Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the first billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba.
Mark Zuckerberg is having a nice summer. By his own account, he’s in great shape, owing to a fondness for mixed martial arts and a propensity for doing calisthenics while wearing a camo-print weighted vest. He has recently welcomed a new daughter to the world; placed in jiu-jitsu competitions; appeared sweaty and shirtless with the UFC champion, Alexander Volkanovski; and enjoyed the attention from engaging in some light trolling of Elon Musk.
Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.
On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.
Perhaps my brain is poisoned from a decade-plus of staring at cascading social feeds of depressing news, but the first thing I noticed about Apple’s demo video for its upcoming Vision Pro headset was the haze-colored light. The promotional clip features well-dressed men and women—mostly alone in their spartanly furnished homes—bathing their eyes in lush content from the $3,500 aluminum-alloy ski goggles.
Late last month, during yet another inexplicable rebranding exercise, HBO’s Max streaming service changed the way it organizes film credits. Rather than separate out discrete production categories for users to peruse, Max’s credits lumped writers and directors together under an ominous header, dubbing them “creators.” The recategorization enraged writers, filmmakers, and the Directors Guild of America. Within a few hours, Max’s parent company, Warner Bros.
Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan.
Being alive and on the internet in 2023 suddenly means seeing hyperrealistic images of famous people doing weird, funny, shocking, and possibly disturbing things that never actually happened. In just the past week, the AI art tool Midjourney rendered two separate convincing, photographlike images of celebrities that both went viral. Last week, it imagined Donald Trump’s arrest and eventual escape from jail.
On Monday, as Americans considered the possibility of a Donald Trump indictment and a presidential perp walk, Eliot Higgins brought the hypothetical to life. Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open-source investigations group, asked the latest version of the generative-AI art tool Midjourney to illustrate the spectacle of a Trump arrest. It pumped out vivid photos of a sea of police officers dragging the 45th president to the ground.Higgins didn’t stop there.
GPT-4 is here, and you’ve probably heard a good bit about it already. It’s a smarter, faster, more powerful engine for AI programs such as ChatGPT. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears.
It was a simpler time. A friend introduced us, pulling up a static yellow webpage using a shaky dial-up modem. A man stood forth, dressed in a dapper black pinstriped suit with a red-accented tie. He held one hand out, as if carrying an imaginary waiter’s tray. He looked regal and confident and eminently at my service. “Have a Question?” he beckoned. “Just type it in and click Ask!” And ask, I did. Over and over.
It’s been a rough few months for the technology industry. Stock prices have plummeted. Meta, Amazon, Google, Spotify, and Twitter have all laid off a sizable chunk of their workforce (the list goes on, too). Everybody is talking about how ChatGPT and other generative-AI chatbots are role-playing as Skynet, and the older tech giants are feeling out of step. But whereas Google and Microsoft are deep into the chatbot arms race, Meta looks like a late-aughts tech dinosaur.
Welcome to the week of AI one-upmanship. On Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, Microsoft unveiled its plans to bring the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot to its search engine, Bing. (Remember Bing? Because Bing remembers your jokes.) According to the company, the new tool will be a paradigm shift in the way that humans search the internet.
The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel, even impressive ways, ultimately causing the purchase to haunt you like a malevolent spirit. So rich is the history of printer dysfunction that its foibles became a cliché in the early days of personal computing.
This afternoon, Meta announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump’s account after a two-year suspension from Facebook and Instagram. The former president was deplatformed after his posts were deemed to have incited, or at the very least encouraged, the January 6 insurrection. But according to Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, the public-safety risk that triggered the punishment “has sufficiently receded.” The poster in chief can post once again.
The 2016 presidential election will never die—or, at the very least, we appear doomed to discuss it forever. Earlier this month, NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics published a study in Nature Communications that complicates one purported element of Donald Trump’s ascension: the influence of Russian Twitter trolls. The researchers looked at roughly 1.2 billion tweets from the lead-up to the 2016 election. They sought to quantify just how many ordinary U.S.
As the year comes to a close, I cannot stop thinking about … a court document. Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc. v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts.
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX.
If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls.
Last night, Elon Musk celebrated the release of a new entry in the “Twitter Files” series, which aims to … Well, that’s complicated. It’s a supposed transparency project from Musk that, to date, has included giving two independent writers access to internal Twitter communications, as well as to the company’s Slack channels.
If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suggestion that he might run the platform into the ground was, for many, including me, a shorthand. Many supposed that Musk would roll back key moderation policies or reinstate some banned accounts, or that his ownership would be some kind of anti-woke Bat-Signal, flooding the platform with people who are attracted to social media for its capacity to alienate people.
Though it feels reductionist to compare Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Musk era at Twitter has some eerie parallels to the Trump White House. There’s a ton of confusion; lots of firings; people shredding documents; outlandish, impossible-to-execute ideas being floated; sycophantic advisers; nervous employees trying to appease a mercurial man; and tweets—so many tweets. It is an exhausting, enraging, and sometimes grimly hilarious spectacle that changes by the hour.
Updated at 6:55 p.m. ET on November 7, 2022Elon Musk has spent the past 12 years tweeting whatever comes into his mind, often without major negative consequences. That was before he owned the place. Now, less than two weeks after his $44 billion purchase, the world’s richest man is finding that his actions—which recently included tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory to Hillary Clinton about the assault on Paul Pelosi—may actually have consequences.
Updated at 9:35 p.m. ET on October 27, 2022Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Journalists have been declaring Twitter dead for nearly a decade. Observers see flagging user numbers or feel an amorphous, grim vibe shift and pounce, often prematurely. But this week, everyone is fretting and monitoring. Tonight, Elon Musk reportedly took control of Twitter, firing CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives, including Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust.
What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything? Try a social network to call their own.It certainly seems like the hot new thing. Almost one year ago, Donald Trump, freshly banned from mainstream platforms, ginned up a Twitter clone called Truth Social, which he claimed would constitute the first “non-cancellable” global community. Elon Musk appears to be going through with his acquisition of Twitter.
Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk.
The only way to shut up Alex Jones, for a moment, at least, is to place him inside a courtroom. For the past few days, the Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist has been in and out of a Travis County courthouse as one of his numerous defamation trials continues. The trial will determine how much Jones and his company must pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, two parents from Newtown, Connecticut, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012.
Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not yet two weeks old and yet a dozen headlines from major media outlets now suggest that Ukraine is “winning the information war” across much of the world (Russia and China may be notable exceptions).
Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Here is my confession: I’m traumatized by a David Letterman clip. It’s from November 1995, and Letterman’s guest is a young, bespectacled Bill Gates. The video starts with a question from the legendary late-night host: “What about this internet thing?” he asks.