Complex Roundtable: The Most Fascinating Tech Stories of 2013 (So Far)

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to Vpeeker—a site that loops recently uploaded Vines in realtime. The catch: It never stops. My fascination with Vpeeker has a lot to do with Vine in particular, the bite-sized video-sharing app released at the onset of 2013. In many ways the app has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other, much like Twitter did before it. And despite Zuck & Co. debuting Instagram Video just weeks ago—Look guys you can now record up to 15 seconds and place filters on videos!—there is still a certain allure to Vine; its magic being rooted in its simplicity. And let's be real, there's nothing like the original. The app's success and ever-growing popularity (especially among teens) has been my favorite story of the last six months.

But if you had to pick one moment, trend or story, which would you choose? We decided to round up a group of writers and editors from Wired, BuzzFeed, The Verge, Circa, New York, and Complex to determine the most compelling stories of 2013 so far. Here's what they had to say.

RELATED: The Most Fascinating Tech Stories of 2012

One of the most overlooked stories of the past six months took place just weeks ago. The world's biggest tech company made the year's biggest gaming conference—one where Sony and Microsoft both showcased next-gen hardware—seem trivial without even announcing a new iPhone or iPad model. E3 became an afterthought to Apple's latest mobile operating system and bizarre-looking desktop. Aside from the announced price points and system unveilings, no one even paid attention to what else transpired during the expo. Nintendo knows the feeling all to well.

Seriously, I remember sitting in the media room in the Los Angeles Convention Center and discussing with other journalists how iOS 7 was gaining more mainstream exposure than E3 in its entirety. That brought up the question of whether the mobile industry has already killed console gaming. I wouldn't necessary chisel its death date on the tombstone just yet, but it's becoming more and more evident that we're headed into its last generation. —Alex Bracetti, Complex (@alexbracetti)

This year's Google I/O developer conference resulted in no new phones, tablets, or Chromebooks being introduced. And the three and a half hour keynote was too long. But co-founder and CEO Larry Page,who has been dealing with ongoing vocal cord issues spoke publicly for the first time in months. Page's voice was soft, and a bit groggy, but the entire room was so quiet and attentive, that it didn't matter. He spoke largely off the cuff, and offered an optimistic vision for the tech industry, calling for less negativity and a focus on "building things that don't exist." The whole thing was a surprise—none of the press or attendees knew this would happen. And, by far, the best part was Page dreaming aloud of what some have since dubbed a Google Island. "We haven't built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There are many exciting things you could do that are illegal or not allowed by regulation. And that's good, we don't want to change the world. But maybe we can set aside a part of the world. I like going to Burning Man. As a technologist maybe we need some safe places where we can try things and not have to deploy to the entire world. I like thinking about things like that."

The statement was a radical one for someone like Page. Most CEO's don't speak so freely and earnestly, and I loved that he was doing this in front of 6,000 people in attendance and more than 40,000 watching live online. And it all felt very appropriate for Google - a company that is a bit more creative and risk happy than most in tech. Since then, a lot has been written about what Page said, but nothing is as much fun to read as Mat Honan's fictional visit to Page's paradise, "Welcome to Google Island." It's the sort of piece that I wish I'd written—a story with big ideas, critical commentary, a captivating narrative, and a bit of nudity. Watch Page's comments on YouTube, then go read Honan's piece. It's one of the best one-two punches in tech journalism this year. —Nathan Olivarez-Giles, The Verge (@nateog)

Rob Rinehart's blogpost "How I Stopped Eating Food" this February led to a wave of media excitement picking up on his invention of a drink mixture called "Soylent" he'd created in hopes of being able to forgo food entirely. His initial experiment seemed both sensational and strangely awkward, presented with the stiff enthusiasm of a home shopping network testimonial. "I haven't a bite of food in 30 days, and it's changed my life."

After the first wave of amazed news stories picked up on Rinehart's work, everywhere from Vice to The Economist, skeptical countertheorists emerged, including a lengthy post in The Verge forums suspecting the whole thing was a viral plant from an advertising agency. After three months of experimentation however, Rinehart's efforts appear to be genuine, with a launched a Crowdhoster project (after being rejected by Kickstarter) that quickly raised more than $400,000. After three months of self-experimentation, with a diet primarily based on Soylent, Rinehart made samples available to Forbes writer Caleb Melby, who claimed to be a convert after a week on the liquid diet.

