Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog posts so they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.

The small, behind-the-scenes changes site operators deployed over the years have made browsing the web — especially on mobile — more frictionless and enjoyable. But Google’s preferences and systems don’t just guide how sites run: Search has also influenced how information looks and how audiences experience the internet. The project of optimizing your digital existence for Google doesn’t stop at page design. The content has to conform, too.

But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

As the asterisk implies, the dodo* wouldn’t be a real dodo, in the strictest sense. It would be a genetic hybrid, a calculated reinterpretation of a dodo—ideally bearing some traits of its namesake but perhaps also those of the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, whose cells will be manipulated to express the physical traits of the extinct species. A Nicobar pigeon in all its gothic iridescence is certainly beautiful, but it is not a dodo. And with no real dodos around to teach this new bird how to be a dodo, it may behave like a different bird. Is this dodo* worth it?

If we reach a point where native ecosystems have been restored, conservation is abundantly and globally funded, governments have taken meaningful and equitable action against climate change, no species are endangered by our presence on the planet, and people no longer live in poverty that makes poaching a rhino horn or mammoth tusk a necessary trade-off for survival, then sure: Let the dodos* and mammoths* frolic. But in the world we live in, spending lots of money to inflict unknown degrees of suffering on living and dying animals in pursuit of creating hybrids that will require immense and expensive assistance to survive on their own amid vanishing wilds does not just seem misguided. It seems funereal.

Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it. There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton—both ex-Google computer scientists—share the basic view that the technology can be toxic. Weizenbaum’s pessimism made him a lonely figure among computer scientists during the last three decades of his life; he would be less lonely in 2023.

There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.

Weizenbaum liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life.

Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, two of my favorite writers in the tech space, are a bit more pessimistic. But rather than solely picking apart Threads—though they admittedly do a bit of that—they train their view on the entire landscape of social media. When the billionaire boys’ club continues to bicker online and direct our digital attention at their whims, do any of us really win? 

With a few threads posted, and the most eager followees following or followed, the dopamine high cleared, revealing reality: The age of social media is over, and it cannot be recovered. Zuckerberg has merely copied and pasted a social network, and we are back where we started, only with all the baggage and psychological scarring of previous connectivity experiences. Big tech companies now dictate where attention, and therefore money, power, and influence, reside. You don’t have to like that fact to admit that it’s the case: Is Threads a thing? Should we be on it? 

Others had been pumping out viruses for months, but Dark Avenger built his to be lethal. His first creation would be known as Eddie. When a user ran a program infected with Eddie, the virus would not start by attacking other files. It would lurk in computer memory and hand back control to the original program. However, when a user loaded another program, skulking Eddie would spring into action and infect that program. These infected programs would be Eddie’s new carriers.

Eddie also packed a payload that slowly and silently destroyed every file it touched. When the infected program was run the 16th time, the virus overwrote a random section of the disk in the computer with its calling card: “Eddie lives … somewhere in time.” After enough of these indiscriminate changes, programs on the disk stopped loading.

Destructive viruses were not new. Vienna, for example, destroyed every eighth file. But Eddie was far more malicious. Because Eddie infections took a while to produce symptoms, users spread the virus and backed up contaminated files. When users discovered that their disk had turned into digital sawdust, they also learned that their backups were badly damaged. Dark Avenger had invented what are now called “data diddling” viruses — viruses that alter data in files.

Dark Avenger was proud of his cruel creation and claimed credit in the code. First, he inserted an ironic copyright notice: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.” The “Eddie lives” string that wreaked such destruction was a tribute to his love of heavy metal music. “Eddie” refers to the skeletal mascot of the band Iron Maiden; Somewhere in Time is the name of Iron Maiden’s sixth album, in which Eddie appears on the cover as a muscular cyborg in a Blade Runner setting, next to graffiti that reads “Eddie lives.”

In many ways, a16z created the playbook for the boom times in tech. During the era of fawning tech journalism and low interest rates, valuations of private companies exploded. Founders were “geniuses” and “rockstars”; it was easy to raise and easy to spend. There were herds of “unicorns,” companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. (This is to say nothing of “decacorns.”) Startups stopped running lean and instead got fat, attempting to outspend their competition.

This strategy is now at least two vibe shifts behind.

The feeling of the internet has become such a feeling, a feeling of continuous vulnerability, and you can’t turn it off, it never ends. Even if my phone is off, is elsewhere, even if my computer is in a different country, the internet is there wherever I am, because it’s in me now. I’m talking about the lingering psychic, psychological, and physiological connection that I can no longer shut off, that has changed my mind. It manifests as a minor but noticeable discomfort, a permanent buzzing in my mind, like a leaf blower that never moves on down the street. Or consider the feeling of having your mouth stuck wide open at the dentist’s, or your breast smashed by the mammographer, or your legs spread for whatever consensually chosen activity you’d like to imagine; you may want what’s happening, you may have voluntarily paid for it or requested it, for reasons that fall along a spectrum from necessity to deep desire, but part of your original want includes the assumption that the experience will end, you will be able to relax your jaw and have your boob back and curl up into a ball.

Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations.

All told, Atari was in many ways the early embodiment of the modern Silicon Valley narrative: groundbreaking innovation, unconventional business strategy and — most notably — the profound impact of integrating technology into our lives (namely in the form of the culturally ubiquitous Atari 2600 home gaming system).

We drummers tend to be ambivalent about technology. Like most musicians, ours is a craft that is technologically mediated. The affordances of sticks, pedals and things to hit with them enable our sound. We are used to the jokes that suggest we lack the intelligence of our fellow musicians. (What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.)

We worry that our bandmates, presented with technological alternatives, might look on us as a problem to be solved. We are loud; we take up space; our instruments are heavy and slow to assemble; our sounds are harsh and inconsistent, and sometimes we speed up or slow down when we play. Faced with a drum machine that keeps metronomic time, plays no more or less than is asked of it and, once purchased, costs nothing, we can’t help but feel judged: is that all you think of us? Is that thing all it takes to make a drummer redundant?