Farhad Manjoo

On the one hand, there are some clear problems with how programmatic ads are placed. The industry is rife with complexity. This type of advertising is also quite new, so a lot of the machinery that runs the ad market is still in the works. But these problems are also fixable and should not obscure a larger truth:

Even though they are far from perfect, in many ways programmatic ads are creating a more efficient advertising market. And given that advertising pays for nearly the entirety of what we see and do online, the upside of all the hand-wringing is that we are now examining how all of that money gets spent — a process that should lead to better ads, and better media, too.

One secret to longevity as a pundit is to issue predictions that can’t be easily checked. So here’s one for the time capsule: Two hundred years from now, give or take, the robot-people of Earth will look back on the early years of the 21st century as the beginning of a remarkable renaissance in art and culture. That may sound unlikely to many of us in the present. In the past few decades, we’ve seen how technology has threatened the old order in cultural businesses, including the decimation of the music industry, the death of the cable subscription, the annihilation of newspapers and the laying to waste of independent bookstores. But things are turning around; for people of the future, our time may be remembered as a period not of death, but of rejuvenation and rebirth.

Tech policy has undergone a huge change under President Donald Trump, but it doesn’t seem that a lot of the changes are getting much attention, considering everything else the administration is doing.

In a normal news cycle, the rollback of Obama-era tech policies would get a lot more attention. But make no mistake, the changes coming in privacy, network neutrality and potentially many more tech regulations will be profound. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, promised the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” and right away we’ve begun to see that happen. Under the new president we have a new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, possibly a different standard for antitrust review on big mergers, and maybe lots of money for infrastructure that might seep into the tech economy. Here’s the biggest tech policy changes we’re expecting under President Trump.

We’re witnessing the stirrings of a national popular movement aimed at defeating the policies of President Donald Trump. It is a movement without official leaders. In fact, to a noteworthy degree, the formal apparatus of the Democratic Party has been nearly absent from the uprisings. Unlike the Tea Party and the white-supremacist “alt-right,” the new movement has no name. Call it the alt-left, or, if you want to really drive Mr. Trump up the wall, the alt-majority. Or call it nothing. Though nameless and decentralized, the movement isn’t chaotic. Because it was hatched on social networks and is dispatched by mobile phones, it appears to be organizationally sophisticated and ferociously savvy about conquering the media. The protests have accomplished something just about unprecedented in the nearly two years since Trump first declared his White House run: They have nudged him from the media spotlight he depends on. They are the only force we’ve seen that has been capable of untangling his singular hold on the media ecosystem.

There’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating.

In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the country to register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.

These moves may sound incremental, and perhaps not immediately alarming. China has been restricting the web forever, and Russia is no bastion of free speech. So what’s so dangerous about blocking apps? Here’s the thing: It’s a more effective form of censorship.

Nearly a year ago, I argued that we were witnessing a new era in the tech business, one that is typified less by the storied start-up in a garage than by a posse I like to call the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Together the Five compose a new superclass of American corporate might. For much of last year, their further rise and domination over the rest of the global economy looked not just plausible, but also maybe even probable. In 2017, much the same story remains, but there is a new wrinkle: The world’s governments are newly motivated to take on the tech giants.

In the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, the Five find themselves increasingly arrayed against legal and regulatory powers, and often even against popular will. The precise nature of the fights varies by company and region, including the tax and antitrust investigations of Apple and Google in Europe and Donald J. Trump’s broad and often incoherent criticism of the Five for various alleged misdeeds. This is the story that will shape the contours of the next great era in tech: Five huge companies that can only get bigger are set against governments that increasingly see them as a clear threat to governing authority. So, happy New Year.

Messaging app Whatsapp has quietly become a mainstay of immigrant life. More than a billion people regularly use WhatsApp, which lets users send text messages and make phone calls free over the internet. The app is particularly popular in India, where it has more than 160 million users, as well as in Europe, South America and Africa.

Because it’s free, has a relatively good record on privacy and security, and is popular in so many parts of the world, WhatsApp has cultivated an unusual audience: It has become the lingua franca among people who, whether by choice or by force, have left their homes for the unknown.

Though Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users to become one of the most popular social networks in the world, it has not attracted the media attention that the 140-character platform earns, perhaps because journalists and presidential candidates don’t use it very much.

Snapchat’s news division has become a popular and innovative source of information for young people, but it is rarely mentioned in the hand-wringing over how social media affected the presidential election. Snap, which is based far outside the Silicon Valley bubble, in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles (CA), is pushing radically new ideas about how humans should interact with computers. It is pioneering a model of social networking that feels more intimate and authentic than the Facebook-led ideas that now dominate the online world. Snap’s software and hardware designs, as well as its marketing strategies, are more daring than much of what we’ve seen from tech giants, including Apple.

Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election? Much of that remains unclear, because the Internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information.

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case. If you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.

Cable news has functioned as the harrowing background soundtrack to much of 2015 and 2016. In covering terrorist attacks, protests against the police and a presidential election whose daily antics seem tailor-made for the overheated ethos of cable, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have all won huge increases in viewership. But as they say on cable, we’ve just gotten word of some breaking news — and it’s not pretty.

Recently, the biggest story in the country was dominated by live-streaming apps made by Facebook and Twitter. Historians of television news often cite the 1991 Gulf War as the breakthrough moment for cable — a conflict that proved there was a market for round-the-clock coverage of the sort that CNN was offering. For most humans, the recent police shootings, the subsequent protests and the mass assassination of police officers in Dallas (TX) were a tragic commentary on modern American race relations. But for that subspecies of humans known as television executives, the events might also have functioned as an alarming peek at a radically altered future. What we saw was live streaming’s Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news — and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that’s not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.