Pixel 10: The Global Smartphone That Knows Your Shame By R. Santiago, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Dateline: Somewhere over the Ionian Sea, where the in-flight Wi-Fi costs more than a Cypriot pension Google’s Pixel 10—announced this week from a stage in Mountain View, livestreamed to 194 countries and three orbiting Chinese space stations—arrives with the…
Flight Radar: The World’s Most Polite Panopticon Somewhere over the Black Sea, a Boeing 737 freighter named “Rainbow Unicorn” is ferrying 42 tons of cut-price Lithuanian cucumbers to Riyadh. At 04:17 UTC you can watch it on FlightRadar24, sandwiched between a Qatar Airways A350 bound for São Paulo and a Russian business jet whose owner…
Big Brother, Bigger Brother, Biggest Brother: A Global Prime-Time Panopticon From the concrete sprawl of São Paulo to the neon-lit insomnia of Seoul, the question ricochets through group chats, taxi radios, and half-drunk living rooms like an anxious metronome: “What time is Big Brother on tonight?” At first glance it’s a banal TV query—one more…
PARIS – The camera never lies, as the old adage goes—an observation so hilariously naïve it could only have been coined before Photoshop, deepfakes, and whatever filter turns your average despot into a dewy-skinned cherub. From the marble corridors of the Louvre to the rubble of Kharkiv, the humble camera has become the most widely…
Big Brother Is Streaming—And He’s Got 8K Resolution By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1.3 petabytes of face-recognition data will be filed away in places you’ve never heard of, with names like “Project Lavender Mist” or “Operation Helpful Walrus.” From Singapore’s lamp posts that scold jaywalkers in real time to Detroit’s “Green Light”…
Big Brother Live Feeds: The Planet’s Longest Unscripted UN Security Council Meeting by Our Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar items are also under 24/7 surveillance There was a time, quaint as a rotary phone, when the phrase “Big Brother live feeds” conjured up grainy shots of twenty-something strangers arguing about dishwater in…
YouTube TV: The Planet’s Couch Potato Imperialism (Dave’s Locker International Desk, 14 June 2024) From the smog-choked high-rises of Jakarta to the one-bar villages of rural Moldova, humanity has finally agreed on something: the best way to see the world is to sit perfectly still and let Google beam it into your retinas. YouTube TV—Alphabet’s…
Somewhere between the cloud and the couch, humanity has quietly annexed a new country the size of Rhode Island and twice as cynical. It issues no passports, levies no taxes, and still manages to feel overcrowded. Cartographers call it a “digital collaboration platform”; everyone else calls it Interland. Born inside a Google sub-committee that was…
Geneva, Switzerland — While diplomats at the Palais des Nations were busy drafting strongly-worded press releases about climate, trade, and whatever crisis will trend next week, a far more consequential summit was taking place three tram stops away. Inside a pop-up showroom that smelled faintly of espresso and existential dread, Garmin unveiled the Fenix 8…
