Dark patterns are the often unseen web-design choices that trick users into handing over more time, money, or attention than they realize. A team of Princeton researchers is cataloging these deceptive techniques, using data pulled from 11,000 shopping sites, to identify 15 ways sites subtly game our cognition to control us. The research builds on the work of Harry Brignull, a London-based cognitive scientist who coined the term dark pattern in 2010, and the authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, whose work on “nudges” explores how default options influence behavior. Just over one in 10 websites contain at least one type of dark pattern, the Princeton research finds. The more popular the site, the more likely it has at least one.
Almost 1 in 4 US consumers (which equates to 32.6 million households) are unbanked or underbanked. That means these people either have no access to banking products like credit and debit cards, or must pay exorbitant fees to use instruments like prepaid debit cards. (It seems counterintuitive, but the highest fees in the banking and credit industries are charged to those who can least afford them.) Denying these individuals access to basic products and services based solely on payment method borders on discriminatory. It’s one thing for luxury brands to self-select their customers on the basis of price point, but it’s another for a retailer to deny access to a person trying to buy a pack of gum.
The dream of starting a company in your dorm room to solve the world’s problems and make billions in the process is still thriving on campus. But a competing dream, perhaps just as old, appears to be growing in fervor now, too: to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia. Students have not failed to notice the unflattering headlines that have dogged Silicon Valley over the past several years—the seemingly unending scandals in which the biggest technology companies in the world have mishandled user data, facilitated the spread of misinformation, and sold software to the agencies enforcing the Trump administration’s harsh immigration agenda. All of this has sparked new conversations inside and outside the classroom, and there are signs that the once-reliable pipeline between Stanford and Silicon Valley is narrowing—at least a tiny bit.
Considering its size and social footprint, LinkedIn has been a notably minor character in major narratives about the hazards of social media. The site hasn’t proved especially useful for mainstreaming disinformation, for example, nor is it an obvious staging ground for organized harassment campaigns. It is unique among its social media peers in that it has not spent the last five years in a state of wrenching crisis. And perhaps even more importantly, LinkedIn is not, in the popular imagination, a force for radicalization, a threat to democracy, a haven for predators, an environment that encourages mob behavior, or even a meeting place for pot stirrers.
For years, the devices and services we use have ever more aggressively monitored our activities and mined our data. But as consumers have grown increasingly attuned to privacy concerns, solutions have been appearing to help them evade tracking. Browsers such as Brave and search engines such as DuckDuckGo play up their privacy-first design. When it comes to the dominant mobile operating systems, Google has talked about preserving privacy by providing more transparency and exposing opt-out controls. Apple, on the other hand, has sought to create services that remove the opt-out requirement by not collecting data in the first place, turning privacy preservation into a key differentiator.
If you want to get a rosy view of the future of virtual and augmented reality, ask a company that works in the space. If you want to get a pessimistic view, ask an investor. But if you want a realistic view, one shaped by experience instead of conjecture and wishful thinking, ask the folks who are actually making the stuff. From their perspective, according to a new report from the organizers of the annual conference XRDC, things aren’t looking bad at all.
As a primer on the scandal, which dominated headlines around the world for two years after the election of President Donald Trump, the film is both succinct and thorough. It begins as news is breaking that Cambridge Analytica unethically scraped data from millions of Facebook users and used it to target vulnerable and impressionable voters in an effort to elect Trump and pass the Brexit resolution. Then it tracks the fallout. The film is bookended by professor David Carroll’s quest to get his own data back from Cambridge Analytica—a story WIRED told in depth—but focuses mainly on former CA employee Brittany Kaiser and her abrupt and somewhat baffling decision to turn against her employer.
TikTok can feel, to an American audience, a bit like a greatest hits compilation, featuring only the most engaging elements and experiences of its predecessors. This is true, to a point. But TikTok — known as Douyin in China, where its parent company is based — must also be understood as one of the most popular of many short-video-sharing apps in that country. This is a landscape that evolved both alongside and at arm’s length from the American tech industry — Instagram, for example, is banned in China.
Under the hood, TikTok is a fundamentally different app than American users have used before. It may look and feel like its friend-feed-centric peers, and you can follow and be followed; of course there are hugely popular “stars,” many cultivated by the company itself. There’s messaging. Users can and do use it like any other social app. But the various aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man. In this way, it’s from the future — or at least a future. And it has some messages for us.
Pocket Operator [is] a device released four years ago by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago — cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.
All of our screens are now TVs, and there is more TV to watch on them than ever. More dramas, more comedies, more thrillers, more fantasy-adventure series, more dating shows, more game shows, more cooking shows, more travel shows, more talk shows, more raunchy comedies, more experimental comedies, more family comedies, more comedy specials, more children’s cartoons, more adult cartoons, more limited series, more documentary series, more prestige dramas, more young-adult dramas, more prestige young-adult dramas — more, more, more.
Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Hermès are battling for young consumers. Will their strategies—which include everything from podcasts to video games—pay off?
As Taina Bucher explores in her book, If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics, we are generally in the dark when it comes to explaining the specific mechanics of the algorithms at the heart of our favorite apps, but what we do regularly guess at is how to make them notice us. As Bucher discovered in conversation with social media users, people tweak the content of their posts on Facebook, or even the time of day they post, in an attempt to catch the algorithm’s eye and ride the wave of its amplification. This is familiar to anyone who’s used social media, and it’s why news organizations repost old content when a topic is trending on Twitter, or why you see a million hashtags at the end of Instagram posts. Everyone is just trying to get noticed.
