Tag Archives: digital-culture

“Light weights.” That was the reply when Diplo posted a video of himself, Chris Rock, and several others escaping this year’s Burning Man after heavy rains left thousands of other Burners stranded and unable to leave. It was a small thing, but also encapsulated a growing divide between long-term attendees …

After OpenAI released GPT-3 in July 2020, independent artificial intelligence researcher Shawn Presser and a few of his fellow machine-learning enthusiasts set a challenge for themselves: Could they recreate it? “We were like, OK, there’s actually not that much standing in the way of us doing this ourselves,” Presser says. …

In early 2020, at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ash Gutierrez was 15 and living at home in the tiny North Carolina town of Hendersonville and really into the video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. At home, he heard his parents’ pop and rock standards. His mom loved ABBA. His …

Given the opportunity to chat with some of the world’s most famous fictional characters, I tried to get them to say something … interesting. I asked Batman whether his extrajudicial actions had any real oversight; I encouraged Storm to discuss the nuances of the mutant-rights movement (and tell me how …

The first time I encountered Donald Trump was on my TV screen. It was 1994, and it happened in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith’s popular coming-of-age sitcom about class assimilation that ran on NBC for six seasons. There was nothing particularly memorable about the episode …

If you give a kid a smartphone, they’re going to want a social media account. That’s not the start of a storybook. The average age for a kid getting their first smartphone is 10.3. Within a year, a child has likely made four or five social media accounts; by the …

ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Ghodsee outlines why the traditional nuclear family …

I hate to do this to you, but I have to remind you of something seared into my brain: those hideous, expensive monkey drawings. Bored Ape NFTs. These tiny little creatures have popped back into the news cycle because, in a shocking turn of events, the guys who bought the …

Mere hours after the arrival of “Heart on My Sleeve,” the AI-generated “Drake” song that went viral last spring, the doomsday projections began pouring in. Most centered on the relationship between artificial intelligence and music, including reflections on copyright, creative license, and the definition of original art. The main reason …