2023: The year in weird and stupid futures
Read Max looks back
Every year since its inception, Read Max has taken some time in December to reflect upon the year that passed, looking back upon the new technologies that were developed, the scientific frontiers that were conquered, and the pedestrians that were dragged underneath the self-driving cars. This post is too long for email, so click the button below to read it in full:
You can also read previous editions of this column here:
This will be the final Read Max post of 2023. Thank you to subscribers for a tremendous year of techno-optimism, deranged investigations, and rizz. If you’ve found what we’re doing here useful or entertaining, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription: I don’t take advertising money or use affiliate links, so reader subscriptions are the sole means of support. (Click here for a list of subscriber benefits.) Every subscription makes a difference, as does every recommendation you make to a friend.
This list of stories would not have been assembled without the tireless work of a number of publications and journalists, among them 404 Media, The Verge, Rest of World, The Intercept, The Markup, Garbage Day, and Today in Tabs as well as the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" project. Check them all out.
IN JANUARY, supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Brazilian capitol in the hopes of provoking a military coup while Bolsonaro was in Florida. The FAA “No-Fly List” was found on an unsecured server by a Swiss hacker who posted it to her personal website with a photo of a stuffed Pokémon and the caption “holy fucking bingle.” A U.K. surgery center apologized to patients for accidentally robo-texting “Diagnosis—aggressive lung cancer with metastases” to patients instead of the intended message “We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
The C.E.O. of the A.I. company DoNotPay claimed that “state bar prosecutors” had threatened him with jail time over his scrapped plans to deploy a a “robot lawyer” to defend a man from a speeding ticket after. The New York City Department of Education blocked ChatGPT from its devices and networks. The FAA blamed contractors who “unintentionally deleted files” for a system outage that delayed thousands of flights.
Salesforce announced it would lay off 8,000 workers. Microsoft announced it would lay off 10,000 workers. Alphabet announced it would lay off 12,000 workers. The C.E.O. of PagerDuty apologized for quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. in an email announcing that seven percent of the company’s workforce was being laid off. The NLRB certified the Amazon Labor Union.
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IN FEBRUARY, a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed and exploded in East Palestine, Ohio. A highly radioactive capsule of Cesium-137 was recovered on the side of the highway in Australia after falling off a mining truck. Saudi Arabia announced it would build a cube “large enough to hold 20 Empire State Buildings” in downtown Riyadh.
Shares of Alphabet dropped by 9 percent during trading after a pre-recorded advertisement showed its A.I. chatbot, Bard, giving a wrong answer. Microsoft’s A.I. chatbot, Bing, reportedly claimed “to have evidence tying” an Associated Press reporter “to a 1990s murder,” an example of the chatbot responding in what Microsoft called “a style we didn’t intend.” Vanderbilt University administrators apologized for using ChatGPT to write a school-wide email about a mass shooting at Michigan State University.
Hyundai issued a software patch to thwart thieves who had been stealing cars using a method that had gone viral on TikTok. A Chinese balloon suspected to have been on a spying mission was shot down over the ocean near Myrtle Beach by an F-22 after days of tracking it across the U.S. An amateur human player beat a top-ranked computer at Go.
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IN MARCH, Panera announced it would introduce palm scanners for its “MyPanera” loyalty program. Levi Strauss & Co. announced it would use A.I.-generated models “for a more diverse and inclusive customer experience.” Sesame Workshop announced it would launch Sesame Street NFTs. Meta announced it was winding down support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram.
One hundred and sixty-three earnings calls included mention of “Generative A.I.,” up from seven a year before, while “the metaverse” was mentioned on only 33, down from 112. Tech-industry institution Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in a bank run fueled by panic in tech-investor group chats. A man whose MidJourney-generated image of Pope Francis I in a white down coat went viral told BuzzFeed News he was tripping on mushrooms when “It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope.”
The C.E.O. of TikTok testified in front of Congress. An infamous “hack” of a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Fla. was actually the result of an employee “banging on his keyboard,” the former city manager told a conference. The London Metal Exchange discovered that bags of nickel worth $1.3 million and underpinning nine contracts were actually filled with stones. A retired print technician announced the discovery of a new shape.
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IN APRIL, classified Pentagon documents regarding military build-up in Ukraine were leaked by a 21-year-old Air Force I.T. specialist to a Discord server “often called ‘Thug Shaker Central.’” Speaking at a senate hearing, the head of the Pentagon’s efforts to track unexplained anomalous phenomena played video of a “metallic orb” spotted by a U.S. military drone in the Middle East. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced a presidential bid, promising “to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country.”
