassy AIs are not the problem
  27. AI is creating the Play-Doh internet
  28. Who’s responsible for fixing tech?
  29. How Google profits from criminal activity
  30. ChatGPT’s drawbacks, and how to respond
  31. A new year to make tech better
  32. A few more inspiring people

2022 41

  1. Why we can’t trust Apple
  2. Bonfire of the vanity project
  3. As cities embrace surveillance, we can resist
  4. A future for people doing good work
  5. Scary Silicon Valley: A Halloween update on Big Tech
  6. Moralists, unite
  7. A song about surveillance
  8. AI is already turning against you. We can fix it.
  9. AI image generators: tools and risks
  10. Waking up to the genetic surveillance state
  11. Why Amazon bought Roomba
  12. A “what now?” moment
  13. A most welcome decline
  14. An “internet for the people” or a plastic beach
  15. Our last chance in tech
  16. Jennifer Egan and a Forum update
  17. Citizenship and smartphones
  18. Celebrating one year of the Creative Good community
  19. A cryptocurrency explainer
  20. The religion of Silicon Valley
  21. Walking away from tech
  22. Where to go after Twitter
  23. What Elon Musk is really up to, with Twitter
  24. An alternative to Amazon, and avoiding data brokers
  25. God, death, and tech with Sasha Stiles
  26. The web as monopolized surveillance space
  27. Human rights and digital spycraft
  28. Responding to crypto hype
  29. Designing for deceit in Silicon Valley
  30. Security settings won’t save us
  31. Bandcamp risks becoming an Epic failure
  32. Ukraine, Russia, and resources to help and learn more
  33. The restart of history
  34. Past the valley: Deepfakes are achieving lifelike status
  35. Why you should resist Amazon by cancelling your Prime account
  36. Facebook tells the truth in its Super Bowl ad
  37. What happened to the monkeys with Elon Musk’s brain implant
  38. Concentration of power is the problem
  39. We said ‘never again.’ Now look at Xinjiang
  40. Facebook patents and the comet in Don’t Look Up
  41. I founded Creative Good 25 years ago today – and learned a few things

2021 60

  1. Are Facebook and Google criminal enterprises?
  2. Move slowly and don’t break things
  3. My predictions for Apple’s smart glasses
  4. Indigenous thinking and the future of civilization
  5. What Jaron Lanier gets right, and wrong, about the metaverse
  6. Tesla is a meme stock and everything is dumb
  7. The banality of tech
  8. Big questions, answered by Big Tech
  9. Smiling in the metaverse
  10. Big Tech’s latest misbehavior calls for action
  11. Facebook’s laughable response to the whistleblower
  12. Get your community organization off of Facebook. Right now.
  13. Voice surveillance must die
  14. The fall of Facebook
  15. So, “Zuck talk” is, like, increasing, right?
  16. Robots in baseball
  17. Why we might transform computers into “tiles”
  18. Explaining the last 20 years
  19. What to do when the storm arrives
  20. Public libraries are better than Google
  21. WeWork and waste
  22. Discussing new articles
  23. How to prove vaccine status – with privacy
  24. Artists, mistreated by YouTube, reveal the risks of working with Google
  25. We can’t trust tech, from A(pple) to Z(oom)
  26. Things that are not a computer: brains, cities, and churches
  27. On resisting emperors and their delusions
  28. On Pegasus spyware and Jon Fasman's interview on We See it All
  29. Cameras and con games: Silicon Valley’s demented fun house
  30. Bad cockpit design? Don’t blame the pilot
  31. The spirit of New York, and the internet, depend on what we believe in
  32. The fashion industry is captured by Silicon Valley – and China
  33. We finally have a chance to break up Amazon
  34. My simple, brief, and totally wrong explanation of Bitcoin
  35. Beijing is giving orders to Big Tech, the NBA, and... John Cena?
  36. Why you should pay attention to ‘Made in China’
  37. Apple’s new iPhone commercial is a rip-off
  38. Is your phone listening to you? A response to the "toothpaste" thread
  39. Apple is rotting. Live Photos shows why.
  40. Paying respect to our new techno-king
  41. Announcing the Creative Good community
  42. Join us.
  43. Senators and flamethrowers
  44. The future and the remotest beach in the world
  45. Grasping for facts while Google lies
  46. When customer obsession goes wrong
  47. Our system is clogged by something bigger than a boat
  48. Yes, handcuffs will fit Big Tech CEOs
  49. Fighting nihilism, The Nothing, and NFTs
  50. Pumping up the worthless with NFTs
  51. How not to fix customer service
  52. Amazon Ring is creating the surveillance complex
  53. Tech warnings from unlikely sources
  54. Worse than 'The Matrix'
  55. No, an exploitative product is not "great"
  56. Why I'm losing faith in UX
  57. Hope for the boss battle
  58. The aftermath of insurrection
  59. The bright side of insurrection
  60. Something fun to close out 2020

