Fans of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One have been waiting on a film adaptation of the book since it hit shelves in 2011. Actually, considering the film rights to Cline’s story were sold to Warner Bros. before anyone had flipped a single page, some folks have been anticipating the movie a lot longer than they waited for the novel. Now, the wait is over. Ready Player One is here.

But a lot has happened in the nearly seven years since Cline released his virtual-reality-filled geek fever dream. For one, VR, which felt like it was still decades out when Wade Watts put on his goggles in RPO, is now very real and present in many homes. (There is no virtual OASIS where people spend most of their days, though.) For another, the idea that money could be digitally mined like it is in the OASIS was only feasible in the minds of a few Bitcoin believers; today it’s not uncommon to find athletes and celebrities waxing poetic about cryptocurrency. But more than anything, the cinematic landscape and what audiences are looking for at the multiplex has shifted—2011 was the year of Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, and J.J. Abrams’s Super 8; now movies like Wonder Woman, Black Panther, and Reynolds’s Deadpool rule the box office and Rotten Tomatoes while Snyder’s Justice League, well, doesn’t.

But that’s just the scenery. Ready Player One is still, after all, helmed by Steven Spielberg, the guy who served as creative director for the childhoods of almost everyone in the movie’s target audience. If anyone could turn Cline’s collection of pop culture references and videogame narrative mechanics into a crowd-pleaser, it’s him. Did he pull it off? WIRED editors Peter Rubin and Angela Watercutter, who have together been covering VR and Cline’s work for years, are here to hash it out.

Angela Watercutter: So Peter, I want to give you the mic as soon as possible because I just finished reading your great review of Ready Player One, but I want to quickly say I was very nervous about this movie. I’ve known Cline since I fact-checked WIRED’s feature on his movie Fanboys and always enjoyed talking to him. I liked Ready Player One when I read it, but in the intervening years my views and perspectives on gamer culture, virtual reality, and social media have changed a lot. And I’m probably not the only one. I guess I was just worried that the ideas and pop culture references in RPO that were amusing in 2011 would be groaners now. So when you saw the film at South by Southwest and reported that it wasn’t terrible, I was relieved. And when I saw it myself, I was glad it offered up some moments of joy, even if I didn’t love it on the whole. If anything, it didn’t make me nostalgic for the things it references—Iron Giant! Freddy Krueger! “It’s fucking Chucky!”—so much as it made me miss a time when referencing them still felt novel. But I’ll come back to that. First I want to talk to you about VR. As the man who literally wrote the book on it (handling your shameless plug for you!), what did you think of how the film presented the future of virtual reality?

Peter Rubin: First off, my publisher thanks you for the plug! Second, I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO MENTION CHUCKY IN MY REVIEW. That was one of those moments that killed at the SXSW premiere. (To be fair, Cline lives in Austin … and Spielberg came out to introduce the film … and was escorted by Sixers. There were a lot of moments that killed at the premiere.) But you asked a different, and much better question, so let’s jump into it. Ever since Warner Bros. showed the movie’s first trailer at last year’s Comic-Con, I’ve been waiting for it with a faint sense of dread. Some of it was because the movie was marketed as a “pop culture holy grail” from the outset; some of it was because, like you said, my relationship with the book—and especially the worldview portrayed in it—had changed. (I think this is a refrain we’re going to come back to.)

But more than anything, VR has made unimaginable leaps since 2011—and in some cases, the sci-fi has already been outpaced. We may not have the X-1 haptic suits and flawless wireless headsets able to deliver hiccup-free room-scale experiences, but we’re well on our way. (And the omnidirectional treadmill that Wade Watts uses in his rig? That’s real, y’all). So in a weird way, RPO’s vision of the future undershoots reality, and winds up feeling like paleofuturist fantasy. Like, if you think we’ll still be rocking big-ass headsets in 2045, you must also be rocking a Miami Vice-era suitcase phone. That’s all outside the headset, though. Spielberg’s actual vision of the OASIS doesn’t feel too far off from where we’re headed—in no small part because the OASIS is exactly what inspired so many people who are working in the VR industry.

But what we see of the OASIS in RPO is also a tiny subset of what it actually holds—and how we’ll actually use VR. We won’t just be playing deathmatch, like Aech and Daito and Sho spend so much time doing. We’ll be socializing, dancing, unwinding, even seducing and being seduced. And I have a feeling that identity won’t be quite so guarded. On the contrary, in fact: authenticating who we are will be hugely important. There’ll always be places like Planet Doom, though, and the people who hunger for that are the people who will most unreservedly love the movie.

