Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2019 i WIRED

Now that I’ve turned my mind to reveling in the glory of technology, I’ve been gazing back at the olden, golden days. And the other day I remembered that, once upon a time, humans had to remember things. Not just useful things like phone numbers or how to calculate percentage change. Also things that had no right to occupy brain cells, like whether the best draft of your novel was in a Word doc named “Next Great American!!” or “Next Great American???? Revision 4,” and, worse, did you save said doc in a folder named To Do List or YOU CAN DO THIS? Also, did the path to said folder lie behind /Documents/New Years Resolutions or /Desktop/Private/My Dreams? I mean, bless Steve Jobs and his Cult of Skeumorphians for turning…

You know what I hate? Rating drivers on Lyft. Three stars? Five stars? I know Lyft wants to feed the ravenous maw of its machine intelligence, but I worry drivers will get punished for low ratings. In the app-dominated gig economy, platforms already hoover up as much as 30 percent of the fees, and workers barely eke out a living. So when Lyft asks me to rank drivers, I lie—I give everyone five stars. It makes me think: Why doesn’t someone try to run an on-demand labor app that doesn’t seem to exploit its workers? ▪ Well, that world is inching into reality with the emergence of worker-owned apps, where they own and run the marketplace themselves. It’s a trend that could save the gig economy from itself. One of…

GAMEVICE FOR ANDROID Best for: Switch devotees The name is apt even if the spelling isn’t; this controller grips my phone like a vise. A flat cable linking the two halves runs along the back, and the sides snap together nicely (magnetically) for storage. The built-in USB-C plug provides a latency-free connection to a Samsung Galaxy or Pixel phone. The setup, with the screen dead-center, was awesome for racing games like Riptide GP and will feel familiar to fans of Nintendo Switch (it me!) or PlayStation Vita (R.I.P.). The compact joysticks are perfect for preteens or the small-handed, and there’s a headphone jack for Minecraft-ing during your commute. Plus, like on the Rotor Riot, I can use the joysticks as triggers for mobile gaming that matches the functionality of my…

Some writers used to drink when the words didn’t come. Now we have the internet. Whenever I get stuck writing, instead of sliding open the bottom drawer with the whiskey bottle, I load up The New York Times or Politico, check my email, or, when all else fails, start Googling old acquaintances. Most of us have done it. What ever happened to that bucktoothed kid from third grade? There he is, grinning at you from the computer screen—balding, paunchy, mustachioed—and you’re reading about his lake cottage, his wood-turning hobby, his Danube cruise, his grandchildren, his cats. A few months ago, as I was staring at a wretched chapter I was trying to write, I idly Googled the name “Peter Anderson” and “New Jersey.” Petey was my best friend growing up…

“Back when I was pregnant with my third child, I sort of flipped out and became the leader of our neighborhood earthquake preparedness group—we live over the Hayward fault. Then I totally forgot about it. This story reminded me to replace the batteries in the little miner’s helmet flashlights I bought 10 years ago, since there’s yet another fault line to worry about.” — Tabitha Soren, photographer for “Nevada by the Sea” (page 62) “Despite Facebook’s intentions to tamp down political ragebait in 2018, Fox News has gotten more engagement on the platform than any other English-language publisher since then. We pretty much found out why.” — John Gravois, editor of “15 Months of Fresh Hell at Facebook” (page 46) “I became intrigued by the United Church of God, the…

JUST GET OUT OF MY SPACE Hustling is the default mode of the 21st century, and I’m not above listing my adorable split-level Victorian on Airbnb during my out-of-town weekends. Need to rent a car for the day? Take mine—I wasn’t using it anyway. But whoring out my bed—my own private sanctuary, complete with sweat-stained sheets and raggedy stuffed elephant named Elephant—on Recharge, the “Airbnb for naps”? I’d rather sell a kidney. The tech industry thinks that every last inch of my personal space should be for hire, that strangers should be able to rent it, on demand, by the hour, at their convenience. I call it, with eye roll heavily implied, the sublet economy. Initial moves toward the micropersonal seemed sane enough: Share the extra storage space in your…