Rinehart's writing feels evangelical in its own clipped and hyper-empirical way. Many of his fundamental arguments are persuasive: food waste is a bigger problem than starvation, our least healthy cravings can be traced to an incompatibility with our cubicle-dwelling lifestyles and the 200,000 year-old physiological machinery that's carried our species to this point. And yet, there is a discomforting insistence that the solution to these incompatibilities should be to start drinking a liquid solution, rather than to, say, rethink the abstraction of office-driven economies and the massive waste their surplus wealth often encourages. It seems these social structures will only be empowered if subsistence on a liquid food is made possible. We will feel marginally better about ourselves while avoiding the larger conflict of whether our present social conditions are trading virtue for tolerable efficiency.

"Reductionism is not romantic, but everything can be improved once seen as the sum of its parts," Rinehart wrote after the third month of his experiment. "If we can make transistors that are cheap, fast, and low power, surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally. In the past food was about survival. Now we can try to create something ideal."

Like its namesake, Rinehart's grand scheme is both utopian and sublimely horrific, clearing space for new and unforeseen problems that will replace the old. His story goes to the heart of the drama of technology itself: whether our life's work should be to invent new material solutions to our problems, or to use those problems as markers for how to better moderate our behavior toward one another and our environment. Should we change the world or ourselves? It's an irresolvable dichotomy, and Soylent captures both ends of the rhetorical spectrum. —Michael Thomsen, Complex (@mike_thomsen)

My pick is the four-part debate on Slate between Farhad Manjoo and Evgeny Morozov. I respect both Manjoo and Morozov immensely, and I've read boatloads of each of their work, so seeing the two debate an issue near and dear to my heart – the discourse and rhetoric of tech and Silicon Valley – was a delight. I agreed with Manjoo that Morozov's book (To Save Everything, Click Here) was, in some ways, a straw-man convention, and that reflexive criticism of technological thinking is just as bad as reflexive celebration of it. But I agreed with Morozov on many of his points, too: the folly of looking to tech to solve our societal problems, the uncritical stance of the tech press, and the tendency of writers like Manjoo (and, frankly, me) to examine only whether a given tech product is likely to fail or succeed, not whether it should succeed, or whether its success would represent a net good or a net bad for humanity. I came away from their debate hesitant to pick a winner, but more enlightened and self-critical than I'd arrived. I think that means it was a good debate. —Kevin Roose, New York (@kevinroose)

When the chaos and destruction of the Boston Marathon bombings erupted into the streets of Cambridge on that April afternoon, sadness, confusion and anger quickly flooded into households across America. When the news broke, I instinctively felt the urge to sign on to Twitter to grab any information I could. When I finally got access to social media, there it was: updates, footage and photographs burned across each and every timeline I could see.

As days passed, many of these photographs were used on Reddit to erroneously call out a group of Middle Eastern men as suspects, and led to a New York Post cover featuring a photo of two innocent men whom they alluded to as suspects. Yet, while the public scrambled through social media's vacuum of video and images to make sense of the attacks that left four dead and hundreds injured, law enforcement agencies were flexing new technological muscle to identify and find the suspects.

Just six weeks after the bombings, NOVA released the documentary, "Manhunt-Boston Bombers," which profiles the successes and failures of the technology behind the eventual capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the missteps that could have prevented the attacks altogether. It's a revealing film with incredible reporting from seasoned journalist Miles O'Brien that shows the contrast between the homemade bombs the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly made, and the sophisticated surveillance and recognition systems we have in place—which, as you can imagine, walk the line between being truly remarkable, or terrifying tools with no stake in a little thing called privacy. Interestingly enough, just two weeks after the film aired, the NSA leaks came to light.

While the documentary focuses on technology, it doesn't forget the human element behind the machines, reminding viewers that it's "human beings that solve crimes." —Jason Duaine Hahn, Complex (@jasonduaine)

On the surface, the Edward Snowden story doesn't seem like a "tech" story so much as an intelligence story, or the story of a high-profile leak, or someone who's been charged with spying and is now the target of an international manhunt. But that's the problem, isn't it? The story of the guy who leaked some of the most revealing pieces of information to ever be made public about the extent to which the American Surveillance State lords over us is now overshadowing the revelations themselves. And those revelations? They basically amount to the fact that your life is pretty much just like Enemy of the State, with less Fresh Prince involved.

Yes, the American government is collecting metadata on every phone call, email, and Internet search. If they can collect it, they probably have collected it, or thought about collecting it. Almost everything we do on a machine connecting to a data line of any kind is being scooped up by someone, somewhere, and we're not really thinking about them as we do it. The fact that we're numb to this says as much about how we participate in that exchange as it does the insidiousness by which it's done. The bottom line is that Edward Snowden is our generation's Daniel Ellsberg, with one major difference: Ellsberg's leaks helped lead to the end of one of the most pointlessly violent conflicts in American history. Snowden's leaks are just preparing us for more of what's to come, regardless of whether we know about it or not. —Foster Kamer, Complex (@weareyourfek)