Enough vrambling. What jumped out at you?

Watercutter: This is obviously a movie about finding an Easter egg in a giant virtual world that also has Easter eggs in it—being released on Passover and Easter weekend, no less. Did you have any favorite hidden treats? Did you enjoy seeing the WIRED cover with James Halliday’s shook-looking face? I did. I love a good Room 237 conspiracy, so I enjoyed the whole Shining bit. I liked seeing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (They were there, right?) And seeing Gundam show up was a thrill. (Between this and Pacific Rim Uprising, that mech’s having a moment.) Also, she’s not an Easter egg, but I do feel like seeing Lena Waithe show up was the movie’s biggest thrill. She kinda saved the final third for me—even if, as you pointed out in your piece, she and the rest of the supporting cast weren’t given very much to do.

Rubin: That Shining setpiece was, for me, the best bit in the movie. (And I always love seeing WIRED covers.) It’s also the section of the movie that got just as much of a rise out of the 3D-goggled IMAX crowd in my local multiplex as the packed house at the SXSW premiere. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s because it was the rare moment that bothered to go deeper: yes, it was a reference, but this one didn’t fly by on a speeder bike or dissolve into a shower of coins like so many of the other blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs that crowd the frame. When the High Five first entered the lobby of the Overlook Hotel, both audiences had a good laugh. The rugs! The typewriter! But then the easy gag turned into a legitimately great sequence that built on itself. It had comic relief, it had Shining deep cuts—it even had some of the only moments of genuine peril in the entire movie. If the movie sticks around in our cultural imagination, it’ll be in part because of that sequence.

Watercutter: I agree 100 percent. It was one of the only sequences in the movie that made it seem like Spielberg and Co. wanted to say something about about the ways culture imprints on our psyches instead of just making off-hand references. The entire Shining challenge in the OASIS played with the reasons why that movie sticks with viewers, rather than just making a “Here’s Johnny!” joke or showing the twins and then cutting to something else.

Rubin: Exactly—but I want to go back to your point from the very beginning: “it didn’t make me nostalgic for the things it references…so much as it made me miss a time when referencing them still felt novel.” All the way back in 2010—before Ready Player One, even—WIRED published an incredible essay by Patton Oswalt called “Wake Up, Geek Culture, Time to Die.” And there’s one passage that feels particularly apropos right now:

So, with that in mind, I can’t wait to hear you elaborate. Proust had his madeleine, and many of us who work at WIRED and who read WIRED have our own versions of that: for me it’s the smell of our half-finished basement where I played Pitfall, or the sounds and lights (and, again, smells) of the arcades in my hometown. Now I can play that same game on my laptop—but without that extra sense-memory context, the experience feels a little hollow. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about, or a larger cultural shift in the way we remember these formative stories of our pasts?

Watercutter: I know it’s kind of easy right now to riff on “What does this movie mean now?” but I do really wonder how I, or anyone else, would have received this if it’d come out at the same time the book did, or thereabouts. Like, it’s weird that a contemporary movie set in the future can already feel so dated. If anything, while watching Ready Player One I didn’t feel nostalgia for the days of Atari 2600 and Nightmare on Elm Street sleepovers, I felt nostalgic for the early aughts—before VR and Palmer Luckey funding anti-Hillary Clinton memes, before Gamergate, before I thought Bitcoin could actually screw up my retirement, before Prince died, before TJ Miller’s voice just reminded me of this, before even well-executed Say Anything references made me eyeroll. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I want to go back to a time when everyone was just oblivious to reality; society is much better off confronting these things head-on. It’s just that Ready Player One felt like it was made in a time, and for an audience that didn’t want to take its head out of the sand—or their headsets. Watching it, I was just perpetually reminded that, whether intentionally or not, it was made for audiences who might think that fighting for your right to play and winning the girl is the most important thing in the world (not, like, doing something about the poverty that made everyone escape into VR in the first place). (Alyssa Rosenberg has a really smart piece related to this over at The Washington Post.) That bummed me the hell out. Maybe I’ve just become a cynic, but that was my big takeaway—and I probably wasn’t the only one.

