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Imagine if Congress had a clear-eyed guide to the technological upheavals shaping our lives. A team of in-house experts who could have flagged the risks of generative AI before ChatGPT went public, raised alarms about deepfakes before they flooded social media, and assessed the vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure before ransomware shut down pipelines. For a time, Congress had exactly that, in the form of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). But lawmakers shuttered it 30 years ago, and were still feeling its absence today. Created in 1972, the Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress something it almost never has: a reliable way to understand the science and technologies reshaping the world. The offices reports didnt tell lawmakers what to do. Instead, they laid out the risks and the benefits (so cleanly that members on opposite sides of an issue could wave the same report to make their case). The OTA was overseen by a 12member board, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with equal representation from the House and the Senate. In just over two decades, it produced over 750 studies, on everything from Alzheimers to automation. It was an impartial repository of interdisciplinary experts who would proactively assist Congress in understanding emerging technology, says University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, and to do so at a time early enough in its life cycle that it had not become full of special interests that had not grown around it, like barnacles. But not everyone was pleased with OTAs body of work. In 1980, Washington Times reporter Donald Lambro published Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes, arguing that the agency often focused on issues championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberals. In his view, OTAs studies were duplicative, frequently shoddy, not altogether objective, and often ignored. (Lambros criticisms were, ironically enough, arguably quite partisan: True, OTA sometimes revisited issues already studied by other agencies, but a 1977 Government Accountability Office (GAO) review noted that OTA’s output made “significant contributions in areas of concern to Congress.”) That sentiment carried into the Reagan era. OTAs sharply critical assessments of President Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Pitched at the height of the Cold War as a revolutionary system of space and groundbased weapons capable of intercepting Soviet missiles in flight, SDI struck supporters as a technological moonshot. OTAs assessment was a splash of cold water: the office warned that the programs staggering cost and ambitious scope offered little assurance it could actually shield the nation from a Soviet attack. Those findings triggered intense political backlash, including from the Heritage Foundation, which in 1984 accused OTA of letting politics override objectivity, claiming that at least one division had prioritized discrediting SDI over providing balanced analysis. The report also argued that flaws in the study and the release of sensitive information were unlikely to be the result of simple mistakes or misunderstanding, concluding: The evidence that some OTA staffers oppose the Administrations Strategic Defense Initiative seems clear and compelling. (Several subsequent independent reviews echoed OTAs assessment of SDI.) The controversy continued when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the SDI dispute to condemn the agency outright. OTA has been obsessed with proving that President Reagans strategic defense initiative is both wrongheaded and dangerous, Helms said in 1988. The political pressure only intensified as the partisan tides shifted. During the 1994 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich vowed that if Republicans took control of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment would be on the chopping block. Once his party indeed did sweep into power, Gingrich (now ascended into the role of House Speaker) made good on that promise: In 1995, with a staff of about 140 and an annual budget of roughly $21 million (a rounding error in terms of congressional budgets, Calo says), OTA was quickly defunded, effectively shuttering the office. The move drew swift criticism even from within Gingrichs own party. New York congressman Amo Houghton, for example, lamented, We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology. Shuttering OTA solved a partisan problem in 1995, but it left Congress flying blind on science and technology, a gap it has never truly closed. There have been a number of attempts to resurrect OTA, but none have succeeded. House Democrats have floated funding proposals, including a 20192020 effort to allocate $6million to restart the office but these measures died in the Senate. In the meantime, Congress has tried to fill the OTA-sized hole with alternatives like the Government Accountability Offices Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) unit. But while this setup offers some basic technical support, critics argue it lacks OTAs mission-driven focus and deep multidisciplinary expertise, and thus produces far fewer insights than its bureaucratic forebear. They do not have anything like the capacity that the OTA had, says the University of Washington’s Calo. The stakes of that void are becoming increasingly clear. Take, as an example, large language models: An office like OTA could have assessed the risks, outlined guardrails, and prepared Congress before the tools reached the public. Without that kind of early guidance, lawmakers are left reacting after the fact, often leaning on industry lobbyists or outside experts. In the absence of OTA, theres, regrettably, been quite a bit of soft capture by the tech sector, says Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former Justice Department scienceand technology advisor. And its easy to make the oh, you silly Congress, if only you understood the technology, you’d realize the error of your ways type argument when Congress lacks the technology expertise to respond.” Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at Harvard University, argues that the most damning consequence wasnt just the loss of OTA itselfit was what the closure signaled about Congress. It was an early example of ideology trying to shut down facts, he says. And what were left with, he argues, is a tech policy landscape that is shaped largely by lobbyists. Which is not good, he adds, because it comes with an agenda.
