Exploring bleeding edge experiments, oddities, new and bizarre dicoveries, and fact-checking conspiracy theories since 2008. No question is out of bounds and no topic is too strange for a deep dive.
# oddities
Social media trolls declared “15-minute cities” to be a New World Order plan for open air mass prisons, derailing plans to make North American cities more livable yet again.
# tech
ChatGPT and its competitors are set to turn search, news, and social media into a complete dumpster fire.
# tech
Governments are no longer just interested in controlling social media narratives with bots and premium content. They’re now reaching for new laws.
# tech
Facebook is still horrible. But for the time being, it’s indispensable for getting the word for just about anything out.
# oddities
Proving that we can’t just have nice things in the age of social media, the conspiracy theory industry jumped on the first images from JWST.
# tech
A study of American politicians’ tweets shows they’ve become angrier and more crass over the last decade. Why? Because social media algorithms reward them for it.
# oddities
Combine malicious propaganda with paranoid people who want to believe they know secrets they don’t, and you get a noxious mess.
# tech
With an invasion of Ukraine and thinly veiled threats of nuclear war, we’re living on the edge of World War 3 thanks to Rupert Murdoch, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
# politics
A massively profitable global industry got that way by showing people only what they already believe. Now we’re dealing with the fallout.
# education
Debunking scams and disinformation has become exponentially harder. We need to dig deep into why people believe what they do, and how social media exploits their fear and anger.