Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i WIRED

In our December/January special issue, wired used the release of The Matrix Resurrections as a launch point to explore the future of reality. Andy Greenberg argued that the original Matrix is the best hacker movie ever. Cecilia D’Anastasio wrote that we’re already living in a metaverse of Big Tech’s making. And Laura Hudson profiled the philosopher Timothy Morton, creator of the reality-blowing concept of hyperobjects. Also, in a report from Reveal and wired, Will Evans investigated how, for years, Amazon has failed to protect millions of customers’ data. Readers shared their bill proposals, film theories, and visions RE: “BEST HACKER MOVIE” “The Matrix isn’t the best hacker movie. It’s the best documentary.”—Micah Lerner (@micahlerner), via Twitter RE: “AMAZON’S DARK SECRET” As Amazon has captured a larger and larger slice of the ecommerce market, consumers…

JACOB LOEWENSTEIN STARTED his talk at the Augmented World Expo by apologizing. The audience in Ballroom B was small—fewer than a hundred people, masked and spaced apart at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, waiting to hear about collaboration software for the virtual workplace. Loewenstein is the head of business development at Spatial, a venture-backed startup that has spent the past couple of years convincing big corporations to drop money on VR headsets and virtual meeting apps for their employees. But that day he launched into a presentation on his company’s shift toward NFTs, crypto art houses, and “metaversal” meet-and-greets with members of the Utah Jazz basketball team. “This is kind of a weird situation,” Loewenstein began. “For those of you who have used Spatial,…

Standing on her back porch and peering through a gap in the trees, out across a canyon, Liz Johnston can see a patch of red light. The night sky above it glows an intense orange. A few miles away, a hill is ablaze: Massive flames are engulfing a dense expanse of pine, fir, and cedar. It’s August 16, 2021—the middle of California’s fire season. Johnston is looking at the Caldor Fire, which over the next two months will go on to burn 221,835 acres and prompt evacuations in the resort town of South Lake Tahoe. But here, in rural El Dorado County, 40 miles east of Sacramento, she hasn’t gotten an evacuation order. Johnston’s house sits on a hillside in a forest that’s simultaneously verdant and bone dry. Beside the…

—@oscartkav, via Instagram Honorable Mentions YOUR SESSION HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY UPLOADED. —AUSTIN ANDRU, VIA EMAIL MY AI SAID, “TRY ANALOG DATING.” —@JOSHDBLACK, VIA TWITTER HER INSURANCE ONLY COVERED CHAT BOTS. —SPENCER MCKEEHAN, VIA FACEBOOK SO TELL ME ABOUT YOUR MOTHERBOARD. —@J.D._HARELIK, VIA INSTAGRAM SWIPE LEFT UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT. —@CVELASCOP, VIA INSTAGRAM CONNECTION INTERRUPTED. DATA CANNOT BE ANALYZED. —@DUYKHAM_, VIA TWITTER IF YOU ARE DEPRESSED, PRESS 1. —@JFINDURA, VIA TWITTER A TOTAL NEUROLOGICAL REBOOT SHOULD HELP. —KEVIN JEROME HINDERS, VIA FACEBOOK Every month, we ask for a new six-word story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Submit your ideas there, along with the hashtag #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit the archive at wired.com/six-word to see how we’ve illustrated our favorites.…

IF MOUSETRAP TECH is still the paradigm of Yankee ingenuity, it’s surprising how sluggish murine-assassination R&D is. The avant-garde “no touch, no see” blackbox traps that electrocute mice may seem impressive, but in my experience they only work once—and they’re nearly $20 apiece. The trap that still tops best-of lists is roughly the same as the one patented by James Henry Atkinson in 1899: a cheap quick-release spring that’s triggered by a naive rodent, and instantly snaps its neck. But three other household tools have improved, and vastly, since Victorian times: humidifiers, glue, and eyelash enhancers. All this ebullient disruption has taken place in the vapor, adhesive, and eyelash “spaces” without incubators, accelerators, fortresses of secrecy in Palo Alto, investor decks, NDAs, or glossy magazine stories about the genius of…

BACK IN JULY 2020, a DJI Mavic 2 drone approached a Pennsylvania power substation. Two 4-foot lengths of nylon rope hung down from its rotor arms, and a thick copper wire ran between the ends, connected with electrical tape. The craft had been stripped of any identifiable markings and of its onboard camera and memory card, in an apparent effort by its owner to avoid detection. The likely goal, according to a joint security bulletin released by the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center, was to “disrupt operations by creating a short circuit.” The drone crashed on the roof of an adjacent building before reaching its ostensible target, damaging one of its rotors in the process. Its operator hasn’t been found. According to the…

