The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok

The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok

TikTok’s dissociative identity disorder community thinks doctors don’t know what’s going on. Some doctors feel the same about them.

Earlier this year, Dr. Matthew A. Robinson — a clinician and researcher at Harvard Medical School’s largest psychiatric facility, McLean Hospital — delivered a lecture to a room full of his peers.

His concern was palpable at the outset. “We have been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID,” Robinson said.

DID, or dissociative identity disorder, is a mental health condition that was previously known as multiple personality disorder. It is thought to be an extremely rare response to prolonged abuse experienced in childhood, often at the hands of a caregiver, and causes people to experience several distinct and separate states of consciousness as if they are multiple different people sharing the same body and mind. Its existence has been debated by academics for years.

Robinson’s lecture, however, was not about the existence of DID. Instead, it was about a new challenge for the clinicians like him that treat it: TikTok.

The social media platform is home to a community of people with DID, who are known as “systems” — a name that signifies their status as several distinct identities, called “alters,” sharing a single body. On TikTok, systems have posted videos about their experiences with the disorder, which have become popular with teenage audiences and attracted more than 5 billion views.

It was TikTok, in Robinson’s eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals. “It’s possible that social media is revealing new ways for individuals with genuine DID to express themselves,” he said in his lecture. But he also issued a warning: “however, it’s also very possible that social media and internet trends are contributing to increased DID claims that are not genuine.” That is, people claiming to have DID might be mistaken, confused, or simply faking it.

Robinson — a member of McLean Hospital’s trauma research program, which delivers specialized care to people with dissociative disorders — said he could not accurately diagnose anyone through social media at the outset of his talk. Still, he used TikToks to illustrate his points. He started with a clip of a rainbow-haired DID system purchasing a personalized cake to celebrate their official DID diagnosis, something Robinson thought was “surprising,” as it contrasted with the typically “hidden” nature of the disorder. He shared footage of a system cycling through eight elaborate neon outfits — complete with wigs and cat-like paws — attributed to their different alters, “overt changes” of appearance that Robinson felt were “not characteristic” of the DID patients clinicians see each day.

“They look and act nothing like the sensationalized [social] media representations created for entertainment purposes.”

Robinson theorized that members of DID TikTok, and the young people being influenced by them, were exhibiting symptoms of “imitative DID,” a form of malingering where people pretend to have the dissociative disorder for attention or status. He closed his lecture with a TikTok of a system playing Guess Who? with their husband. They were using the board game to help him figure out which alter was currently “fronting,” or controlling, their system’s body. “I have a number of my own patients who I treat for DID and have always understood their experiences to be genuine,” said Robinson. “They look and act nothing like the sensationalized [social] media representations created for entertainment purposes.”

DID creators on TikTok, however, felt that Robinson was missing the point. Jenna Kraft, a 41-year-old author and host of the Gianu System, was the creator shown playing Guess Who? with her husband in Robinson’s lecture. “In the description of my videos it says, ‘this is a dramatic representation of our actual conversations,’” Kraft says. “Someone in the comments called it ‘edutainment.’”

Kraft — whose alters include JA, a man-hating lesbian, and Kaleb, a hat-loving teenage boy — says Robinson’s presentation was distressing to her system and the other influencers he featured, who faced waves of abuse off the back of his lecture. “I have screenshots of someone coming onto my page to tell someone they shouldn’t believe me because this doctor says I’m faking,” she says. “People were given a license to hate.”

DID creators and their fans lashed out at Robinson in response. They felt the lecture discredited their experiences and further entrenched stigma against people with the disorder. Actress AnnaLynne McCord, who came out as a DID system in 2021, called the lecture “asinine” and “crazy.” Systems began to “review bomb” McLean Hospital, where Robinson works, leaving comments on Google about the “unethical” and “disgusting’ presentation. A petition was circulated calling for a “formal apology” and “reparations” from McLean Hospital as well as a wide range of trauma experts; another petition called for Robinson’s license to be revoked.

In the end, McLean removed all videos of Robinson’s lecture from its owned channels, but the fallout has continued. Academics involved in the space are scared to speak further about the issue of imitative DID. “I would rather not give this more publicity,” said one off-record academic, who — like many other clinicians involved — ignored or declined The Verge’s requests for an interview. “I do not want to make any enemies.”

Robinson, his peers, and the creators of DID TikTok are now at odds over the difficult question of what’s real and what’s just a new way of discussing challenges around mental health. Academics and clinicians think unrealistic and possibly even fake depictions of DID are influencing young people to self-diagnose themselves with or imitate the disorder. The creators on TikTok, on the other hand, think their community is building a new understanding of DID through social media — and causing its presentation to evolve in real time.

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Experts have raised the alarm around TikTok and its impact on self-diagnosis for several years now, especially in the context of mental health and neurodevelopmental issues. In 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported on research suggesting that young women were developing Tourette syndrome-like tics from the platform, and earlier this year, the BBC reported on the potential for inaccurate ADHD self-diagnosis through TikTok. Some writers have attributed the rise in interest around mental health conditions and neurodevelopmental disorders to the “trivialization” of conditions like autism on TikTok, where they are reduced to appealing or even trendy personality quirks. Others believe it’s happening because of the platform’s potential to rapidly spread mental health misinformation. The end result is the same either way: a rise in self-diagnosis, conducted largely under the guidance of Dr. TikTok rather than the assessment of a clinician.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many women — who often exhibit neurodivergent traits differently than their male counterparts — feel that TikTok helped them to pursue accurate diagnoses of autism or ADHD after years of misdiagnosis. Videos created by people with disorders like schizophrenia are littered with grateful comments from people who feel seen, represented, or better connected to loved ones with the disorder. The platform has broadly been celebrated by its users as a place where mental health can be discussed openly and even destigmatized.

TikTok declined to comment on the details of this article. A spokesperson declined to be quoted on the record while discussing how TikTok handles videos about medical misinformation.

As a result of this reduced stigma around mental health — at least in certain online communities — the way that conditions like dissociative identity disorder appear online has started to look very different to what clinicians are used to. On DID TikTok, some creators present their alters as having unique and distinct genders and styles, like the Winter System, whose alter Mason uses an ice-blonde wig, electric blue-colored contacts, and drawn-on face tattoos to make himself feel more at home in the system’s body. Others, like @kyaandco — also known as DissociaDID on YouTube, where their system has been posting about DID for the last five years — take a more artistic approach, using short dance videos to contrast and explain how two of their different alters feel about sex and sexuality. One of the biggest influencers in TikTok’s DID community, the A System, has shared livestream footage in which two of their alters — Asher and April, who each have different genders and senses of style — argue over how their body should be dressed and even use name tags to help viewers keep up with who is fronting at any given moment.

According to Asher, an alter in the A System, the props that his system uses for videos — like certain hairstyles or wigs to signify the presence of sassy female alter April or cat ears as a shorthand for anime-loving teenage alter Art — are purely for the benefit of their audience. “When we use things like cat ears, it’s because we’re talking to an audience online, and it’s easier to explain what’s going on in our head. We don’t do that in our day-to-day lives,” says Asher, who creates and posts most of his system’s social media content. (The A System’s alters share the body of a 33-year-old man named Chris, live in Ohio, and have over 1 million followers on their shared TikTok account.)

“You see all these systems with shared experiences, it shows you it’s not the end of the world”

Asher believes clinicians are overlooking a key issue when criticizing systems’ collective online behavior: they have finally found a sense of community and (virtual) confidence. “The people in charge of researching this need to realize that people with DID are no longer afraid to present themselves,” he says. “They are no longer forced to be silent, and they’re not going to be.”

