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…
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…
Global Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker – Somewhere between a Berlin co-working loft and a Jakarta food-court Wi-Fi hotspot If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the TikTok War is being fought with lip-syncs and lo-fi filter presets. From the marble lobbies of Brussels to the humid back rooms of Manila’s influencer incubators,…
Office 365: The World’s Most Ambitious Digital Colony By our roving correspondent in a Wi-Fi cave somewhere between GMT+8 and existential despair When Microsoft announced that Office 365 would henceforth be “Microsoft 365,” the planet reacted with the same collective shrug it reserves for new UN resolutions and gluten-free airline meals. Yet beneath the rebranding…
The NFL App: America’s Pocket-Sized Colosseum Goes Global By [Name Redacted for Legal Reasons], Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the Indian Ocean and the Arctic Circle, a Berlin commuter streams the third quarter of Chiefs-Bills on a U-Bahn whose Wi-Fi was last upgraded during the Weimar Republic. In Lagos, a data reseller…
Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s most famous hoodie-wearing billionaire, has spent the last decade auditioning for the role of “global sovereign by accident.” From Nairobi to Naples, his creation—Facebook, now the overfed parent Meta—has become the de-facto public square, confession booth, and riot-inciter rolled into one blue-branded burrito. At Davos they still call him “Mr. Zuckerberg”…
A Comcast Cable Goes Slack: How One Midwestern Outage Became a Global Parable by Daria Voss, Dave’s Locker International Desk CINCINNATI—When the Xfinity network in Ohio’s Hamilton County dropped dead at 07:14 local time last Tuesday, the immediate victims numbered roughly 1.2 million souls—give or take a few remote workers who swear they were “just…
Sam Altman: The Accidental Emperor of the Algorithmic Age By our jaded foreign correspondent, still recovering from a blockchain conference hangover GENEVA—If you had asked the world’s diplomats a decade ago which American twentysomething would end up holding a veto over their national sovereignty, they might have muttered “Zuckerberg” between gritted teeth. Yet here we…
Somewhere between the fifth Parisian café burning its third espresso of the morning and a Delhi call-center rep forwarding “10 Ways to Love Yourself Before 9 a.m.” to 3.2 million inboxes, HuffPost quietly completed its metamorphosis from American upstart to planetary mood ring. Conceived in a SoHo loft in 2005 as a liberal vanity project…
A Pocket-Sized Empire: How the Smartphone Conquered the Planet and Everyone’s Attention Span Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of avocado toast, humanity quietly decided to hand its collective consciousness to a 6-inch slab of Gorilla Glass. The smartphone—once a charming novelty for Finnish executives and Californian geeks—now outnumbers toothbrushes…
**The Global Theater of Task Cast: How Humanity’s Endless To-Do Lists Became Our New Religion** GENEVA—In a world where nuclear treaties expire like milk and democracy comes with a 30-day trial period, humanity has found its new opiate: the sacred art of task casting. From Silicon Valley’s glass temples to Mumbai’s chai-scented coworking spaces, we’ve…
Sam Thompson and the Curious Case of the Planet-Sized Personality Dave’s Locker International Desk – Monday, 09:14 GMT Somewhere between a Tokyo bullet-train bar car and a Lagos rooftop speakeasy, the name “Sam Thompson” is being whispered with the same nervy reverence usually reserved for crypto moguls who haven’t yet been indicted. Who, exactly, is…
