I'm Joining CNN. And The Rip Current is Coming With Me.

A note on where I've been, where I'm going, and why this newsletter is still the center of it all.

I’ve been on this beat for more than two decades, and the through-line has always been the same question: what is technology doing to us? I chased that question as editor-in-chief of Popular Science, and then across the world for Al Jazeera, where I covered not only the surveillance infrastructure of other nations, but also the discovery that the United States engaged in mass domestic surveillance. I brought the same question to NBC News, where I spent years making tech and the new forms of power it creates legible to a general audience, and to The Loop — a book I finished nine months before ChatGPT arrived and made the danger impossible to ignore. Every step on this path has taken me toward the same realization: the accountability gap between what these systems do, how their creators profit from them, and what the public understands about all of it is dangerous, and closing it is my life’s work. That’s the work CNN has now asked me to bring to them.

As of today, I’m a CNN contributor, covering how technology is reprogramming democracy, enriching a tiny group of people, and transforming American society.

The Rip Current remains an independent media brand — and the center of everything I do. A bigger platform means more pressure on the people and institutions that deserve scrutiny, more reach for the investigations we build together here, and the visibility that brings in new sources and new stories. Because this newsletter, and the work I do for subscribers, is not a side project. It is the project. And you are the foundation of what I do. Thank you for being here.