Table of contents for March/April 2024 in WIRED

RE: “THERE’S ALWAYS ANOTHER VIDEO” “So many memorable characters, including Sid and Nancy of the NextDoor era.” —@svzwood RE: “HOW TO CREATE A MONSTER” Variants of the Mirai botnet are still around and seriously impacting servers. It feels incredible how a small thing can gradually grow bigger and bigger until it’s no longer under control. —@DavideRoznowicz This story highlights the lack of educational and technology career opportunities out there. K-12 education fixates on academic pathways into tech careers. This STEM education myopia makes it impossible to recognize and engage students with diverse learning approaches. All three kids caught up in this early IoT chaos could have found their way into productive pathways had the gatekeepers not chased them away. —@tk1ng Smart young men with anger about obstacles in their personal…

THE PLACE Vertex THE PORTAL The New York Times THE PROMISE A smoother brain OK, LOOK, I KNOW how it sounds when I say that I wind down from a long day on the internet by playing a game on the internet. I’m a freelance journalist writing a book about private equity, which means I spend my working hours toggling between half a dozen Google Docs, twice as many academic papers, and enough Chrome tabs to regularly crash my six-year-old computer. And when I’m not writing (which, let’s be honest, is often), I’m toggling between Instagram, Bluesky, and X (yes, still). Were I a well-adjusted person, I would close my laptop at 6 pm and practice piano or knitting or, hell, poker—literally any hobby that allows me to detox from…

MARINA HADJIPATERAS, THE dashing American venture capitalist, has only one word of derision. She speaks it softly and rarely. Conservative. A family can be conservative. An investment, a choice. The way she uses the word, it’s never political. It’s also never a good thing. The first time I hear Marina deploy her tender curse is during lunch with her brother Alex on the harborside deck of Zephyros, a seafood restaurant in the fifth-century-BCE port city of Piraeus, near Athens. Sophisticated—God, they’re sophisticated, I keep thinking, dimly recalling a line from Fitzgerald. As platters arrive, I’m aware that I’ve never settled on a way to gracefully extract bones from fish. Marina, a general partner of the VC firm TMV, which she founded with the Iranian-American entrepreneur Soraya Darabi in 2016, is…

LEX FRIDMAN HAS done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom. But it’s something Fridman says, offhand, that really justifies the extended run time: “I think that if we’re living in a simulation, it’s written in JavaScript.” To review: JavaScript is what makes static web pages “dynamic.” Without it, the internet would resemble nothing so much as an after-hours arcade, lifeless and dark. These days, the language is used in both front- and backend development for a whole host of mobile platforms and apps, including Slack and Discord. And the main thing to understand about it, in the context of Fridman’s…

IN THE BEGINNING there was only one. It looked like an aluminum beach ball with four car antennas sticking out. Stuffed with radio transmitters, history’s first human-made satellite emitted a spectral beeping signal from its solitary orbit for just three weeks before its batteries died. That was enough to terrify the world. The Soviet Union’s 1957 surprise launch of Sputnik was, famously, the jump scare that startled the United States into a space race. But in a lesser-known series of events, Sputnik’s appearance also frightened many of Earth’s non-superpowers into taking decisive action. Facing the real possibility—just 12 years after Hiroshima—that Moscow and Washington were about to turn the commanding heights of space into rival platforms for mass annihilation, a group of diplomats at the United Nations began looking for…

12:02 MARCH 12, 2054 (GMT-5) SÃO PAULO TO JFK He knew the land beneath him carried scars, but when observed from such a height those scars appeared to vanish. The geometric partitions of farmland, the crowns of pure snow on distant mountains, the rebuilt cities studding the vague horizon, all of it evidence of how the nation had seemed to heal itself. It was as if the events of 20 years past had never occurred. Those events—that war—had driven him from this place, but he’d decided to return, to the nation of his birth, to his true home. That morning, once on board his Gulfstream, he’d asked the pilot about their planned route north into JFK. From the flight console a holographic scene sprang into view. Their route had them…

ERIC MIGICOVSKY HAS long been a believer in open source software. The mild-mannered but intense Canadian systems engineer is most known for creating—and very successfully crowdfunding—the cultish Pebble smartwatch, with its open source software-development kit. Migicovsky’s product preceded the Apple Watch, but Apple is a famously skilled “fast follower.” Its 2015 entry into the smartwatch market crushed Pebble, which was acquired by Fitbit the next year. Then, in 2020, while Migicovsky was riding out the pandemic and noodling on new ideas as a partner at Y Combinator, he became obsessed with how chat apps were becoming increasingly siloed. There are a million options to choose from—Signal, WhatsApp, Line, Telegram—but you “need to keep track of which friends are on which network,” Migicovsky wrote. Even more fundamentally, there’s a schism between…

SHOU ZI CHEW: Almost every time I visit a new city, I try and meet a few creators. And then I follow them on my TikTok. So it becomes like a friendship, sending messages, and we just stay in touch. DEXTER THOMAS: That is cool. It’s really fun, yeah. [Chew pulls out his phone.] Follow me, I’m @shou.time. I’m going to follow you. OK. This is you, right? [reading from my first post] Uh, your caption says, “This is a terrible app.” Well, I didn’t like it back then because it was all Musical.ly kids. My opinion has changed. You have only two comments on this post. OK. You should post more. I should. But right now, here we are in Mesa, Arizona, at the first live TikTok concert. Why…

—@TRappaRT, via X Honorable Mentions It chose storage space over souls. —@JDHaveman, via X When pressed, its alibi was 404. —Amanda Peterson, via Facebook Robot charged with battery. Gets life. —Evan Donahue, via Facebook Can’t arrest me, I am distributed. —@fsidders, via Instagram Sentenced to blue screen of death. —@parrollo, via Instagram Dead battery? You’re out of order! —David Reeg, via email It demanded a jury of peer-to-peers. —Scott Bradley, via email Robot vacuum bullies tabby. Gets life. —Liisa W, via email I didn’t know humans can’t reboot. —Joshua Cuestas, via email Bit by bit, AI’s defense collapsed. —YN Hickman Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have…