Rubin: I don’t see how you could have been! There are a lot of great ways to make a popcorn movie (and we’ve seen them, especially over the past year), but this seemed content to just be Good. Worse, it felt dated, and I don’t mean the retrophilia—I mean the worldview it reflects. Yet, despite the movie’s flaws, I’m glad it’s out there. I’m glad it’s doing well on Rotten Tomatoes (OK, reasonably well), and I’m glad to recommend it when someone asks me. In a lot of ways, it’s like VR itself: you know it has boundless potential, you just need to manage your expectations.

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Ernest Cline, author of the best-selling novel 'Ready Player One,' and one of the screenwriters behind the upcoming film, deep dives into his book and explains the stories behind every video game referenced in 'Ready Player One.' From Yars' Revenge to Asteroids to Quake, Ernest goes into the history of each game and reveals why he included it in the book.
'Ready Player One' is in theaters now

The morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand.

Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, and spent the next several hours reviewing his notes and frantically pacing the halls. “I think I made a groove in the floor,” Kennedy says.

By 3:30 pm, it was finally time. Kennedy’s answers started off slowly, as he worked to steady his nerves. Then, about an hour into his testimony, Exhibit 81 flashed on a screen inside the courtroom. It was a map of part of Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, but it might as well have been a chalk outline of a body.

“It was like a crime scene,” explains Daniel Jacobson, an attorney for Arnold & Porter, which represented the League of Women Voters in its bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2011 electoral map, drawn by the state’s majority Republican General Assembly. The edges of the district skitter in all manner of unnatural directions, drawing comparisons to a sketch of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

As an expert witness for the League of Women Voters and a political scientist at West Chester University, Kennedy’s job was to show how the state’s map had evolved over time, and to prove that the General Assembly had drawn it specifically to ensure that Republicans would always win the most seats in Congress.

“Mr. Kennedy, what is this?” asked John Freedman, Jacobson’s colleague, referring to the tiny, single point that connects one sprawling side of the district to the other. Or, if you like, where Goofy’s toe meets Donald’s rear.

“A steakhouse,” Kennedy answered, according to the court transcript. “Creed's Seafood Steaks in King of Prussia.”

The only thing holding the district together, in other words, was a single ritzy seafood joint.

“If you were in the courtroom, it was just devastating,” Jacobson says.

Districts like Pennsylvania’s seventh don’t get drawn that way by accident. They’re designed by dint of the centuries-old practice of gerrymandering, in which the party in power carves up the electoral map to their favor. The playbook is simple: Concentrate as many of your opponents’ votes into a handful of districts as you can, a tactic known as "packing." Then spread the remainder of those votes thinly across a whole lot of districts, known as “cracking.” If it works as intended, the opposition will win a few districts by a landslide, but never have enough votes in the rest to win the majority of seats. The age of computer-generated data splicing has made this strategy easier than ever.

Until recently, courts have only moved to stop gerrymandering based on race. But now, the law is taking a closer look at partisan gerrymandering, too. On Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a brand new congressional map to replace the one Kennedy testified about. The new map follows a landmark decision last month, in which the three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices overruled a lower-court decision and found that Pennsylvania’s 2011 map did in fact violate the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal elections.” The court ordered the Pennsylvania General Assembly to submit a new map, with approval of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Tom Wolf. Following unsuccessful appeals by the General Assembly, the court drafted and approved its own map, which will now be in effect for the midterm elections in November, opening up a new field of opportunity for Democrats in the state.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump urged Republicans in the state to "challenge the new 'pushed' Congressional Map, all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Your Original was correct!"

According to Jacobson, given the Supreme Court of the United States already declined to stay the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision, it's unlikely they'll take up the case. It's already agreed to hear four other gerrymandering cases this term, which may well re-write the rules on this twisted system nationwide.

The change that's already come to Pennsylvania may not have been possible without the research Kennedy and three other expert witnesses brought to light. They took the stand with a range of analyses, some based in complex quantitative theory, others, like Kennedy’s, based in pure cartography. But they all reached the same conclusion: Pennsylvania’s map had been so aggressively gerrymandered for partisan purposes that it silenced the voices of Democratic voters in the state. Here's how each came to that conclusion—and managed to convince the court.

The Only Bad Restaurant in Town

Carnegie Mellon mathematician Wes Pegden had already written an academic paper proving that the Pennsylvania map was drawn with partisan intent. His challenge in the courtroom was to convince a room full of non-mathematicians. So he came armed with an analogy.

