Influencers in the Wild is an Instagram account with just over 4 million followers. The name suggests that the account’s posts feature popular social media personalities, but instead the name is ironic, and curated in its stream are clips of ordinary people making social media content — in other words, behaving as if they were influencers. We are treated to the behind-the-scenes vantage point — of dudes flexing; of women twerking; of people singing; of endless, bizarre posing; and of this guy doing whatever he’s doing and this couple doing… something.

I’m sure Influencers in the Wild is popular because…

Our social media content was supposed to only be a temporary problem. Back in 2007, when people began to worry that maybe all the stuff they were posting to Facebook might affect their job prospects, Jason Warner, a then-recruiter at Google, no less, offered reassurance. Eventually, employers aren’t going to worry about things like your embarrassing Facebook photos, he wrote, because “as time goes on, more and more detail about all of us will be found online.” This was the promise: volume — the ubiquity of so much similar content from so many people — would save us, individually. That…

For over a decade, the image of a young girl smirking in the foreground as a home in the background is engulfed in flames has circulated as fodder for countless memes. The picture, known simply as Disaster Girl, though originally taken by an amateur photographer — who then entered it into an online contest, sparking its journey across the web — has all but officially entered the public domain. That is, until Thursday, at least technically speaking.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports that the then-young girl in the photo, Zoe Roth (now 21), recently sold the image as a…

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. …