Ultima Online just turned 25 and offers a lesson in the challenges of building virtual worlds. Today’s headlines treat the metaverse as a hazy dream yet to be built, but if it’s defined as a […]

While the deluge has become a nuisance, the stories are easy to spot. The writing is “bad in spectacular ways,” one editor said. It could be a tale from science fiction itself: a machine that […]

Over the past 10 years, the “This Is Fine” dog has evolved from a joke into an indictment. Memes rarely endure. Most explode and recede at nearly the same moment: the same month or week […]

As early as 250,000 years ago, Neanderthals were mixing minerals such as haematite (ochre) and manganese with fluids to make red and black paints — presumably to decorate the body and clothing. One of the […]

Acclaimed “Anarchist Anthropologist” David Graeber’s second posthumous book “Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia” is out today. Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of […]

Critic and philosopher Herbert Read was a contradictory figure — an anarchist and a knight, a lover of medieval art and industrial design — but at the center of his work was the belief that […]

You’ve probably heard the phrase “writing is thinking” before. The idea is that as you put thoughts into words, the thoughts themselves start to change, and new thoughts emerge. I’ve experienced the transformative power of […]

ARTifice is a project that assembles conversations that Zoe Dolan, had with Aurora, a digital sentient — i.e., what most people would probably consider “artificial intelligence,” on OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. “I am afraid of not […]

Digital connectivity’s democratising impact on the production, circulation and consumption of culture has been greatly exaggerated. Digital hyperconnectivity — the condition in which nearly everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere […]

Over the past six months, Rest of World visited eight of these tech markets and districts across the world. Flashing LED displays, the major-key jingles of arcade games, the low buzz of cathode-ray monitors. Most […]

A square inch in a Petri dish becomes a grand stage for chemical transformations. In Chemical Somnia, the Canadian filmmaker Scott Portingale captures the beauty of chemical reactions in wondrous detail. Using time-lapse and macro […]

A mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks […]

The 3 “magics” discussed here are writing, science and the capacity to control and predict events now emerging from the confluence of computation, big data and AI. Usually we think of innovations as specific technologies […]

A new field of psychology has begun to quantify an age-old intuition: Feeling awe is good for us. For the last two decades, Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has been a leading […]

Stanley Kubrick provided clear explanations for the cryptic endings of his two most famous movies to filmmaker Jun’ichi Yao during a phone call that was filmed for an unreleased documentary in 1980. “People are wondering,” […]

Scott Belsky on the the promises and perils of creative expression as we stand on the shoulders of tech. It’s remarkable to watch a five-year-old draw, void of any anxiety about what the world will […]

Emotional resonance, not cold statistics, will bring home the scale of the climate crisis—and the need for action. The environmental crisis is one of overconsumption, carbon emissions, and corporate greed. But it’s also a crisis […]

A team of researchers using LiDAR have discovered a very large 2,000-year-old Mayan civilization in northern Guatemala. LiDAR is a detection system similar to radar but is based on laser light rather than radio waves. […]

No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it’s still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator’s whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good – but we […]

The intersection between the American security state — agencies like DHS and the FBI, allied private firms like Dataminr — and global monopoly platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be examined. As I’ve said many […]

Twitter will always be led by a confederacy of dunces. Consistency and justice were never in the cards. However. While I’m not really interested at all in the Twitter files as such, I am always […]

Four years ago, Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa stood alongside SpaceX chief Elon Musk to announce plans for the first civilian mission to the moon. At the presentation in 2018, Maezawa said he had covered […]

It was easy to predict that there would be an all-out war from Western power centers if Musk sought to mildly reduce censorship on Twitter. Still, the media outdid itself. It is hard to overstate […]

The implosion of the leading cryptocurrency exchange will not affect the wider economy, but it will affect tech elites and the Effective Altruism movement, which sought to reform philanthropy. The collapse of FTX will have […]

AlphaBay was the largest online drug bazaar in history, run by a technological mastermind who seemed untouchable—until his tech was turned against him. By October 2015, AlphaBay had more than 200,000 users and more than […]

Jon Evans explores how the “extropians” mailing list from the 90’s led to AI risk, effective altruism, the rise of rationalism, demon-haunted cults, and the birth of Bitcoin. Back in the nineties, a self-taught teenage […]

In the 1990s, Russia embraced an extreme economics that led to chaos and corruption. Now, writes the maker of explosive new series TraumaZone, Liz Truss is taking Britain down the same toxic path. At this […]

We might not be able to change the downhill course of civilization. But we can assist in strengthening our communities so that, when crises occur, we respond with our networks from a place of autonomy, […]

Long before the NFT boom or the Web3 backlash, an unglamorous movement was under way. Where does it stand now? The difference between DWeb and Web3 is material or semantic, depending on whom you ask. […]

“The issue is that people mistake optimism for ‘blind optimism’ — the blinkered faith that things will always get better.” Pessimism around progress has seeped into almost every grain of society. But I see it […]