A Console for the End Times: How the Nintendo Switch Became the Planet’s Shared Tamagotchi By Our Man in the Departures Lounge You can tell a lot about a civilization by what its commuters clutch on the 07:23 to anywhere. In Tokyo it’s a slim pastel rectangle; in São Paulo it’s wedged between empanada crumbs…
Twitch: The 24-H7 Coliseum Where Nations Go to Watch Each Other Stall By the time the sun rises in São Paulo, a Korean teenager is already 17 hours into a “Just Chatting” stream, explaining in near-perfect Portuguese why he prefers Brazilian memes to K-pop stans. In the same breath, 34,000 viewers from 112 countries vote…
The Curious Case of the World’s Loudest Whisperers A dispatch from the international noise floor They began as a humble American soccer club, the Seattle Sounders, but—like most things American—they refused to stay in their lane. Now, from Dakar to Dubai, the term “sounders” is being co-opted, repurposed, and weaponized by an odd alliance of…
Carlos Gu and the Glorious Farce of Global Tech Ambition By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a WeWork in Shenzhen and a Palo Alto juice bar that charges extra for “hope,” the name Carlos Gu began circulating last month with the quiet inevitability of a tax hike. To most of the planet—i.e., anyone outside…
Hovland: The Quiet Norwegian Who Convinced the World to Change Its Mind By “Sven the Cynic,” Oslo Bureau Chief, Dave’s Locker OSLO—On a drizzly Thursday that looked like every other Thursday since the glaciers retreated, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Dr. Petter Hovland, 57, had won the Peace Prize for “re-engineering global consensus at…
Huawei and the Art of Global Schadenfreude By A. Correspondent, filing from an airport lounge that still smells like 2019 hand sanitizer Somewhere over the South China Sea, a Huawei P60 silently pings a cell tower that isn’t supposed to be talking to it. The tower, built by the same company that made the phone,…
PARIS — Somewhere between a Moldovan data-center and a Singaporean coffee shop that accepts Dogecoin for flat whites, the word “blockchain” has achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously the most over-promised cure since snake oil and the most under-explained phenomenon since democracy. From Davos panels to Lagos fintech meet-ups, the distributed ledger has become…
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…