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E-Commerce
YouTubers dedicate their lives to building a following in hopes of creating and sustaining a livelihood. For top creators, the rewards are immense: MrBeast, the worlds biggest YouTuber, is estimated to be worth $1 billion. Its no surprise, then, that YouTube channels are valuable assets, often bought and sold for significant sums. A new study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv reveals that 1 in every 400 YouTube channels has changed hands on third-party platforms, frequently undergoing complete transformations in the process. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed Fameswapa kind of eBay for social media profilescataloging 4,641 YouTube channels with a combined 823 million subscribers listed for sale between October 2024 and March 2025. They then tracked which of those channels sold, confirming more than $1 million in transactions during that six-month period. It was really remarkable, says Alejandro Cuevas, the papers lead author. A YouTube spokesperson said that selling accounts violates the platforms Terms of Service, and the company will take action if such activity is detected. “If we detect that bad actors are creating channels with the intent to scam, mislead, spam, or defraud other users, we terminate those channels, the spokesperson tells Fast Company. Given the high prices paid, new owners are eager to see a return on their investment. About one in four of the tracked channelsrepresenting a combined 220 million followerswere completely overhauled within 30 days, with changes to their handle, title, and description that erased any connection to the original identity. The researchers found that these revamped channels continued to gain subscribers over the following 12 weeks, suggesting most viewers didnt notice the switch. However, many new owners werent focused on producing quality content: 37% of repurposed channels later promoted material flagged by YouTube as potentially harmfulespecially political disinformation, crypto schemes, and gambling ads. A follow-up analysis by the same researchers of 1.4 million randomly selected channels from analytics platform Social Blade revealed that around 0.25% showed similar patterns of transformation. The growing trade in YouTube channels reflects broader shifts in how we consume content, says Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a coauthor on the study. Part of the reason why this is so prevalent right now is because systematically, in these platforms, weve seen a decrease in the agency over what we consume, he says. Knowing that a channel already has an audience and a veneer of credibility makes it easier to push new content into users feeds. The shortform content paradigm facilitates this a lot, because in the past, you would search for channels directly, maybe by name, or be more aware of that, says Cuevas. This just makes it more fertile ground for these type of thing.
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E-Commerce
If you sit on the terraced steps at the newly-rebuilt Wagner Park on the Manhattan waterfront, looking out at the Statue of Liberty, you probably wont know that theres an 18-foot-tall flood wall hidden under your feet. The small park, which just opened after an 18-month renovation, is one piece of a larger, $1.7 billion system of flood protection being installed in New York City. Most of the park now sits around 10 feet higher than it did in the past, with the hidden wall high enough to hold back water in a storm surge. Under the central lawn, a 63,000-gallon stormwater cistern holds rain in heavy storms, then recycles the water to irrigate the park. On the other side of the wall, near the Hudson River, rain flows through gardens and into an infiltration system that releases it slowly to help avoid floods. [Photo: Battery Park City Authority] You can engineer these solutions with large floodwalls everywhere, says Raju Mann, president and CEO of Battery Park City Authority, the public benefit corporation that manages urban planning in the area. But here, we took a more careful approach. How do we have a great open space that also has flood protection in itnot how do we just build a flood protection project? [Image: BPCA] From the beginning, the design team knew that they wanted to avoid exposing the floodwall as much as possible. In a few spots in the park, tunnels underground meant that it wasnt possible to go down to the bedrock, and the wall is exposed. But most of it is completely hidden. In other parts of the park, flood gates integrated into pathways can pop up in an emergency, but otherwise arent noticeable. [Photo: Battery Park City Authority] Its a beautiful waterfront, says Gonzalo Cruz, vice president and principal for landscape architecture and urban design at AECOM, the engineering firm that worked on the design. We want people to feel very connected to its experience and how to navigate the park, he says. “Back in the day, when mechanisms for flood protection were put into place, they were erected without any consideration for how people use these spaces. Were rethinking the way we think about open space and how we design around infrastructure. The redesigned park feels larger than it previously did, Mann says, with more outdoor rooms and space for concerts and other performances. It will also have a new energy-efficient pavilion with community space where nonprofits can have classes, and a rooftop terrace. Gardens through the park are designed with native plants. The paving materials were chosen to help reduce the urban heat island effect. The solar-powered lighting in the park is DarkSky compliant to reduce the impact of light pollution on wildlife. [Photo: Battery Park City Authority] The plan for the transformation started more than a decade ago, after Hurricane Sandy devastated lower Manhattan. The storm surge reached 13 feet at Battery Park, at the southern tip of the island. Streets and subway tunnels were flooded. The power went out for days. Some offices closed for weeks. A hospital had to evacuate patients. Two residents drowned in a basement apartment in the East Village. Wagner Park sits next to the Battery, but at a higher elevation. It avoided flooding during Sandy. But its in the 100-year flood plain. The city recognized that major storms are becoming more likely because of climate changeboth storm surges and heavy rain. And it knew that the park needed to be better protected. The new design is based on flood levels that are possible in the 2050s as the sea level rises. [Photo: Battery Park City Authority] The floodwall will connect to other projects to the north and south. Collectively, the new infrastructure will help make it less likely that the surrounding neighborhoods flood. Thats especially important now, Mann says, as the federal government is pulling back from climate action. As we’re getting less serious as a country about managing our greenhouse gas emission, then we need to get more serious about how we actually adapt to a change in climate, he says. I think it’s going to put more and more pressure on places to think about how do we actually grapple with the reality that increasingly looks like. And with some optimism, meaning, can we actually design better places? I think that this project, and other projects getting delivered now, provides some optimism that climate change adaptation doesn’t need to be just taking your medicine. It can actually be better space.
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E-Commerce
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