Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. Like many, I use Google to […]
arketyp. News Feed
Digital, tech & innovation narratives curated from across the web
Self-Captaining Ships Start Their Mutiny
The unmanned “Mayflower” made landfall in Canada and Hyundai’s autonomous tanker vessel completed its first cross-ocean voyage. Two different (at least partially) self-steering ships completed landmark journeys in the past few days. But both milestones […]
Nonsense on Stilts
The sooner we all realize that Lamda’s utterances are bullshit—just games with predictive word tools, and no real meaning — the better off we’ll be. There are a lot of serious questions in AI, like […]
How Do You Revitalise a Rundown World?
For some, degenerate goblinhood is a period of renewal and resurrection into a new form: gnome mode. We’re in the darkest valley of goblin mode now, and gnome mode looks very attractive from our perspective […]
The UK’s Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK’s Freedom Lectures Are a Farce
The Assange persecution is the greatest threat to Western press freedoms in years. It is also a shining monument to the fraud of American and British self-depictions. This decision is unsurprising — it has been […]
Conti’s Attack Against Costa Rica Sparks a New Ransomware Era
“They proved and showed that a cybercrime group can do country extortion.” Even among Conti’s long rap sheet of more than 1,000 ransomware attacks, those against Costa Rica stand out. They mark one of the […]
The Last Capitalist
Elon Musk’s popularity can be understood within the context of the post-war managerial coup against the capitalist class and our collective yearning for agency and ownership. The founder-capitalists were defeated by the managers in the […]
Web3 Is Dead. Long Live Web5.
With its image tarnished by monkey jpegs and shitcoins, it seems we’re already moving on from Web3. Web3 was heralded as “the future of the internet.” Well, less heralded and more shouted about really loudly […]
Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain
The story of literacy, Luther, and your left ventral occipital temporal region is but one example in a much larger scientific mosaic that is just now coalescing. Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as […]
SEC Launches Insider Trading Inquiry into Crypto Exchanges
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a sweeping inquiry into whether crypto exchanges have proper safeguards to prevent insider trading on their platforms. According to a person with direct knowledge of the inquiry, […]
Celsius Hires Restructuring Attorneys
Celsius announced early Monday it would pause withdrawals along with its swap and transfer products, citing “extreme market conditions.” Crypto lending firm Celsius has hired lawyers specializing in business restructuring to help it navigate its […]
Coinbase and BlockFi Lay Off Hundreds of Staff
Coinbase and BlockFi are laying off hundreds of staff members, equivalent to a fifth of their workforces, as they struggle to survive the second wave of the ongoing crypto crash. Employees at Coinbase, once the […]
Visionary Futurist Neal Stephenson and Crypto Pioneer Peter Vessenes Announce Lamina1
Stephenson’s book Snow Crash originally described the Metaverse and gave it its name. Thirty years later, the biggest names in Web 3 are supporting Lamina1’s vision for a blockchain protocol equal to the Metaverse’s original […]
Google Sidelines Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Sentient
Google placed an engineer on paid leave recently after dismissing his claim that its artificial intelligence is sentient. Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible A.I. organization, said in an interview that he […]
Huawei Officially Patents a Quantum Computer
From the patent listing, Huawei has developed a type of “quantum chipset and quantum computing device”. Huawei’s new type of quantum computing device aims to solve the current issues of producing quantum chipsets which include […]
How One Billionaire With a 300-Year Plan Fueled the Popping Tech Bubble
Masayoshi Son used SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund to remake the world in its image. It’s not a pleasant picture. All this brings us to the main point: the Vision Fund invested in […]
NASA is Putting Together a Research Team to Study UFOs
NASA announced that it is putting together an independent team of researchers this fall to study sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, the updated term now used to refer to UFOs. The space agency […]
State of CSS 2022
Web styling features of today and tomorrow, as seen at Google IO 2022, plus some extras. The year 2022 is set to be one of CSS’s greatest years, in both features and cooperative browser feature […]
VR vs. AR vs. MR vs. XR: What’s the Difference?
It’s no longer just VR vs. AR. There is an alphabet soup of metaverse acronyms, often used imprecisely. So, what do they all mean? With all the hype around the metaverse these days, many people […]
12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2022
Every year, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) puts out its AI Index, a massive compendium of data and graphs that tries to sum up the current state of AI. The 2022 AI […]
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software
Agile, a method for managing software development has achieved enormous popularity in technical workplaces of all kinds — and even non-technical workplaces. Where had it come from, and why? I began to explore the history […]
Foreboding Army PSYOPS Recruitment Video Shows ‘Who’s Pulling the Strings’
A new recruiting video for the US Army psychological operations career field gives off a slightly creepy, surreal vibe. Given the number of references in the video to Russia and China, it’s also hard not […]
What Hacking AOL Taught a Generation of Programmers
The open source ethos behind the rogue AOL add-ons communities that flourished in the 1990’s. “I used to joke that everything I needed to know for infosec I learned on AOL,” Self says. “It’s not […]
The Internet Origin Story You Know Is Wrong
The history of the internet is repeatedly reduced to the story of the singular Arpanet. But BBSs were just as important—if not more. The standard history of the internet jumps from Arpanet to the web, […]
China and Russia On Track to Set Up Moon Base by 2036
In the next decade, an international coalition plans to build a lunar research station to transfrom humanity’s exploration and observation of the Moon. The planning phase is already underway, and it is going well. Construction […]
Eavesdropping on the Brain With 10,000 Electrodes
Thanks to advances in neuroscience and microelectronics engineering, we finally have a tool that will let us begin to reverse engineer the wonders of the brain. People often think of technology as applied science, but […]
A C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge
A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues? On March 7, 2017, the Web site WikiLeaks launched a series […]
Did a Human Write This, or an Algorithm?
Sudowrite and Dall-E use machine learning to produce astonishingly serviceable text and images in a flash. What does that mean for stodgy old human beings? While no one can agree on exactly when the robots […]
How Harmful is Social Media?
There’s a general sense that it’s bad for society—which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers. “A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke […]
NEPTUNE FROST: Spiritual, Joyful, Badass Cyberpunk
Multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams and Rwandan artist Anisa Uzeyman use the coltan mines in the hills of Burundi as a springboard to embark on an ambitious DIY sci-fi musical, Neptune Frost. Neptune Frost toys with […]