WIRED July/August 2022

RE: “THE END OF ALCOHOL” Sobriety as a service (and a vibe) is creating some … complicated issues. — S. E. Smith (@sesmith), via Twitter RE: “THE CRYPTO TRAP” It’s horrifying to read about this type of evil among us, but I am thankful for the miraculous occurrences—Jonathan Levin memorizing the characters of the address and sharing them with Janczewski and Gambaryan—and the massive work that went into arresting these predators and saving victims. Some things just can’t be unseen. I wish all the best for the mental health of those who worked on this case. —Tony Leung I can’t help but feel even more disillusioned about the blockchain. The web was supposed to be about information, and the blockchain started as nothing more than an insanely inefficient way to laund … err, conduct “secure” financial…

A STACK OF DVDs landed on my desk one spring afternoon in 2005, when I was working as a television critic at The New York Times. The discs comprised The Staircase, a six-hour documentary about a murder in Durham, North Carolina. This voluminous chunk of culture was produced by a Frenchman with a name like a knight’s: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. Six hours! At the time, that struck me as a headache, and a highly auteurist duration for a single documentary. I was too pregnant to stay up past midnight for what I expected to be a droning subtitled critique of la condition américaine, possibly in black and white. This was some 15 years before the rapid-fire “exploitation” of so-called true crime in a dizzying range of media, in which truth is…

IT USED TO be that if you were a technophile you were also very possibly, to some degree, a conspiracist. The two were adjacent; some of the foundational texts of nerddom are basically conspiracies repackaged as fiction or parody—The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Book of the SubGenius. When the internet showed up, it became the place to go for the good stuff. It could teach you about the cabals that run the world, or about how ghosts are just time travelers. I took to it like a duck to tainted water, armed with the names of FTP sites written in a notebook. It was just the stuff for a powerless adolescent looking for order. The alternative—that I was a normal person instead of a suppressed genius—was unthinkable. As the internet grew, becoming…

ON MAY 10, a pair of Berkut 540 aircraft soared a few thousand feet above Ventura County, California. Each pilot donned a custom AR headset and saw a ghostly, glowing image of a refueling aircraft flying alongside their planes. Then, one of the pilots performed a refueling maneuver with the virtual tanker while the other watched. It was a test flight into the fledgling military metaverse. Tech companies are scrambling to establish a foothold in virtual worlds. But they aren’t the only ones: The defense industry is increasingly gripped by mania for the metaverse—whatever that is. The military, which was an early adopter of AR technology, is investing in virtual experiences that are less polished, cutesy, and spacious than Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, but that’s partly the point. In recent months, fighter pilots…

WHEN MATT HIRSCH takes his family out on long drives in his 2020 Hyundai Ioniq, he religiously plots out charging stations along the way. It’s a ritual of family road-tripping that goes with the territory for Hirsch, an EV-lover who has his own trusty charger next to his driveway in suburban Boston. The problem: Chargers out in the world are not nearly as trusty. At one particularly dreaded station run by Electrify America in Chicopee, Massachusetts, he often finds some if not all four of the chargers broken. It’s a vexing situation. Hirsch worries that unreliable charging networks will thwart the wider adoption of EVs, perpetuating the carbon-dioxide-spewing catastrophe of gas-powered cars. He frets about it even more now that he has children who will inherit the world we’re ruining today.…

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2021, a Russian Nudol anti-satellite interceptor was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 650 miles north of Moscow. The target: an aging surveillance satellite. The missile strike was a success, but it left behind a cloud of debris so large that astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to seek shelter aboard two crew capsules in case an evacuation was necessary. “The orbital environment is already highly polluted due to the routine activities of the space powers, let alone when they start deliberately blowing things up in orbit,” says Bleddyn Bowen, an expert in space warfare at the University of Leicester in England. Russia isn’t alone in intentionally producing orbital shrapnel: the US, China, and India have taken plenty of shots at satellites. Based on data…