Stories We Can’t Stop Thinking About: Deepfakes, the Tesla Backlash, and All Things Chips
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” our hosts talk about three big stories from February.
Navigating the workforce cuts has “been absolute chaos,” says Armando Rosario-Lebrón, a vice president of the National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents workers in Plant Protection and Quarantine program. “These ports were already strained in how they process cargo, and now some of them have been completely decimated,” Rosario-Lebrón says. “We could be back…
Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.’’ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and…
After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most successful internet influencer from China on YouTube, is suddenly posting videos again. Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, who is best-known for sharing soothing, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming, and working on elaborate art projects, posted three…
Days after the rule went into effect in January, the bureau was sued by NetChoice and TechNet, two trade groups representing Big Tech. In addition to challenging the rule, the groups accused the CFPB of unlawfully exceeding its mandate, alleging that the rule is a “breathtaking assertion of its own jurisdiction.” The CFPB’s indefinite pause…
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t just rely, for their on-trend position-taking, on vague, nostalgist, technophobic feelings anymore. Now they have research papers to…
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s crypto empire continues to expand. In late March, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, announced a new bitcoin mining venture. Shortly before that, the parent company of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, entered an agreement to launch a series of crypto-exchange-traded funds. President Trump himself has previously…