You learn very quickly on TikTok how to get rich quick. Tips, tricks, and hacks abound. “Do you speak English? And do you want to make $450 for 45 minutes of work? Then you need to watch this,” one such video begins in typical fashion. The instructions, typically laid out in around 30 seconds, usually by dudes, are always (apparently) dead simple. In this case: Sign up at a website that hires freelance voice actors to record audiobooks.

There are alternatives, of course. You could troll the clearance aisles at Wal-Mart for products to sell on Amazon at an extreme…

In February, ghosts started appearing on Twitter. They emerged from the past, smiling and nodding, silently tilting their heads, moving for the first time in decades, sometimes a hundred years or more. They were friends, relatives, historical figures, reanimated by modern technology. “I love the way MyHeritage brought my great-grandfather to life!” one person exclaimed on Twitter. “Incredible to see my late father come to life again,” wrote another. “Miss him every day.”

The reanimation process was just that — animation. Genealogy site MyHeritage’s deep learning tool that it calls DeepNostalgia. It applies a set of predetermined movements to a…

“Although Facebook’s critics often talk about sensational content dominating News Feed… many of the most popular posts on News Feed are lighthearted. They’re feel-good stories. We want to show people that the overwhelming majority of the posts people see on News Feed are about pets, babies, vacations, and similar. Not incendiary topics,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs told Casey Newton last week, as they discussed his recent lengthy defence of Facebook’s algorithm, and its role in social and political polarization,. …

“The Suez accident, which is holding up an estimated $9.6bn of goods a day…has drawn attention to the inherent fragility of tightly stretched global supply chains at the very moment when they are already being buffeted by a pandemic and in an era when the philosophical underpinnings of global trade are being challenged.”

This is how the Financial Times summarized the stakes as the massive Ever Green cargo ship remained lodged across the Suez Canal. It’s freedom, thanks to the diligent work of a tugboats and what appeared to be a comically small excavator — the subject of a million…

Suddenly, I cannot escape non-fungible tokens.

These digital things — works of art, sports clips, tweets — that, to prove their authenticity, are linked to the blockchain, feel as though they are everywhere. Endlessly discussed on Twitter. Espoused on Tik Tok as a new way to make easy money. Cramming the digital news pages. They are increasingly difficult to ignore, particularly when they’re being sold for tens of millions of dollars. …

“That’s a loaded piece of toast,” Meghan Markle noted during her interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Sunday, referring to the UK tabloid that accused her of perpetuating environmental destruction by eating her “beloved” avocados. It was just one example Winfrey cited of the UK tabloids vilifying Markle for doing the same things for which they had earlier praised Kate Middleton: holding her baby bump too much; not spending Christmas with the Queen; choosing scented candles for her wedding ceremony; etc. The list is pretty long.

The point by that stage of the conversation was already clear: the UK tabloid…

Our modern web platforms operate on a shared governing theory that technology can create order from chaos. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Before Facebook’s IPO, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that, beyond its goal to “make the world more open and connected,” it sought to make people’s lives better and easier by giving them the power to organize their relationships, whether personal, economic, or political. …

Five days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance in a Clubhouse chat room, the New York Times reported that Facebook is considering launching its own Clubhouse-style service. The two events are not necessarily connected — sources told the Times that Zuckerberg “has been interested in audio communication forms” — but the coincidence of the two is symbolic of both the way Facebook endlessly imitates its fiercest competition, folding copycat services into its own apps (Instagram’s Reels closely resembles Tik Tok videos), and how the tech sphere more broadly seems stuck in a imaginative rut.

The second might…