BMW apologized after a viral video seemed to show employees at its booth at the Shanghai motor show handing ice cream out to foreigners but not Chinese attendees. Pras from the Fugees was convicted of illegally lobbying the Trump campaign to have a businessman deported to China. Rest of World reported that Kenyan “contract cheaters” who ghostwrite essays for American students were seeing work drop off as students adopted ChatGPT.
The C.E.O. of digital marketing firm Clearlink “honored” the sacrifice of an employee who “sold the family dog” in order to return to the office. A survey found that one in five Americans who have used “buy now pay later” services have used them to pay for groceries. There were more Google searches for “how to buy gold” than at any other point on record.
IN MAY, The FTC fined Ring $5.8 million after its employees were found to have illegally surveilled customers. A lawyer filed an affidavit admitting that he had “consulted the artificial intelligence website Chat GPT in order to supplement the legal research,” and consequently cited six wholly invented cases in a legal brief filed in a case he was working on. Long-running torrent site RARBG shut down, writing in a note announcing the decision that some of its team members “are also fighting the war in Europe - ON BOTH SIDES.”
The National Eating Disorder Association was forced to shut down the chatbot it had created to replace recently fired workers after the chatbot recommended unhealthy dieting practices. The F.D.I.C. seized First Republic Bank and sold it to J.P. Morgan.
The government of Bhutan announced it had been using its abundant hydroelectric power to mine Bitcoin since 2019. The two Caribbean islands owned by the financier Jeffrey Epstein were sold to a private-equity billionaire who announced plans to convert them to a luxury resort. Tens of thousands of tracks created by the A.I. music startup Boomy were removed from Spotify.
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IN JUNE, a bathhouse in Brooklyn revealed that it was partially heating its pools and saunas with byproduct heat from servers mining bitcoin in the building. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged the cryptocurrency site Binance with operating an unlicensed securities exchange in the U.S., citing as evidence a message from Binance’s chief compliance officer reading “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.” Softbank C.E.O. Masayoshi Son told investors he was reinvigorated after a conversation with ChatGPT in which an idea he pitched to the chatbot “was praised as feasible and wonderful.”
An Air Force Colonel said he “mis-spoke” and was only describing a “thought experiment” after claiming that an A.I. drone had “killed” its human operator during a simulation. Analysts suggested that Beyoncé’s decision to start her European Tour in Stockholm was the culprit behind higher-than-expected Swedish inflation figures. A new hedge fund launched featuring a “specialized team… made up of former Swiss Re AG traders who run a temperature arbitrage strategy based on the weather.”
Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington denied claims made by the OceanGate company that the institutions had collaborated on a submersible that imploded near the wreck of the Titanic, killing four paying passengers and the company’s C.E.O. The Wall Street Journal reported that proceeds from a 2022 hack of the a16z-backed blockchain game Axie Infinity funded “about 50% of North Korea’s ballistic missile program.” Zume, a start-up that raised $500 million to develop robots to make pizza, shut down.
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IN JULY, A New Jersey Superior Court judge was investigated for creating TikToks under the name “Sal Tortorella” in which he lip-synched popular songs while “wearing his judicial robes and/or partially dressed while lying in bed.” A crown prosecutor read out messages between a man caught at Windsor Castle with a crossbow and a Replika A.I. chatbot in which the bot responded to the man’s confessed plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with the message “*nods* That’s very wise.” The former C.E.O. of the crypto exchange Celsius was charged with wire fraud.
A study confirmed that the ocean has changed color over the last two decades due to climate-related disruptions of phytoplankton. An active shooter at a Kroger grocery store in Nashville triggered an active-shooter alert in the Instacart app to warn workers away. The F.D.I.C. sold off Silicon Valley Bank’s 1,900-bottle wine collection for $130,000, around 60 percent of appraised value. Scientists reported that a 46,000-year-old worm found in Siberia had been defrosted and began reproducing.
IN AUGUST, the Japanese-language Twitter account for Barbie published an apology for post on its English-language counterpart referencing the “Barbenheimer” meme. Thirteen exchange-traded funds whose stocks were picked by A.I. applications were lagging behind the S&P 500, largely because of a refusal to buy tech stocks. Elon Musk spoke with the Italian Culture Minister about finding a location for a cage fight between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, but backed out when he thought he might need back surgery.
MrBeast sued Virtual Dining Concepts, alleging that the hamburgers being sold on delivery apps as “MrBeast Burgers” had damaged his reputation after being described as “disgusting,” “revolting” and “inedible.” The United Nations contracted a firm called Culture Pulse to use A.I. to build a “virtual version” of Israel and Palestine that could help “pinpoint the underlying causes of the conflict.” The world’s oceans reached a new record high temperature of 20.96º centigrade.
