WIRED helps you dive into emerging technologies and discover how they affect culture, the economy, and politics.

WIRED

“The uncanny valley is alive with the sound of music.”

Experts are using AI to pick apart classic recordings from the 50s and 60s, isolate the instruments, and stitch them back together in crisp, bold ways. Jesse Jarnow reveals how after decades of slow advancement, deep learning has now sent the sonic invention into overdrive, and it is set to provide the audio landscape with endless possibilities.

Mark Deakins

How audio pros ‘upmix’ vintage tracks and give them new life

Is this the beginning of the end for cash?  

Backers see it as a way to reach the unbanked. But any system could give the government a record of every dollar you spend. Some countries are already testing it, and influential figures in the US are warming to the idea. Gregory Barber explores whether digital currency is a great answer for the dwindling use of cash or just another way for governments to reduce privacy.

Marni Penning

As digital currency’s popularity rises, so do privacy fears

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. Mcflurries.

One couple built a device to fix McDonald’s ice cream machines, so why the fast-food giant freeze them out? Andy Greenberg explores the dramatic events surrounding the couple's quest that reveals how a lucrative business model with a secret menu is likely to blame for the ever-broken machinery.

Sean Crisden

They hacked McDonald’s ice cream machines — and started a cold war

Plastic rain is the new acid rain.

At any given time, 1,100 tons of microplastic are floating over the western US. Matt Simon explores how new atmospheric modelling has revealed the surprising sources of this dangerous pollutant.

Karl Miller

Plastic is falling from the sky. But where’s it coming from?

When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease, she and her husband set out to find a cure.

"In retrospect, it might have been a clue. But in early 2010, when Kamni Vallabh first began to complain that her eyesight was failing, there didn’t seem to be much cause for concern. She was 51; maybe middle age was catching up with her." When Vallabh passed away from a rare genetic disease, her daughter and son-in-law set out on a tireless journey to stop the killer. Kelly Clancy reports on this fascinating story in WIRED magazine.

Sarah Naughton

One couple’s tireless crusade to stop a genetic killer

A tale of two cultures, technology and understanding where one comes from.

After attending a self-breakthrough workshop in Beijing that deciphered the country’s tech culture, Yiren Lu explores in WIRED magazine how she left with a transformed vision of her Chinese-American self.

My week of radical transparency at a Chinese business seminar

It is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped.

Craigslist began in 1995 as a mailing list with announcements of events of interest for technical people but is now known as the most notorious online classifieds advertising site. WIRED magazine takes a deep dive into what makes the site so strangely successful.

Malk Williams

Why Craigslist is such a mess

Unlikely connections: bridging long distances and cultural divides through gaming.

Do you believe in love at first kill? Jonathan Casey and Tiffany Witcher met through the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, as they were both plotting the assassination of each other's characters. Now, they're married, and they're far from being the only ones with a similar story. In WIRED magazine, Elizabeth Landau delves into this 21st-century type of love story.

Rachel Perry

They found community, and then love, in online games

Six roommates used public health data to create an online COVID-risk points system for every activity.

In this peculiar dynamic, "one microcovid equalled a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus." Activities would be assigned a 'microcovid value', and those living in the household would be allocated a budget of risk to 'spend' accordingly ("10,000 points for the year, but they had only 3,000 points to spend"). In this fascinating piece for WIRED magazine, Gregory Barber talks to the group and gets a first-hand account into how the system came to be, and what it's been like to use it.

"Beginning in May, the four members of Ibasho’s new COVID subcommittee began to develop a system for weighing and budgeting viral risk. Olsson called their risk points microcovids, in a tip of the hat to Howard, and one microcovid equalled a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus. They pulled epidemiology papers from Google Scholar and gathered around the table in the hearth to go through the data. The first step was to impose a top-line risk budget that would anchor all of their calculations. They debated this question at length. Olsson floated the idea of 10,000 microcovids per person per year — the equivalent of a 1 percent chance of catching COVID. But what was the actual cost of 10,000 microcovids? By their estimations, for people their age, a 1 percent chance of getting sick was about as risky as driving, which was something they did without thinking."

How many microcovids would you spend on a burrito?

Steven Levy: what a bet about technology made in the 1990s tell us about the state of humanity today.

In 1995, a WIRED co-founder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate — a quarter of a century later, what will be the judge's decision? Here, Levy contemplates.

"Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We’re about to find out how easy that money is. As the time to settle approached, both men agreed that Patrick, the holder of the checks, should determine the winner on December 31 2020. Much more than a thousand bucks was at stake: the bet was a showdown between two fiercely opposed views on the nature of progress. In a time of climate crisis, a pandemic, and predatory capitalism, is optimism about humanity’s future still justified? Kelly and Sale each represent an extreme side of the divide. For the men involved, the bet’s outcome would be a personal validation — or repudiation — of their lifelong quests."

A 25-year-old bet comes due: has tech destroyed society?

An unusual duo, but a classic American swindle story.

 How a teetotaling fundamentalist teamed up with a hard-partying tycoon to dupe the lucrative American biodiesel production industry. Vince Beiser explores the rise and fall of Jacob Kingston and Lev Dermen, who undertook on a wildly complex series of exploitative business ventures, involving barges of recycled grease, forged papers and phantom truck trips to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The lion, the polygamist, and the biofuel scam

Find out more about crypto's artistic side.

Kings of Leon recently became the first band to distribute an album as a non-fungible token leaving many to puzzle over their function. Here, Gian Volpicelli gives us a break down of the cryptocurrency, commonly known as NFT, and analyses whether it is just another crypto fad — or the future of digital art.

Michael Bott

NFTs boom as collectors shell out to ‘own’ digital art

Out with cookies, in with the FLoC.
 
Google’s plans to remove third-party cookies from their browser may seem like a step towards privacy, but in reality, it’s nothing but an empty promise. Gilad Edelman explores how Google’s “privacy theatre” move has been marketed as a leap forward, and yet it does not change the underlying forces of an industry built on surveillance advertising. In this insightful analysis, he warns that its replacement could end up revealing more information about users than ever before.

Google and the age of privacy theater

Meet Hollywood’s celebrity sex tape broker.

Amanda Chicago Lewis explores the curious vocation of Kevin Blatt, who works as a connection between the celebrities and the people that have something to sell. In this piece, she examines how his understanding of the shifts in controversy has seen him survive successive trends in technology and media, while both the stars and the moral standards we accuse them of violating have changed.

Andi Arndt

Sex tapes, hush money, and Hollywood’s economy of secrets

New research reveals some complex problems.

Some of the system's key data sets contain errors. Will Knight examines how this could mean bad decisions by self-driving cars and medical algorithms, and identifies the need for an urgent fix.

The foundations of AI are riddled with errors

What you should know about vaccine verification.

Vaccinated Israelians have already been given the all-clear to travel, and other national plans for confirming immunity are in the works. But for some, the wider effects of the pass are concerning. Maryn McKenna examines the implications surrounding vaccine passports, from how they will use data and protect privacy to how they could provide an even wider chasm of global economic inequality.

COVID-19 vaccine passports are coming. What will that mean?

Is it time to ditch them?

Upgrades in communication tools have made many aspects of work instantaneous, but they've also made it increasingly difficult to find uninterrupted hours of focus time. Cal Newport analyses how the technology of the 80s and 90s created a ‘productivity paradox’ that has seeped into the modern day. In this deep dive into the history of technology-driven productivity, he argues that we need to rethink the ways that we communicate to make the best use of our time.

Email and Slack have locked us in a productivity paradox

The trouble with constant reminders.

In 2019, Lauren Goode made a painful decision to cancel her wedding. But the algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps, have made sure that she cannot move on from a day that she would rather forget. In this deeply personal piece, she analyses the problems with allowing technology to capitalise on emotional memory and the concerning reality that, for many, these algorithms do not let traumatic memories rest.

I called off my wedding — the internet will never forget

What is the next step for Big-Tech's data privacy?

Facebook is being sued for weakening data protections whilst Google is being sued for strengthening them. Gilad Edelman examines how these lawsuits indicate compatibility between privacy and competition laws is urgently needed before irreparable damage is done to both areas.

Antitrust and privacy are on a collision course

A light-hearted reminder that sometimes it's okay to eat your friends. 

1846, winter. 89 people become trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains with limited supplies. By spring, only half of them will survive, in part by eating the remains of those who passed away in the difficult conditions. But could they have done anything else? Cody Cassidy provides a guide for surviving a winter with The Donner Party.

The case for cannibalism, or: how to survive the Donner party

The darkest corner of the web harbours many engrossing stories — this one is no exception.

On paper, Stephen and Amy Allwine lived a regular life in a small Minnesota town. They had met decades ago while attending university and had been together since. They were both religious and were seemingly close to those values. Then, with the help of someone he only knew as Yura, whom he contacted via the dark web, Stephen decided to plot Amy's assassination. Mara Hvistendahl tells us the Allwine's remarkable story.