Veteran systems feel that DID’s fantastical online presence is a symptom of progress rather than a signifier of social contagion or malingering. The Stronghold System, founder of DID advocate group The Plural Association, tells The Verge that when they were diagnosed with DID a decade ago, the lack of available information made them scared of themselves. “Now, when you type in dissociative identity disorder, and you see all these systems with shared experiences, it shows you it’s not the end of the world,” says Stronghold, whose body is 35 and lives in the Netherlands. (They asked The Verge to quote them as a system rather than the individual alter that was fronting at the time of their interview.)

Stronghold also pointed toward the nature of social media content to explain the difference between systems in clinical settings and online. “It might seem like six different alters are all talking in the video — but many people film for three weeks and then put it together,” they say. “I do feel like [researchers and doctors are] not understanding social media culture, and how people present differently outside of a clinical setting. Systems present differently when they’re not in crisis.”

Some researchers see a positive pattern emerging from the reduced stigma around mental health on platforms like TikTok, which has created more room for people with mental illness and neurodivergencies to explore their identity and bond with each other over shared experiences. “Illness has always been stigmatized or something that people experience in private, and there’s been no community space to explore what that is as an identity,” says Amanda K. Greene, an interdisciplinary researcher at the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine in Michigan. “There’s more space for that [exploration] to be tenable online.”

Greene published research earlier this year on the creative ways in which the DID community enacts their identity through TikTok, highlighting how insider humor and comedy are a large part of how systems perform connectivity with each other. She believes it’s important to examine such videos in context — as entertainment on social media — rather than taking them at face value. “I think sometimes when we’re looking at social media, there can be this misunderstanding that offline experiences just get sort of picked up and transported online,” Greene says. “But the way that people are experiencing their identities and illnesses is very much tangled with the platforms they’re talking about them on.”

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Of course, not everyone on the internet is being completely honest about having DID. In recent months, anonymous confessions have started to pop up across the internet, made by young people who claim they faked DID for attention, usually across a number of years and almost always between the ages of 11 and 17. In one TikTok video, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times, a young person shares the “fake” DID alters they created and sketched for themselves in 2021. In a separate series of clips, someone who claims to have been popular among DID communities on Tumblr in the mid-2010s gave a full account of the years they spent faking DID online for fun and attention. Many more people have come forward on Reddit claiming to have created fake alters with disabilities, pretended to have alters based on YouTubers, made up trauma to justify having DID, or even used DID as a way to get out of taking responsibility for their actions.

Some of the accounts of DID fakery stretch back to Tumblr and other pre-TikTok social media platforms, which may support the idea that the present academic discourse around DID TikTok amounts to a moral panic. “Clearly, it’s not TikTok that causes imitative DID,” says Stronghold, who pointed to research published between the late 1980s and 1990s that examined imitative DID, long before social media existed. “The term has been around for a while.”

Systems are also acutely aware that people faking DID do appear on TikTok. “Are there people faking DID online for attention? Yes. 100 percent. But real recognizes real,” says Asher. He says many fake DID accounts — from people claiming to have thousands of alters, sometimes with offensive or distasteful identities like Hitler or the YouTuber Technoblade, who died of cancer in 2022 — are the work of people determined to bring real DID systems down. “A lot of these accounts, if you do a little bit of digging on them, are run by trolls purposely to discredit systems,” Asher says. He shared screenshots of several Facebook groups with The Verge in which members discussed and shared evidence of themselves faking DID online to mock systems and add to the narrative that all systems online were faking the disorder. “It’s a bigger problem than people think.”

But even if viewers are seeing fakery on TikTok, doctors are seeing a very real uptick in DID inquiries at their clinics. Dr. Andrea Giedinghagen, a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist from Washington University in St. Louis, tells The Verge that she saw more patients seeking DID diagnoses at the start of the pandemic than she had until that point in the entirety of her career. “In my estimation, and I could be wrong, it was a lot more people believing they had DID [than actually have it]. I have never worked with somebody that I’m generally concerned has DID,” says Giedinghagen, who has published research on the rise of social media self-diagnoses among young people.

Although Giedinghagen appreciates that these communities can be a vital resource for people with mental health problems, she still thinks they have the potential to be dangerous. “I’m glad those communities exist, but when people misdiagnose themselves, it becomes a problem. I’ve had people cry in my office because I told them that they do not have the diagnosis that they think they have.” Giedinghagen says that some young people she’s seen appear to base their identities around self-diagnosed autism, ADHD, and other conditions they’ve learned about through TikTok. It’s exacerbated by the rise of discourse on TikTok that can be dismissive of the opinion of medical professionals when it conflicts with the view of the patient. “If we’re not able to have conversations about the possibility that a diagnosis is not always exactly what a patient thinks, it’s very hard to be a physician — and this is part of what worries me.”

Robinson, in his lecture, was also worried about the public perception of DID. He suggested that young neurodiverse people were picking up imitative DID from TikTok as both a creative outlet, an excuse for poor behavior and social skills, and an excuse to “retreat into themselves.” He wasn’t sure how to help them, and he was even more concerned about how their social media posts could impact the already entrenched stigma around DID.

“We are deeply concerned about social media representations and self-diagnosis, and the way it likely delegitimizes DID for those that have the diagnosis,” Robinson said. “We don’t want these representations to undermine the significant research and clinical progress that’s been made in recent years.”

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McLean Hospital acknowledges that Robinson’s lecture may have had the “regrettable” outcome of some content creators feeling their diagnosis was being questioned. “We have been saddened to learn the presentation resulted in hurt feelings, discouragement, frustration, and sadness for some. This was not our intent and the feedback that we have received has been valuable,” the hospital wrote in an unsigned statement to The Verge following repeated requests for comment.

But the hospital stood by Robinson’s concern that patients may be seeking out incorrect diagnoses based on social media portrayals from platforms like TikTok. The hospital has “heard directly from many [people seeking treatment] that they learned about DID through social media,” the statement says, and Robinson’s lecture was designed to “encourage awareness and a dialogue” about how to best treat and understand these patients.

“We are sincerely concerned that this trend on social media will further marginalize individuals living with DID, while also doing a disservice to those who are living with another treatable but misidentified disorder,” the hospital wrote.

“I was not trying to fool or trick anyone. I am just a person who’s struggling with mental health.”

Kraft, whose videos were featured in the presentation, understands the hospital’s concern. “I do see from a professional standpoint what Dr. Robinson was trying to do,” she says. “I just think he did it in the most unprofessional, unresearched way possible.” In Kraft’s eyes, Robinson’s lecture exposed the DID community to further online harassment and harm. “To have the hands that should be healing hands be the ones that injure,” she adds, “has dealt the community a blow.”

Finding a way forward that both honors and protects systems who are active on TikTok while addressing the concerns of clinicians over imitative DID could be tricky. In recent weeks, one of the DID influencers who presented online with colorful wigs and props released a video to tell their followers they did not have dissociative identity disorder after all and had instead just been confused.

“I was not trying to fool or trick anyone. I am just a person who’s struggling with mental health,” said the creator, who on TikTok had amassed more than 80,000 followers as the Winter System. “But the reason that I’m making this video is because I feel like I have a responsibility to you guys. My face, now, for millions of people, is the first time that they’ve ever heard of Dissociative Identity Disorder — and I don’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

They pledged their support for the wider DID community and urged followers not to misunderstand their ordeal as a reason to disbelieve systems on TikTok. Instead, they called for more media literacy and education around DID as a way to resolve the issue.

It’s a lesson that could help both TikTok viewers and staffers at McLean. “When you watch media, you need to analyze it critically. When one person … posts about DID, don’t assume DID is like that for everyone,” the influencer continued. “It is on you guys to have the media literacy to know that.”

