Internet Culture

This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.

Nilay called it back in 2024, and now the Gray Lady is on board with recognizing the demise of the open web. It takes a look at how Google went from being a gateway to the internet to becoming the internet for many users who never leave the cozy confines of its AI summaries.

AIM chimes. Teletype machines. Floppy drives. Dialup modems. Tamagotchis. The whole thing is a wonderful soundboard that instantly transports you to a bygone era. There’s not much to do here besides click a few icons and listen to the sounds, but it’s still a nice way to kill a few minutes.

After more than a year and a half in court, satirical news site The Onion is rebooting Alex Jones’ InfoWars — even as the conspiracy channel hangs in legal limbo. Comedian and writer Tim Heidecker has been tapped as creative director, and he came on the show to share his vision for the platform. Also mentioned: peptides, The Beatles, and the state of Tim’s vocal chords. Enjoy!

Malik, who founded the tech blog GigaOm in 2001 before eventually transitioning into venture capital, died on Wednesday at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said Om’s family in a post on his website.

Over the weekend, the DoorDash X account posted repeatedly about the World Cup, but instead of tagging New Zealand soccer player Tim Payne, the account tagged musician T-Pain — who responded accordingly. The posts had no indication that they were an ad (as the Federal Trade Commission requires).

A major case surrounding lookalike products (“dupes”) came to a close this week, in which Deckers, the maker of UGG boots, sued direct-to-consumer brand Quince, alleging it had knocked off its shearling ankle boot. A jury found that Quince’s version was indeed substantially similar to the design patent for the UGG boots — but also that the patent itself was invalid in the first place.

Some advice: follow beetle moses, who never misses.

I was on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to talk about why our feeds are just clips now — what we’re calling “the clippening” of content online. You’ve probably seen these videos of podcasts, musicians, TV shows, livestreams and more. Underneath it all is an economy of clipping companies pumping out mountains of paid content.

Some evidence collected by police in the killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO can’t be shown to a jury, a judge ruled on Monday — including a cellphone, a passport, a loaded magazine for a handgun, and a computer chip found during a search of Mangione at a McDonald’s.

If Palantir can stick its logo on French workwear, why not The Verge? That gets my vote in our new call for Verge merch ideas.

I missed this last week, but the XOXO organizers put together a wonderful website where you can watch all the videos from past years of the conference (which held its last iteration in 2024).

Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.

Glitchy lo-fi art. Inscrutable plot. Fake backstory about a 35th anniversary release. Kings. Swords in stones. Spaceships. Oh, and an absolutely killer soundtrack. You owe it to yourself to go spend a few minutes exploring the strangely beautiful (in an ugly sort of way) world of Ruin.

Developer Niels Leenheer decided to see if he could recreate the classic FPS using the language that describes webpage formatting. cssDOOM is a bit messy and definitely pushing the limits of what is possible using cascading style sheets, but it’s undeniably impressive.

The popular fanfiction archive has been up and down since around noon ET yesterday. While service was temporarily restored by 8PM ET, the platform went down again shortly after, and will remain so for “at least several hours” while AO3 attempts to resolve the issue.

Redfin is doing a geoguessing-themed game of skill to give away a million-dollar house in its app, based on clues found in its Super Bowl ad, and Rainbolt is part of the promo — but he’s not allowed to help, based on the rules here.

If you believe internet rumors claiming the Stranger Things finale had “two hours” cut from its two-hour runtime, and have ignored actors and others saying that the claim is fake, the show’s creators have responded.

Critic Ben Davis rounds up the art words that helped him better process 2025. I think the term “delightmare” hits the spot:

In court Thursday during evidence suppression hearings, prosecutors showed a hand-written note that police say they found among Mangione’s possessions. It was only briefly shown and hard to make out, but one day’s tasks included buying USBs and a digital camera from Best Buy. Journalist Lorena O’Neil reports one section of the note may have referenced archiving social media pages, which were scrutinized by the public after Mangione’s arrest.

As usual, Google is back with another set of the year’s top trending searches, as well as archived lists for previous years. Just don’t be too surprised when you see 2025 top spots taken up by Charlie Kirk, KPop Demon Hunters, or Arc Raiders.

Though Club Chalamet started off as just another stan account, The Wall Street Journal reports that Simone Cromer — the woman behind the Timothée-obsessed page — has found new success on Substack where she has generated enough revenue to “cover the cost of her summer vacation to Italy” with just a few hundred subscribers.

We’re back in New York court this morning for pre-trial hearings on whether key evidence in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting case will be barred from being shown to jurors — that includes items like a firearm and notebook recovered when Mangione was arrested. As I left the courthouse last night, some Mangione supporters were already “in line” to try to get inside on Tuesday. They camped out across the street in tents overnight.

A Department of Corrections officer at the Pennsylvania prison where Mangione was held after his arrest told the court that he and Mangione discussed how traditional media and social media was reacting to the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The corrections officer told Mangione that from his perspective, mainstream media focused on the crime, whereas social media users discussed the wrongdoings of the healthcare industry.