How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge
I woke up one day last year and realized I no longer listened to music. Instead I just listened to sludge—a blur of indistinguishable songs that...
The Internet Archive’s Literary Civil War
A lesson I learned early in life: never piss off a librarian. Apparently District Court Judge John G. Koetl skipped out on a formative traumatic-shushing experience,...
Who Should You Believe When Chatbots Go Wild?
In 1987, then-CEO of Apple Computer, John Sculley, unveiled a vision that he hoped would cement his legacy as more than just a former purveyor of...
Alphabet’s Layoffs Aren’t Very Googley
In 2004, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin engaged in a comically passive-aggressive IPO road show. They eschewed business suits for casual garb, refused to...
My Week With the Future of Garbage Bins
It’s 10 pm and, like a vampire stirring in its coffin to greet the nocturne, my garbage bin comes to life. A semicircle of yellow lights...
Twitter Is No Longer a Creative Haven
WIRED has written frequently of late about Elon Musk’s Twitter, so forgive me for coming back to it—but for those of us as terminally online as...
How to Stop ChatGPT from Going Off the Rails
When WIRED asked me to cover this week’s newsletter, my first instinct was to ask ChatGPT—OpenAI’s viral chatbot—to see what it came up with. It’s what...
Why the World Fell for FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried
Back in April I paid $12 to “attend” a virtual event with 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Around 45 other people registered for the Zoom, which...
Good Luck Getting Elon Musk to Stop Tweeting
Why do it? When I wrote about Musk’s tweeting earlier this year, I leaned toward the idea that Twitter itself had led him into this 280-character...
Why Meta Is Tanking—and How Zuckerberg Can Fix It
2012: Facebook plays catch-up with mobile. Not many people realize that Facebook had an existential scare when the action in computing shifted from the desktop to...