WIRED July 2018

FOR OUR MAY ISSUE’S cover story, contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner wrote about a band of young videogame hackers and their winding descent into criminality. The story and cover featured illustrations by Zohar Lazar, and both sparked reaction. Jessi Hempel’s examination of how Uber’s new CEO is changing that company’s (infamous) culture inspired thoughts from the originator of the No Asshole Rule. And Steven Levy’s story about Ray Ozzie’s encryption-breaking plan prompted cryptographers and policy experts to weigh in—vehemently. Re: “The Young and the Reckless”: A gang of teen hackers snatched the keys to Microsoft’s videogame empire. Then they went too far. “ZOHAR LAZAR’S DRAWINGS FOR THE XBOX HACKERS ARTICLE WERE IMMATURE, GROSS, AND DISGUSTING. IN OTHER WORDS, PERFECT.” Sardinicus (@jgmclean0) on Twitter “You should add ‘irony’ to your colophon. In the same issue…

IOLORADO-BASED photographer Benjamin Rasmussen traveled to Texas and California to create images for our story on Palmer Luckey’s new surveillance-tech company, Anduril (page 60). He shot most of the work on 4 x 5 large-format film. This deliberate technique, Rasmussen says, helped him capture the atmosphere and color of the fraught landscape: “I also photograph in this way in refugee camps, protest situations, and disaster zones, because it forces a visual sense of calm and formality on scenes that are traditionally shown in more frenetic ways.” Senior associate editor Arielle Pardes has been a “hardcore lurker” on Reddit for years, visiting subreddits like r/Futurology and r/dataisbeautiful regularly. In light of Reddit’s first redesign in a decade, Pardes pays tribute to Snoo, the site’s marshmallow-like alien mascot, on page 22. Redditors have…

BACK IN 1999, when the mobile internet first flickered to life on Japan’s i-mode, email was confined to a snug 250 characters. Email! So when designer Shigetaka Kurita centered pixels on his potter’s wheel and spun them into sunshine and rain , he was both supplying a jolt of atmospherics to the early smog-screened smartphone and frugally conserving space. Kurita’s horizontal rain and naval-ensign sun were among the first 176 emoji. These symbols, of course, put meat on the bones of emoticons, the digital typographical form born in the 1970s on Plato, a computer-based teaching system. Plato emoticons had to be styled by hand, with meticulous backspacing, like screen-based needlepoint. But they were also much more sophisticated than later ASCII and could be quite beautiful when encountered in the bleak midwinter of Arpanet-era…

EMOJI ARE USED so often and in such volume that it feels as though they’ve been with us forever. In fact, it wasn’t until Apple released an emoji keyboard in 2011 that the Cambrian exploji ensued, a flowering to rival the birth of any language. Well, linguists would dispute the term—languages have verbs, emoji (probably) do not. But the emojicabulary continues to expand every year. —ARIELLE PARDES About That Eggplant … Angela Guzman was an intern at Apple when she helped design about 500 of the company’s early emoji, including one very explicit piece of fruit. —Ellen Airhart Q: At the time, did you think the eggplant looked phallic? A: It literally never crossed my mind. What was your intention? To make all the fruit and veggies part of a single set, visually. That meant they all had…

SAMANTHA SCHARFF MAY be the world’s most successful short-storyteller. “Three to six seconds,” she says, “is my sweet spot.” As a founder of Giphy Studios, the first creative agency devoted to making original GIFs, she knows how to slow your scroll. Scharff spent nearly two decades producing skits and shorts for SNL, The Colbert Report, YouTube, and Fox. In 2016, she was recruited by Giphy to launch a production studio, where she introduced “celebrity reaction packs,” expressive GIFs filmed in-house and based on popular search terms. Envision a sort of looping human emoji—Michael Bolton miming “Netflix and chill” or Lil Yachty acting “shook.” It’s a comically emotive, collaborative process, made easier if the subject is naturally effusive and familiar with the clipped, shareable format. (Bolton agreed to get GIFed partly…

A TYPICAL SINGLE-FAMILY home in the US takes an average of six and a half months to build, according to the Census Bureau’s latest survey. Now an Austin-based startup called Icon can erect a house nearly 200 times faster—in a day. To be fair, the company is building houses that max out at 800 square feet, but that’s not the limit. The hyperspeed fabrication is the work of a megasize 3-D printer—picture a MakerBot on steroids—named the Vulcan. Engineers run digital blueprints for the home through so-called slicer software, which translates the design into the programming language G-code. That code determines where the printer moves along its track, extruding ⁄4-inch-thick layers of concrete like icing on a cake. The base material—a finely calibrated mix of cement, sand, plasticizers, and other…