‘If you want to kill someone, we are the right guys’

Analysing the digital tools helping them to wrestle back control.

The pandemic has seen a spike in demand for deliveries such as Uber Eats and Doordash, but many of its employees are concerned that they are not paid fairly for their work. Aarian Marshall examines the delivery driver-created programs emerging to help freelancers keep control of work moderated by intentionally opaque algorithms and ever-evolving pay structures.

Emma Powell

Gig workers gather their own data to check the algorithm’s math

His emaciated body was discovered in a tent, just a few miles from a major Florida highway.

Mystery solved: he was friendly to passers-by and said he was detoxing from digital life, but after he died in his tent, no one could figure out who he was... until his identity — and troubled past — was uncovered by the collective effort of the internet. Nicholas Thompson tells us what happened in WIRED magazine.

"His life was a mystery packed inside a tragedy. A man had died alone in a yellow tent, and his family didn’t know. 'He’s got to be missed. Someone must miss this guy,' said Natasha Teasley, a woman in North Carolina who organized a Facebook group with several thousand people dedicated to discovering his identity. Members of the group lit candles for him. They talked about 'bringing him home.' They scoured every missing-persons database. Everyone had a story they wanted to be true: He was trying to escape modern society. He was trying to escape a medical diagnosis. He was trying to escape someone who wanted to hurt him. This was a way to use the internet to do something good."

If you would like to find out more about the case, search "A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack" on Curio.

The unsettling truth about the ‘Mostly Harmless’ hiker

Climb aboard, put on your fanciest clothes, consider heading down to Deck and...

If you've ever watched the film, Titanic, and wondered what you would have done onboard, here's a piece for you. Cody Cassidy will take you on a journey into what happened on that cold spring night in 1912, highlighting all of the decisions that could have saved your life, and the ones that would have brought it to an unfortunate end.

Chris Brinkley

How to escape a sinking ship (like, say, the Titanic)

When did 'the Internet' become 'the internet'?

Why did that happen, and how has it changed us? In this brilliant piece for WIRED magazine, we joining an exchange between a reader who asks whether these change in the way we refer to the internet sheds light on "meaningful shift in how we think about technology?"

Kathleen Gati

Hello, world! It is ‘I,’ the Internet

He was nice and said he worked in tech. After he died, not even DNA databases could figure out who he was.

'Mostly Harmless' was the name he used to go by and stories of his journey encompass over 600 miles across multiple states in America's East Coast. People remembered him for his friendliness and manners. But, when his body was found in a tent in the Big Cypress National Preserve, a still unresolved mystery unfolded. Nicholas Thompson takes a look into this fascinating story for WIRED magazine.

A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

Just because something can be done, does it mean it should be?

"As the functionality to recreate a person’s touch, appearance, voice, and unscripted dialogue progresses, the notion of resurrecting people as digital entities is becoming less hypothetical. So much so that it almost feels inevitable." In WIRED magazine, Janet Manley explores the vast ethical complexities of a practice that may not be as far ahead as some currently envision it.

Jodie Bentley

The ethics of rebooting the dead

"On the app, users drape themselves in the trappings of Black culture — and steal the viral spotlight."

For WIRED's Jason Parham, it’s exploitation at its most refined and disturbing. In this piece, he dives into the struggles black creators are facing in the digital creative spectrum, where they have seen different approaches to their content and clear limitations to make their voices heard.

This article was originally published in WIRED in April 2020.

TikTok and the evolution of digital blackface

A time-bomb waiting to explode in South America, and a hacker eager for adulation.

In 2019, a hacker gave Glenn Greenwald a trove of damning messages between Brazil’s leaders. Some suspected it was the Russians, but the truth was far less boring. Darren Loucaides explores this fascinating investigation for WIRED magazine.

The scammer who wanted to save his country

At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen: WannaCry.

The self-propagating piece of malware exploded across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, and it was Marcus Hutchins who found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, "neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately." Then, he was arrested by the FBI. Andy Greenberg tells Hutchings' fascinating untold story in WIRED magazine.

"Beyond all of that, he was tormented by the truth: Despite all the talk of his heroics, he knew that he had, in fact, done exactly what he was accused of. A feeling of overwhelming guilt had set in the moment he first regained access to the internet and checked his Twitter mentions a month after his arrest. “All of these people are writing to the FBI to say ‘you've got the wrong guy.’ And it was heartbreaking,” Hutchins says. “The guilt from this was a thousand times the guilt I'd felt for Kronos.” He says he was tempted to publish a full confession on his blog, but was dissuaded by his lawyers."

