Amazon Prime Video: The World’s Longest Layover Lounge By our correspondent in a windowless room, somewhere between Schengen and daylight saving time Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a Scandinavian flight attendant is apologizing for turbulence while 200 passengers scroll past the same thumbnail of “The Boys.” Three continents, one algorithm, zero surprises—welcome to Amazon Prime Video,…
If you want a crash course in planetary mood swings, forget the nightly news—just open FotMob. The little green icon on 55 million phones is essentially a portable ECG for the collective psyche of Earth, beeping every time a 19-year-old winger in La Liga stubs a toe and an entire continent winces. In the grand…
Spotify, the Swedish-born jukebox that now soundtracks the apocalypse, has quietly become the most influential diplomatic force never to sit at the UN. From Lagos to Lima, commuters ride buses whose rattling engines are masked by algorithmic playlists named things like “Chill Vibes for Existential Dread.” The platform boasts 489 million users, or roughly the…
The Algorithmic Silk Road: How TikTok Became the World’s Most Efficient Delivery System for Cultural Fentanyl From the marble lobbies of Brussels to the tin-roofed cyber cafés of Lagos, one 15-second clip at a time, TikTok is quietly finishing the job that the East India Company started with opium and Netflix continues with Korean dating…
The planet’s collective calendar just received another immovable holiday: EA Sports has decreed that FC 26 will land on 26 September 2025. Mark it in crimson—right next to elections no one trusts, COP summits no one honors, and the next “once-in-a-century” storm. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roof bars of La Paz,…
Geneva, Switzerland — Somewhere between a Swiss banker’s yawn and a climate refugee’s cough, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26, the operating system that promises to unite the planet in a shared hallucination of progress. The keynote was streamed live from a carbon-neutral bunker 30 meters beneath Lake Lucerne—because nothing says “global harmony” like an underground…
Google Gemini: The World’s Newest Polyglot, Poly-currency, Poly-problem Child by L. V. “Vesper” Moreau, Senior International Chronicler of Algorithmic Misbehavior PARIS—On a rainy Thursday that felt suspiciously like the last rainy Thursday, Google unveiled Gemini, its latest multilingual, multimodal, and multi-continent artificial intelligence. The launch party—streamed from a loft in Mountain View and simultaneously simulcast…
**The Global Unmasking: How Doxxing Became Humanity’s Favorite Blood Sport** In the grand theater of human cruelty, we’ve progressed from public stonings to public shamings with remarkable efficiency. Welcome to the age of doxxing—where your home address becomes a punchline and your Social Security number is the new autograph. From Moscow to Mumbai, São Paulo…
At 3:12 a.m. Singapore time, while most of the planet was either asleep or doom-scrolling, Google quietly flipped the switch on Gemini AI’s newest party trick: a “universal photo engine” that promises to generate any image you describe in any language, style, or historical period, provided you don’t ask it to draw hands holding more…
Reddit Goes Dark: A Planet Holds Its Breath While the Meme Mines Collapse By Our Man in the Ether, filing from an undisclosed timezone When the servers at Reddit HQ flickered and died at 03:41 UTC on a grey Tuesday—an hour when only insomniacs, Australians, and algorithmic traders are awake—humanity discovered, to its mild surprise,…
Facebook’s $725 Million Privacy Settlement: A Global “Oops, We Monetized Your Soul” Rebate By Our Correspondent, fresh from deleting cookies (the browser kind, alas the biscuit jar is still full) In the grand bazaar of geopolitics, where empires once traded spices and gunpowder, today’s hottest commodity is you—specifically, your taste in cat videos and your…
iOS 18.7: A Patch Heard ’Round the World – Or at Least in the Airports That Still Have Wi-Fi By Dave’s Locker International Desk GENEVA—Somewhere between the 37th parallel and the Duty-Free Toblerone display, Apple released iOS 18.7, an update so modest in ambition it could be mistaken for a UN climate-resolution: everyone applauds, nobody…
