BBC iPlayer: The Last Empire Still Broadcasting in Glorious Standard Definition of British Guilt By the time you read this, iPlayer has already expired on your cousin’s smart fridge in São Paulo. The BBC’s flagship streaming service—once a plucky national catch-up platform—now functions as a sort of 21st-century East India Company, only with more buffering…
Welcome to the post-post-apocalypse, dear reader. While most of the planet is still busy arguing about vaccine passports and the correct pronunciation of “Kyiv,” a small but determined slice of humanity has decided the real geopolitical flashpoint is a downloadable texture pack called Cyberpunk 2077: Chrome. CD Projekt Red’s latest free update—essentially a digital spa…
Tallinn, Estonia—population 452,000, or roughly the number of people who will claim they were “into Baltic tech before it was cool”—has spent the last decade quietly trolling the rest of the planet. While the world’s self-proclaimed “innovation hubs” busied themselves stapling “AI-powered” stickers onto everything with a pulse, Tallinn simply built a functioning digital state,…
La Voix: When the Whole World Starts Whispering in French PARIS—Somewhere between the third croissant and the existential dread that usually arrives with the bill, it dawned on me that “la voix”—the voice—has become the last border checkpoint humanity forgot to patrol. From Seoul subway ads hawking AI voice clones of K-pop idols to Nigerian…
Schiphol, 05:47 a.m. local time: the departure boards flicker like a bad poker tell, then politely inform 70,000 passengers that their flights have been “re-accommodated to tomorrow, maybe.” Behind the scenes, ransomware—christened “Skytanic” by some under-caffeinated analyst—has locked down everything from baggage algorithms to the barista card readers. Welcome to the latest pan-European wake-up call:…
Air-traffic controllers from Lisbon to Larnaca spent last Tuesday doing something they normally reserve for their lunch breaks: staring at empty screens with the serene expression of people who have just remembered that the cloud is not, in fact, on their side. A coordinated cyber-raid—elegant bureaucrats pronounce it “ransomware campaign,” the rest of us call…
When the Lights Went Out (and Nobody Noticed): A Global Tour of the Latest Cyber Attack It began, as these things now do, on a Tuesday. Somewhere between the second espresso and the third passive-aggressive Slack message, a modest-sized Latin American logistics firm discovered its servers were speaking fluent Cyrillic and its customer database had…
GENEVA—The phrase “spitting image” used to be quaint, the sort of thing British grandmothers muttered while pinching a child’s cheek and declaring him the exact replica of some long-dead sea captain. Today, the expression has gone global, industrial-grade, and—because nothing good ever stays local—weaponised. From Lagos to Lausanne, the human face is now a mass-produced…
Steve Netflix Is Not a Man—He’s a Metaphor with a Broadband Addiction By our jaded correspondent in the Hotel Bar That Never Closes, Geneva The planet woke up last Monday to discover that “Steve Netflix” was trending in 47 languages, three of which are spoken only by algorithmically generated customer-service avatars. Within hours, #SteveNetflix outranked…
iOS 26: A Global Soft-Power Coup in 6.1 Inches By Dave’s Locker’s Bureau of Late-Stage Capitalism Correspondence GENEVA — While the United Nations was busy drafting yet another sternly-worded letter about somewhere being on fire, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26 last week, instantly redrawing the planet’s cultural map faster than you can say “non-binding resolution.”…
Microsoft Xbox Prices: The Great Global Wallet-ectomy, 2024 Edition ————————————————————- It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with a tweet. Last week, Microsoft quietly announced that Xbox Series X|S prices will rise “in select markets,” a euphemism as bland and ominous as a tax audit. From São Paulo to Stockholm, gamers performed the synchronized international…
M&T Bank’s mobile banking app decided to take an unscheduled sabbatical last Tuesday, and the ripples reached well beyond Buffalo, New York. From a sidewalk café in Lisbon to a co-working pod in Nairobi, expatriates who still keep their paychecks in upstate New York suddenly discovered that money—once the world’s most dependable fiction—had gone on…
