The Big Tech whiplash is here

“What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything?” asks Charlie Warzel . If the billionaire in question is Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), the answer isn’t a fancy car or private jet but a social-media company to call their own. With Trump’s Truth Social and Musk in the process of acquiring Twitter, Ye’s recent move to buy Parler is the latest example of a celebrity becoming a landlord in search of his own consequence-free social-media domain. Read the full story here .

For those of us who aren’t contrarian billionaires, social media can still present its own problems. Specifically, envy. “You are unlikely to die alone because your social-media posts are less popular than others’,” our happiness columnist, Arthur Brooks, writes. “But the pain can still be just as acute.” Read the full story here .

Envy may or may not play a hand in the cheating allegations plaguing 19-year-old Hans Niemann, who defeated the greatest chess player who’s ever lived in a tournament last month. Weeks later, no one can say for certain whether or not Niemann used chess-playing AI to achieve his September 4 victory over Magnus Carlsen (Niemann denies the accusations). Matteo Wong asks: How do we find the line between human and computer? Read the full story here .?

Before we go, I’ll leave you with two more stories I’m thinking about this week. First, our writer Ian Bogost installed 16 cameras to turn his house into a surveillance fortress; he shares what he learned after a year of 24/7 home monitoring here . And once you’ve had your fill of AI, surveillance, and Big Tech, Michael Owen has a more humble suggestion: Go ahead, buy a piano .

— Kate Lindsay

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From the Archive?

“Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults,” by Olga Khazan (February 2020)

If there’s anything corporate America has a knack for, it’s inventing new, positive words that polish up old, negative ones. Silicon Valley has recast the chaotic-sounding “break things” and “disruption” as good things. An anxious cash grab is now a “monetization strategy,” and if you mess up and need to start over, just call it a “pivot” and press on. It’s the Uber for BS, you might say.

Read the full story.?

Last Word?

“I think we all know this, but it’s so tempting. Points and rewards circumvent the hard work of building internal motivation to do the dishes (and let us skip the whining as well), but in the end, it has to stop.”? — Liz Busby, responding to Josh Wilbur’s “I Thought I’d Found a Cheat Code for Parenting ” on Twitter .