Welcome to RATED AND SLATED, the column that’s terminally online so you don’t have to be.

This week, I’ve been distracting myself from the horrors of a livestreamed war by playing a relaxing new video game which lets you pilot a military drone.

I’ve been enjoying Remote Reaper: FPV Drone so much that I’m packing in the day job to focus on my YouTube channel, where I’ll be streaming myself carrying out combat missions. Subscribe now!

I’ll be modding the simulator so that I can drone bomb my favorite cities around the world. I’ve got no time for anyone who says this game could be used to generate military training data or perform real combat operations.

In fact, I’m so confident that this is all just a load of harmless fun that tonight I’ll be sending the reaper to pay a visit to my own home. Tune in live below!

RATED AND SLATED

AI FLIGHT BUDDIES

If this is the baseline level of AI psychosis for the general population, it won’t be long before you find yourself sitting on a commercial flight next to an LLM fanatic who’s “having a full-on kii with the bot” about how he’s about to hijack the plane—AND YOU MADE IT ON WITH THE BOX CUTTERS TOO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED TWIN NAHHH BUT BE FR… YOU REGRET NOT BRINGING THE BIG SUICIDE JACKET NOW? —oh well, at least you won’t have to worry about popping your ears for much longer.

ROBOT SECURITY DOGS WITH INDIAN ACCENTS

Does the robot security dog have this accent because it’s manned by a human operator or because it was abandoned as a pup, stuck in India, living on the streets, surviving, being a tourist guide, smoking on the fucking roads?

3D-PRINTED SALMON

I’m sick of going on X and seeing you complaining about 3D-printed salmon. I don’t want to hear that it’s not real meat, that “it contains zero fish at all”—grow up! This looks every bit as appetizing as all those AI-generated food menus. Well, it’s your loss; more for me. In fact, strap me into an eating chair, stick me under the specialized food-grade nozzles, and print those fake layers of muscle and fiber straight into my mouth, layer by layer, until I contain more slop than my own timeline.

THE FUTURE OF JOB INTERVIEWS

To be fair, if my AI agent does the video job interview with the AI recruiter while I’m not in the room, then I’d say that’s actually getting my new employer ready for what I’m going to be like at work: dissociating at my desk before vanishing off for 40-minute shits on company time. My agent had better work on his innocent face for when he’s asked who blocked the toilet in the gender-neutral restroom with partially digested 3D-printed salmon.

GOD’S OWN INFLUENCER

I know Cyber-Apostle of the Eucharist Saint Carlo Acutis isn’t technically “alive” anymore, but what’s to stop him from being the Pope? Maybe the real reason Leo XIV hates AI so much is that, like the rest of us, he’s worried it’s going to steal his job.

MARK ZUCKERBERG PRETENDING TO ENJOY GUINNESS

Pintbaby Is Now 42, You Won’t Believe What He Looks Like Now.

3 small mercies

“WHERE IS GONE?”

This melancholy duet sounds as if it could’ve been written to be Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten’s dream collaboration with Lana Del Rey, if only she wasn’t too busy recording a GTA VI radio station with her airboat captain husband to jump on the track. Fortunately, ROSALÍA was free to cut a yearning vocal take—presumably because there was no one around to take her on the alligator tour she’d originally planned for the day.

CAMERONWINTER.FILM

Want a sad night out with the boys? Well, great news: The Cameron Winter concert film is coming to a cinema near you. Why not cheer up your pals by buying the official Live at Carnegie Hall grand piano popcorn bucket? Stick it on your lap, tell ’em to reach to the bottom, and then you, too, can bust out the falsetto.

THE RETURN OF GIRLS

If you promise to reboot Girls every ten years, then I will commit to the internet’s most stringent longevity protocol. I need to be around to see what happens to the bloodlines of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna. You will find me in the hyperbaric chamber 100 years from now, watching their febrile descendants resort to increasingly extreme measures to keep their little dreams alive amidst the spectacular, decayed opulence of a futuristic New York City. By that point, I’ll be the last millennial alive, the only person in the world who still believes that Lena Dunham is the voice of our generation.

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

The post The Internet Is a Cruel and Enticing Place, Week #1237 appeared first on VICE.

Welcome to LOST WEEKEND, VICE’s Monday briefing.

Forget about curing cancer and ending war; what I really need from AI is it to get me a ticket for the Glastonbury Festival.

If I had my way, Glastonbury would become a gathering of the 210,000 most effective users of agentic AI in the world. The hippies and hedonists who’ve hogged it for the last however many decades have had their turn. Newsflash, wastoids: There are plenty of other parties where you can torch your brain cells and pump your biological age up a full generational bracket. Surely what I’m saying isn’t even that controversial. The true spirit of Glastonbury is transformation. And what could be more transformative for Western Europe than its very own Burning Man?

The second- and third-order benefits are difficult to compute. In my brave new world, Glasto would simply be attended by a better quality of person, the whole thing undergoing a kind of demographic transfusion: partygoers out, go-getters in. What, you thought us AI guys would be handing over our entrepreneurial smarts at the gate? Before you know it, we’ll be monetizing the portaloos, converting human waste into revenue for the suits in charge. We’ll be bussing in blood boys to turn the VIP into a hangover-free zone. The chat at sunrise will be like nothing the Stone Circle has ever heard before, as tech-bro visionaries debate the merits of psychedelic drugs and whether or not we’re living in a simulation.

“Before you know it, we’ll be monetizing the portaloos, converting human waste into revenue for the suits in charge”

No doubt there will be naysayers. The usual suspects will complain that entry to Glastonbury should be determined by how much each potential consumer actually cares about music (yawn). But this would result in the most suboptimal festival in living memory, with disparate clusters of black metal connoisseurs and Japanese noise aficionados stumbling across the 600-hectare site, blinking like trapped moles. Some folks are just better off in their bedrooms.