Imagine, Pegden told the court, you’ve touched down in a new city and asked your taxi driver to drop you at any restaurant, something that would give you a sense of the local culinary scene. You give the cabbie a fat tip, go inside the restaurant, and have a terrible meal. Did the driver bring you to a bad restaurant on purpose? Or is it a true reflection of all of the restaurants in the city?

To answer that question, you could always sample every single restaurant, but that would take too long. A more efficient, but still effective option: test every restaurant immediately surrounding the bad one. If they're all bad, the driver really did pick a representative dining establishment. If they’re all really good? The driver screwed you over.

That's essentially how Pegden tested the Pennsylvania map. He developed a computer program that begins with the current Pennsylvania map, then, instead of drawing an entirely new map from scratch, it automatically makes tiny changes to the existing one to create 1 trillion slightly different maps. In the analogy, these trillion maps are the nearby restaurants. The system only draws districts that a court might accept, meaning they’re contiguous, reasonably shaped, and have similar population sizes, among other things.

Christopher Warshaw, George Washington University

Then, Pegden analyzed the partisan slant of each new map compared to the original, using a well-known metric called the median versus mean test. In this case, Pegden compared the Republican vote share in each of Pennsylvania's 18 districts. For each map, he calculated the difference between the median vote share across all the districts and the mean vote share across all of the districts. The bigger the difference, the more of an advantage the Republicans had in that map.

After conducting his trillion simulations, Pegden found that the 2011 Pennsylvania map exhibited more partisan bias than 99.999999 percent of maps he tested. In other words, making even the tiniest changes in almost any direction to the existing map chiseled away at the Republican advantage.

“You can almost hear the mapmakers saying, ‘No don’t do that. I wanted that right there just like that,’” Pegden says. “It gets at the basic question of what citizens, judges, and courts want to know: Did these people go into a room and design these maps to suit their purposes?”

Until now, researchers have struggled to find truly random maps to compare to gerrymandered maps; the number of possible maps is so astronomically high, it’s impossible to try them all. But Pegden’s theorem proves you don’t have to try every restaurant in town to know you got a raw deal. You just need to take a walk around the block.

The Bright Red Dot

Unlike Kennedy and Pegden, Jowei Chen was no witness-stand novice. The political scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor has provided expert testimony in a litany of redistricting cases, including in North Carolina, where judges relied heavily on Chen's testimony in their decision to overturn the existing map.

Like Pegden, Chen uses computer programs to simulate alternative maps. But instead of starting with the original map and making small changes, Chen’s program develops entirely new maps, based on a series of geographic constraints. The maps should be compact in shape, preserve county and municipal boundaries, and have equal populations. They’re drawn, in other words, in some magical world where partisanship doesn’t exist. The only goal, says Chen, is that these maps be “geographically normal.”

Chen generated 500 such maps for Pennsylvania, and analyzed each of them based on how many Republican seats they would yield. He also looked at how many counties and municipalities were split across districts, a practice the Pennsylvania constitution forbids "unless absolutely necessary." Keeping counties and municipalities together, the thinking goes, keeps communities together. He compared those figures to the disputed map, and presented the results to the court.

The following chart shows how many seats the simulated maps and the disputed map generated for Republicans.

Most of the maps gave Republicans nine seats. Just two percent gave them 10 seats. None even came close to the disputed map, which gives Republicans a whopping 13 seats.

The chart showing the number of split municipalities and counties paints a similarly compelling picture.

Chen used two other metrics to measure the disputed map’s compactness relative to the simulations. The first, called the Reock score, analyzes the ratio of the district’s area to the area of the smallest circle that can be drawn to completely contain it. A district that’s a perfect circle, in other words, would have a Reock score of one. The more distorted the district’s shape gets, the lower the score.

Chen also put the map up to the so-called Popper-Polsby test, which is the ratio of the district’s area to the area of a circle whose circumference is the same length as the district’s perimeter. Again, the lower number, the less compact the district.

Here’s how the disputed map fared on both tests against the simulations:

Chen conducted another simulation with an additional 500 maps, this time, requiring that none of them pit two incumbents against each other. The goal was to see if the General Assembly drew the original map this way not based on partisanship, but based on protecting incumbents. But the results were largely the same. On every metric, the disputed map was an outlier.

“These charts are what really resonated with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices,” says Jacobson. “You see 500 black dots. Then you see the actual plan. It’s way out in nowhere land.”

The results, Chen says, complemented Pegden's evidence perfectly. “It’s not a question of whose metrics and methods do you like better,” he says. “The point is: Here’s a diversity of methods, and they are leading us to the same answer. Maybe that tells us something.”

