WIRED April 2022

In our March issue, Darren Loucaides pulled back the curtain on Telegram, a private messaging app that has become a haven for disinformation, abuse, and the American far-right. Amanda Chicago Lewis dug into one company’s contentious quest to create a field sobriety test for driving while high. And Becca Andrews confronted the vulnerabilities of personal finance apps after her mother fell victim to a phone scammer. Readers share their empathy, befuddlement, and schemes to scam the scammers: RE: “MESSAGE RECEIVED” “Every platform remains at the whims of the team behind it.”—Zoe Scaman (@zoescaman), via Twitter RE: “MESSAGE RECEIVED” A cultish culture and libertarian ideology that sees social networks as transcendent structures that will free communications from state control … Facebook and the anti-Facebook actually look pretty much alike. —Beatriz Vilchez (@beatriz_vilchez), via Twitter Framing every tech…

SIGHT ISOLATES, SOUND INCORPORATES. This was the signature insight of Walter Ong, the tech philosopher who considered spoken language superior to written language and a greater stimulus to intimacy and imagination. A proud phonocentrist, Ong further believed that heroism lives almost exclusively in speech. This rings true. There are many heroic calls to arms—think of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky defying the Russian invasion—but heroic emails are few. Social media has long pitched its tent in the domain of logos—the word. Twitter and Facebook may seem rambunctious, but they’re mostly made of silent symbols. Such written language, in Ong’s analysis, will always engender the arrogance of “the last word”; distraction; disengagement from the shared human struggle to make meaning; and neurotic repetitiveness—backing and filling, skimming, rereading, parsing, sharing, screenshotting. By contrast, Clubhouse is…

WHAT IS A REAL APE? For OpenSea, the internet’s most popular NFT marketplace, answering that question is pretty much a no-win proposition. Last year, Bored Apes—cartoon images of apathetic primates in varied states of dress, linked to unique cryptocurrency tokens—skyrocketed in popularity. Now the cheapest cost $309,000, and OpenSea is crawling with imitations, rip-offs, and arch satires of the whole phenomenon (itself full of veiled imitations and rip-offs). Late last year, two accounts on Open-Sea, called Phunky Apes Yacht Club (PAYC) and PHAYC, respectively, started hawking mirror-image versions of the original Bored Apes—minting primates that faced left instead of right. Both claimed to be thoughtful parodies of the coveted simians and not straight-up copypastas like the hordes of other apes clogging the platform. In December, OpenSea banned the flipped-ape projects, perhaps…

LIKE MANY NERDS before me, I spent a goodly portion of my life searching for the perfect computing system. I wanted a single tool that would let me write prose or programs, that could search every email, tweet, or document in a few keystrokes, and that would work across all my devices. I yearned to summit the mythic Mt. Augment, to achieve the enlightenment of a properly orchestrated personal computer. Where the software industry offered notifications, little clicks and dings, messages jumping up and down on my screen like a dog begging for a treat, I wanted calm textuality. Seeking it, I tweaked. I configured. The purpose of configuration is to make a thing work with some other thing—to make the to-do list work with the email client, say, or the…

LAST AUGUST, INTEL revealed fresh details on its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will churn out a new generation of chips studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947. With salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors—by himself. He sliced wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using UV light, and dunked them in acid by hand, chronicling it all on You-Tube and his blog. Zeloof figures that, well, “another human figured it out, so I can too, even if it takes me longer.…

THERE ARE MANY ways to label a hunk of beef. Take a stroll down the meat aisle of a grocery store in the US and you’ll be presented with a smorgasbord of descriptors: rib eye, Angus, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, grass-fed, vegetarian-fed. But soon you might see yet another designation: low-carbon. In November, the US Department of Agriculture approved a first-of-its-kind program that will allow beef producers to market their meat as “low-carbon” if they can show that their cattle are raised in a way that emits 10 percent less greenhouse gases than an industry baseline. On first glance, the plan sounds like a step in the right direction. But some scientists worry that the labels might mislead consumers by dramatically understating the climate effects of raising cattle. They have a point. Shoppers staring at…