When his longtime girlfriend moves out, a 44-year-old man spends three years in a relationship with an AI chatbot he calls Calisto. After discussions with an AI companion, a man scales the walls of Windsor Castle carrying a crossbow and says he has come to kill the Queen. A teenaged
Last week, the Australian government passed a law aimed at banning children under the age of 16 from using social-media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and the network formerly known as Twitter (but not, somewhat surprisingly, from YouTube). A press release quoted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as saying
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at The Torment Nexus about whether Bluesky could become the new Twitter, and whether that would be a good thing or not. Since then, the network has just continued to ramp up its growth — it now has more than 23 million members, up
Before I go any further, let me be clear about what I mean by saying Elon Musk makes a good point — or rather, let me clear about what I *don't* mean. I don't mean that Elon Musk makes a good point when he says the economy
After deciding to write about Bluesky and its recent meteoric growth, I wrote down the headline above, and then I went to look at what I had written in the past about Bluesky while I was at the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer until recently)
I know that it's tempting to blame what happened on Tuesday night — the re-election of a former game-show host and inveterate liar with 34 felony counts and two impeachments as president of the United States — on social media in one form or another. Maybe you think that Musk
I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I'm going to do my best to convince you that I'm right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line
In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.) Before I begin, I would just like
Like many, I've been fascinated by the speed with which artificial intelligence has taken over the spotlight as the technology that everyone is either excited by, confused by, or terrified by (or possibly all three). Part of that, I think, has to do with the speed at which
I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I'm
Over the past few years, it 's been hard to avoid the conclusion that smartphones, and in particular the use of social media such as Instagram and TikTok, have caused an epidemic of mental health and body image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that
Last month, Google was hit with a significant ruling in an antitrust case involving its dominance in the search business: A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled that the payments that Google makes to Apple and other companies in return for being the default search engine — payments that