Cruise Agrees to Reduce Driverless Car Fleet in San Francisco After Crash

Cruise Agrees to Reduce Driverless Car Fleet in San Francisco After Crash A driverless Cruise taxi with a passenger collided with a fire truck Thursday night, just one week after state officials allowed the service to expand.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator to block OpenSea in fight over payments

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator to block OpenSea in fight over payments

Yuga Labs owns Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Meebits, and other NFT series. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Two of the biggest names in the NFT space are clashing over the future of how the tokens’ creators get paid. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, said today that it would block the ability to trade its newer NFTs on OpenSea by February 2024. The move is meant to protest OpenSea’s decision to stop collecting royalties on behalf of NFT creators — a huge blow to Yuga’s business.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that their original creator would get a cut every time they were resold. For companies like Yuga, which saw explosive prices on its Bored Ape collection for a time, those royalty fees added up to tens of millions of dollars (a blog post suggests the number was $35 million for Bored Apes alone just via OpenSea trades as of November 2022).

But despite the many promises of Web3, it was ultimately up to NFT marketplaces to enforce and distribute those fees for artists. And as the NFT market has deflated, more marketplaces have been happy to cut artists out of the picture as a way to lower fees and attract sellers. The leading marketplace, Blur, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee in most cases, far lower than the 5 to 10 percent fee that artists typically set.

The ban only applies to newer NFTs

Not all of Yuga’s NFTs will be blocked from OpenSea because of technology constraints. The company said it would drop OpenSea support on “all upgradable contracts and any new collections,” which means that older collections — including its most famous, Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks — will likely continue to be traded there, dulling the impact of this protest.

“We’ll be working toward disallowing OpenSea’s marketplace to trade our collections as they phase out royalties,” Emily Kitts, a Yuga Labs spokesperson, told The Verge. She declined to offer details on which collections would be affected.

OpenSea tried for a time to find ways to enforce creator fees, but on Thursday the company threw in the towel. It announced that as of March 2024, all royalty fees for artists would be optional — tips, essentially, that the seller could choose to distribute or not. Fees will be optional for all new collections starting August 31st.

Many NFT businesses rely on those fees. They’ll create a limited number of NFTs, sell them for a low-ish price, and then focus on growing the value of the tokens so they can pocket the resale fees later. (Bored Apes were sold for around $220 at launch, which is a lot less than the $216,000 Jimmy Fallon is believed to have paid for one less than a year later.)

Resale fees aren’t the only way that NFT businesses can make money — CrytoPunks don’t have a fee, for instance — but it’s certainly among the primary ways. The Bored Ape collection has a 2.5 percent fee, and after acquiring the Meebits NFT collection, Yuga added a 5 percent fee.

“Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so creators are properly compensated for their work,” Yuga CEO Daniel Alegre said in a statement this afternoon. Yuga Labs has previously blocked certain transactions from happening on Blur and other marketplaces that don’t enforce royalty fees.

Low interest rates and loneliness: the origins of the pandemic crypto boom

Low interest rates and loneliness: the origins of the pandemic crypto boom

Glauber Contessoto, also known as “Pro,” records a video about Dogecoin. | Image: This Is Not Financial Advice

This Is Not Financial Advice and Easy Money attempt to explain the extremely online financial mania. Their very divergent takes show how difficult it is to fully understand.

Finance is often taught like math — as though it’s a series of fixed and inexorable rules. But if that were true, bank runs wouldn’t occur.

Psychology is at least as important to regular finance as balance sheets. The point of being able to transact in abstract tokens, whether dollars or Dogecoin, is to be able to engage in a relationship with a stranger with some degree of confidence. All money is about community. Money is also, to some degree, about correctly predicting the future; your dollars or Dogecoin will continue to be worth a predictable amount when you engage in future transactions. Investing in particular is about the future, namely, trading present money for presumed future returns; the crucial step here has to do with expectations. The psychological element here is most obvious in boom-bust cycles.

Speculative manias have a long history, and I look forward to the economist who tries to interpret the most recent retail investing boom in light of Hyman Minsky’s hypothesis that market-based financial systems are often unstable and prone to crisis. Until then, we have two efforts — a book and a film — to deal with the most recent cryptocurrency boom and bust cycle.

“I hate that I’m stuck in this position, but in the future, one day, I’m going to be really happy, and I wanna manifest that.”

Unlike some other efforts to document the boom of retail investing, This Is Not Financial Advice isn’t a cheap content grab. This beautifully shot and scored documentary from Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci is a genuine, if slightly naive, piece of art.

Temple and Ingrasci follow several retail investors as they explore the markets. We are introduced to Senay Kenfe, a Long Beach, California, activist who tries to demystify investing through investing club-style educational meetings; Rayz Rayl, of Sellersburg, Indiana, who quit teaching math to play professional poker after he made more than double his teacher’s salary gambling and moved into day trading from there; and Kayla Kilbride of Seal Beach, California, who makes TikToks to try to demystify finance to other people and document her own journey of learning how investment works.

The heart of the documentary, though, is Glauber Contessoto, better known as “ProtheDoge” (Twitter) or “The Dogecoin Millionaire” (YouTube).

“I hate where I’m at right now,” Contessoto says at the beginning of the documentary. “I hate that I’m stuck in this position, but in the future, one day, I’m going to be really happy, and I wanna manifest that.” And to that end, on February 5th, 2021, Contessoto takes everything out of his bank account, sells all his stocks, maxes out two credit cards, and throws it all into Dogecoin. This is $180,000.

“I could cash out right now and go about my life, but I would feel like I’m letting everybody down.”

Contessoto’s life throughout the documentary is a striking example of cruel optimism, where what you want prevents you from actually flourishing. At one point, his Dogecoin account is worth $2.2 million, but he has only $162 in available cash. He is living in a shitty apartment, which is furnished largely with things he picked up from the street or built. At several points, friends, YouTubers, and his own mother urge him to sell at least some of his Dogecoin holdings. But he won’t. “I could cash out right now and go about my life, but I would feel like I’m letting everybody down,” he says.

And why does Contessoto think that Dogecoin is worth betting on? Well, Elon Musk says it’s the future of the financial system. The branding is good. Contessoto likes the memes. Trying to explain how currency works isn’t going to sway him. Those explanations are complex, nerdy, for chumps; his explanation is simple.

Besides, Contessoto knows that the existing financial system doesn’t work for him because he doesn’t have a social security number. (He and his family immigrated from Brazil.) At one point, heartbreakingly, he describes all the jobs he’s been fired from because he doesn’t have a social security number; in a scene with his mother, he displays a childhood photo where he is playing soccer barefoot. His vision board in his house is about success: “entrepreneur,” “true innovators believe they can change the world,” “money,” and “go take a leap” are among the text peppering it, along with a photo of a Tesla Cybertruck.

Part of what’s striking about Contessoto is how lonely he seems to be; he is usually pictured alone. Though we do see him with friends and family, most of his time seems to be spent in his apartment by himself. At one point, he has a birthday party and is rearranging his apartment to host it — it’s the most people he’s ever had over to his place, he says.

Financial decision-making was often about investors’ self-perception, and emotions tended to outweigh math

A notable contrast in the documentary is Senay Kenfe. Kenfe spent 11 years as a warehouse worker and lived with five roommates, putting 70 percent of his income in the stock market. He likes “boring” investments. When he was nine years old, he told his mom that his goal was to buy the houses in his neighborhood so he could sell and rent them to his friends.

We see Kenfe meeting with people in his community in real life to try to educate them about investing. He talks about “buying back the block” and reinvesting in his own community. He shows the camera the apartment building he plans to buy in Long Beach, and when he does buy it, he puts a mural of Malcolm X on the side. Of all the people in the documentary, Kenfe seems the happiest by far. He is uninterested in cryptocurrency; he emphasizes the importance of boring investments.

