Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two computer geeks worth more than $300 billion put together, are posturing to fight each other in a mixed-martial-arts cage match.
“Vision Pro feels familiar, yet it’s entirely new.” That’s how Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, introduced the company’s new computer goggles at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. The Vision Pro headset, which resembles a glass scuba mask with a fabric head strap, seamlessly blends the real and digital worlds, Cook said. But the product’s name, which could just as easily describe a brand of contact-lens solution, hints at a challenge.
Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.And yet, board games are terrible.
Many years ago, when picking up my teenage daughter from an outdoor mall, I found myself surrounded by her friends. “You’re verified,” one of them said, gushing. At first I thought this was some new youth slang term for “cool” or even “uncool.” But alas, she was referring to Twitter. I had a blue check on the service. That kind of verified.
Last fall, when generative AI abruptly started turning out competent high-school- and college-level writing, some educators saw it as an opportunity. Perhaps it was time, at last, to dispose of the five-paragraph essay, among other bad teaching practices that have lingered for generations. Universities and colleges convened emergency town halls before winter terms began to discuss how large language models might reshape their work, for better and worse.
ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.
Photographs by Peter Garritano for The AtlanticIn 2004, Steven Spielberg made an entire movie about the terror of getting stuck for months in an airport, but I might be happy never to leave the new LaGuardiaAir travel itself, the part where you are crammed like a rodent into a metal tube, is clearly miserable.
What do you get when you buy something? The thing, of course—a Big Mac, airline transit to Miami, the right to stream Bridgerton. This is the hard product. But you receive secondary goods and services as well: the box in which you can transport your burger, complimentary Wi-Fi with your SkyMiles membership, the kinship of watching a show with your family. Call this the “soft product.” If you don’t get the hard product, you’ve been swindled.
“Fudge,” I remember saying, only I didn’t say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a “clicker,” the game lore’s name for a medium-difficulty enemy.
A boyfriend just going through the motions. A spouse worn into the rut of habit. A jetlagged traveler’s message of exhaustion-fraught longing. A suppressed kiss, unwelcome or badly timed. These were some of the interpretations that reverberated in my brain after I viewed a weird digital-art trifle by the Emoji Mashup Bot, a popular but defunct Twitter account that combined the parts of two emoji into new, surprising, and astonishingly resonant compositions.
We are living through the most Twittery moment of all time. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, whose users sometimes call it a “hellsite,” tweeters have been tweeting in panic mode, as if from an aircraft about to careen into a mountainside.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Everything’s so smart now. Smartphones, smart speakers, smart lamps, smart plugs, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart thermostats. Smart things are smart not because they have smarts, but because they connect to the internet. Online connectivity allows them to be controlled, either locally or from afar—and in ways both visible and invisible.The sales pitch for smart devices typically focuses on convenience.
I’d like to drive less, exercise more, commune with nature, and hate myself with a lesser intensity because I am driving less, exercising more, and communing with nature. One way to accomplish all of these goals, I decided earlier this year, was to procure an e-bike. (That’s a bicycle with a motor, if you didn’t know.) I could use it for commuting, for errands, for putting my human body to work, and for reducing my environmental impact.
I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
This is exhausting, but I’ll attempt to bring you up to speed: Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter accepted this offer, presumably because it was the best the social-media company’s directors thought they could do. Then Musk changed his mind and said he was pulling out of the deal, claiming that he couldn’t tell how many Twitter users were fake. And then Twitter sued Musk to force him to go through with the purchase.
A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became so enthralled by an AI chatbot that he may have sacrificed his job to defend it. “I know a person when I talk to it,” he told The Washington Post for a story published last weekend. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.” After discovering that he’d gone public with his claims, Google put Lemoine on administrative leave.
Updated at 6:10 p.m. ET on May 18, 2022“What do you think of this company Netscape?” my parents asked. It was 1995, and they had called me on the landline, which back then just meant the telephone. Netscape was a company that made a graphical web browser—the web browser, really—but gave it away for free. Its income statement showed only modest revenue (and substantial losses). The web was new and exciting but unproven, so I steered my folks away from Netscape’s IPO.
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product.
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product.
You can call Elon Musk a lot of things. Agent of chaos. Savvy investor. Obsessive workaholic. But the tech-industry analyst Benedict Evans has a different suggestion. He calls Musk a “bullshitter who delivers.” I’d go even further: Musk exemplifies a new kind of bullshitter, one we haven’t really seen before.
At high noon on an early-spring day in 2017, six steers doomed to die escaped their slaughterhouse and stormed the streets of my city. The escape became a nuisance, then a scene, then a phenomenon. “Man, it was crazy!” one onlooker told the local alt-weekly. “I mean, it was fucking bulls running through the city of St.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict could trigger a massive cyberwar, New Scientist surmised. An unprecedented cyberwar is likely, Senator Marco Rubio warned. The hacker group Anonymous has allegedly launched a cyberwar against the Russian government.Cyberwar sounds bad—and it is. Broadly, it names the global threat of combat mixed with computer stuff.
Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.
Wordle! It’s a word game people are playing online. Each day, the game offers one new puzzle: Guess a five-letter English word correctly in six or fewer tries. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct, which are wrong, and which are the right letters in the wrong place. It’s fun! But why?Games seem like trifles, and many are, which can make them difficult to take seriously as art or culture.
“Today was great!” my 7-year-old exclaimed recently when I came home from work. By cosmic standards, her day wasn’t that special. She went to the playground, where she finally mastered the monkey bars. She visited the history museum—or at least its gift shop. She got “really big” nachos. She went to the kids’ art studio. Two years ago, visiting a museum and a nacho joint was so common, it wouldn’t even have registered.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic.
In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that.