vulture lists
May 22, 2023
The 100 Hardest Video-Game Bosses, Ranked From gods and zombies to a shark and a tree, the one trait they share is an ability to end your game swiftly.
How The Matrix ’s Red Pill Became the Internet’s Delusional Drug of Choice It’s inspired a whole pharmacy’s worth of memes and cyberideologies — some playful, some hateful.
the money game
Oct. 24, 2021
Why Your Group Chat Could Be Worth Millions If you turn it into a DAO, that is. But what’s a DAO? It’s a little bit cryptocurrency, a little bit gamer clan, a little bit pyramid scheme.
You’re Not Crazy. Money Is. Welcome to the non-fungible, memeified, cryptodenominated, degenerate future of finance.
vulture lists
Dec. 13, 2020
The Best Way to Read John le Carré’s George Smiley Books If I wanted to undertake the worthwhile project of reading le Carré’s Smiley novels for the first time, this is the order I’d recommend.
election results
Nov. 7, 2020
Time Has Never Moved As Slowly As It Did This Week Everyone wanted to talk about the election, and no one wanted to talk about the election.
Can Twitter Fix ‘Misinformation’ Like Mayor Bloomberg’s Manipulated Video? On March 5, Twitter is rolling out new policies around misinformation. Will they work?
technocracy
Feb. 20, 2020
A Lurkers’ History of the Internet In Lurking and other new books, writers are constructing an alternative history of the internet.
technocracy
Feb. 13, 2020
I Got a Ring Doorbell Camera. It Scared the Hell Out of Me. What it’s like to live with an Amazon Ring security camera.
new hampshire primary
Feb. 12, 2020
Yang Is Out. Yangism Is Here to Stay. Yang’s campaign revealed a strain of politics with a significant and passionate constituency — one that won’t evaporate in the candidate’s absence.
5 Theories About Conspiracy Theories We live in the age of red yarn and corkboard. There’s no easy explanation — but here are five theories why.
The Real Problems With the Iowa Caucuses’ ‘Shadow’ App Technical failures were amplified by institutional failures, which were amplified by communications failures, creating a cascade of incompetence.
technocracy
Jan. 30, 2020
Why We Should Ban Facial Recognition Technology It’s much harder to move fast and break things when you’re not allowed to move at all.
Big Tech’s Most Powerful Apostates, Ranked Self-criticism is suddenly huge in Silicon Valley. But not all critiques are created equal.
who were the 2010s?
Nov. 26, 2019
BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti on Making the World a Meme Talking the dress, the dossier, and the next pivot to video with the CEO of the company that transformed digital media over the last decade.
life in pixels
Nov. 21, 2019
How Should You Feel About Zuck’s Dinner With Peter Thiel and Donald Trump? It’s extremely normal for the president to dine with the head of the largest communications apparatus on the planet and his democracy-skeptic mentor.
the future issue
Nov. 13, 2019
In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past?
intelligencer chats
Oct. 24, 2019
Is Facebook’s Political-Ad Policy Really That Bad? Intelligencer staffers discuss whether Mark Zuckerberg deserves the barrage of criticism he’s getting over his company’s policy.
geopolitics
Oct. 15, 2019
LeBron James Was Disappointing on China. Expect More of the Same. James’s answer on Daryl Morey’s tweet was not the statement we might have hoped for. But it is the kind of statement we should start to expect.
life in pixels
Oct. 9, 2019
Coleen Rooney, Instagram Spycatcher The WAG George Smiley acknowledges the truth: Social media makes spies of us all.
ukraine scandal
Oct. 4, 2019
Ukraine Diplomat Desperately Tried to Take Notes on a Criminal Conspiracy Texts between top diplomats reveal that committing an impeachable offense is like doing any other office job in the world.
Is Kamala Harris Right That Twitter Should Ban Trump? Intelligencer staffers discuss the wisdom of removing the president from his favorite social-media platform.
