The Digital Blues in McSweeney’s 54 The End of Trust

We’ve been hacked, heartbroken, election-questioned, and I have been thinking about one tiny bit of digital detritus for a few years. BLUE, not the color of sadness or the blues, but the shade that's used for highlighting and links and most logos on apps and on screens. This is The Digital Blues, my blues, as I go on a quest to understand why that shade is so popular, and how one color from one very small sliver of the US belies our utopian dreams and their inevitable failures. I follow the blues from Yves Klein's going to the beach as a teen through Silicon Valley to see what values are smuggled in with the shade and how they are used to manipulate us and our trust, so we see and don’t see the machinations of the digital realm. You can order the McSweeney’s issue here and a digital copy of it is here thanks to the EFF. Created with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it includes Trevor Paglen and Jenna Wortham and Edward Snowden. I'm honored to be in that company.