WIRED June 2018

Erin Griffith was working as a business reporter at Buyouts magazine when the Great Recession hit, laying bare the unscrupulousness of financial firms. Today, as a senior writer at WIRED reporting on the murky world of cryptocurrency (see her roundup of the sector’s darker side on page 23), she’s experiencing some déjà vu. “There’s a lot of fraud, junk companies, and shady characters that are operating with almost no regulatory oversight in the crypto industry now,” she says. For a break from that strange world, we sent Griffith to San Diego to meet Henry, the first AI-enhanced male sex robot. Check out her story on page 34. Contributing editor Garrett M. Graff literally wrote the book on special counsel Robert Mueller. The Threat Matrix, published in 2011, chronicles Mueller’s time leading…

THE COMMERCIAL WEB steams on as a hopped-up, strung-out system of hyperlinks, engineered to mix Barnumesque humbug with authentic reports, and to overlap ads and news—the better to sucker the eye. But the spirit of mischief that used to define the web has curdled. In place of pranks and profiteering are now exploitation, malice, fraud, racketeering, and warfare. Consider last year’s breakthrough: deepfakes, in which the images and voices of real people are animated in photorealistic pornography and fake news. Digital confections like these exploit individuals, corrupt information space, and undermine the reliability of all digital artifacts. Lost in the funhouse, we’re told to be afraid—and to process every symbol we encounter with heightened diligence. The new catchphrase for web users is “Verify, then trust.” That is, before you so much as…

IN THE GAME Armor Blitz, players assemble an army of anime “tank girls.” When the game debuted on Google Play in November 2016, it grossed just $23,400 in six months, less than half its production cost. Then the same game relaunched on the adult-gaming platform Nutaku—now with the notable addition of hentai cartoon porn. Blitz went on to bank more than $160,000 in six months. ¶ The thriving erotic-gaming industry that originated in Japan is now going global. Backed by porn giant MindGeek (owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube, et al.), Nutaku has become a megaplatform of titillating gaming, offering a mix of imports and indie releases. With 10 million registered users—40 percent of whom play daily—and 70 million monthly pageviews, the platform’s output of single-player kink has exploded more than…

THE BITCOIN HODLERS, ICO hustlers, and Lambo-owning crypto millionaires would like you to know that the cryptocurrency revolution is upon us. Before long you’ll be making breakfast on the blockchain! But as the trustless, decentralized world of digital tokens expands—and Fortune 500 companies, banks, restaurant chains, and even countries (ahem, Venezuela) cautiously wade in—a credibility problem persists. Silk Road and AlphaBay may be gone, but that hasn’t stopped fraudsters, gamblers, sex workers, and drug dealers from cashing in. Sex Escorts, cam girls, and other sex workers now speak fluent crypto. (See: r/GirlsGone-Bitcoin.) At a club in Las Vegas, strippers accept tips in bitcoin, while PinkDate—the “Tinder of escorting”—claims it sold 40 million tokens in a recent coin offering. Gambling Illegal online betting is much easier when money transfers can be made swiftly and untraceably.…

Adderall, shmaderall. Certain biohackers prefer taking teeny-tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs to boost focus. But how much is a microdose, exactly? Here’s our semi-scientific guide. Hint: If you feel the trees breathing, you’re doing it wrong. Acid MICRODOSE (5–10 MCG): Users claim that a microhit of LSD clears mental locks and helps with depression. It’s often taken first thing in the morning with distilled water—chlorine can kill key compounds. OVERDOSE: Visions, cosmic oneness, epiphanies about epiphanies. Mushrooms MICRODOSE (0.1 G): A taste of psilocybin (or its synthetic version, which is often used in clinical trials) brings on a low-key wave of zenlike happiness. They say. OVERDOSE: Warps in spacetime. Ibogaine Hydrochloride MICRODOSE (2 MG): This drug, extracted from iboga roots, can produce a calm focus that, unlike Adderall, also acts as a mild aphrodisiac. (Its main use is…

PREPPING FOR A big presentation is stressful, and your boss isn’t making it any better. He’s leering at your coworker Rachel in the middle of a meeting (!), asking if she’s bringing a date to the company dinner (!!). I mean, what do you do? Say something? Take it to HR? Talk to Rachel? Every choice feels kinda wrong—even though you’re just seeing all this in a virtual-reality headset. ¶ The discomfort is the point, says Morgan Mercer, founder of Vantage Point, the company behind the VR demonstration. Traditionally, on-the-job harassment training has been a choice between the lesser of two borings—schlocky video or snoozy slide deck—but Mercer wants to put you in the room. ¶ She’s a survivor of sexual violence herself; she knows the subject can be hard…