We start this week with Jason’s story about OpenAI and Microsoft’s big admissions from court records that they are destroying the internet in all sorts of ways, and stealing intellectual property on an unprecedented scale. He admit it. After the break, Emanuel explains how he hijacked a real band’s Spotify page with AI-generated slop. In the subscribers-only section, we hear all about iLands, the AI agent platform that is basically just spam.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,
We start this week with Jason’s story about OpenAI and Microsoft’s big admissions from court records that they are destroying the internet in all sorts of ways, and stealing intellectual property on an unprecedented scale. He admit it. After the break, Emanuel explains how he hijacked a real band’s Spotify page with AI-generated slop. In the subscribers-only section, we hear all about iLands, the AI agent platform that is basically just spam.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Dix ans, ça semble presque court lorsqu’on le dit rapidement. Mais lorsqu’on regarde tout ce qui s’est passé dans le monde numérique depuis septembre 2016, j’ai parfois l’impression d’avoir couvert plusieurs époques technologiques différentes à travers plus de 500 épisodes du podcast. À l’origine, l’idée était assez simple : retrouver au micro ce que j’aimais […]
Dix ans, ça semble presque court lorsqu’on le dit rapidement. Mais lorsqu’on regarde tout ce qui s’est passé dans le monde numérique depuis septembre 2016, j’ai parfois l’impression d’avoir couvert plusieurs époques technologiques différentes à travers plus de 500 épisodes du podcast. À l’origine, l’idée était assez simple : retrouver au micro ce que j’aimais […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Mon Carnet du 25 septembre 2026 – 10e anniversaire Mon Carnet, le podcast de Bruno GuglielminettiVendredi 25 septembre 2026 Le grand magazine de l’actualité numérique Débrief avec Jérôme Colombain (5:30)Retour sur l’actualité numérique de la semaine Édition spéciale : les 10 ans de Mon Carnet (59:53)Bruno Guglielminetti retrouve cinq collaborateurs […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Mon Carnet du 25 septembre 2026 – 10e anniversaire Mon Carnet, le podcast de Bruno GuglielminettiVendredi 25 septembre 2026 Le grand magazine de l’actualité numérique Débrief avec Jérôme Colombain (5:30)Retour sur l’actualité numérique de la semaine Édition spéciale : les 10 ans de Mon Carnet (59:53)Bruno Guglielminetti retrouve cinq collaborateurs […]
Payer en Chine peut encore être déroutant pour un visiteur étranger. Le pays fonctionne largement avec les paiements mobiles, principalement WeChat Pay et Alipay, alors que les cartes de crédit internationales restent moins courantes dans de nombreux petits commerces. Tencent veut maintenant simplifier cette expérience avec TenPayGo, une nouvelle application de paiement conçue spécialement pour […]
Payer en Chine peut encore être déroutant pour un visiteur étranger. Le pays fonctionne largement avec les paiements mobiles, principalement WeChat Pay et Alipay, alors que les cartes de crédit internationales restent moins courantes dans de nombreux petits commerces. Tencent veut maintenant simplifier cette expérience avec TenPayGo, une nouvelle application de paiement conçue spécialement pour […]
Les chercheurs en cybersécurité de Cisco Talos viennent de documenter un logiciel malveillant qui illustre très concrètement une nouvelle étape dans l’utilisation de l’intelligence artificielle par les cybercriminels. Baptisé CLOSED QUORUM, cet implant Windows ne se contente pas d’utiliser un modèle d’IA pour générer du texte ou du code. Il consulte plusieurs modèles pour décider […]
Les chercheurs en cybersécurité de Cisco Talos viennent de documenter un logiciel malveillant qui illustre très concrètement une nouvelle étape dans l’utilisation de l’intelligence artificielle par les cybercriminels. Baptisé CLOSED QUORUM, cet implant Windows ne se contente pas d’utiliser un modèle d’IA pour générer du texte ou du code. Il consulte plusieurs modèles pour décider […]
Google ouvre les précommandes au Canada de ses premiers Googlebook, une nouvelle catégorie d’ordinateurs portables haut de gamme conçue autour de Gemini et pensée pour fonctionner étroitement avec les téléphones Android. Les premiers modèles, fabriqués par Acer, Asus, Dell, HP et Lenovo, seront proposés à partir de 1 299 $ CA. Avec cette nouvelle gamme, […]
