Tag: CULTURE

Far-right YouTube is the internet age equivalent of conservative talk radio: It’s a place for ultra-conservative commentators to react vehemently, personally, emotionally to the news of the day and the creeping horrors of American progressivism. But while the commentators—who range in ideology from mainstream libertarian to openly white nationalist—certainly owe a debt to Glenn Beck…

By nearly any measure, Netflix has had a ridiculous year. When all is said and done, the company will have spent upwards of $10 billion (and perhaps as much as $13 billion) to produce more than 550 new movies and shows. Those new movies and shows, in turn, have helped to attract some of the…

When @sweden began its grand experiment in 2011, Twitter had never seemed more full of possibilities. In New York, Twitter served as a digital bulletin board to organize protesters at Occupy Wall Street. In the Middle East, tweets served as the roots of the Arab Spring. Companies signed on to engage with customers; celebrities made…

Kathy Yaeji Lee creates in the multihyphenate. She’s a DJ, producer, singer, and occasional rapper who pilots between cultures as nimbly, and as wondrously, as she injects them with alternate life. On “One More”—a thump-shy club soother with a beat that never quite breaks free from its casing—the Korean-American wunderkind attempts to ground herself amid…

In a year that's already seen mass layoffs across multiple media brands, what happened yesterday at videogame publisher Activision Blizzard somehow felt more like a reckoning. During an earnings call with investors, chief operating officer Coddy Johnson confirmed that despite "record revenues" in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company would lay off approximately 8…

Gone are the days of multiplayer videogames with a set roster of characters. Sure, people still play Team Fortress 2 more than a decade after its release, but its nine classes remain just as they were in 2007. Now, though, incessant updates and patches have turned the most popular titles into ever-evolving sagas, with ever-evolving…

As one of the solar system's pre-eminent writers of climate change-driven, politically astute science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson wouldn’t be anyone’s prime suspect for a crime against nature. Yet here we are, standing at the edge of his plot in a community garden, and it’s bare except for some scrubby, dying shrubs and what looks…

You can find WIRED a lot of places these days. There’s the magazine, of course (which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year!). There’s this website, which you might be reading on a laptop or tablet but are probably reading on your phone. There’s YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Glizznork,…

When it comes to Game of Thrones opinions, there's really only one I trust: WIRED alum Laura Hudson's. Back when we worked in the same office I used to secretly marvel at her dog-eared and tattered copies of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's…

Susan Wojcicki has a difficult job. As CEO of YouTube, she leads one of Alphabet’s biggest money makers and most popular platforms. But the company she helms is very different than the YouTube that launched in 2005, when the mission was “Broadcast Yourself.” In recent years, and particularly since the 2016 election in the US,…