Political Silencing

Another question before the court was whether the partisan map actually impacted representation in Congress. After all, just because most Pennsylvania representatives are Republicans doesn't mean they'll always vote with Republicans. But Christopher Warshaw, a political scientist at George Washington University, showed mathematically that the Republican advantage also meant that the state's Democrats had little chance of having their voices heard in DC.

To assess the map’s partisan nature, Warshaw used a metric called the efficiency gap, which researchers at the University of Chicago Law School and the Public Policy Institute of California devised in 2015. It measures the number of votes that each party “wastes” in a given election to gauge how packed and cracked its districts are. Every vote a party gets in a district that it loses counts as wasted. In districts the party takes, any vote over the total needed to win is considered waste as well.

“You want to get as many seats in a legislature with as few votes as possible,” Warshaw explains. “You want to get zero votes in the districts you lose.”

To determine Pennsylvania's efficiency gap, Warshaw calculated the difference between each party’s wasted votes and divided it by the number of total votes cast in the election. He found that the 2011 map not only gave Republicans a bigger advantage in Pennsylvania than they had before redistricting; it gave them an advantage like few the country has ever seen. “It is really one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in modern American history,” Warshaw says.

Warshaw analyzed the average efficiency gap in states with more than six representatives between 1972 and 2016, and found that the vast majority have historically had an efficiency gap hovering around zero.

He also found, however, that since 2010, the last year before districts were redrawn, maps have become increasingly skewed toward Republicans, as the party dominates state legislatures and governorships across the country.

Even so, the slide toward Republican advantage has been far more drastic in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Republican candidates won only 49 percent of the congressional vote in Pennsylvania, but gained 72 percent of the seats.

Finally, Warshaw deployed a commonly used model called the DW-Nominate score to show how partisanship has changed in Congress over time. This score ranks members of Congress on a scale from -1, being the most liberal, to +1, being the most conservative. As the chart shows, both parties have been creeping toward their respective poles steadily over time.

Warshaw doesn’t try to prove that gerrymandering created that partisanship in Congress. His point is merely that in Pennsylvania, where more Democratic votes are wasted, it becomes almost impossible for Democrats to see issues they support turn into federal policy. This degrades trust in government and in elections.

“Representative democracy should be largely responsive to what voters want, and if it’s not, it calls into question democratic bona fides,” says Warshaw. In societies where elections shut one entire subset out of power, he says, “all kinds of bad things can happen.”

“Ultimately, people think why are we even having elections?” Warshaw says. "There’s nothing inevitable about democracy.”

The Evolution of Maps

Though by far the least technical expert in the case, John Kennedy was perhaps the most compelling. In preparation for his nerve-wracking two hours on the stand, Kennedy, an expert in Pennsylvania elections, dug through decades of old maps dating back to the 1960s to assess how the shape of districts and their partisan outcomes have evolved over time.

He methodically walked through how Pennsylvania’s first congressional district, comprising much of Philadelphia, has been packed with Democrats, while Democrats in Harrisburg have been cracked between the fourth and eleventh congressional districts, creating Republican majorities in both places.

But it was the seventh congressional district—and the single seafood restaurant holding it together like a piece of Scotch tape—that clinched it. He showed the court how the district had morphed from a squarish shape to today's sprawling, cartoonish scene. “How do you justify the seventh congressional district?” Kennedy says. “It’s absurd.”

Where Chen and Pegden laid out the mathematical proof of partisanship, and Warshaw demonstrated how that partisanship translates to policy, Kennedy showed in the starkest terms just how obviously gerrymandered these maps looked even to the untrained eye.

As gerrymandering cases proliferate across the country, there’s been some talk in research circles of the need for one true metric to measure it. Overturning Pennsylvania's gerrymandered map, though, required detailed analysis from all angles. “Metrics are just evidence," says Jacobson. "It’s always helpful to have more evidence not less.”

In the Pennsylvania case, Judge P. Kevin Brobson of the Commonwealth Court agreed that Republicans had obviously and intentionally given themselves an advantage, but stopped short of saying they had violated the state’s constitution. In January, the Supreme Court disagreed, striking down the old Pennsylvania map.

In a matter of months, Pennsylvanians will head to the polls once more to elect 18 representatives to Congress, based on an entirely new electoral map that leans far less in one party’s favor. For Kennedy, an academic who spends most of his time studying history, it’s been a rare opportunity to make history, instead.

