FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, speaking at her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on April 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Saul Loeb/Getty Images Lina Khan’s FTC wants to change how we think about anti-competitive behavior. Federal Trade Commission chair Lina...
Category: Internet & technology
What is generative AI, and why is it suddenly everywhere?
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Between ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, AI suddenly feels mainstream. Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere — or at least, that’s what it seems like to me: A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned in passing that...
The streaming boom is over
Jennifer Coolidge stars in the second season of HBO’s White Lotus. | Courtesy of HBO Streaming isn’t going away, but go-go spending is going, going, gone. Here’s a standard streaming TV joke/complaint: There are so many different services that someone...
Your stuff is actually worse now
Walter Zerma/Getty Images How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products. My beloved 10-year-old black bra finally broke last Christmas. The elastic had some slack and it’d been fraying for a while, but its death...
23 things we think will happen in 2023
Getty Images Will Biden and Trump remain the frontrunners? Will Putin remain in charge of Russia? Will China start a war? These and other forecasts of the year to come. This will be the fourth year in a row that...
Big Tech’s Big Flops of 2022
Vox; Getty Images/CSA Images RF We bid adieu to moonshots, Portals, and ad-free Netflix. This was not a great year for Big Tech. In 2022, the economy slumped, stocks fell, inflation skyrocketed, and belts tightened. Silicon Valley was one of...
Good luck explaining a TikTok ban to young people
The TikTok logo is displayed outside a TikTok office in Culver City, California. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Consensus is building in Washington that the most popular social media app among teenagers is a national security risk. How do you explain...
Why you saw more ads on your iPhone in 2022
Amanda Northrop/Vox Apple’s privacy-friendly ad business is also an antitrust avoidance strategy. Have you noticed there are more ads on your iPhone this year? You aren’t wrong — there are. Hope you don’t mind, because in 2023 there may be...
Elon Musk now says he’ll step down as Twitter CEO
Twitter CEO Elon Musk is questioning the validity of a poll he ran after people voted overwhelmingly for him to step down from his role at the company. | Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images But we don’t know when, or...
America’s most important EV is also its goofiest
The United States Postal Service unveils two of its battery-powered vehicles at an event announcing its plan on implementing electric vehicles, at the Postal Service Headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 20. The USPS announced it intends to deploy over...