Tabla de contenidos para September 2023 en WIRED

IN 2015, AS FOOD DELIVERY and ride-sharing services proliferated around the world, Saudi Arabian entrepreneurs Ayman Alsanad and Naif Al-Simiri realized that smartphones could do much more than connect passengers to cab drivers or hungry diners to local restaurants. They launched an app, Mrsool, which crowd-sources couriers for virtually any errand, whether delivering spare parts, documents, or medicine. Less than a decade later, Mrsool has become one of the country’s fastest-growing startups. Consumers can post almost any sort of request on the platform, where freelance drivers put in competing bids for the job. “Our vision has always been for Mrsool to be like a friend when you’re in need. Mrsool is always ready to help people get the products and services they need, right when they need them most,” Ayman says.…

CRYPTOCURRENCY values rise and fall, but one number just keeps going up. Whenever somebody loses money to a crypto scam or hack, the Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 Is Going Just Great, ticks higher—it recently passed $67 billion. White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with mainstream coverage of crypto, which she says paid too much attention to rags-to-riches tales and not enough to its dark underbelly. A software engineer, White coded Web3 Is Going Just Great as a side project to “entertain me and me alone,” she says. But within a few months, it was a hit. When White first learned about crypto at a conference in the early 2010s, she admired its pro-privacy and anti-censorship principles, and its potential to, say, shield dissidents…

I THOUGHT MY INTERVIEW WITH GRIMES—the mysterious techno artist, fan of all nerddom, and the deepest of insiders in Elon Musk’s world—would be one-on-one. Instead it wound up as a roundtable discussion. Turns out there are multiple personas embedded in the surprisingly haimish human who sat under a tree with me and spent the waning hours of an afternoon in conversation. There was Claire Boucher, the given name of a Vancouver kid obsessed with video games and devoted to provoking adults with misbehavior and the embrace of taboo subjects. There was Grimes, the self-invented, scrappy DIY musician and provocateur who weaves sci-fi into her work and released what Pitchfork judged to be the second-best song of the 2010s. And there was her preferred nomenclature, “c,” invoking the speed of light.…

THE SCENE IS STRAIGHT out of Boots Riley’s madcap moviemaking handbook. In a city where Black residents have been steadily priced out, the two of us sit—Riley wearing one of his signature hats, me hatless—swapping stories over lunch as rock music drains from the speakers above us. This is Oakland, the director’s longtime home, and perhaps our talk wouldn’t feel so surreal if it weren’t the exact kind of thing Riley, impresario of all things Black and bizarre, would write into one of his scripts. Ext. A Japanese fusion restaurant. Two Black men chow down on fried chicken, pondering their existence. ¶ As an artist, Riley embodies a kind of allegorical immodesty. How to put it? He thrives in contradiction, happily welcomes what he calls the “beautiful clutter” of life.…

THE MEDIA STUDIES building at Queens College is small and dark, with low ceilings and narrow corridors. It was built more than a century ago as a residential school for incorrigible boys, and a certain atmosphere of neglect remains. When I visit on a January weekday to see Douglas Rushkoff, who teaches here, he guides me around a stack of fallen ceiling tiles to his offce in a back corner of the first floor. The Wi-Fi in the room is spotty, so he uses an Ethernet adapter to plug his laptop into the wall. The only evidence that we haven’t traveled back to the ’90s is that when it’s time for class, no students show up. Instead, Rushkoff opens his laptop and brings up a grid of faceless black boxes.…

“While looking through my parents’ old photo albums, I noticed that they had lots of pictures of friends gathered together. It made me think about the camera roll on my phone, which is full of screenshots and selfies. Why don’t I take pictures with my friends?”—Say Cheese Dear Cheese, All modern technologies bend toward self-referentiality. Long before the birth of the smartphone, the earliest screenshots required actually pointing a camera at a television or computer screen, an act that (for those who can remember it) recalled the repelling force of two like-charged magnets, or the nauseating infinite regress of two mirrors facing each other. Part of you half-expected a black hole to swallow you up, punishment for having summoned some elusive paradox in the universe. We now live full-time in…

Replications That Helped Get This Issue Out: Trying all 17 of the latest Twitter clones; GuitarLessons365’s YouTube tutorial for Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss”; reusing old selfies on new social media platforms; Secret Invasion on Disney+; bingeing Game of Thrones for the third time; reproducing my mother’s Persian lentil rice; trying to mimic Architectural Digest–level design with peel-and-stick wallpaper; eggs on toast with chili crisp—every morning; rereading books from college; Jean Baudrillard and Elias Canetti; listening (and dancing) to Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure on repeat; singing “Open Shut Them” to a toddler more times than should be necessary; Better Than Food book reviews; California native plants from Urban Tree Farm Nursery; AC on all day, every day; beginning the summer with no tank tops, buying four, and now…

IN NOVEMBER 2018, a school administrator named Akihiko Kondo married Miku Hatsune, a virtual pop star. The relationship had been aided by a hologram machine that allowed Kondo to interact with Hatsune. When Kondo proposed, Hatsune responded with a request: “Please treat me well.” The couple had an unoffcial wedding ceremony in Tokyo, and Kondo has since been joined by thousands of others who have applied for unofficial marriage certificates with a fictional character. Though some people raised concerns about the nature of Hatsune’s consent, nobody thought she was conscious, let alone sentient. This was an interesting oversight: Hatsune was apparently aware enough to acquiesce to marriage, but not aware enough to be a conscious subject. Four years later, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose held a long conversation with…

THE FIRST TIME we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. “I cry every other day,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Every time I say goodbye to my parents or friends, it feels like it could be the last time.” Meindertsma, 31, is the founder of Pause AI, a grassroots protest group campaigning for a halt in the development of artificial intelligence. He’s been interested in AI for a couple of years, but the technology’s sudden growth, spurred by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, made him worry about the future of humanity. He watched as the bots became more and more sophisticated, and as figures like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, warned of the…

BenQ Genie e-Reading Desk Lamp The whimsical, swooping grin on the curved head of BenQ’s desk lamp doesn’t just brighten the mood, it also illuminates more of your desk than a traditional lamp. Positioned 2 feet over your workspace, the convex strip of LEDs illuminates an area over 3 feet wide. Tap the ring on the head to turn the lamp on, and twist the knob on top to adjust its brightness up to 1,600 lux. Press the knob to enter color-temperature mode and dial in the hue between 2,700K and 5,700K. The Genie also has two presets: a bright, cool light for reading on paper and a slightly dimmer, warmer light for working on a screen. An ambient light sensor adjusts the glow as you toil past your…