A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
Second Life was perhaps the first virtual world to enter mainstream discourse. Its founder thinks new virtual reality technologies are its successor, and destined for mass adoption. http://www.bit.ly/wired-secondlife
A piece examining the extent of Russian cyber warfare in the Ukraine.
A message board allowing users to post anonymously has played a significant role in the recent history of internet culture (think – the birthplace of the meme), the development of new extreme right movements sometimes called the ‘alt-right’, and the series of events that put Trump in the White House.
Bored teenagers looking to make some extra cash have played a major part in spreading the fake news that has influenced major global events – this piece looks at how they do it.
Private Eye editor Ian Hislop is the author of this essay on ‘the death of debate’ and what it is doing to our society.
A long look at the infamous online marketplace for illegal goods, starting with a DEA raid on a grandpa in Utah who had just taken receipt of $27,000 of cocaine. http://www.bit.ly/wired-silkroad
The author describes his “sordid double life” in Hackmud, a new online multiplayer game set in a dystopian future. The game itself is inaccessible in that you play the role of an AI, it is text based and you can only play by coding scripts, and yet the piece draws you in, painting a vivid picture of a lawless digital outpost, where no one is to be trusted, and everyone is on the make.