WIRED February 2023

As CEO and Co-Founder of Midwam, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Al-Muawad is using technologies such as holograms, augmented reality, and virtual reality to help trade fairs, historic sites, music venues, and cultural festivals tell unforgettable stories and create immersive experiences that leave lasting impressions on their visitors. The impact of these experiences can be profound. Al-Muawad says that many people have been moved to tears by some of the immersive content that Midwam produces. “By being innovative and creative, we can revolutionize the way people engage with art, heritage, and culture.” Khalid Al-Muawad CEO and Co-Founder of Midwam “To touch someone’s emotions that way is the strongest engagement that we can imagine,” he says. “It is testimony to the technology we use and the power of the story we create working hand…

“I hadn’t thought of agriculture until Scott reached out and I reflected on my personal missions,” Parag says. “People don’t appreciate how much tech is used in agriculture. It felt like a natural fit. Nearly two years into the job, it is one of the best decisions I have ever made.” As Chief Digital Product Officer at CNH Industrial, Parag is developing precision technologies that help farmers improve the yields on their crops and run their farms more efficiently, profitably, and sustainably. As the global population tops eight billion, it is a mission that is critical to the future of humanity. “Every day, I wake up with purpose, because no matter what is happening, we have to feed the world,” Parag says. One of the innovations from CNH Industrial helping to transform agriculture…

OF ALL THE THREATS posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise. Twitter will devolve into pornography. Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt. Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost…

“HAPPY TO TALK about it if this is interesting,” Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, texted Elon Musk last spring. He continued, opaquely: “Twitter conversational OS—the town-square for your digital life.” This is how billionaires communicate: in slogans, brand identities, and occasional large sums. It’s up to everyone else to figure out the details. “Well I don’t own it yet,” Musk replied. (To be fair, he was fielding a lot of texts at that moment.) But then he did own it, and by winter the Twitter takeover was a giant, thorny public mess. Whatever magic spell kept people together on the platform seemed to have broken. It was like the plot of Encanto without the happy ending: “The graveyard for your digital life.” Twitter’s troubles are due not just to Musk, who…

THERE WAS NO prospect of pumping more oil out of the old well. It was just a depleted cavern deep beneath the sun-baked Texas soil. But in July, some folks from a Houston-based biotech firm called Cemvita Factory came along and squirted a liquid into it. When they returned five days later, it was no longer an oil well—it had transformed into a hydrogen production plant. The liquid they spritzed down the bore hole was a carefully mixed cocktail of bacteria and nutrients. Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down residual oil hydrocarbons—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—in order to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide. This field test, though small in scale, was a “huge success,” says Cemvita’s chief business officer, Charles Nelson, who would not comment on…

9% Portion of all plastic ever produced that has been recycled. Currently, the US recycles just 5 percent of its plastic waste. 1 Number of employees remaining in late November on the Twitter team that enforces its ban on child sexual abuse material in the Asia Pacific region, home to around 4.3 billion people. $2.5M Estimated total profit made last year by scammers scamming other scammers on online hacker forums and marketplaces. 29 Peak gigawatts of electricity that bitcoin miners in Texas are expected to draw from the state’s energy grid by 2026—four times the peak demand of New York City. READOUT SOURCES: “PRODUCTION, USE, AND FATE OF ALL PLASTICS EVER MADE,” SCIENCE ADVANCES/BEYOND PLASTICS; ANONYMOUS; SOPHOS; ELECTRIC RELIABILITY COUNCIL OF TEXAS READOUT ILLUSTRATION BY JACQUI VANLIEW; GETTY IMAGES…