Statgeist: Charting the Wired World

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots.

Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.

Amid a wave of backlash, some industry-friendly groups are employing creative and time-tested strategies to woo the youth.

The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.

The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.

From their dorky parties to their weird walks, the movie holds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other stakeholders with contempt, while demonstrating their recklessness.

Three engineers put GPT, Claude, and Grok in charge of a real car. Only one of them was successful.

Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.

My Google Home Speaker had been burning through more data than all the rest of my devices combined. As I looked into it further, I found other smart home devices that had the same problem.