Innehållsförteckning för December 2021/January 2022 från WIRED

$82B Amount of venture capital funding that poured into American startups from July through September of this year—about as much as VCs invested in all of 2017. 14% Portion of VC investment in 2021 that has gone to startups with all-female or mixed-gender founding teams—the smallest percentage in five years. 50M Number of LinkedIn users in China in mid-October, when the social network announced that it was ceasing operations there, citing a “significantly more challenging operating environment.” 20°F How much higher temperatures can soar in cities compared to the surrounding countryside, where swaths of trees “sweat,” releasing water vapor and cooling the air.…

== NEW MEETING TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE == ====== “SIMULATION NEXT STEPS” ======= == GENERATED AT 17/1.4326804812586S == ===== SINGULARITY STANDARD TIME ====== Hello, everybody. It’s great to see you all in one place for the first time. I’ve been doing my best to learn your names, but I’m terrible with hexadecimal, so bear with me. Before we start, a quick housekeeping note: I know you’re used to holding these stand-up meetings once per Earth extinction event, but I think we need a more agile cadence. Let’s try Tuesday mornings. Look out for the calendar invite. I’d like to begin by thanking each of you for the warm welcome you’ve given me since I took over as product manager. Like I told the Stakeholder this morning, I can’t imagine a team I’d…

LIKE RELIGIOUS PROPHETS, BIG TECH LUMINARIES ARE PREACHING the coming of the next internet. According to their gospel—blog posts by tech companies and venture capitalists alike—tomorrow’s cyberspace will be empyrean, transcendent, immersive, 3D, and all folded together, the disparate sites and services we live and die by gathered under one love. It will be a super-platform that convenes sub-platforms: social media, online video games, and ease-of-life apps, all accessible through the same digital space and sharing the same digital economy. ¶ Virtual reality companies say you’ll get there through VR headsets, while augmented reality companies say you’ll wear AR smart goggles. And with boyish enthusiasm for science fiction fueling their piety, these preachers are calling this vision the metaverse, after Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash. BACK WHEN STEPHENSON…

MIDWAY THROUGH THE MATRIX, CYPHER GLIDES A KNIFE THROUGH an enormous steak, gazes at the hunk of meat dangling off his fork, and acknowledges that his reality is not, well, real. That steak is a construct, part of a digital program telling his brain that it is “juicy and delicious.” Angry and disillusioned with the harsh, scorched real world, Cypher asks for safe passage back to a virtual one, where he’ll once again be fed a steady stream of preprogrammed electrical signals to be interpreted by his mind as a luxurious experience. ¶ That scene stayed with me, back in 1999, after the credits rolled and I exited a Tokyo movie theater not too far from Akihabara, a dense hub for vendors selling electronics, video games, and experimental displays, all…

HOSTILE SUSPICION OF OTHERS, encompassing everything from the position of their mask to their stance on mandates, has marked this wretched pandemic from the start. Now, in perhaps the unkindest cut, suspicion is aimed at people with long Covid—the symptoms that may afflict as many as a third of those who survive a first hit of the virus. One theory is that Covid infection riles up the body’s defenses and can leave the immune system in a frenzy, causing shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, and brain fog. In The Invisible King- dom, her forthcoming book about chronic illness, Meghan O’Rourke reports that doctors often reject these symptoms as meaningless. When medical tests for these patients come up negative, “Western medicine wants to say, ‘You’re fine,’” says Dayna McCarthy, a physician focused…

On September 26, 2018, a row of tech executives filed into a marble-and wood-paneled hearing room and sat down behind a row of tabletop microphones and tiny water bottles. They had all been called to testify before the US Senate Commerce Committee on a dry subject—the safekeeping and privacy of customer data—that had recently been making large numbers of people mad as hell. Committee chair John Thune, of South Dakota, gaveled the hearing to order, then began listing events from the past year that had shown how an economy built on data can go luridly wrong. It had been 12 months since the news broke that an eminently preventable breach at the credit agency Equifax had claimed the names, social security numbers, and other sensitive credentials of more than 145 million…

