Technology

The distance has been breached. The physical world we inhabit and the digital world we created are now touching and becoming one. Where the overlap is most pronounced, on the foremost edges, people are making things, rekindling the old, creating the new, all enabled by an interconnected world.

The arrival of the internet was an extinction-level event for much of the old media. But can the new apex predators learn from the fates of those they supplanted?

For inspiration, five contemporary individuals and five modern classics to return to.

Mind clones. Self-aware digital beings, reconstructed from your life’s digital footprints, able to reason, remember, and feel.

Ingrid Burrington is one of the few researchers and designers paying attention to the infrastructure that powers and connects all our shiny gadgets and gives us access to all the knowledge in the world.

The dawn of the anthropocene is forcing us to confront the full extent of our impact, beyond the physical destruction of habitat, to include social and cultural impact across species. What are the implications?

For those who believe in the theory of the 'great stagnation', the enduring B52 is probably its most iconic attestation. A superb example of good design and engineering but, alas, it also feels like a failure of progress.

As we increasingly operate according to the algorithms and information architecture of the internet, we learn not only to write like computers, but think like them too.

Paris city authorities rewrote traffic laws to allow cyclists to run red lights—or griller le feu—at 1,800 T-junctions across the city, legitimizing a common practice and integrating bicycle behavior more deeply into urban infrastructure.