I don’t know why people are crying about the price of tickets, which are just £408, or to put it another way, less than an annual subscription to GPT Plus. Fortunately, there is little need to worry about depressing brokies these days, after security tightened up around the turn of the century, cutting off the kind of audacious freeloaders who loved music so much they were prepared to pole-vault a moat of human excrement to listen to some.

Increasingly, the tides are shifting in our direction. Putting tickets for the world’s biggest festival on sale at 9AM on a Sunday felt like a message to the pill-poppers and freakniks that they’re no longer welcome; no doubt most of them were too busy sleeping off their hangovers to log into a platoon of devices and stare at a set of unmoving green bars for four hours. Even if the queue contained the odd degenerate who’d been awake all night, I’m confident they couldn’t have successfully navigated a purchase that didn’t involve at least one Albanian man. Which is great, as these are the last people you’d actually want to hang out with at a festival. 

Since the introduction of ID verification, buying tickets for Glastonbury has been a test of how effectively you can organize friends and family members into your very own home bot-farm operation. AI puts an end to that. There will be no more screaming at grandmother because her arthritic fingers can’t enter the registration numbers fast enough to complete a purchase on her Kindle’s internet browser. AI can do that job way better, then book flights to Ghent so we can euthanize her.

There was a last-minute change to the system this year, but it was easy enough to get around. The new “hack” was to gather up as many unused registrations as possible—begging, bribing, or blackmailing anyone who’s had kids or got sober since the last instalment of the festival in 2025—and making use of the extra unique queue numbers. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an underground trade in the registration numbers of the recently deceased. Did you know they eat their fries with mayonnaise in Belgium?

“I don’t know why people are crying about the price of tickets, which are just £408, or to put it another way, less than an annual subscription to GPT Plus”

I learned that this week. AI agents are already making dinner reservations. Once they work out how to get into Glastonbury, you’ll know the singularity isn’t far away. AI can refresh a browser window faster than any human in history, so hopefully next year, the ticket rush will be a thing of the past. And if you drugged-out doomers don’t like the sound of that, you can stay home and watch on the BBC—as long as your agent has sorted out the license renewal.

OTHER NEWS

• Shout out to Kid Rock collaborating with Eminem for some religious rap about staying friends despite having political differences. Gonna be one of my least favorite genres.
• FBI Director Kash Patel just got engaged to country singer Alexis Wilkins, which implies the existence of unfathomably hideous his-and-hers customized Nikes (good luck finding a wedding dress to go with them).
• London’s underground art fair, Minor Attractions, returns this month and will include live music for the first time—one of the venues is the kinky co-working space STÜCK (which we’ve written about before), which I guess makes sense as it’s a pretty… fluid space. 

PREDICTION FOR THE WEEK AHEAD

• After the release of single “Patient Zero”—which tragically coincided with the death of a scientist at a Russian plague laboratory—Taylor Swift’s new track, “Mass Extinction Event”, is an unexpected return to form (streaming numbers are down though after millions die from Black Death 2.0).

BRAND NEW SENTENCE

• “The two-year-old robots were trained to throw themselves into molten steel after no longer serving a purpose”

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

The post When Is Glastonbury Going to Let My AI Agent Buy Tickets? appeared first on VICE.

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out ...Read More

If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: “We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!”

Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner by ...Read More

If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.

Most ...Read More

In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.

Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their ...Read More

Let’s start with two obvious facts:

That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:

With that out of the way….

Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after he landed his private ...Read More

There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness ...Read More

CORY EFRAM DOCTOROW was born July 17, 1971 in Toronto, Canada. He attended alternative schools and worked at SF specialty store Bakka Books, but dropped out of high school at 17 and briefly moved to Mexico to write. He dropped out of four universities in two years and worked as a CD-ROM programmer, website designer, volunteer in Central America, CIO for a film company and an ad agency, founder of ...Read More

No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ‘‘enshittification’’ – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.

My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of ...Read More

In conflict, we find clarity.

We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.

It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows ...Read More

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people. ...Read More

I was surprised as anyone when I found myself accidentally using a large language model (that is, an “AI” chatbot) to write some prose for me. I was twice as surprised when I found myself impressed by what it wrote.

Last month, an airline stranded me overnight in New York City when my flight to LA was canceled due to an air traffic control snafu. The airline rep at the ...Read More

On June 20, 2023, I will be awarded an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada. The text below is the speech I will give.

Goodness me, it is a gigantic honour to be here today, and to be recog­nized in this way. I’m profoundly grateful to the faculty and administration here at York, and to my friends and family ...Read More

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switch­boards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell’s chief engineer described them as ‘Wild Indians.’ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day ...Read More

As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate.

In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, every­one ...Read More

If the bullies at the school gate steal your kid’s lunch money every day, it doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give your kid, he’s not gonna get lunch. But how much lunch money you give your kid does matter – to the bullies. Hell, they might even start a campaign: “The chil­dren of Jack Valenti Elementary School are going hungry! Congress must step in to give those kids ...Read More

“Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers will have to be destroyed.”

Quatloos. Credits. Euros. Dollars. Dogecoin.

Wait, Dogecoin?

At some point in your life, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What is money?” There’s something existential about pulling a bank-note out of your wallet and asking yourself, “Why does so much of my wak­ing life revolve around getting more of these slips of green paper?” (Outside of the USA, you may ask ...Read More

We’re all trapped on a bus.

The bus is barreling towards a cliff.

Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive.

Even if we survive, none of us know how we’ll climb out of that deep canyon.

Some of us want to yank the wheel.

The bus is going so fast that yanking the wheel could cause the bus to roll.

There might ...Read More