LIKE NEO’S PINK, HAIRLESS BODY IN THE MATRIX’S GREAT reveal, cities have been invaded by tubes for nearly their entire lives. Over the centuries, water pipes, gas pipes, steam pipes, electricity cables, and air ducts have crept across buildings and landscapes, coursing through walls, floors, and sidewalks on their way to making the modern world. ¶ By a long margin, the water came first. Earthen conduits moved stormwater in Xi’an, China, millennia ago; lead tubes led drinking water under the stone-paved streets of classical Rome. In response to the waterborne pandemics of the 19th century, the modern European and North American city became defined by sewers and drains so extensive as to be beyond imagining. Today, when water tumbles out of the tap into your sink, it is but a…

PUNK 5124 / She is one of 147 Punks who have a blond bob and one of 332 wearing a VR headset. PUNK 5224 / His luxurious beard can be found on 286 Punks, while 414 have finger-in-socket red hair. This Punk sold in April for $66,664. PUNK 1478 / One of 88 zombies, this bearded, wild-haired Punk is Erick Calderon’s avatar on Discord and Twitter. PUNK 4344 / She is one of 382 with green clown-eye makeup; 696 have red lipstick. Her creators call her coif “frumpy hair.” PUNK 3435 / She rocks a sporty headband (406) and purple lips (655). Serena Williams owns a nearly identical Punk. PUNK 7804 / Only nine aliens exist. The cofounder of the startup Figma, Dylan Field, sold this one in March for…

IT’S NEVER A BAD TIME to delete your Facebook account. Chances are good you use it less than ever, and every time you do log in you’re greeted by a slurry of reheated viral news and life updates from two or three distant acquaintances. Lately, though, people have been hit by a torrent of new reasons to pull the plug. There’s the seemingly endless series of news stories reporting that the company now known as Meta Platforms ignored internal research about the various harms its products cause. There was the prolonged outage that made you think maybe so much of the world’s internet activity shouldn’t run through a single platform. There’s the general sense that Facebook is probably, on the whole, not so great for society. If you’ve hit that…

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THE FIRST MATRIX MOVIE INTRODUCED A GENERATION OF SCI-FI FANS TO AN ANCIENT philosopher’s saw: What if your entire reality were a deceit? Two decades on, the film’s plot—free-thinking renegades attempt to expose the lies behind an oppressive system—is as timely as ever, but its conceptual premise feels almost quaint. The technologies that have emerged since then do indeed raise the question of what is real, but now they do it in ways that are stranger than even the movie predicted, if rarely quite as sinister. ¶ Your day-to-day reality is an increasingly synthetic experience: Computerized voices inhabit your smart speakers, deepfakes bring dead movie actors back to life, and AI-generated artworks go for eye-watering prices at auction. The simulacrum is extending into food too: Supermarket shelves already contain countless…

CYBERPUNK IS LIKE CYBERSPACE: INSTANTLY RECOGNIZABLE, BUT so ubiquitous as to be intangible. An aesthetic movement and a commentary on capitalism, it can be a genre, a subjectivity, an adjective, a political approach, a time period. (Though the same could be said of the words Renaissance or Victorian.) It can tackle artificial intelligence, embodied identity, digital immortality, or simply, in the case of Pat Cadigan’s Synners, whether a marriage can survive electronic pornography addiction. Like the best fiction, cyberpunk still slips on like a pair of fingerless gloves, even if—in the 21st century, partially situated in the future it imagined—it’s hard to see where fiction ends and reality begins. ¶ Despite all of this, cyberpunk often gets reduced to an aesthetic: black leather, mirror shades, implants—pieces of flare that look…

WE CAN ALL AGREE THAT LEAVING the house is a marvelous thing. But what if your city stroll was enhanced by encounters with historical figures who walked those streets when they were cobblestoned? Or if it featured sightings of extinct or even imaginary species? John Hanke not only wants to see things like that happen, he has made it happen by sending millions of people on outdoor quests to capture imaginary cartoon characters. As the CEO and founder of Niantic Labs, Hanke launched Pokémon Go in 2016, and he remains obsessed with a vision of a physical world enhanced by digital objects, the concept now called augmented reality. He has been pursuing this vision since at least 2010, when he founded Niantic as an internal startup at Google, then spun…