SAMSUNG Q900R QLED SMART 8K UHD TV Sure, you might have brought home a 4K television just last week. But there’s no stopping the march of progress, and Samsung is at the vanguard with this set. It’s an 8K panel—roughly 8,000 pixels wide and packing four times as many points of light as a 4K TV. Anyone with cash to burn can plop this 125-pound beast onto a stout pedestal and be engulfed by the 85-inch display. And while 8K content is rarer than an albino wombat, over the next few years broadcasters should start screening sports and special events in the new format. Next-gen gaming consoles from the likes of Sony and Microsoft, due in 2020, should support near-lifelike 8K titles as well. While you wait for content to…

ATARI 2600 VIDEO COMPUTER SYSTEM Pundits used to joke that there were four major TV networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and Atari. In 1977 the first Atari Video Computer System sold for $200. Buyers could plug it into the TV, letting the family play seminal, interactive games like Asteroids and Pac-Man, while broadcasters tried to keep viewers’ attention with Falcon Crest and Mork & Mindy. Atari’s console wasn’t the first to commandeer TV screens, but in the late ’70s the VCS skyrocketed in popularity because it was so versatile. The system let users pop game cartridges in and out, giving its audience a near-endless array of options. Atari was also in the coin-operated arcade machine business, which gave it ready access to fresh material (including the Japanese title Space Invaders). The…

THE STREETS OF DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, were iced over on the night of January 25, 2018, which added a slight element of danger to the prospect of trekking to the Hotel Seehof for George Soros’ annual banquet. The aged financier has a tradition of hosting a dinner at the World Economic Forum, where he regales tycoons, ministers, and journalists with his thoughts about the state of the world. That night he began by warning in his quiet, shaking Hungarian accent about nuclear war and climate change. Then he shifted to his next idea of a global menace: Google and Facebook. “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” he said. “The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but…

THE GRAY BUSES THAT ROLL ALONG LOS ANGELES’ Orange Line don’t look like other buses: They’re 60 feet long, and their streamlined design means they don’t just stop. With some pomp, they arrive. They dock. And today, on a drizzly Sunday, nearly every seat on the Orange Line is taken. The route connects the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley to a Metro Rail station in North Hollywood, 18 miles and about an hour away. It’s perhaps the country’s best example of “bus rapid transit,” a grade of service that’s supposed to combine the best features of a trolley line with the relative cheapness of a bus. People dig it. Today, the woman next to me is speaking quietly into her phone in Russian; next to her a guy…

ACER PREDATOR X34 This 34-inch display packs nearly two times as many pixels as a standard HD monitor and gently curves to fully saturate your field of view. It’s a first-person shooter’s dream screen, with a special mode to brighten gloomy dungeons and a crosshair-bolding mode for snappier sniping. Oh, and there’s no lag, so when you get blasted you’ll have only yourself to blame. $1,000 LOGITECH G703 + POWERPLAY You don’t have to plug in this wireless gaming mouse to charge it—just pushing it around on Logitech’s Powerplay pad keeps it juiced up at all times. The mouse responds as quickly as my reflexes, and I don’t have to worry about battery life anymore. That peace of mind is well worth the asking price: $100 for the mouse, $100…

I’ve never seen anything in VR quite as realistic as this car. It’s like something out of the future, all chrome and curves; the lights of the Berlin platz twinkle off it as it rotates slowly in front of me, and even the writing on its tires is crisp and legible. But when I crouch down to take a closer look, something brushes against my leg. The visual experience is so real, for a nanosecond it seems like there’s another person admiring with me. But no—it’s the cable connecting my headset to the computer that powers it. Welcome to VR’s leading edge; please don’t mind the tether. Today’s newest headsets have features that seem to have leaped over from sci-fi. Yet the most amazing of them—from eye-tracking tech to the…

RECENTLY I DOWNLOADED AN APP THAT WAS SUPPOSED to help me find people to carpool with. I’m not someone who relishes the idea of coordinating with strangers for my commute but, still, I wanted to give it a shot. For two weeks, I asked drivers—many of whom, the app indicated, had signed up but never actually accepted any carpool requests—for rides between my home in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood and my office South of Market. When that failed, I tried to use the app to get to Silicon Valley. Nope. Then within Silicon Valley. Crickets. Finally, one morning I got a notification that someone named Krishna was offering to give me a ride. By the time I navigated into the app, Krishna’s request had disappeared. This unfortunate performance wouldn’t have…