At a time of enormous uncertainty, widespread gun violence, and climate crisis, maybe it’s time for a new era of mainstream games that provide an escape from conflict, rather than reveling in it. Game designer Robin Hunicke has been thinking about this her whole career. Starting out on The Sims series, she was the producer of Journey, one of the most beautiful and thoughtful adventure games ever made. Now, at her development studio Funomena, she and her team are working on peaceful, interesting video game projects, such as the virtual reality experience Luna, an interactive fairy tale set in an enchanted forest, where players can create their own relaxing aural environments. She thinks the time is right for this kind of approach to enter the mainstream.
It’s no wonder that the phrase “everyone has a podcast” has become a Twitter punch line. Like the blogs of yore, podcasts — with their combination of sleek high tech and cozy, retro low — are today’s de rigueur medium, seemingly adopted by every entrepreneur, freelancer, self-proclaimed marketing guru and even corporation. (Who doesn’t want branded content by Home Depot and Goldman Sachs piped into their ears on the morning commute?) There are now upward of 700,000 podcasts, according to the podcast production and hosting service Blubrry, with between 2,000 and 3,000 new shows launching each month. In August William Morrow will publish a book by Kristen Meinzer, a co-host of the popular “By the Book” podcast. Its title: “So You Want to Start a Podcast.”
And yet the frequency with which podcasts start (and then end, or “podfade,” as it’s coming to be known in the trade) has produced a degree of cultural exhaustion. We’re not necessarily sick of listening to interesting programs; but we’re definitely tired of hearing from every friend, relative and co-worker who thinks they’re just an iPhone recording away from creating the next “Serial.”
Thin, soft electronic systems that stick onto skin are beginning to transform health care. Millions of early versions1 of sensors, computers and transmitters woven into flexible films, patches, bandages or tattoos are being deployed in dozens of trials in neurology applications alone; and their numbers growing rapidly. Within a decade, many people will wear such sensors all the time. The data they collect will be fed into machine-learning algorithms to monitor vital signs, spot abnormalities and track treatments.
If you wanted a sneak peek of what the future of television looks like, you couldn’t ask for a better one than this year’s Comic-Con. WarnerMedia pulls Friends off Netflix to try to attract people to HBO Max, its forthcoming streaming service; NBCUniversal does the same with The Office. Meanwhile, with its purchase of Fox, Disney buys out Comcast and takes full control of Hulu, resulting in the company owning two streaming services outright (the other being Disney+)—each with its own legacy catalog, each with its own originals pipeline. Add in Apple, DC Universe, and whatever else, and you’ve got some hard decisions to make.
That changes the calculation of fandom considerably. Comic-Con, at its core, is still about personal investment in pop culture, and that investment happens at all levels. You’ve got people dedicated to a character, to a movie, to a game, to a narrative universe—and, increasingly, to the platforms that deliver those stories and universes. Don’t believe me? Read a psychographic profile of Generation Z; YouTube and Netflix far outrank Disney and Nintendo in perceived coolness. (I regret to inform you that this one, which Google commissioned in 2017, is called “It’s Lit.“) While that reputation is part predicated on the stuff that comes out of those pipes, the fact remains that the pipe itself has a role like never before. Just like Comic-Con, it’s all getting bigger—and it’s all getting so, so much smaller.
Four of the seven Google employees who organized a 20,000-person walkout in November have resigned from the company, including two women who claimed Google retaliated against them for their internal activism. The latest to leave is Meredith Whittaker, who ran Google Open Research and has emerged in the past couple of years as a prominent voice demanding increased accountability from tech companies around uses of artificial intelligence.
Old and new meet when classical music and virtual reality come together in performance. Technology is often touted as the long-awaited saviour of the classical music scene. With virtual reality, it opens up entirely new ways of thinking about — and experiencing — performance. Dutch composer Michel van der Aa recently premiered his mixed reality opera Eight in Amsterdam, followed by a run of performances at the Aix Festival in France in July 2019. It’s being touted as a “breakthrough” work that integrates technology and music in new ways, while eschewing peripheral gimmicks designed only to impress. “We’re surrounded by electronics and multimedia technology,” Van der Aa told The New York Times. “So it would feel artificial to not allow that on an opera stage.”
“How dark do you want to get,” YouTuber Lindsay Ellis asked the moderator of one of the first panels at VidCon, the flashy, annual digital video conference in Anaheim, California. VidCon may have once been known as a breathless celebration of all things digital video and all the fame and money that comes with it for creators, but in 2019, it was kicking off with a discussion led by the executive director for Uplift, an organization that provides resources for YouTube creators dealing with sexual violence, about how online video communities have changed over the years. “It was fun,” said Ellis. “Now it’s like, OK, how do we protect ourselves from our audience?”
Spend enough time on the social media app TikTok, and you’re bound to see a Life360 meme. That’s because Life360, a location-sharing app aimed at families, is apparently ruining the lives of teenagers all across the United States. The service allows parents to track their kids’ whereabouts in real time, among other features. As one girl with long, blond hair jokes in a popular TikTok clip, it’s set her summer vacation on fire. Some of the videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of likes—in other words, they’re relatable.
