Tag Archives: digital-culture

Be warned, all ye who watch House of the Dragon thanks to your parents’ Max account: A password-sharing crackdown is coming. Warner Bros. Discovery, Max’s parent company, plans to launch the restrictions in late 2024, WBD’s head of global streaming and games, JB Parrette, said at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media …

As music from Universal Music Group artists started to disappear from TikTok recently, a different kind of earworm got stuck in my head. Even though it’s not a song, I sang it in the shower and whispered it in my sleep: “You have been promoted! You are now one of …

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Neither Warner Bros., which produced Wonka, nor the character Willy Wonka are actually affiliated with the disastrous viral Glasgow event known as Willy’s Chocolate Experience. It’s an easy mistake to make. Aside from the name, the event featured actors clearly costumed …

Lanny Smoot builds lightsabers for a living. No, not like the ones kids used to create with flashlights and plastic tubes—realistic extendable ones, with penumbral edges and laser-blocking abilities. Like an actual Jedi. He’s whipped up giant electromagnetic eyes, too, as well as an omnidirectional HoloTile floor, which adapts to …

Of the 12.5 million works currently hosted on the fan fiction hub Archive of Our Own, SenLinYu’s Manacled ranks as the second-most-read on the entire site—but you won’t be able to read it there for much longer. A dark romance between Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy set in …

Charlotte is the TikTok generation’s Virgin Mary. Only she’s not human, and she’s carrying up to four messiahs. For a brief moment, some wondered aloud whether Charlotte, a round stingray about the size of a serving platter, might have been knocked up by a shark. She has been in a …

In her delightfully cheeky Verizon Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé swore to do one thing: Break the internet. As the commercial demonstrated, she could not—at least not in the literal sense. Instead, after the commercial ended, she did something else: She hacked the internet, dropping two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” …

Like any good citizen of the internet, I went hunting for memes when I first heard the news. Rachel Dolezal, the notorious race grifter who courted controversy in 2015, had been fired from her teaching gig for operating an OnlyFans account. I was in need of a good laugh. Only, …

“Biggest audience since the moon landing.” That was the headline when Nielsen released viewership numbers for Super Bowl 2024. About 123.7 million people in the US watched the game, more than any other game since Nielsen started keeping track and, yes, close to the 125 to 150 million people in …

While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there are more people looking at more ads for more time. It’s just good business. As the …