Google ouvre les précommandes au Canada de ses premiers Googlebook, une nouvelle catégorie d’ordinateurs portables haut de gamme conçue autour de Gemini et pensée pour fonctionner étroitement avec les téléphones Android. Les premiers modèles, fabriqués par Acer, Asus, Dell, HP et Lenovo, seront proposés à partir de 1 299 $ CA. Avec cette nouvelle gamme, […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Weber : Le podcast suisse cherche à structurer son industrie Thierry Weber change exceptionnellement de terrain pour revenir sur la deuxième édition du Meilleur du Podcast, organisée à Lausanne. Ce rendez-vous veut rassembler une industrie suisse romande encore très fragmentée et lui donner des outils communs, notamment une mesure d’audience […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Weber : Le podcast suisse cherche à structurer son industrie Thierry Weber change exceptionnellement de terrain pour revenir sur la deuxième édition du Meilleur du Podcast, organisée à Lausanne. Ce rendez-vous veut rassembler une industrie suisse romande encore très fragmentée et lui donner des outils communs, notamment une mesure d’audience […]
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Her earlier books, including The Second Self (published in 1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) became something like a model for my own writing and this kind of reporting— approaching the internet with an ethnographer's mindset and taking nonjudgemental documentation of how people are behaving and feeling
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Her earlier books, including The Second Self (published in 1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) became something like a model for my own writing and this kind of reporting— approaching the internet with an ethnographer's mindset and taking nonjudgemental documentation of how people are behaving and feeling in a given space, even if that space is digital.
Through talking directly to people in their own environments, whether they were in MUDs and early virtual chat spaces or Second Life and massive role-playing games, her work revealed endlessly interesting firsthand perspectives on lifestyles that people still found subversive, marginal, and at times perverse. The people she interviewed often said that digital worlds offered support, companionship, sexual satisfaction, gender play and freedom that the quote-unquote "real" world did not. These were topics traditional academia wasn't yet touching: cyber-sex, intimate relationships unfolding in chatrooms, embodiment in online worlds that felt as real to their inhabitants as the world their physical selves sat in behind a keyboard.
What struck me about those books — and later, in Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries — was often how fundamental the human needs for connection and vulnerability are, despite the technology being used to fulfill those needs.
Fast forward to today. Something has shifted. “In 1984, I called the computer a second self,” Turkle writes in her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. “Computers provoked an explosion of talk about what was essential about being a person and about how new computational ideas might illuminate our thinking about the mind. With the digital twin, the metaphor is turned on its head. It’s the agent who is in charge and imagines a version of you. Now you’re the second self. So when you are given time to get ‘back to your life,’ it’s been diminished.”
Professor Turkle is a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines comes out on September 29.
The technology today is wildly different than it was in the 80s, but as Professor Turkle explores in our conversation for the 404 Media podcast, the need for empathy, vulnerability, and to feel understood remains central to the human experience. With increasing reliance on conversational “companion” chatbots like ChatGPT and Replika, we risk misinterpreting machine programming as care, and risk misattributing human qualities like empathy and emotional intelligence onto unfeeling, incapable robots. The result, she argues, is a population forfeiting its empathy skills at an alarming rate, trading difficult feelings and conversations with humans for convenience and instantaneous feedback.
“When people turn to a chatbot, they don’t have to dread the fatigue of genuine give-and-take. And they don’t fear judgment or abandonment. But when we talk to chatbots, we lose the skills required to interact with humans, so chatbots start to feel like a better option. With an alternative, disappointment with people feels unnecessary,” Turkle writes.
