Ideas

The title card that opens 1979’s original Mad Max places the action in a very near future, looming just “a few years from now.” George Miller’s cult action-thriller captured the edginess of a world teetering on the brink. The film depicts a…

“It’s really radical,” Stanley told me of Maven, “We got rid of likes and follows. That’s like insanity.” Some early adopters seem to be on board. “I quit all social media about three years ago because of the hostility, disinformation,…

Would it be too disruptive if protests staged sit-ins or chained themselves to the doors of AI developers, one member of the Discord asked. “Probably not. We do what we have to, in the end, for a future with humanity, while we still…

Red vs. Blue is officially over. On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery released Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final installment in the long-running saga that was once at the forefront of a whole new form of entertainment: web videos created…

When it came time to make Metaphor: ReFantazio, developer Atlus had a guiding principle: make a video game that was a culmination of all the beloved RPGs the company had made before it. “We decided to challenge the fantasy genre,” director…

One assurance of navigating the vast expanse of social media is that The Discourse never stops. It's: death, taxes, and never-ending discourse. Mass consensus is all but extinct. More than anything, fandoms dictate so much of conversation…

When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to…

This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can…

The US economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech—a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new…

Though ideas at Disney aren’t always developed in a linear fashion—a prototype of an invention might be started years before the company finds the place to put it into action, or an idea for something artistically cool might germinate for a…