Welcome to Debugger, a New Medium Publication About Consumer Tech

Brought to you by the OneZero editorial team

I still remember my first computer. It was a Macintosh Plus, and it wasn’t really mine. My dad bought it for our family, but I don’t remember anyone but me ever using it. It was 1986. I was 13 years old and it was my first love.

I’ve had many loves since then, both of the Mac and the PC variety. “Love” is a stretch for most of the PCs I’ve owned, but once they could connect me to the internet I didn’t really care which operating system they ran.

I’ve spent the last 20 years (and then some) covering technology in print, online, on television, and on podcasts. I’ve seen a few things, not all of them good. I love gadgets, but I also recognize that my old Macintosh Plus and so many of my other loves since then might be rotting in a landfill right now. I’ve become ever more distrustful of the Amazon Echoes I have scattered about my house, and I left my Ring Video Doorbell behind at the last place I lived. I know that the internet I connected to for the first time back in 1993 is very different from the one I connect to now. (For the record, it wasn’t perfect then either, especially for a 20-year-old woman.)

And yet, I still have hope for technology. I still get excited about what new hardware and software can help us do that we couldn’t before. I still believe the number of ways the internet connects us outnumbers the ways it divides us. Social media isn’t cigarettes and robots aren’t taking all of our jobs.

There was a time in my life when people could ignore computers and technology, but if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that that time is gone. Even the most technologically illiterate among us have been forced into Zooming if they wanted to connect with anyone outside of their household.

And it is into this world that we launch Debugger, a new gadget publication from the OneZero team at Medium. Debugger is your spot for reading and learning about consumer technology — including helpful stories about data privacy and digital wellness. We will find and publish the smartest writing on consumer tech that helps you understand how gadgets, apps, websites, and anything else that we call “tech” is shaping our lives, for better or worse.

We’ll feature writers you already know and love from OneZero, as well as other diverse perspectives from real people writing on the Medium platform. We want to share the best Medium stories about how our technology works, how it doesn’t always work like we think it does, how we wish it would work, and how, armed with a spudger, a Raspberry Pi, and a GitHub repository we might be able to make it work how we want it to work. If you have a tech story to tell, we want to help you tell it. Send Medium drafts, pitches, and dog pics to debugger@medium.com. (And to learn how Debugger fits into the expanded OneZero lineup, you read more here.)

Thanks for reading,

Megan Morrone
Senior Platform Editor, OneZero and Debugger