Wayward Netflix, Wayward Pines: A Parable for the Streaming Apocalypse By Our Bureau Chief Emeritus, still technically on sabbatical in Geneva The news that Netflix has quietly shuffled *Wayward Pines*—that M. Night Shyamalan-produced fever dream about a town where time, ethics, and plot coherence all go to die—into its “Leaving Soon” carousel should have registered…
Swayze Bozeman, a 27-year-old digital nomad from Missoula, Montana, has become the first human to be de-platformed by a refrigerator. Last Tuesday, somewhere between the durian stall at Bangkok’s Or Tor Kor market and the 7-Eleven that sells better sushi than most of Tokyo, his smart fridge back home—an Internet-of-Things behemoth named “Fridgely” by its…
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…
Tim Berners-Lee: The Man Who Gave Humanity a Rope and Watches Us Hang Ourselves in 4K Across six inhabited continents, at this very instant, roughly five billion souls are hunched over glowing rectangles, doom-scrolling, doom-shopping, or doom-dating. Each tap, swipe, and passive-aggressive emoji owes its existence to one diffident Brit who, in 1989, thought it…
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…
Facebook’s $725 Million Privacy Settlement: A Global Receipt for Twenty Years of Oversharing By Our Correspondent, Somewhere with Better Wi-Fi Than You Mark Zuckerberg’s legal team finally found the “download receipt” button—except instead of a PDF, it’s a $725 million class-action settlement, and instead of a printer, it’s wired directly to the 250 million Americans…
Nintendo eShop to Close: A Funeral March for the World’s Smallest, Most Expensive Nation-State By Dave’s International Desk (Tokyo → Rio → Lagos → Your Couch) TOKYO—On a humid Thursday, Nintendo politely informed the planet that, come March 2025, the eShop for 3DS and Wii U will flat-line. The announcement landed in fourteen languages, which…