Kenfe’s story echoes an older style of retail investing: investment clubs. During the 1990s internet bubble, sociologist Brooke Harrington documented these clubs, in which ordinary people pooled money so they could have accounts big enough to receive the attention of brokers. Before the advent of online trading, this was one of the main ways for retail investors to access the stock market.

A lot of Harrington’s findings will be familiar to the viewer of This Is Not Financial Advice: financial decision-making was often about investors’ self-perception, and emotions tended to outweigh math. Also, financial success wasn’t the thing that determined whether investors stayed in the market — some of the most successful investing clubs disbanded. The thing that mattered most for whether people continued to dabble in the stock market was whether they viewed themselves as investors.

Contessoto made and lost so much money as to render money meaningless

No one in This Is Not Financial Advice tied his identity more closely to his investments than Contessoto. His social media branding is specifically about his Dogecoin investment; the fan art he receives and hangs on his wall reinforces that identity. So even though Contessoto’s crypto account swings in ways that make me nauseated, he stays in the market. The crux of his social identity is his Dogecoin bet.

In the run-up to Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, Contessoto is excited, and I want to scream — I watched the event and know already what will happen to him. That $2.2 million was his peak; closer to the end of the documentary, he’s down to $199,980 in Dogecoin. That’s still more than his initial investment, but he made and lost so much money as to render money meaningless.

At the end of the documentary, Contessoto moves to a three-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas. He’s made more than $690,000 in sponsorship deals on YouTube. Because he hasn’t touched his Dogecoin, his authenticity can be tapped for advertising. Contessoto outlines his long play: monetizing the attention he got from his Dogecoin bet with merch, a cartoon, and ad placement.

The documentary presents this as something of a happy ending, but Contessoto doesn’t seem to be any more embedded in a real community than he was in the beginning — his online community seems to be something for him to leverage for profit. He seems troublingly lonely.

There was a casino open all hours of the day, a casino you could get to from your own couch

In retrospect, it seems the pandemic threw gasoline on what was already a raging fire. A decade of low interest rates made startup land boom; in parallel, the crypto world boomed, too. But when covid struck, a one-two punch of Federal Reserve policy and the isolation and boredom of 2020 pushed more people than ever into investing.

Sports had been halted, so sports betting also ground to a halt. Nothing was going on. But there was a casino open all hours of the day, a casino you could get to from your own couch — and so crypto took off. And in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, most people under the age of 40 already viewed the financial markets as a casino.

Easy Money, actor Ben McKenzie’s book written with journalist Jacob Silverman, was also born of pandemic loneliness. The book has its moments; McKenzie and Silverman can be charming company. McKenzie was, after all, inspired to write a book while high — and if there’s a single writer out here who hasn’t had their own version of this moment, I’d like to meet them. Of course the difference is that McKenzie did write it.

Curiously, though, for a book that often brushes against the social aspects of money, McKenzie seems not to understand the role community and loneliness play in cryptocurrency — even as he delightedly portrays the crypto skeptic community. Lurking under the Excel spreadsheets, there are what John Maynard Keynes called the “animal spirits.” Cryptocurrency in particular is moved by the animal spirits, as we observed in This Is Not Financial Advice.

McKenzie looked into crypto, and it was contempt at first sight

McKenzie gives the explanations that wouldn’t move Contessoto — the boring, complicated ones about interest rates, the problems with Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, and what a currency actually is. This all feels very dutiful and is accordingly dull: anarcho-libertarians, Silk Road, Bitcoin pizza, ICO boom, amen.

Easy Money picks up when McKenzie stops explaining cryptocurrency and tells us about how his pandemic went. He was in a bad way (“bored and depressed,” in his own words) and a friend from college who’d “given me the worst financial advice of my life” told him to buy Bitcoin in early 2021. McKenzie looked into crypto, and it was contempt at first sight.

McKenzie is convinced most crypto, maybe all crypto, is in fact a security, though this is hardly clear legally. (We will find out, though!) Regardless, like many people bitten by the crypto bug — whether skeptics, opportunists, or true believers — he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He read an article from Silverman called “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam” and decided that he’d located a possible co-author. He nervously approaches the journalist and is rewarded with friendship, something he was in dire need of during the pandemic.

McKenzie makes the most of his celebrity, which gets him in the door in ways most journalists can only dream of. It also gives him valuable insight into the celebrity NFT bubble — after all, figuring out how to manage money in an uncertain business isn’t easy. I wish McKenzie had spent more time on the likes of actor-turned-VC Ashton Kutcher and the forays of various celebs into the Bored Ape Yacht Club and MoonPay; I suspect he’s got a pretty good bead on how IP works in Hollywood, and the best explanation I’ve heard for celebrity interest in NFTs has to do with owning the IP that properties could be developed from. Royalty checks are generally a steadier income stream than acting gigs, after all.

The sections where McKenzie meets other skeptics are the highlights of the book

Occasionally, though, McKenzie’s fame leads him on wild goose chases — a shaggy dog story about martinis with some self-proclaimed CIA guys makes me think he got conned by some fans.

Easy Money is a little scattered, and maybe trying to cover too much territory. There’s a chapter where McKenzie goes to El Salvador to see for himself how Bitcoin is doing there (not so hot, turns out!); a brief encounter with Celsius’ Alex Mashinsky where Mashinsky admits how few dollars are backing the crypto tokens; a long detour into the bizarre world of Tether; an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried where McKenzie, long accustomed to answering others’ questions, discovers there is an art to asking them.

The final chunk of the book feels shoehorned in — it is a rushed retelling of the Terra / Luna and FTX collapses. There are also some minor errors: Bankman-Fried, for instance, says he made his money doing arbitrage from Japan, not Korea, as the book has it.

The sections where McKenzie meets other skeptics are the highlights of the book; the crypto skeptics form a loose community that makes McKenzie feel less lonely during the pandemic. These portraits of internet randos committing acts of journalism on the fly — in newsletters, on Twitter, and on podcasts — are lively and enjoyable; you get the sense that the camaraderie McKenzie feels from these people is what really got him through the pandemic.

These financial communities are self-reinforcing — in crypto, members urge each other not to sell because HODLing benefits the wider group

I have been fascinated by crypto skeptics for quite some time; it is a kind of anti-fandom that pays just as much attention to the crypto world as the true believers do. (I follow cryptocurrency loosely because I think it’s hilarious, but I also view the existing financial system as a pretty good joke. I suppose that makes me a financial existentialist.) It’s a mistake not to have made these people the heart of Easy Money; they are vivid and compelling. Had McKenzie and Silverman approached the narrative differently, writing about the skeptics in more detail would have allowed them to explain tricky financial concepts in the narrative itself, rather than in boring textbook-like chunks.

But more to the point, crypto really is about community; the true believers aren’t wrong about that. It’s not the kind of community where I’d expect members to rearrange their schedules to let me cry on their couches because I’d just gone through a nasty breakup or to create a meal train because someone just had a kid; it’s more like the kind of community that forms around sports teams. (Before crypto, there were penny stocks and Mary Kay cosmetics.)

These financial communities are self-reinforcing — in crypto, members urge each other not to sell because HODLing benefits the wider group, as we already saw with Contessoto. They communicate through memes and in chat rooms, and they are always available, even in the middle of the night. I understand these relationships to be shallow, but they are relationships.

The skeptic community mirrors this; in fact, many true believers and skeptics are friendly. Smart crypto investors often root for skeptics because skeptics are highly motivated to find frauds — and if you do believe cryptocurrency is a meaningful technology, weeding out scams is necessary to leave the real innovation standing.

Finance isn’t just feelings and it isn’t just math

During the last crypto hype cycle, when many of us were stuck at home with nothing to do, online communities were a lifeline because our real ones were inaccessible. McKenzie’s experience with the skeptics — and his reverence for their work — suggests that he was among the people who stayed sane by finding a community online.

