How algorithms learned to anticipate our decisions and began shaping the choices we thought were our own. I. The Frictionless Afternoon Imagine opening an audio application on an ordinary afternoon. On the main screen, the software surfaces three albums. You…
What Happens When the Company Holding Your Genome Goes Bust When 23andMe collapsed into Chapter 11, the auction of assets built around its 15-million-customer genetic database exposed the governance gap between the permanence of genetic information and the mortality of…
How the creator economy turned children into income streams while labor protections failed to follow them home. I. The Childhood That Never Goes Off Camera When twenty-one-year-old Shari Franke sat before the Utah Legislature’s Business and Labor Interim Committee in…
How tech companies turned physical ownership into a temporary software lease. I. The Thing That Still Works On the morning of April 9, 2024, Dropcam home security cameras mounted above front doors and living-room baseboards quietly stopped functioning. Google had…
How biometrics are turning the body into a credential for airports, payments, transit, and everyday life I. The Credential You Cannot Drop Imagine an enrolled traveler at Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. Her phone stays…
AI can preserve a loved one’s voice and personality after death. It can also turn mourning into a subscription. When Diego Felix dos Santos uploaded an audio message his late father had sent from a hospital bed to the voice…
Sleep Used to Be Free. Now There’s an Industry Selling It Back to Us Sleep has never been entirely free of commerce. People have been buying mattresses, sleeping pills and blackout curtains for generations. What is new is not the…
The growing dumb phone revival reflects a simple question: has smartphone convenience come at the cost of attention, privacy and time? A modern smartphone can navigate you across a continent, pay your rent, unlock your front door, translate a menu…
In January 2024, a finance worker at the multinational engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong received an email from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer requesting a secret transaction. Suspicious, the worker joined a video conference call to clarify. On…
Standfirst Artificial intelligence can generate almost anything instantly. It still cannot generate history. As digital technology makes content abundant, trust has become the one asset AI cannot manufacture. Article Before the first ball is struck at Wimbledon, another contest has…
