WIRED May 2021

RE: “GOD VIEW” The surveillance tech singularity is close.—S. E. Smith (@sesmith), via Twitter RE: “DEAR BIRTH MOTHER” Dating back to the orphan trains in the 1850s, the notion that adoption should be a state law issue is laughable. It’s all interstate activity. We regulate nail salons in this country better than we regulate the transfer of actual children. —Maureen Flatley (@moflatley), via Twitter Makes me thankful we were able to find an agency that emphasized education, ethical adoption, and support before and after an adoption for all members of the triad. These stories make me more convinced of how important those factors are for everyone. —David Lystlund, via Facebook When a group of people with lived experience express that a system has harmed them, and you call them “an anti-adoption movement,” you’re perpetuating and…

EVERY HUMAN ENDEAVOR must have its influencers, and Dogecoin is no exception. But in case these influencers haven’t influenced you yet: Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency, a virtual medium of exchange made valuable not by any bank or government but by those who use it. Don’t worry. It’s not a Johnny-come-lately crypto like Potcoin or Fonziecoin; it’s almost venerable. Invented in 2013 by Billy Markus (then a software engineer at IBM) and Jackson Palmer (then a product manager at Adobe), Dogecoin was conceived as a cute comeback to the deadly serious Bitcoin, the cloak-and-dagger global-finance opera that started in 2009. Meant to be relatable, Dogecoin was inspired by the beloved Doge meme of the Obama era, which shows a photo of a creamcolored Shiba Inu embellished with enigmatic phrases in Comic Sans…

LATELY I’VE TAKEN greatly to this epaper tablet, the ReMarkable 2. I’m not sure who sells it. Not Apple or Amazon. It’s slower and monochrome and less powerful than my iPad, but somehow its duller, paperlike screen and its simple software encourage me to scribble, and I’ve been using it to write weird calligraphic notes that I send to my friends. Sometimes I prepare presentations with it, in cursive, and use them when I’m on a video call in lieu of Power-Point. It doesn’t glow or read email, and I delight in that. As I doodle in the sunlight, my Roomba bumps my foot. The children have named it Biscuit. You can connect to it via an app, but lately I just hit its big dumb button, and it does its…

WHITE-COLLAR DRONES complain about going to meetings. But they also complain about not going to them: If you miss a crucial discussion, you’re out of the loop. Nobody takes good notes, people forget what was said or remember selectively. Information dies. You can record meetings, but who’s going to listen to hours of that? Last year, Zack Kanter—the CEO of Stedi, which makes business-to-business software—experimented with a new tool, Rewatch, that tries to solve this problem. Every time Stedi employees hold meetings on Zoom, Rewatch records the whole thing, then uses voice-dictation AI to transcribe it. That means Kanter and his 56 employ-ees, who all work remotely, now have a searchable archive of everything said in all meetings. “It’s unbelievably useful for us,” he says. Let’s say he’s setting up a meeting…

46% → Portion of streaming video-on-demand customers who share the login of at least one service they subscribe to with nonsubscribers, according to a study from research firm Magid. 10X → Decrease in hearing sensitivity among fish that grow up in oceans acidified by carbon emissions, according to a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 8.7 → Megawatt-hours of energy consumed by the sale of six NFTs by French artist Joanie Lemercier—the equivalent of two years of energy use in his studio. 65% → Engagement boost that far-right news organizations get from publishing misinformation over far-right orgs that don’t, according to the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at NYU.…

IN NOVEMBER 2003, Barrett Lyon, a security researcher and college student, debuted an unusual art piece: a vast, celestial jumble of lines, bursts, and branches that formed a kaleidoscopic depiction of the global internet. Dubbed Opte, the image wasn’t just an artist’s rendering but a technical analysis of internet “traceroutes,” diagnostic tests used to scout possible paths through a network. Years later, finding himself with more free time during the pandemic, Lyon returned to the project with fresh enthusiasm. In February he released a new version of Opte, a 10K video that lets you watch the evolution of the internet from 1997 to the present. This time Lyon tapped into Border Gateway Protocol routing tables—essentially the subway maps of the internet—to give a more accurate and nuanced view. The closer…