Technology | The Atlantic
Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death
Jacob Stern
When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America--with some notable and appalling exceptions--can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded...
It's Just an App
Kate Lindsay
In 2019, I had full-blown app fatigue. My scrolling time was dominated by Instagram and Twitter, my idle hours by YouTube, and on top of that I was still checking Facebook, Snapchat, and whatever buzzy platform my friends were touting that week. (Remember Lasso? Anyone?) There was no room for any more, I told the publicist sitting across from me in a conference room in Anaheim, California. But she was insistent that, as a journalist writing about internet culture, I needed to start paying more at...
End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
Jonathan Haidt
Photographs by Maggie ShannonThis article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you've likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States--fairly stable in the 2000s--rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.The probl...
What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet
Nathaniel Lubin
Earlier this year, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift were shared repeatedly on X. The pictures were almost certainly created with generative-AI tools, demonstrating the ease with which the technology can be put to nefarious ends. This case mirrors many other apparently similar examples, including fake images depicting the arrest of former President Donald Trump, AI-generated images of Black voters who support Trump, and fabricated images of Dr. Anthony Fauci.There is a tendency for media c...
Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality
Charlie Warzel
If you're looking for an image that perfectly showcases the confusion and chaos of a choose-your-own-reality information dystopia, you probably couldn't do better than yesterday's portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales. In just one day, the photograph has transformed from a hastily released piece of public-relations damage control into something of a Rorschach test--a collision between plausibility and conspiracy.For the uninitiated: Yesterday, in celebration of Mother's Day in the U.K., the Roy...
I Asked 13 Tech Companies About Their Plans for Election Violence
Caroline Mimbs Nyce
In January, Donald Trump laid out in stark terms what consequences await America if charges against him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election wind up interfering with his presidential victory in 2024. "It'll be bedlam in the country," he told reporters after an appeals-court hearing. Just before a reporter began asking if he would rule out violence from his supporters, Trump walked away.This would be a shocking display from a presidential candidate--except the presidential candidate was Don...
I Am in Cloud-Storage Hell
Charlie Warzel
Here I was, going about my day and minding my own business, when a notification popped up on my phone that made my blood run cold: Your iCloud storage is full. I am, as I've written before, a digital hoarder whose trinkets, tchotchkes, and stacks of yellowing newspapers (read: old pixelated memes) are distributed across an unknown number of cloud servers around the globe. On Apple's, I've managed to blow through 200 gigabytes of storage, an amount of data that, not even a decade ago, felt almost ...
It's Time to Give Up on Email
Ian Bogost
You got a new credit card, maybe, or signed up for a food-delivery service. Let the emailing begin. First there's one to verify your new account, then a message to confirm that you've verified your new account, then an offer for an upgrade or a discount. A service I recently started using sent four emails for a single activity, counting log-in notices, confirmations, receipts, and confirmations of the confirmations. Workday, the software that manages HR and payroll for my office, emailed me an al...