Ask anyone who has tried to set up a cryptocurrency wallet for the first time what they remember most, and the answer is rarely the thrill of owning digital assets. It is the twelve or twenty-four random words they were told to write down on paper, store somewhere safe, never photograph, never type into a…
Read MoreSwiping through a dating app has always involved a small leap of faith. A profile photo, a short bio, a handful of details about someone’s job or interests, these are the only signals a person has to go on before deciding whether to start a conversation, and for most of the history of online dating,…
Read MoreFor most of modern history, the sequence behind building a nation has run in one direction: a group of people occupies a piece of land, develops shared institutions over generations, and only much later, if ever, becomes something the rest of the world recognizes as a country. Land came first, community came second, and formal…
Read MoreFor most of the internet’s history, the question of whether the entity on the other end of a conversation was human answered itself. A comment on a forum, a message in a chat room, a review left on a shopping site: these were, almost by default, produced by a person sitting somewhere typing, because nothing…
Read MoreVideo games occupy a strange and precarious place among the cultural works of the last half century. A film from the 1970s can usually be found and watched, a novel from the 1950s can be pulled from a library shelf, and a song from any era is a search away, but a video game from…
Read MoreA government agency sends a legal notice to a hosting company. A court orders a domain registrar to suspend a name. A platform’s trust and safety team flips a switch and a page that existed a moment ago simply stops resolving. For most of the internet’s history, this has been the anatomy of a takedown,…
Read MoreThe idea that a person could be paid simply for walking, running, or exercising has an immediate and almost irresistible appeal, because it promises to turn an activity that many people struggle to do enough of, physical movement, into a source of financial reward, aligning the pursuit of health with the pursuit of money in…
Read MoreWhen a traveler books a hotel room or a vacation rental through one of the familiar booking websites, the price that appears on the screen feels like the cost of the room, a number set by the hotel and paid by the guest, with the website serving as a convenient place to find and reserve…
Read MoreFor most of the brief history of artificial intelligence in everyday life, the technology has been something people talk to, a clever assistant that answers questions, drafts text, and offers suggestions but ultimately hands every consequential decision back to a human, who must be the one to click the button, enter the payment, and complete…
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