What happens when people stop caring that there’s not a human on the other line? We got into that on the podcast.
“It's a product whose fundamental directive is to keep your attention. And so it matters very much that we sort of become glommed onto it as though it were a person when it isn't,” Professor Turkle said in our conversation. “But more than that, I think that it's very important to ask, what is the end game of this?” She referred to the interview Mark Zuckerberg gave last year when he said Americans can only have three real friends, and intended to let AI fill in the demand for more.
“Now that to me is a very dark endgame,” she said. “And so people who say, ‘What the hell? I kind of like it.’ Well, let's just think about where we're moving towards. Because it's not just a little entertainment. It's a corporate project to get us involved in certain kinds of relationships that are going to make tons of money and to keep us at our screens all day talking to sycophantic, seemingly loving entities that don't know who we are and don’t care about us.”
In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about how we got here, the concept of “deskilling” one’s own capacity for human connection and vulnerability, whether there’s a way back out of this mess for us, and what happened when she asked a chatbot to roleplay her own legacy (spoiler alert: nothing good).
Cela fait maintenant plus d’un mois que j’utilise quotidiennement le Pixel 11 Pro Fold de Google et, chose assez rare quand je teste un téléphone, je n’ai pas vraiment envie de revenir en arrière. Pas parce que Google aurait réinventé le téléphone pliable. Au contraire, plusieurs critiques lui reprochent justement d’évoluer avec prudence. Mais à […]
Cela fait maintenant plus d’un mois que j’utilise quotidiennement le Pixel 11 Pro Fold de Google et, chose assez rare quand je teste un téléphone, je n’ai pas vraiment envie de revenir en arrière. Pas parce que Google aurait réinventé le téléphone pliable. Au contraire, plusieurs critiques lui reprochent justement d’évoluer avec prudence. Mais à […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Débrief transpacifique – Depuis Shanghai, l’IA à un tournant Cette semaine, changement de décor : Jérôme Colombain (Monde Numérique) n’est pas à Paris, mais à Shanghai pour Huawei Connect. Notre Débrief transatlantique devient donc exceptionnellement un Débrief transpacifique. Jérôme raconte une Chine ultra-numérisée, où les paiements par QR code dominent, […]
Mon Carnet, le podcast · Débrief transpacifique – Depuis Shanghai, l’IA à un tournant Cette semaine, changement de décor : Jérôme Colombain (Monde Numérique) n’est pas à Paris, mais à Shanghai pour Huawei Connect. Notre Débrief transatlantique devient donc exceptionnellement un Débrief transpacifique. Jérôme raconte une Chine ultra-numérisée, où les paiements par QR code dominent, […]
We start this week with Joseph’s story about the people who are reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations. He got a bunch of documents all about these contractors and saw real prompts himself. After the break, Sam tells us all about the Automattic CEO getting kicked out. Then coming back again. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us why a16z thinks enshittification is not real.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscri
We start this week with Joseph’s story about the people who are reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations. He got a bunch of documents all about these contractors and saw real prompts himself. After the break, Sam tells us all about the Automattic CEO getting kicked out. Then coming back again. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us why a16z thinks enshittification is not real.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
This week we’re joined by Jennie Rose Halprein, executive director of Library Futures, a non-profit that advocates for a fair digital future for libraries and the communities they serve. We have written a bunch of stories about libraries over the years, and I have talked to Jennie a few times for those stories. I always have really interesting conversations with her, but a lot of what we talk about never makes it into my articles. That’s why I wanted to share one of those conversations with you
This week we’re joined by Jennie Rose Halprein, executive director of Library Futures, a non-profit that advocates for a fair digital future for libraries and the communities they serve. We have written a bunch of stories about libraries over the years, and I have talked to Jennie a few times for those stories. I always have really interesting conversations with her, but a lot of what we talk about never makes it into my articles. That’s why I wanted to share one of those conversations with you today. We of course touch upon censorship but also many other subjects, so I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Connexion
