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You Are Already Living Inside a Computer

Futurists predict a rapture of machines, but reality beat them to it by turning computing into a way of life.

Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even faucets. Even garden hoses. Even fidget spinners. Supposedly “smart” gadgets are everywhere, spreading the gospel of computation to everyday objects. It’s enough to make the mundane seem new—for a time anyway. But quickly, doubts arise. Nobody… read more

The Empire of Apple

The company’s new iPhone and retail “town centers” presage a future of Apple as global infrastructure—one that may already have arrived.

For two decades now, Apple has been fighting a battle between attention and disregard. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO, the company was a struggling maker of personal computers with limited market share. Then came the iMac, a Mac computer people finally wanted to own again. Then the iPod, which transformed the company into a maker of… read more

The Banality of the Equifax Breach

With over half of the entire U.S. adult population potentially exposed, what’s left to do but shrug and sigh?

Consumer data breaches have become so frequent, the anger and worry once associated with them has turned to apathy. So when Equifax revealed late Thursday that a breach exposed personal data, including social-security numbers, for 143 million Americans, public shock was diluted by resignation. There are reasons for the increased prevalence and severity of these breaches. More data is being… read more

Video Games Are Better Without Stories

Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative?

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions… read more

The Wisdom of Nokia’s Dumbphone

The smartphone’s ubiquity has made it boring and oppressive. A new, retro handset opens the door to a different future.

They weighed heavy in pockets and jackets and bags, for they were thick and bulky, not lithe and narrow. Harried professionals never clutched one ostentatiously to say silently, “I’ve got better things to do than listen to this pitch or order this coffee.” Fashionable youth never dangled one nonchalantly from fingers as a flirty pique. Nothing was less sexy or… read more

Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival

Facing an uncertain future, the company keeps trying to mine its storied past.

The Japanese video-game giant Nintendo has had a rough decade. Ten years ago, the company was riding high on the commercial and cultural success of the Wii, its physical-controller console, and the DS, its popular handheld. Nintendo’s stature—and its stock price—climbed to record highs by 2007. But flailing Wii remotes around in the den proved to be a short-lived trend… read more

Russian Invasion

A review of Dan Ackerman’s The Tetris Effect

In an official photo from April 6, 1993, Hillary Clinton smirks slightly while playing a Nintendo Game Boy aboard a flight back to Washington, DC. The record doesn’t note what game she was playing, but surely it was Tetris, the cartridge that shipped with the popular Nintendo handheld upon release in 1989. When the photo was released last year, Clinton was already… read more

Why a Silicon Valley Founder Is Funding a Factory for Trump Memes

For wealthy geeks like Palmer Luckey who seek vengeance against the institutions they perceive to exclude them, “The Donald” is an obvious ally.

The classic battle between nerds and brutes is one of brains versus brawn. In the geek films of the 1980s that introduced and immortalized this conflict—Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles—the nerds are always outcasts and misfits. And these fables all end the same way. Through a combination of smarts and good fortune, the nerds demonstrate some… read more

This Wild Picture of Obama Wearing a VR Headset Explains Everything

40,000 years of visual media in one surprising White House photograph

  This remarkable photograph of President Obama wearing VR goggles in the West Wing looks like the very image of futurism. But new technologies will become old and familiar, just as all those before them have become invisible to contemporary eyes. But there they are, preserved in the amber of history, just waiting for the VR headset to join them.… read more

How Crystal Pepsi Anticipated Silicon Valley

The clear cola’s nostalgic relaunch harkens back to a time when the world’s problems seemed simple.

Like love or peace or tenderness, cola is not a simple thing, but a complex one. In the mid 1800s, John Pemberton invented the soft drink we know by the name by combining extracts of the African kola nut and the coca plant: Coca-Cola was born. But the taste of cola—originally a pharmaceutical tonic—had very little to do with either… read more