Wired

Far-right communities online are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris after speculation that she may replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in the US election.

But rather than focusing on her policies, experience, or ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have focused instead on her sex life, her race, and rethreading old conspiracies about her eligibility to be president.

These attacks have been spurred on by former President Donald Trump. “He just quit, you know—he’s quitting the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the Daily Beast last week and subsequently posted by Trump to his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump adds. “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s so fucking bad.”

The UK’s new government already has big plans. In the first few weeks after the election, it will signal to the world that Britain is “back” as a leading global player and rekindle ties with old friends in Europe.

Yet Britain’s calling card, when it comes to tech industry credentials, is not as sparkling as it once was. Its big bet on tech, allegedly a priority for the Conservative party following Brexit, has yet to manifest into a new golden age for the industry.

I’m David Gilbert, a reporter on WIRED’s Politics desk covering disinformation and online extremism. I’m filling in for Makena this week, and wanted to talk about reality. Not in the sense of whether we’re living in a simulation or not (obviously we are), but in how we perceive the world around us.

Over this July 4 weekend, you might meet family members or friends you haven’t spoken with for a while. You might chat about the news and the economy, and given the fact that it’s an election year, you will probably talk about politics. But at some point during the conversation, you might find yourself asking: “What the hell are they talking about?”

Almost immediately after the UK general election was called on May 22, the meme war began. Social media campaigns from both the Labour and Conservative parties shared hundreds of memes, from Labour’s viral TikTok using English singer and TV presenter Cilla Black’s “Surprise! Surprise!” to mock the Conservative Party’s plans for mandatory national service at the age of 18, to the Tories’ TikTok video showing only blank slides titled “Here are all of Labour’s policies.” Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party have contributed their own share of memes in the lead-up; meanwhile, the two leading parties in the polls have been engaged in a “trolling” back and forth on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X.

As mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz has plenty of problems to reckon with. Her London borough is wrestling with entrenched poverty and the capital’s highest rate of residents stuck in temporary housing. But midway through her second term, Fiaz has a new plan to turn things around. She believes that AI could provide a multimillion-pound boost to economic growth, and she’s campaigning for Newham to get a share. “We want to be able to seize the opportunities of the data economy,” she says, “and data centers are a core part of that.”

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In December last year, the UK’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, visited Singapore General Hospital, regarded as one of the best in the world. What he witnessed there surprised him: “Patients arrive having already registered their appointments via an app. They check in on touchscreen kiosks awaiting them at reception. Tablets at their bedside allow them to read about their treatment or call for assistance,” Streeting says. “This is Space Age stuff compared with where the NHS is today.” Streeting characterizes the National Health Service as an “analog system in a digital age.”

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“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights.

Over the past 18 months, Elon Musk’s X has become a hive of disinformation, particularly around breaking news events, such as the Gaza conflict and the Baltimore bridge collapse. But after Thursday’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, the expected torrent of disinformation and conspiracies flooding the platform never materialized.

Instead of sharing conspiracies about the debate, Trump just posted multiple undoctored clips of Biden’s responses to his platform Truth Social.

The persistent surveillance under which most Americans reside appears likely to continue unabated after federal lawmakers pulled from consideration on Thursday a privacy bill that legal experts contend has little hope of protecting anyone’s privacy.

United States lawmakers who’ve flirted for years with the idea of offering Americans a semblance of control over their own data yanked at the last moment the latest iteration of a “comprehensive” privacy package that’s been subject to continual editing and debate for the better part of a decade. The bill, known as the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), was scheduled for markup Thursday morning by the House Energy & Commerce Committee (E&C), which holds jurisdiction over matters of commercial surveillance.

In the mid-1980s, when Will Wright was just getting started as a game designer, he realized that the process of constructing a game—building out the individual levels—was fun in and of itself. Why not share the joy of creation with players? He conceived of a new game in which people could build their own digital metropolis, tweaking it as needed to maintain its health. When Wright brought the idea to publishers, none were willing to fund it: Who’d want to play a game with no clear way to win? So Wright cofounded his own company, Maxis, and released SimCity in 1989. It became the top-selling computer game of its time.