Binance, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crypto Bomb By Our Man in 200 Jurisdictions (and Counting) If you stare long enough at the Binance logo—two diagonal rectangles forever sliding past each other—you start to see the entire twenty-first-century condition: frictionless, borderless, lawless, and just one fat-fingered trade away from total…
PlayStation 5 Pro: A Console So Advanced It Can Render the Collapse of Civilization in 8K By the time the PS5 Pro rolls off its Shenzhen assembly line next month, four continents are already on fire—some literally, some only on social media. Sony’s marketing department, ever the optimists, calls the machine “the future of play.”…
SPACE—THE FINAL FRONTIER that no one on Earth can afford to ignore anymore, mainly because the bill just landed in everyone’s mailbox. While your local council still can’t fill a pothole without three feasibility studies, twelve nations are presently arguing over who gets to park a titanium Winnebago on the dark side of the Moon….
Google Turns 27: A Global Teenager Pretending to Be a Grown-Up By: Your Slightly Jet-Lagged Correspondent Happy belated 27th, Google—or, as the EU calls it, “that unruly exchange student who still hasn’t learned to knock.” From a Singaporean hawker centre with free Wi-Fi to a Moldovan shepherd checking barometric pressure on a cracked Android, the…
The Silk Road Is Dead—Long Live the Silk Road A sardonic tour of humanity’s digital black market, from a Bangkok internet café to a Moldovan server farm By the time you finish this sentence, three new darknet marketplaces will have opened, two will have exit-scammed, and one will have been seized by a three-letter agency…
ASUS ROG Ally X: The Handheld That Thinks It’s a Console, a PC, and a Cry for Help Bylines from Taipei, Redmond, Lagos, and the back row of economy class Somewhere over the Pacific, 39,000 feet above humanity’s collective Wi-Fi anxiety, the ASUS ROG Ally X just finished downloading the day-one patch for Palworld. The…
Spectrum Down: When the World’s Digital Vein Flatlines and Humanity Re-enters Analog Hell By our correspondent in Geneva, where the coffee is strong enough to reboot a continent The outage began, as all modern catastrophes do, with a shrug emoji. From São Paulo stock traders to Seoul K-pop stans, users discovered that Spectrum—Charter Communications’ plump…
Electronic Arts: The Global Circus That Fits in Your Pocket By “Roaming” Rodrigo Valdez, filing from a hotel whose Wi-Fi is less reliable than a Russian peace treaty There’s a moment—usually around 3:14 a.m. local time—when the entire planet pauses to watch a South Korean teenager destroy a Swede in a game neither of them…
Travis Decker: The Man Who Accidentally Became a Global Brand by Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific Somewhere between the 14-hour flight from Dubai to São Paulo and the third lukewarm airline G&T, it occurred to me that Travis Decker is less a person than a weather system. Like El Niño or a crypto bull…
From the neon canyons of Shibuya to the half-lit favelas of Rio, the phrase “FC 26 PS5” is currently being whispered, screamed, and autocorrect-mangled in more languages than Esperanto ever managed. On the surface it’s just the next annualised instalment of EA Sports’ football sim, freshly varnished for Sony’s shiniest black monolith. But beneath that…
In a world where handheld consoles now outnumber passports at most border crossings, ASUS just lobbed another plastic rectangle into the global carry-on luggage wars: the ROG Ally X. The sequel nobody asked for—except, apparently, every commuter from Lagos to Lisbon who has discovered that a 90-minute metro ride is the perfect span to finish…
In the grand, borderless theater of late-stage capitalism, the Xbox Ally X has arrived like a well-timed punchline—delivered in Dolby Atmos, naturally. Microsoft’s newest handheld PC—sorry, “portable gaming companion”—landed last week with all the subtlety of a drone strike in a suburban cul-de-sac. From the neon canyons of Akihabara to the smog-softened skyline of São…