Michael Satow

The confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who saved the internet

The government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network — internal company emails show why.

Did Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook really betray a promise for better privacy protection because they thought they could get away with it? Gilad Edelman reflects for WIRED magazine.

The US Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan coalition led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James representing 46 states, along with the District of Columbia and Guam, both filed a lawsuit against Facebook on the 9th of December 2020.

The smoking gun in the Facebook antitrust case

Steven Levy on why we have to learn the story of polar codes.

In WIRED magazine, Steven Levy investigates how a Turkish scientist’s obscure theoretical breakthrough helped the Chinese tech giant, Huawei, gain control of the future — and why US telecoms never really had a chance.

"Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home — and more vilified by the United States. That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft; the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies. As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran. The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political."

Huawei, 5G, and the man who conquered noise

She ambitiously promised a toy that works for any and every body — but that was only the beginning.

Lora DiCarlo said her company’s robotic vibrator, the Osé, would redefine the market. But her hyped-up personal brand was the real masterstroke. In WIRED magazine, Lux Alptraum profiles the American entrepreneur on a mission to create a more satisfying world.

"The Osé didn't have to be groundbreaking for this mission to succeed. It didn't even have to exist. That's an awkward truth about the tech-crazed culture of the moment: Startup founders may be treated as celebrities, but technology itself—what it does, how it works—can sometimes be an afterthought. We may venerate the gadget, but we're in thrall to something more abstract: the promise of a better, more satisfying world."

One woman’s high-touch bid to upend the sex-toy Industry

Being an e-commerce platform is just one of the many, many things the company does.

Cloud computing provider, TV producer, fashion designer, wind-farm backer, and organizer of crowdsourced micro-labour tasks. What doesn't Amazon do? If you feel your life has become highly dependent on the tech giant, and are looking for answers as to why that has happened, Paris Martineau and Louise Matsakis offer us just that in this remarkable study of Amazon's power over consumers around the world.

"A bit of context: It helps to know how Amazon makes money. While its retail business is the most visible to consumers, the cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (known commonly as AWS), is the cash cow. AWS has significantly higher profit margins than other parts of the company. In the third quarter, Amazon generated $3.7 billion in operating income (before taxes). More than half of the total, $2.1 billon, came from AWS, on just 12 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Amazon can use its cloud cash to subsidize the goods it ships to customers, helping to undercut retail competitors who don’t have similar adjunct revenue streams."

Why it's hard to escape Amazon's long reach

There are a lot of caveats to Pfizer and BioNTech's news. But plenty of reasons to be hopeful too.

If approved by the FDA, Pfizer and BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine would be the first of its kind, setting a record for speed — but raising questions about distribution. Megan Molteni investigates in WIRED magazine.

This article was amended following the announcement by Moderna regarding its first interim findings in mid-November.

Why it’s a big deal if the first COVID vaccine is ‘genetic’

America's most powerful spy yields more control over our lives than we can possibly imagine.

Meet General Paul Nakasone. He reined in chaos at the NSA and taught the US military how to launch pervasive cyberattacks — and he did it all without anyone noticing. Garrett M. Graff explains how in this fascinating investigation for WIRED magazine.

Ron Butler

The man who speaks softly — and commands a big cyber army

A study found that liberals and conservatives use different words to express similar ideas.

It seems the segregation of the left and the right isn't just about ideological beliefs, but also about the way we speak. In WIRED magazine, Will Knight reports on the findings of the Carnegie Mellon University investigation, after it examined 86.6 million comments from more than 6.5 million users on 200,000 YouTube videos.

Ken Foster

The left and the right speak different languages — literally

The humour site has survived it all: new owners, layoffs and a culture war.

When ClickHole — an offspring from the famous satirical website The Onion — launched in 2014, the media landscape was considerably different from the one of today. Back then, it was joining a booming industry. Nowadays, its survival relies on its capacity to adapt to the times. Kate Knibbs, from WIRED magazine, talks to its original writing team and tracks down the site's evolution through the years.

ClickHole started as a meat joke — can it avoid being offal?

For Audrey Tang, tech can build trust, tame misinformation and strengthen democracy.

In WIRED magazine, Andrew Leonard profiles Tang — a hacking prodigy, trans woman, and Taiwan's youngest-ever cabinet appointee — analysing the nation's remarkable response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the vital role she has played seeing it through thanks to her open policies, which she believes may also work in the US.

Gary Furlong

How Taiwan’s unlikely Digital Minister hacked the pandemic

Breaking down the imageboard site linked to several mass shootings in recent years.