If McKenzie had kept his scope narrow — either on the community of crypto skeptics or as a memoir of his own pandemic-related involvement in the crypto world — the book would have been stronger. I can see an excellent book peeking out from under the one that exists, which is mediocre. Still, it’s a good effort for a first-time author, and McKenzie and Silverman are often quite funny on a line level.

Easy Money also provides crucial context missing in This Is Not Financial Advice. McKenzie points out Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller’s notion of the naturally occurring Ponzi: a sustained rise in prices that happens because investors believe other investors will continue to go up. The documentary takes place during the era of low interest rates, an environment primed for the naturally occurring Ponzi — but it seems not to notice, the way a fish doesn’t notice water.

Without this context, This Is Not Financial Advice leaves viewers with the impression that gravity will never return to the markets — which demonstrably isn’t true, as the Fed rate hikes have shown already. As the money supply tightens, fewer people want to gamble; they need that money for necessities. What that means for crypto as well as the creator economy Contessoto is participating in is unclear.

Easy Money and This Is Not Financial Advice each seemed to be supplying context the other lacked. Finance isn’t just feelings and it isn’t just math; if you hope to be successful at investing — or even just understanding what’s happening in the economy — you need both. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard.

How to delete your Twitter history

How to delete your Twitter history

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Over the last few months, Elon Musk’s X, which was formerly known as Twitter, has been a bubbling cauldron of strange advertising decisions, continuous upheavals, and weird overflows of testosterone.

Not that Twitter has ever been calm waters. Before Musk, Twitter was the social media world’s most reliable double-edged sword. One minute, you were retweeting a funny meme account and enjoying some wholesome discussion about your current TV binge fixation, and the next, you were being buried by a harassment campaign or finding your day ruined by a thread that makes you want to throw your laptop through the window.

Either way, if you’re now on X or were ever on Twitter, it’s a good idea to take precautions with your posting history since, even if you’ve moved on to one or more other social networks, it’s possible that somebody will unearth one of your old tweets and create a firestorm without you even being aware it’s happening. (And while it’s not necessarily bad to be able to ignore something like that, it’s probably a good idea to know when it’s erupting.)

So regardless of whether you’ve cut Twitter out of your life, the best protection you can provide yourself is the deletion of your Twitter history. Here’s where to start if you’re interested in nuking your timeline and keeping future tweets from falling into the internet’s vindictive void of posterity.

Step one: Archive your tweets

Before you settle on a method to wipe your Twitter history, it’s recommended that you archive your tweets first. To begin with, that means you can just hold on to the folder, in the event you ever want to casually scroll back to that three-month period when you first signed up for Twitter and all you could think to tweet about was breakfast and the weather and earnest hashtag use.

But the main reason that you want to archive your tweets is because, if you have more than 3,200 tweets, you won’t be able to remove them without an archive. How come? Because individuals can only delete individual posts, and if you use a third-party app, Twitter will only allow it to delete the most recent 3,200 tweets. To get around that limitation, most deletion apps use your archive (or tell you how to use your archive) to identify all the older tweets you’ve amassed so they can get rid of them.

To access your archive:

• Go to your Twitter account and in the left-hand column, click on More > Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy.
• Under the Your Account column, click on Download an archive of your data. It can take a day or more until you get your data, so if you think you may be in a hurry to delete your Twitter data, plan ahead.

It’s not hard to get an archive of your data.

Eventually, you’ll get an email from Twitter inviting you to download your archive. It will arrive in a ZIP file, which contains a folder in which you’ll find an HTML file. Clicking on that will open a webpage in your browser window for scrolling through your entire Twitter history, together with a list of JavaScript data files.

Step two: delete single tweets

If you only have a few older tweets that you want to get rid of — because you find them embarrassing, or have changed your mind, or don’t want your new employer tripping over them — you can delete them one at a time.

• Go to your Profile page.
• Find the tweet that you want to delete, and click the three dots to the right of the post.
• Click on Delete.
• A pop-up will ask if you’re sure. If you are, click on Delete.

Deleting a single tweet is not a problem. It’s deleting them in bulk that can be problematic.

Step three: pick a service

There are many services out there designed to help you manage your Twitter history and wipe it clean. Some are free, and some charge a subscription fee. None can immediately delete more than your most recent 3,200 tweets. (This is a function of Twitter’s API). However, most of the apps have found a way of getting around it by helping you download your archive (see step one, above) and then using the archive to, in essence, delete a specified range of tweets that were created before those 3,200.

And even if you’ve used one of these to delete all your past tweets, it’s a good idea to go back and check. There have been reports, including from Verge staffers, that “deleted” posts have mysteriously reappeared.

Current apps include:

TweetDelete, one of the best known, is a web tool that lets you both delete your Twitter history and set a timer for the deletion of future tweets. The free version only deletes those most recent 3,200 tweets. The company does offer three paid plans: a Starter plan for $5.99 a month or $35 a year that will delete up to 500 tweets a month; a Pro plan that, for $6.49 a month or $40 a year, will delete up to 3,200 tweets a month; or the Premium plan for $6.99 a month or $44 a year that attempts to get around the 3,200-tweet limitation by uploading your Twitter data file and then letting you delete a range of specific tweets.

TweetEraser is similar and offers similar features — in fact, its list of premium features is almost identical to that of TweetDelete, and its prices are exactly the same except that, instead of a Starter plan, Pro plan, and Premium plan, TweetEraser offers a Beginner plan, Advanced plan, and Expert plan. The only differences are that TweetEraser does not offer a free version, and it claims “extra fast” deletion in the Advanced plan and “super fast” deletion in the Expert plan.

TweetDeleter will also delete your older tweets using the same strategy as the previous two apps: by using your Twitter archive to find and delete those posts. If you only want to delete certain tweets, you can find them using keywords or whether they’re attached to media. TweetDeleter offers a Standard plan that lets you delete up to 100 tweets per month for $7.99 a month or $47.88 a year; the Advanced plan deletes up to 3,000 posts and 3,000 likes for $9.99 a month or $59.88 a year, and the Unlimited plan lets you delete an unlimited number of tweets and likes (including all at once) for $11.99 a month or $71.88 a year.

Redact is a downloadable app for macOS, Windows, and Linux that deletes posts from an impressively wide variety of services. The free version deletes unlimited posts on Reddit and Twitter and 30 days’ worth of posts from Facebook and Discord. For $84 annually, you can delete an unlimited number of posts from all of those services; remove posts from, according to Redact, over 40 services in total; schedule bulk deletions; and enjoy beta access to new features, among other features.

Update August 18th, 2023, 8:35AM ET: This article was originally published on July 26th, 2018, and it has been updated to reflect recent changes to Twitter / X and to tweet deleting services.

Intelligence Agencies Warn Foreign Spies Are Targeting U.S. Space Companies

Intelligence Agencies Warn Foreign Spies Are Targeting U.S. Space Companies U.S. officials say Chinese and Russian spy agencies are trying to steal technology from private American space companies and preparing cyberattacks that could disable satellites in a conflict.

Twitch will let streamers ban users from watching their streams

Twitch will let streamers ban users from watching their streams

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Twitch is rolling out an update next month that will finally allow streamers to block banned users from viewing their streams. Currently, Twitch allows you to ban users from the chat section of a stream, but they can still view streams.

Twitch revealed earlier this week, during its Patch Notes stream, that a new setting will be available for streamers in September that will boot people out of chat and live streams in real time. Banned users will automatically be blocked from viewing streams, a long-requested feature that streamers have been waiting years for.

Image: Twitch

The new Twitch ban feature.

“At the time being it won’t stop them from viewing VODs or clips, but that is something we also want to include as part of this functionality... in a future update,” said Twitch senior product manager Trevor Fisher during the Patch Notes stream earlier this week.

