Culture / Digital Culture

“It’s time for your lice check,” a woman who goes by “Ms. K” whispers directly into my ear as she starts running her fingers into my scalp and through each strand of hair. I’m in a dark room, Eastern flute music playing in the background as…

Sarah wasn’t expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home.But in August, while listening to “The Gateway Tapes”—a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of…

Created in 1966, Eliza has been called the first chatbot, and her canonical personality “script” was DOCTOR, a mock psychotherapist. Nearly 60 years later, we’ve put Doctor Eliza and one of her distant descendants, Claude, in conversation.…

You wake up. You do not check your phone. Instead, you activate various wearables embedded in your body and have a series of conversations with inanimate objects. You make Minority Report–style gestures in the air. You blink a lot. Things…

I recently heard that a former friend was now heavily into an S/M relationship with Pedro Pascal. This was moderately surprising, as she’s a lesbian and he’s an AI chatbot, but what is fluidity for if not to explore previously untapped…

To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a…

I. The FounderSol Kennedy used to ask his assistant to read the messages his ex-wife sent him. After the couple separated in 2020, Kennedy says, he found their communications “tough.” An email, or a stream of them, would arrive—stuff about…

It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad. “No one tells you this if you’re an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing,” said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European—so subtle it took…

As you’re hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of…

On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it is rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature,…