2020 37

  1. Calling the culprits by name
  2. Venture capital and the WeWork con job
  3. Skin care in a dystopia
  4. Throwing away the robot
  5. The winner of the election is... Big Tech
  6. Announcing Good Reports, a new review site
  7. Covid Alert pros & cons, Skeptech, and a flamethrower
  8. Boasts, lies, and grammar mistakes: Big Tech's antitrust defense
  9. Glimmers of hope in a constricting moment
  10. Surviving the tech age with Maxwell's demon
  11. Big Tech and the good octopus
  12. Smart glasses aren't.
  13. We've survived six months of Covid. Here's... humor?
  14. Happiness and the Rubik's Cube
  15. Surveillance and the shell game
  16. Facebook and your bones
  17. Kamala Harris and the ascent of Silicon Valley
  18. It's a stickup
  19. This is perjury: the Big Tech hearings, summarized
  20. A simple tech ethic
  21. I really hope Gmail allows me to say this
  22. The danger of Twitter as 'ultimate editor' of the news
  23. How to speak Californian
  24. Humor for a different Fourth
  25. Snapchat and content collapse
  26. Apple, eBay, and the desolation of tech
  27. Big Tech's latest apologies won't change much
  28. Something stinks in the tech industry, and we must address it
  29. The algorithmic amplifier fueling corruption in Silicon Valley
  30. Customers are changing in the pandemic. Are you listening?
  31. How to conduct user research during quarantine
  32. Why the Amazon VP should quit his job
  33. Take that, corona: more humor to get us through
  34. Fighting corona with humor
  35. Why the plague will not stop us
  36. Lethal touchscreens and other design disasters - and how to avoid them
  37. Juul and the corruption of design thinking

2019 20

  1. Mind-reading devices are coming from Facebook, Elon Musk, and others. Here's their agenda.
  2. How to create better tech (in one not-so-easy-step)
  3. The showdown between Big Tech and democracy has begun
  4. Facial recognition is already here
  5. Resisting Big Tech is still possible
  6. We need to have a difficult conversation about Google
  7. Understanding customers is still your job
  8. We're entering the age of surveillance capitalism
  9. Surveillance in China will affect you
  10. Why it's tiring to run good user research
  11. Clive Thompson's "Coders" on what makes programmers tick
  12. Toxic Content Has a Simple Solution: Kill the Algorithm
  13. Forget Lean, Your Key Challenge is on This Venn Diagram
  14. The Vessel's Terms and Conditions Bend to Public Pressure
  15. Kicking the Smartphone Addiction
  16. NYC's Leaders Are Wrong on Amazon
  17. How to delight customers — by saying “no” to Big Tech
  18. Saving tech, bookstores, and the world - for humans
  19. Why I’m optimistic for 2019: customers are back
  20. Why Amazon’s HQ2 is a much bigger deal than you thought

2018 10

  1. The rebirth of “good tech” online
  2. Facebook isn’t cigarettes, it’s asbestos
  3. Marking 20 years of “creative good” writing, as Facebook fades
  4. Breaking Up (Big Tech) Is Hard To Do
  5. Tech going sideways, and a song about surveillance
  6. The many deceptions of Mark Zuckerberg
  7. Treating users well in the #deletefacebook era
  8. Alternatives to Big Tech, and a t-shirt
  9. Why you need to pay attention to China and its technology
  10. Why “fail fast” innovation won’t work on the border wall

2017 2

  1. Creative Good has turned 20. Here’s what I’ve learned — and what comes next
  2. Budgeting for customer experience vs. advertising

2016 1

  1. Are customers included in design thinking?

2014 6

  1. Everyone has questions about customers. Here are answers.
  2. Customer experience and the choice between Lean/Agile and waterfall
  3. The disruption delusion: what happens when customers aren’t included
  4. A doctor’s thoughts on the patient experience
  5. You don't have a usability problem, you have a business problem
  6. Outcomes of the Google Glass column

2013 3

  1. The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
  2. How to manage your email: or, A tiny skill that some people claim doesn’t exist
  3. What is a career in user experience really about?