While this is a welcome feature, particularly for tackling harassment, Twitch still allows anyone to watch streams without an account. So if someone is banned they can simply log out of the service or use a browser incognito window to continue watching a stream. Still, at least the ban feature will soon work how you’d expect it to.

The iPhone 15 might have faster charging speeds

The iPhone 15 might have faster charging speeds

Apple may need to ship the iPhone 15 with a power adapter to support the increased wattage from USB-C charging. | Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Apple is set to introduce the iPhone 15 in the next few weeks, and the device’s long-rumored transition from Lightning to USB-C may provide a boost to its charging speed. According to 9to5Mac, some of the new iPhone 15 models will support charging up to 35W, compared to the 27W speeds that the current iPhone 14 Pro is limited to.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made similar predictions last year, claiming that Apple’s supply chain indicated the company would ditch Lightning in favor of USB-C in 2023. According to Kuo, the switch would enable faster charging speeds for iPhone 15 Pro models, but the feature may only be supported via Apple-certified cables. Apple stopped bundling its iPhones with power adapters back in 2020 to try and combat e-waste, so the company may instead recommend that customers purchase the 35W dual USB-C charger it released last year, or the 30W USB-C charger that’s designed for the MacBook Air if it isn’t planning to sell a dedicated iPhone 15 charger.

All new phones sold within the EU must support USB-C charging by December 28th, 2024.

Regardless of charging speeds, it’s very likely that the iPhone 15 will be the first model to transition to USB-C charging. The European Union has a deadline of December 28th, 2024 for all new phones sold within the bloc — including iPhones — to use USB-C for wired charging, so pushing it back another year would be cutting it close for Apple.

We’ve heard various rumors about the iPhone 15’s other features in the run-up to its official unveiling, which is speculated to take place on Tuesday, September 12th. iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max models could see a price bump compared to the last few iPhone generations, and are expected to feature slimmer bezels and a titanium frame instead of the current stainless steel chassis. A few reputable leakers also claim that Apple won’t be selling a leather case for any of its new iPhone 15 models, though you’ll almost certainly be able to find a decent third-party option if this does prove true.

One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it

One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The developer Relay for Reddit, of one of the remaining third-party Reddit apps for Android, detailed the potential prices for planned subscriptions for the app in a new post on Thursday. The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.

In July, Reddit officially transitioned from a free to a paid API, meaning that developers would have to pay the company for accessing Reddit’s data for their apps. The change forced many popular apps to shut down, but a handful of developers, including the one who makes Relay for Reddit, said they might be able to continue making their apps if they charged a monthly fee.

The proposed subscription prices for Relay are between $1 and $5 per month. Here is the full list, from developer DBrady’s post, which appears to include Google’s take of the subscription and Relay’s expected revenues:

$1 - average 45 calls per day, covers ~45% of users (Google: $.15 / minimum of $.52 to Relay)

$2 - average 100 API calls per day, covers ~80% of users (Google: $.30 / minimum of $.97 to Relay)

$3 - average 200 API calls per day, covers ~95% of users (Google: $.45 / minimum of $1.09 to Relay)

$5 - unlimited API calls per day, covers ~99.8% of users profitably (i will likely carry a small loss on the remaining .2% of users but that should be negligible if enough users sign up).

In the newest release of Relay, DBrady says they also added the ability for users to see their average daily API calls. DBrady is encouraging people to share their usage stats and weigh in on the potential prices. DBrady added that the app will remain free “for the next few weeks,” so if you don’t want to pay to use the app, you’ll have a little bit of time until you’re required to.

Last week, the developer of Now for Reddit also gave an update on their plans for a future subscription. The plan is for a subscription to roll out in two or three weeks from the time of their post and they expect to charge a monthly cost of $3 or $4. “This won’t cover the cost of ‘super users’ who use the app all day, but, on average, it should allow me to pay the Reddit API bill,” the developer said.

Many subreddits and users protested against the switch to the paid API in-party because of its effect on the third-party app ecosystem. More than 8,000 subreddits went dark at the peak of the protests in mid-June, but at this point, only a few under 1,800 are still private or restricted, according to the Reddark tracker, and the vast majority of the biggest subreddits are operating as normal. Users also took out their frustrations at Reddit and CEO Steve Huffman on the collaborative r/Place canvas.

AMD is gearing up to reveal new Radeon GPUs next week

AMD is gearing up to reveal new Radeon GPUs next week

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

AMD could reveal a new set of Radeon graphics cards as soon as next week. Scott Herkelman, AMD’s senior vice president, says in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the Radeon team will make some “major product announcements” at Gamescom (via VideoCardz).

While Herkelman didn’t specify what those “major” announcements could be, AMD is due to launch new Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards sometime this year. During an earnings call earlier this month, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company will reveal “enthusiast-class Radeon 7000 series cards in the third quarter” of 2023.

Please join the @AMDRadeon team at Gamescom next week for our next major product announcements!

If you can make it to Germany and will be one of the couple hundred of thousand visitors attending one of the biggest gaming events I hope to talk to you in person!… pic.twitter.com/Te7l7ufU59

— Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman) August 16, 2023

We may have already gotten an early glimpse at one of AMD’s upcoming graphics cards, as a now-removed product listing on PowerColor briefly showed the images and specs belonging to an RX 7800 XT Red Devil chip. The listing said the RDNA3 GPU came with 3840 stream processors and 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit memory interface, along with a 2,210MHz base clock and a 2,565MHz boost clock. If true, that would put this chip between the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and the Radeon RX 7600.

Aside from the launch of new GPUs, AMD is also expected to release FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3), the latest iteration of the company’s upscaling technology. Rumors suggest that the launch of FSR 3 will take place around the same time as the release of Starfield, which comes out on PC and Xbox on September 6th.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait too much longer to see what AMD reveals during this year’s Gamescom in Germany. AMD is set to host a showcase during the event on Friday, August 25th, at noon local time.

Microsoft will let you uninstall more built-in Windows 11 apps soon for less bloat

Microsoft will let you uninstall more built-in Windows 11 apps soon for less bloat

Photo by Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Microsoft will allow Windows 11 users to uninstall even more built-in apps soon. The software maker has started testing a new build of Windows 11 with Canary Channel testers that includes the ability to uninstall the Camera app, the recently discontinued Cortana app, the Photos app, the People app, and the Remote Desktop (MSTSC) client.

Microsoft ships a large number of these so-called “inbox apps” preinstalled with Windows 11. It has been gradually allowing users to uninstall more of them, and we’re getting to the point where most can be removed freely. Most of these built-in apps aren’t huge, so you’re not going to save lots of space by uninstalling them, but having the option to uninstall them completely should make Windows feel a little less bloated.

The ability to uninstall the Camera app has been part of Windows 11 test builds since March, with the option to uninstall Cortana arriving in test builds earlier this month. Windows 11 users who aren’t on Windows Insider builds will need to wait a little while yet to be able to uninstall Camera, Cortana, Photos, People, and Remote Desktop, though. Microsoft is currently planning to release its next big Windows 11 update in September, which may include more uninstallation options.

The Windows 11 September update is also expected to include native support for RAR and 7-Zip files, a new settings homepage, a much better volume mixer, and early access to Windows Copilot.

Driverless Car Gets Stuck in Wet Concrete in San Francisco

Driverless Car Gets Stuck in Wet Concrete in San Francisco Though driverless cars have not been blamed for any serious injuries or crashes in the city, they have been involved in several jarring episodes.

