Twenty Years on the Front Lines of Technology, Power, and the Invisible Forces Shaping Our Lives
The Rip Current is a daily 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.
I’m Jacob Ward — CNN contributor, investigative journalist, and the founder of this newsletter. I’m currently covering how technology is reshaping democracy, concentrating power, and transforming American life for CNN, while doing the deeper investigative work here. Before this I spent years as a technology correspondent for NBC News, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and 15 years writing and editing for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Wired, and others. When I’m not posting here I’m for some reason mostly on TikTok. My Instagram and YouTube 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.
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