LAST SUMMER, THINGS in the US briefly seemed better, Covid-wise. Then the highly transmissible Delta variant crushed hospitals, again—and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave most of the nation’s population the go-ahead, in October, to get booster shots for their mRNA vaccines. Just two days later, the UK government announced that a new variant, Delta-plus, accounted for 6 percent of the country’s cases and was even more infectious than Delta. Before anyone even had a chance to say “no thank you” to that news came the November surprise of the Omicron variant—plus border closures, stock market crashes, and urgings that everyone else get their boosters too. That’s the pandemic roller coaster, a ride no one wanted to go on. Things get better. And a little more better.…

AFTER ALL FOUR OF HER BABIES DIED IN THEIR SLEEP OVER THE COURSE OF A DECADE, KATHLEEN FOLBIGG WAS CONVICTED OF MURDER. BUT ONE TENACIOUS SCIENTIST SUSPECTED THE REAL CULPRIT WAS A MUTANT STRAND OF DNA. HER QUEST TO PROVE IT TURNED INTO A GENETIC—AND PERSONAL — SHOWDOWN. ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING IN AUGUST OF 2018, Carola Garcia de Vinuesa was on her feet at a paperstrewn standing desk in her light-filled office in Canberra when the phone rang. The caller was a former student in the immunology department at the Australian National University, where Vinuesa worked. She hadn’t known the caller well, but she knew he was bright. And he had a story to tell. In the span of 10 years, he told her, four babies in one Australian family had…

YEARS AGO, I ASKED A FRIEND what kind of case she planned to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little offended. “I don’t like to buy stuff for my stuff,” she said. Those words drilled directly into my hippocampus, never to depart. She’s right! I thought. Don’t buy stuff stuff! So simple! I have tried to keep to that principle ever since, and it has gone about as well as you would expect. Sure, I might spend $1,000 on a tech-giant-controlled smartphone, but I only do it every three years (nods sagely) instead of every two. This is how we win. The problem is that certain kinds of stuff simply attract more stuff. The home is an obvious one: It craves sofas, sweaters, buffet cabinets, chandeliers.…

LAST FALL THE International Organization for Standardization—which goes by its European initialism ISO—released its first-ever guidelines for the construction of dildos, vibrators, butt plugs, and the rest of the variegated world of human orgasmogenic creativity. ISO 3533, “Sex Toys: Design and Safety Requirements for Products in Direct Contact with Genitalia, the Anus, or Both,” specs out everything from the materials safe for contact with mucosal membranes to the tolerable range of vibratory frequency and the need for flanges or wide bases on objects designed to be inserted into one’s tuchus. As in all things, form should follow function, especially when that function is funcking. Still, the new standards might not go deep enough. They’re aimed at drawing a line between nominally higher-quality manufacturers that already abide by similar rules and…

In the soft gray dawn of November 26, 2018, off the north coast of Maui, 40-foot waves rolled in off the Pacific Ocean like watery mountainsides half-visible in the mist. By 9 am, as a big-wave surfing contest called the Jaws Challenge at Pe’ahi began, waves nearing 50 feet high broke with such extreme violence that the first surfers in the water fell off their boards on almost every ride. By late morning, 70-footers formed giant aquatic walls topped by foamy cornices that leaped forward and tumbled through space, exploding onto the flat sea with enough force that two surfers were knocked unconscious and had to be rescued. Contest organizers put the event on hold in the interest of keeping athletes safe. Most of the competitors retreated ashore to rest, but not Kai Lenny,…

Early in the first pandemic summer, around the time California started requiring people to wear masks indoors, Jack Abraham booked a weeklong vacation to MIAMI. Four days into the trip, he tested positive for Covid-19. He canceled his return flight to San Francisco and, mildly sick, waited out his sniffles in an Airbnb. By the time he felt better, Abraham found, to his surprise, that he was in no rush to get back. The city was humming with energy, filled with street art and people lazily sipping cortaditos in Cuban cafés. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is actually an incredible place,’” he told me. “And I found I was being very productive.” Abraham had moved to San Francisco in 2008, a baby-faced college dropout with a big startup idea. He sold…