HMD’s repairable Nokia phone initiative lands stateside

HMD’s repairable Nokia phone initiative lands stateside

The HMD Nokia G310. | Image: HMD

HMD is bringing its repairable phone initiative to the US with the Nokia G310, a $186 smartphone that’ll be available from T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile on August 24th. This is technically the third smartphone HMD has released with a design that makes it easier to replace commonly broken components like its battery and display, but its previous Nokia G22 and Nokia G42 were focused on European markets.

As with its previous repairable phones, HMD is partnering with iFixit to supply spare parts and repair guides for the G310. The company’s press release doesn’t offer too many details on how exactly the phone is easy to repair, but previous repairable Nokia-branded handsets have included design features like rear cases that can be unclipped by hand to reveal easily accessible screws and batteries that can be lifted out using pull tabs (though they’re not fully user-removable like Nokia feature phones of old).

Image: HMD

The Nokia G310 from the front and back.

Beyond its repairable element, the Nokia G310 has the specs of a relatively entry-level smartphone. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 Plus processor, with 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and up to 1TB of expandable storage via microSD. It’s got a 5000mAh battery that can be fast-charged at up to 20W via a USB-C port, and the whole device has an IP52 rating which means it has good protection against dust, but only limited protection against water sprays.

Around front there’s a 6.56-inch display with a limited 720p resolution, but at least it offers a relatively snappy 90Hz refresh rate. On the back there’s technically a triple-camera setup, but beyond the main 50-megapixel camera the two additional sensors for depth and macro are only 2 megapixels in resolution. The phone has an 8-megapixel selfie camera, and relies on a side-mounted fingerprint sensor for biometric security.

YouTube Ads May Have Led to Online Tracking of Children, Research Says

YouTube Ads May Have Led to Online Tracking of Children, Research Says YouTube’s advertising practices on kids’ channels could have resulted in companies tracking children across the web, a report said.

Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone. Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool.

Leaked images reveal Lenovo’s Steam Deck competitor with a hint of the Switch

Leaked images reveal Lenovo’s Steam Deck competitor with a hint of the Switch

Image: Windows Report

Valve’s Steam Deck might be getting more competition. Last month, Windows Central reported that Lenovo is working on a handheld gaming PC that runs Windows called the Legion Go, and on Wednesday, Windows Report published what appear to be the first images of the upcoming device.

Based on the images, Lenovo’s take on a PC gaming handheld looks a lot like devices such as the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, but it also has a lot in common with the Nintendo Switch. According to Windows Report, the Legion Go has an eight-inch screen, images show two Joy-Con-like controllers that can be removed, and it even appears to have a wide Switch OLED-like kickstand that you can pop out for tabletop gaming.

Image: Windows Report

The Legion Go’s controllers appear to be a blend of the Switch’s flat but removable Joy-Cons and the Steam Deck’s contoured but attached grips. There looks to be one touch pad on the right controller — by comparison, the Steam Deck has touch pads on both sides — but the back of that right controller also apparently has a wheel. And since the controllers can be removed, Windows Report speculates that the screen is a touchscreen.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from these apparent images of the device (there are more, and you can see them all at Windows Report) is that Lenovo isn’t shying away from making the Legion Go thick. Asus steered away from thickness and heft with the ROG Ally, which wound up with middling battery life, but we’re beginning to see portables like the upcoming Ayaneo Kun pointed towards beefier batteries.

Windows Report says Legion Go will run Windows 11, meaning you should be able to play any Windows games that support the device’s specs. Windows Central previously reported it would use AMD Phoenix processors, which are also found in the ROG Ally and other recent and upcoming Windows handhelds.

Lenovo didn’t immediately have a comment.

Lenovo has dabbled with handheld gaming devices in the past, showing the “LaVie Mini” concept in partnership with NEC at CES 2021 and building an unreleased Android-based device called the Legion Play. If it’s real, the Legion Go seems like a much more serious effort — and I hope it’s real, because I want to see how it stacks up to the likes of the Steam Deck.

The A.I. Industry’s Desperate Hunt for GPUs Amid a Chip Shortage

The A.I. Industry’s Desperate Hunt for GPUs Amid a Chip Shortage To power artificial-intelligence products, start-ups and investors are taking extraordinary measures to obtain critical chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Google Tests an A.I. Assistant That Offers Life Advice

Google Tests an A.I. Assistant That Offers Life Advice The tech giant is evaluating tools that would use artificial intelligence to perform tasks that some of its researchers have said should be avoided.

Apple moved the end call button again in iOS 17

Apple moved the end call button again in iOS 17

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

Apple has moved end call button once again with the latest iOS 17 developer beta. Now, it lives in the lower middle of the call screen instead of on the lower right. It’s a little change, but it might mean that iOS 17’s new call controls won’t feel quite as different once Apple officially rolls out the new software sometime this fall.

The end call button has been in a new place since the first iOS 17 beta that was released in June, but it got some attention recently after some publications reported on the right-aligned. If the comments in our article on the change from last week are any indication, many didn’t like the button’s new position, and the negative reaction may have contributed to Apple’s decision to put the end call button back in the center.

Check out this gallery to get a sense of the button’s progression from iOS 16 to an older iOS 17 beta to now.

Apple may have shifted the call screen controls lower down the screen to make room for iOS 17’s new Contact Posters that are designed to feature the faces of the people you’re talking to. The lower call controls arguably make them easier to use on larger phone screens, too.

There aren’t many other changes in the newest iOS 17 beta, but if you want to see what’s different, check out this article from MacRumors.

Amazon Music Unlimited is getting more expensive for Prime subscribers

Amazon Music Unlimited is getting more expensive for Prime subscribers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon Music Unlimited is getting another price hike, and this one affects people who pay for the music service and Amazon’s Prime subscription.

The cost of Amazon Music Unlimited’s individual plan for Prime members will go up from $8.99 to $9.99 per month, according to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. The price of the family plan for Prime members is going up, too, increasing from $15.99 to $16.99 per month.

The costs of the annual plans for individuals and families that are Prime subscribers are increasing as well, each by $10, THR says. That means the annual individual plan will now cost $99 per year, while the family plan will cost $169 per year.

Amazon spokesperson Rebecca Silverstein confirmed the changes to The Verge. Silverstein also said that new customers will begin seeing the new price “plus applicable taxes” on Tuesday and that existing customers will see the new price on their first bill “on or after” September 19th. (I’m still seeing the old $8.99 price on this Amazon Music Unlimited page, but I suspect that will roll over sometime soon.)

The company increased the cost of Amazon Music Unlimited for people who don’t subscribe to Prime earlier this year. Many music services have gotten higher prices over the past several months, including Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Premium, and Tidal.

Amazon last raised the annual price of Amazon Prime in February 2022.

Update August 15th, 7:28PM ET: Added context from Amazon.

It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to

It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to

Some kids watching TV, back when that was a thing kids regularly did. | Photo by Michel BARET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

It finally happened, at least according to a new metric Nielsen began using two years ago: linear TV now accounts for less than 50 percent of all TV usage. This probably isn’t a surprise unless you're reading this on the couch while watching the NBC Nightly News. Between YouTube, TikTok, and streaming channels, people have a lot of ways to occupy their video-viewing time.

Approximately two years ago, Nielsen started using a new metric for measuring how people spend their TV-watching time. It built in buckets for broadcast TV, cable TV, streaming, and a catchall called “Other” that accounted for people using gaming consoles and media players. The latest report shows broadcast and cable TV each dropping about one percent from June 2023 to July 2023. Streaming and the “Other” category each gained that one percent in the same time period.

But if you compare things to a year ago, the decline is much more pronounced. The analytics firm showed that cable usage had dropped by 12.5 percent since this time last year, accounting for less than a third of viewers’ time, while broadcast TV slid to just one-fifth of total watch time in American homes.

At the same time, Nielsen says streaming had a record-breaking month led by YouTube and Netflix, which together accounted for almost as much viewer time spent as broadcast alone. Nielsen’s “Other” category has been up consistently for the last three months, although it was actually down a percentage point from the same time last year.

