WIRED May 2022

“THE SEEKING IS A never-ending circle until one is satisfied,” Justin reflected, runically, in an email to me. “For me, that satisfaction was never really present until the theories of QAnon started emerging.” Yes, QAnon—the undead cosmology that still haunts the internet. Justin, a Brooklyn entrepreneur who once worked for TED, is best known for having been so jazzed about the QAnon-Trump conceit that he joined the Stop the Steal protest in Washington, DC, on January 6 last year. He now says he wouldn’t have gone if he’d known it was going to turn violent. I had seen a news story about a penitent QAnon adherent called simply “Justin,” and I wanted to hear more; I thought I could find him. (After I did, he asked me to use only his first…

FRIENDS, we need to revamp the calendar. Our years start arbitrarily, based on “the sun,” which people rarely see anymore. And months, they’re a scam, a way to keep peasants tilling and monks distilling. Those people didn’t have social media; they barely had vellum media. Weeks, days, hours, minutes—especially minutes—are just more mechanisms for keeping humans in thrall ultimately based on astronomy, astrology’s lesser sibling. In the globalized information environment we currently enjoy, we should and must construct better timescales. I propose some new terminology. DEMIC: The duration of a pandemic; split into waves, which are further split into prepanic and panic. (Some have conceptualized a post-panic phase, but none has yet occurred.) Examples: “I’ll get a new job after the current demic.” “We should get dinner while it’s still prepanic.” LOOPMAS:…

ZILLOW GAVE UP. For years, the online real estate company—best known for helping owners and prospective buyers estimate the prices of properties—had been purchasing homes from customers who wanted a quick, seamless sale, a practice known as iBuying. The program, called Zillow Offers, involved making a firm, reasonable offer on a home, holding on to the property briefly while making necessary repairs, and then selling it, presumably for a profit. But all too often Zillow found those homes selling for less than it paid for them. Last November, faced with a loss in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the company shuttered Offers and laid off a fourth of its entire workforce. At the time, my colleague Chris Stokel-Walker outlined on wired.com some of the reasons Zillow failed. The key factor…

IN JANUARY, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet noticed something strange: The country seemed to be dealing with serious connectivity problems. On several different days, nearly all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation has only a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world. Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government might have launched a cyberattack against the…

14M → Passenger cars it would take to equal the emissions of all military activity in the EU in 2019—three years before the start of the war in Ukraine. 90% → Estimated percentage of imported neon that the US sourced from Russia and Ukraine. The gas is essential for semiconductor manufacturing. $50M → Amount an activist collective raised to pay Julian Assange’s legal bills by selling an NFT called “Clock,” which displays how many days he has been behind bars. 24 → Estimated number of trees felled per second in Brazil in 2020—mostly by ranchers and farmers clearing land for cattle and crops.…

HUANG HUI CAN sum up his six-month stint as a gig worker in Shanghai in one word: “exhausting.” A PhD candidate at King’s College in London, he embedded with a group of people who delivered food on their electric motorbikes, many for 12 hours a day. Huang soon realized that he could not keep up with his colleagues. Plus, the work is risky. He says he saw six accidents involving couriers during his stint, one of which was fatal. “It was really shocking,” he says. Huang is among a cohort of researchers studying how algorithms control gig workers’ lives. In the past decade, China’s platform economy has engulfed almost a quarter of the country’s labor force, with an estimated 200 million people working in “flexible” employment. Between 2011 and 2020, the…