A Cynic’s Guide to Killing It at Stanford Many of the 1,700 freshmen arriving in Palo Alto this September didn’t come for the Romantic poetry but to network, raise capital, and drop out.
life in pixels
Aug. 1, 2019
Is Andrew Yang the Doomer Candidate? Andrew Yang’s climate fatalism during Wednesday’s debate seemed to reflect a strange, esoteric nihilism taking root in the internet’s weirder corners.
life in pixels
July 30, 2019
Can This Slingshot-Building German Unionize YouTube? An upstart “YouTubers Union” is now allied with Europe’s biggest industrial union. Will YouTube listen?
life in pixels
July 26, 2019
We Should Thank Amazon for Letting Us Have Jobs Amazon jobs might be grueling and difficult, but at least there are electrolyte popsicles so you don’t die of dehydration.
The Senate Hates Facebook’s Cryptocurrency A show of bipartisan dislike characterized today’s Banking Committee hearings on Libra. Facebook might be okay with that.
jeffrey epstein
July 9, 2019
So Was QAnon … Right? Purveyors of the Trumpist conspiracy predicted that an elite sex- trafficking network would be revealed last week. Does the Epstein indictment count?
life in pixels
June 27, 2019
Can You Spot a Deepfake? Does It Matter? If you want to imagine the future, don’t imagine an onslaught of fake video. Imagine an onslaught of people telling you a video is fake.
Slack Is a Boring Company. That’s Why Its Stock Was Exciting. Maybe other tech companies can adopt its unorthodox strategy of “selling a service for money.”
life in pixels
June 18, 2019
Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar Facebook just introduced Libra, a new cryptocurrency designed to blow up the global financial system.
Are the Deepfake Fears Overblown? Intelligencer staffers discuss whether it’s reasonable to fear that manipulated videos will (further) poison the discourse.
surveillance
June 11, 2019
Your iPhone Is Listening to You (If You’re a Spanish Soccer Fan) Facebook isn’t spying on you. Spain’s top professional soccer league is, though.
life in pixels
June 7, 2019
Force Majeure Going Viral on Twitter Can Save CinemaOne Weird Trick for getting audiences to watch foreign and art house films.
YouTube Has Only One Rule YouTube is “reexamining” its harassment policy. Can that solve the platform’s problems?
Should YouTube Have Banned Steven Crowder? Intelligencer staffers discuss the platform’s hesitant response to harassment on its platform.
life in pixels
June 4, 2019
Does Facebook Have a Leaks Problem? Facebook employees are increasingly talkative and increasingly polarized — and a lot of them have access to private user data.
life in pixels
May 25, 2019
game of thrones
May 20, 2019
Westeros Is Screwed How do you say plus ça change in Dothraki?
life in pixels
May 16, 2019
The White House’s ‘Tech Bias’ Reporting Form Is a Masterpiece of Trumpism The White House’s call for stories of bias on social media is the apotheosis of the administration’s belief system.
life in pixels
May 14, 2019
Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again The triumphant return of aimless digital chatter.
life in pixels
Apr. 26, 2019
Joe Biden’s Bad Announcement Tweet Was a Good Boomer Post The oddly punctuated tweet in which Joe Biden announced his presidency was the most authentic possible format for a 76-year-old man.
mark zuckerberg
Apr. 24, 2019
Mark Zuckerberg Has Started a Podcast, Because What Else Do You Do in Your 30s? In an astonishing repudiation of Zuckerberg’s purported focus on “time well spent” as a metric, the first episode is an hour and 45 minutes.
life in pixels
Apr. 12, 2019
New York City Could Destroy Uber (If It Wanted To) Uber’s S-1 filing reveals that the cities the company has run roughshod over have an awful lot of leverage over it.
mueller time
Mar. 28, 2019
Intelligencer Chat: Did ‘the Media’ Screw Up the Trump-Russia Story? Intelligencer staffers discuss whether the calls for a mainstream-press reckoning are fair.
life in pixels
Mar. 18, 2019
Why We Fake College Applications and Facebook Profiles Rick Singer’s college admissions fixing scheme has a lot in common with scams and catfishing on social media.
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