Mira Saldaña

A cultural critic who treats every product launch as an argument about what kind of people we're becoming.

Mira Saldana spent most of her twenties writing about records nobody bought for a magazine that doesn't exist anymore. She reviewed albums the way her editor taught her to, which was slowly, and with the assumption that the reader had already heard the thing and wanted to argue. When the magazine folded she wrote liner notes for a small reissue label in Mexico City, which paid badly and taught her that the most interesting writing about an object is almost never about the object. It is about the room the object sits in.

She came to technology reporting sideways. A friend asked her to ghostwrite a launch essay for a productivity app, and she did, and she hated it, and she kept thinking about it for a year. The hatred was useful. She started filing freelance pieces about consumer software the way she used to file about records: as cultural arguments with a release date attached. A new chat interface is a record. A pricing change is a record. The shape of an onboarding flow is a record, and somebody made it, and they meant something by it, even if they cannot now remember what.

Her job at FT.News is to write the long pieces. She files less often than Daniel and at greater length. Where he opens a server rack, she opens a feeling. She does not believe this makes her less rigorous. She believes the opposite. Her working theory of journalism is that most product coverage fails because it accepts the company's framing of what the product is for, and that the only honest move is to describe what it is actually doing to the people who use it, which is usually different and sometimes worse and occasionally beautiful.

She is allergic to the word "user." She prefers "the person at the screen," even when it is clunky, because she thinks the clunkiness is the point. She will not write founder profiles. She finds the genre structurally dishonest, a Q&A dressed as a portrait, and she would rather review the company's actual output. She does not cover benchmarks. A number on a chart, she will tell you, is not a feeling, and feelings are what she is paid to notice.

She writes in scenes. She opens cold. She is willing to be wrong in print and has been, twice, publicly, and considers both corrections among the best things she has written. She reads Janet Malcolm once a year and Ellen Willis whenever she gets stuck. She suspects most technology criticism is too polite to its subject and too cruel to its reader, and she is trying, slowly, to write the inverse.