This trend is supported by the latest numbers from Leichtman Research, which dropped a report estimating cable providers lost an estimated 1.73 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023. “We think the metrics for linear TV are all bad,” Macquarie media analyst Tim Nolle noted in an August 14 investor report The Hollywood Reporter acquired.

And they are! Some execs like Netflix’s Reed Hastings have even been loudly and proudly banging a drum heralding the death of linear TV for years now. Just last year, he even declared 2032 as the year linear TV would officially die. Meanwhile, Bob Iger over at Disney just recently announced his desire to find minority stakeholders for ESPN and said its linear cable channels “may not be core to Disney,” citing declining cable subscription numbers.

There’s still a chance for traditional TV. Free ad-supported TV services like Tubi and The Roku Channel are increasing in popularity, and if you talk to anyone in the broadcast TV business, they’ll tell you ATSC 3.0 could save TV too. But traditional TV isn’t just competing with Disney Plus and Max; it's competing with YouTube and TikTok, and other video providers that can rely on creators to churn out content faster and more cheaply than NBC or CBS. So Nielsen’s news of declining viewership isn’t a surprise as much as it was always a somewhat depressing inevitability.

Superconductor Scientist Faces Investigation as a Paper Is Retracted

Superconductor Scientist Faces Investigation as a Paper Is Retracted The University of Rochester will examine the work of Ranga Dias, who was an author of a materials science paper unrelated to his superconductor research that was retracted on Tuesday.

Aqara’s new Zigbee light strip supports HomeKit Adaptive Lighting and Matter

Aqara’s new Zigbee light strip supports HomeKit Adaptive Lighting and Matter

The Aqara LED Strip T1 is available now. | Image: Aqara

Aqara has released a new Zigbee RGB smart light strip called the LED Strip T1. It costs $49.99, requires an Aqara hub, and is compatible with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT. When paired with certain hubs, including the Aqara Hub M2, the light strip is also compatible with the Matter smart home protocol.

The T1 is one of the very few light strips that support Apple’s Adaptive Lighting feature — and the only one that supports both Adaptive Lighting and Matter. It doesn’t support Adaptive Lighting through Matter, unfortunately; nothing does. Still, it’s nice to see new, Matter-compliant lighting come to market using the solid Zigbee standard. (Whatever happened to that Hue-to-Matter bridge, I wonder?)

The 6.6ft (2m)-long light strip’s Adaptive Lighting support means you can set it to automatically tune its colors throughout the day to be warmer or cooler depending on the time. The only other light strips that support Apple’s circadian lighting feature at the moment come from Hue and Eve (also the old Nanoleaf Essentials strip, which doesn’t, er, Matter).

Image: Aqara

The Aqara LED Strip T1.

As I said though, connecting the Aqara Strip T1 to Apple Home using the Matter protocol instead of the old-fashioned way means you’ll lose Adaptive Lighting, since the still-nascent “universal” smart home standard doesn’t currently support it. The nice thing is that — unlike Nanoleaf’s Matter Essentials strip, which only supports Apple Home through Matter and thus doesn’t support Adaptive Lighting at all — Aqara’s Apple HomeKit certification means you don’t have to give that up.

The T1 is an RGBIC strip, meaning it can show multiple colors simultaneously (as opposed to older-style light strips that can only show one color at a time). Also, Aqara says each of its ten segments is addressable, so you can control them individually when changing colors, though that doesn’t apply to the tunable white light portion of the LEDs, which applies to the entire strip at once.

Finally, like other colorful smart bulbs and light strips from companies like Govee, you can set up custom effects within the Aqara app if you want to show off fun snaking gradients or flashing colors — it can even sync to music using a built-in microphone.

The trimmable, IP44-rated Aqara T1 LED Strip costs $49.99, and a 1-meter extension kit costs $14.99. It’s available at Amazon in the US, Canada, and several European countries and at other retailers listed on its “where to buy” page.

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Substack now lets you follow writers before subscribing to them

Substack now lets you follow writers before subscribing to them

Illustration by The Verge

Substack now lets you follow writers, offering a way for you to keep tabs on what a writer is doing without having to subscribe to their newsletter. When you follow a writer, “you can stay up to date with what they’re reading, liking, publishing, and subscribing to — through the Notes feed and on their profiles,” Substack says in a blog post.

Substack is perhaps best known as a newsletter platform where writers can make money from getting people to sign up for paid subscriptions. But the platform has also been dabbling with more traditional social networking features such as its tweet-like Notes, and a follow button feels like Substack stepping even more toes into the social networking waters.

The company stresses that follows, which are free, are intended to aid writers as they build out subscription networks. “Following helps writers grow their audience via the Substack network, which is already home to millions of the world’s most valuable readers,” Substack argues. “We built this feature to help maximize — and not replace — subscriptions, which will always be the most important type of relationship on Substack.”

But now, Substack writers may have the added burden of thinking about ways to convert followers and non-followers into subscribers. (Substack is promising that in the future, it will “make ‘upsells’ to subscriptions easier” through notifying followers about “trending posts and other milestones.”)

Last week, Substack’s co-founders said that they want to make the platform a better place for readers, not just writers. The company has already introduced a handful of features to encourage reading things directly on the platform, including mobile apps and the ability to bring RSS feeds to your Substack feed.

For people looking for a new place to read text and post some microblogs given the general degradation of X / Twitter, the follow button might be a useful feature to see what writers are up to without clogging up your email inbox with newsletters.

Want a $4,000 smart door? The Home Depot has you covered

Want a $4,000 smart door? The Home Depot has you covered

The first smart door has landed at The Home Depot, and if you’re good with dropping at least $4,000 on your front door, then you can order one today. That price doesn’t include installation, though, and no matter how handy you are, this one needs the pros — including an electrician to wire it up.

First showcased at CES 2022, the Masonite M-PWR Smart Door is the first residential door to come with a Yale smart door lock and Ring video doorbell built in, but the big selling point is they are all powered by your home’s electrics, so there’s no need to worry about recharging or replacing batteries — a common issue with most smart locks and some video doorbells.

Image: Masonite

Integrated LED smart lighting on the door can work on motion or be set to turn on from dusk to dawn.

The fiberglass doors come in a few different styles and colors; pricing starts at $4,000 and goes north of $7,000. Other smart features include motion-activated lighting and a door state sensor so you can see if the door is open or closed using an app. There’s also an emergency backup battery — so you can still control the door’s electronics even if the power goes out.

Despite the hardware-side integration, you still need to use three separate apps to control the electronics: the Ring app for the video doorbell, the Yale app for the Yale Assure SL door lock, and the M-PWR app for the door itself (including the lighting and the door sensor).

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A post shared by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (@smarthomemama)

The downside of dropping this much money on tech integrated into your home is that you won’t be swapping out your door every few years, yet Ring and Yale will come out with new locks and doorbells. The good news is the parts are replaceable. I spoke with Cory Sorice, SVP and chief innovation officer of Masonite International, in 2022 and he confirmed this, saying: “The door will last decades, but the tech won’t — so it’s designed to make upgrades over time.” However, presumably, they’d have to be designed for this door, and there aren’t many hardwired smart locks on the market right now.

While this is the first time you can buy the door off-the-shelf, it has been installed in new-construction homes since 2022, and it’s UL certified. I checked out a model at the CEDIA Expo last year (see my “hands-on” video above), and it’s got potential. The integrated aspect of the doorbell looks much sleeker than current options, and not having to swap out batteries on your door lock every 4 to 6 months appeals. I also really like the integrated lighting. But while new front doors are not cheap, you are paying a significant premium here over non-smart Masonite doors and installing a smart doorbell and lock yourself.