Fredrick Brennan founded and, until 2016, served as the administrator of 8chan, which provided an anonymous digital safe haven for the type of discussions that made many of its users unwelcome elsewhere on the web: abhorrent racism, violent misogyny, and rampant anti-Semitism. Timothy McLaughlin, from WIRED, interviewed him in 2019 and gathered remarkable insight into one of the most controversial websites in history.

The weird, dark history of 8chan

Bridging technology with natural instincts could be the future of medicine.

An AI system has outperformed physicians when detecting skin lesions, and the results are changing how one school trains dermatologists. Could this methodology be also applied to further areas of healthcare and academia? Tom Simonite contemplates in MIT Technology Review.

This algorithm doesn't replace doctors — it makes them better

Cory Doctorow targets those whose moral compasses have been compromised working for Big Tech.

His series of books, Little Brother, has been a young-adult sci-fi bible for teen hacktivists. But with the latest and darkest entry in the trilogy, it’s all grown up. Andy Greenberg contemplates for WIRED magazine.

Jonathan Booth

His writing radicalized young hackers — now he wants to redeem them

How microbes could help the immune system decipher what’s dangerous and what is not.

Finnish researchers just published the first big test of the 'biodiversity hypothesis' — that exposure to the microbes in the dirt is good for young immune systems. Biotechnology and public health expert, Megan Molteni, investigates the results in WIRED magazine.

Monita Rajpal

What forest floor playgrounds teach us about kids and germs

Jerold Haas was on the verge of a life-altering triumph. Then, his body was found in the woods of southern Ohio.

He was a co-founder of Tessr, a buzzed-about Columbus startup that aimed to use blockchain technology to streamline data sharing in higher education. For him, Tessr was a chance at redemption, but as he was about to achieve it, tragedy struck in 2018. Brendan I. Koerner, from WIRED, tells us this thrilling story.

The strange life and mysterious death of a virtuoso coder

Climate change is fueling a new kind of despair on the West Coast — and beyond.

"Grief has settled over the western US, along with the thick haze of smoke pouring from dozens of massive wildfires up and down California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. It’s grief over the thousands of structures and at least 33 lives lost so far; grief over another villain conspiring with Covid-19 to lock people indoors; grief that the orange-hued dystopia of Blade Runner is now a reality in smoky San Francisco; grief over losing any sense of normalcy, or indeed a clear future." Matt Simon reflects in WIRED.

Simon Mattacks

Climate grief is burning across the American West

The approach is not about finding new ways to study the brain, but understanding its essence.

Network neuroscience could revolutionise how we understand the brain — and change our approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders. Grace Huckins investigates these developments for WIRED magazine.

A radical new model of the brain illuminates its wiring

How stepping out of the confines of reality can be an asset for academia.

Schools are adding ethics classes to their computer-science curricula. The reading assignments: science fiction. Gregory Barber contemplates the potential benefits of this decision for WIRED magazine.

Ashley Klanac

What sci-fi can teach computer science about ethics

In 2020, thousands will show up to vote only to find out they've been purged.

And now, lots of activists — and one Ohio man with lots of cats— are on a quest to fix that. Jack Hitt, from WIRED magazine, investigates Steve Tingley-Hock's remarkable role in preventing all these voters from losing their vital right to vote.

One IT guy’s spreadsheet-fueled race to restore voting rights

A Herculean effort, equaled perhaps only by the search for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

Scarred by trauma and devoted to Trump, a man began mailing explosives to the president’s critics on the eve of an election. Garrett M. Graff, from WIRED magazine, gets inside the race to catch him.

The furious hunt for the MAGA bomber

The scheme involved 7,000 $94 toothbrushes, according to law enforcement.

"The scam works by intentionally sending a company more goods than it ordered and billing for it. On Amazon, every product is given a unique identifier, a string of numbers called an Amazon Standard Identification Number. They are part of an item's listing in Amazon's catalogue. Vendors have the ability to change listings, to make sure things like product descriptions are accurate." Louise Matsakis explores in WIRED magazine.

How four brothers allegedly fleeced $19 million from Amazon

Meet Brian Wallach, the man on a mission to give ALS patients help and hope.

At 37, Wallach was diagnosed with the fatal disease, known for attacking the nerves that control muscular movement, and given six months to live. What did he do next? He tapped a lifetime of connections, and created I am ALS, a life-changing foundation dedicated to finding a cure or treatment — all while grappling with his own mortality. Longtime friend, Brian Barrett, tells Wallach's unique story in WIRED magazine.