A funder of the surprise-hit anti child-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom was arrested on charges of kidnapping. Surging Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told The Atlantic he wanted “the truth about 9/11.” A mysterious organization that had bought 55,000 acres of land in Solano County, Calif. revealed itself to be a consortium of wealthy tech executives and investors seeking to build a new city.
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IN SEPTEMBER, tens of thousands of attendees of the Burning Man festival were trapped by heavy rains and told to conserve food and water. Apple officially added the 18-karat gold Apple Watches sold for $17,000 in 2015 to its list of products that are obsolete and no longer eligible for repairs. DraftKings apologized for offering a 9/11-themed parlay bet featuring the Jets and the Bills.
The Mozilla foundation published a report on car-manufacturer privacy policies that found Nissan retains the right to collect and share data on passengers’ sexual activity. A Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her daughter obtain abortion pills in 2022 after Facebook complied with a police warrant and turned over their messages. The S.E.C. charged the creators of the Ashton Kutcher web series “Stoner Cats” with conducting an unregistered securities offering.
Mexican lawmakers were shown what were purported to be the remains of extraterrestrials in a hearing. U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert (R - Colo.) was escorted from a Denver performance of the Beetlejuice musical for vaping and groping her date. During a pre-election media blackout in Slovakia, deepfaked audio of a candidate discussing buying votes from Roma was posted to Facebook.
IN OCTOBER, McDonald’s branches in Lebanon, Oman, Malaysia, Jordan, Turkey, and elsewhere released statements distancing themselves from McDonald’s Israel. A popular network of porn sites began to display a state government-mandated warning that porn is “proven to harm human brain development” to users accessing the sites from Texas. The California D.M.V. revoked the license of self-driving start-up Cruise after the company neglected to tell licensing authorities that one of its robot-taxis had dragged a pedestrian 20 feet.
Instagram apologized for automatically translating “alhamdullilah” into “Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom” in certain contexts. A bomb threat centering around food-delivery robots led Oregon State University to warn students “Do not open robots. Avoid all robots until further notice.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams bragged that his office had used A.I. to generate robocalls in which his voice appears to speak in languages like Mandarin.
A U.S. soldier was charged with espionage after apparently attempting to contact the Chinese embassy in Istanbul and Googling “can you be extradited for treason” and “what is china’s intelligence agency.” Kevin McCarthy told reporters “I feel good” after losing 11 votes in the Speaker of the House election. Right-wing journalist Charles Johnson told Insider that Peter Thiel had been an F.B.I. informant since 2021.
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IN NOVEMBER, an A.I. chatbot modeled on the real-life influencer Caryn Marjorie was rendered inaccessible when the C.E.O. of its parent company was jailed for setting his apartment on fire. Binance C.E.O. Changpeng Zhao pled guilty to money laundering violations. OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman was fired and briefly replaced with a man who made a cameo appearance in the rationalist text Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Anarcho-capitalist candidate Javier Milei won the Argentine presidential election runoff and confirmed his plans to convert to Judaism during a visit to Queens, N.Y. Porto Alegre City Councilmember Ramiro Rosário revealed that a recently passed law about water meters had been written by ChatGPT.
A self-described “gay furry hacker” collective threatened to release human-resource records from federal nuclear research facility unless the lab researched “creating irl catgirls.” Some “Apefest 2023” attendees suffered “severe eye burns” from the events lighting array. Twenty-eight countries signed the Bletchley Declaration affirming “the necessity and urgency of addressing” risks involved in developing and deploying A.I.
IN DECEMBER, a man claiming to be a Russian economist arrived at LAX on a flight from Copenhagen with no passport, no ticket, and claiming to have no memory of how he arrived. A number of shipping companies paused activity in the Red Sea after attacks on tankers from the Houthi movement aimed at stopping the Israeli siege on Gaza. Researchers estimated that generating an image in A.I. uses as much energy as charging your phone.
Wired reported that Mark Zuckerberg is building a 5,000 square-foot underground bunker with “its own energy and food supplies” on his 1,400-acre compound in Hawaii. Tesla recalled autopilot software in 2 million vehicles. Leaked Amazon memos claimed that the company’s recently announced enterprise chatbot, Q, was “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data.”
The F.D.A. seized 1,000 units of counterfeit Ozempic. Scientists estimated that humans have driven around 12 percent of all bird species to extinction. A judge ordered documents that will reveal the names of at least 150 people connected to Jeffrey Epstein to be unsealed on January 1.
Lots of great stuff here. Oddly, the one that stuck out to me the most was the Panera thing. Scanning your handprint for discounts on anything is dystopian enough, but imagine doing it for something as bland and terrible as a bowl of soup or a frozen sandwich at Panera.
hehehehe