Author: Toby Shapshak

Toby Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff, a Forbes senior contributor and a columnist for the Financial Mail and Daily Maverick. He has been writing about technology and the internet for 28 years and his TED Global talk on innovation in Africa has over 1,5-million views. He has written about Africa's tech and start-up ecosystem for Forbes, CNN and The Guardian in London. He was named in GQ's top 30 men in media and the Mail & Guardian newspaper's influential young South Africans. He has been featured in the New York Times. GQ said he "has become the most high-profile technology journalist in the country" while the M&G wrote: "Toby Shapshak is all things tech... he reigns supreme as the major talking head for everything and anything tech."

Social media has allowed conspiracy theories, disinformation and antivaxxers to spread because it brings more eyeballs, and therefore more advertising. It’s common cause that Leni Riefenstahl was a gifted filmmaker, whose movies were well shot and hugely evocative. The only problem is that those films were almost purely propaganda for the Nazi regime. The odious content of the films was a covert propaganda messaging to sell the Third Reich’s nonsense that Aryans were superior to other races, as conveyed by the title of her most famous one, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will). Sadly, this was one of many…

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Despite all the advances of technology and transportation, what hasn’t transformed is the amount of time it takes the average person to get to work, says Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber.

Access to a city’s centre is a greater success factor than education, he told the Uber Elevate conference in Washington last week. “It Is the key to success in society.”

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I’d never heard of Carlos Maza until this month, when the Vox video producer made a supercuts video of all the homophobic and racist ranting by a popular YouTuber called Steven Crowder. The right-wing pundit has 3.8m subscribers to his YouTube channel has attacked Maza repeatedly, called him an “anchor baby, a lispy queer, [and] a Mexican”.

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In the not too distant future, you will be able to order Uber Eats that will be delivered to you by drone, as the ride-sharing company announced a pilot with McDonald’s in San Diego. Using a current commercial drone Uber has been testing deliveries with the hamburger maker in the California city. Ultimately it plans to create a custom drone for delivering food in a custom box.

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The first problem I encountered, as I gave up Google for a week, was that I couldn’t get my email. As the possibility of living without Android and Google services emerged as the US government banned American firms from dealing with Huawei, I tried to live without the world’s biggest mobile operating system (OS). The short answer: it’s virtually impossible to live without Google in this smartphone era.

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