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The internet loves to tear things to shreds. So to absolutely no one's surprise, it jumped on Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony—a serious event in which the CEO of one of the world's richest companies is answering to the federal government for mistakes like user-data breaches and enabling Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—like a choice steak. Instead of a fork and knife, though, it used its own pointy tools: memes.

Memes used to be about cats and Chuck Norris. But now, not only is a dry, two-day, multi-hour Congressional grilling session considered meme fodder, it's a veritable treasure trove of repeatable phrases and exploitable images. It wasn't entirely Social Network jokes, but those did abound.

No one was safe: not Zuckerberg, and certainly not the octogenarian Senators doing their best to understand the Facebook. A question about websites' business models has become iconic. Pro-Trump online personalities Diamond and Silk have been catapulted onto the national stage. It's been a time to reflect on just how strange our world has gotten. So we gathered up the wildest Zuckberg testimony memes the internet has to offer. And no, we still can't really believe this is happening either. And we know one wide-eyed, besuited Harvard alum who probably feels the same way.

What the Zuck

This isn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s first go-round in the meme machine. Zuck Memes were already an established format with a dedicated subreddit. They’re almost too easy: Take one of Zuck’s stilted public Facebook posts, and re-caption it with the awkwardness dialed all the way up. But while some of this week's memes were similarly dada genius …

… many others were pure schadenfreude:

Senators and Censorship

Zuckerberg wasn't the only one to have his foibles under the internet's microscope. Did you really think aspiring roastmasters would pass up the chance to troll Senator Ted Cruz, whom they allege is the Zodiac Killer?

Or to take some swipes at stodgy, not-quite-tech-savvy Senators?

By far the best baby-boomer blunder though, was Senator Orrin Hatch's, who wondered how Facebook could "sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" Zuckerberg's response—"Senator, we run ads"—quickly became a headline, and, of course, a meme.

(Because the meme-to-merch pipeline now flows faster than ever, there is of course a T-shirt.)

Maybe the oddest part of the Zuckerberg testimony's digital carnival was the rise of Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known as pro-Trump Facebook personalities Diamond and Silk. Their outspoken support of President Trump has earned them over a million followers (including Trump himself), but soon found the social media platform limiting their post's spread. When they asked the company why, they say they received this message: “The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community. This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way.” Which would have been that, except that Ted Cruz cited the pair as an example of Facebook's tendency to censor conservative commentators.

Zuckerberg denied censorship, but acknowledged the concern and said Diamond and Silk were victims of an "enforcement error" he was already working to correct. Still, that's plenty of ammunition for a new wave of memes. Especially since there were visual aids.

But somehow, despite grilling him like a flank steak, the internet came to feel for Zuck. Or at least, find a way to see him as metaphor for the absurdity of our digital lives:

As well as the tension between the tech world and aging lawmakers trying to bring order to a situation they don't seem to fully understand.

So while we might shake our heads at this absolutely bananas state of affairs in internet culture, it's probably better to think of it this way: To understand this week's hottest memes, you have to have tuned into hours of Senators and a globally influential CEO talk the finer points of the attention economy and internet security policy. That may not be the same thing as high voter turnout, but it's still pretty encouraging. Today, memes; tomorrow, perhaps, genuine civic engagement!

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Lately, in considering the erosion of America, the image that first comes to mind is Mariah Carey's now-iconic "I don’t know her" GIF. The gleeful shake of Carey's head. The subtle mischief of her utterance. The animation frames our current moment with dead-on precision. In fairness, from its earliest days, America has never looked like we knew it could. Which is to say, America—a country of sharp contradictions and tangible evils—has never lived up to what it could be. Since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, we have encountered grotesqueries that have further marred the country beyond recognition. Who is she? How did we get here?

One way to characterize all the recent chaos is to understand that Donald Trump's rise and reign was, and continues to be, anchored by an acutely corrosive variety of fandom. This is not your typical fandom; not like the ones we normally discuss here. It is much more pernicious than anarchic XXXtentacion fans or Elon Musk’s army of bros. Trump's ilk falls into the most harmful category of fandom—men and women who, explicitly or implicitly, uphold the structures of white supremacy. His supporters vary in texture and intent, and it would be inaccurate to paint Trump's base in one broad sweep, but there is a considerable portion of white supremacists who very seriously subscribe to, and fuel, his vile thoughts. As I've previously pointed out, to view the world through a white supremacist lens is to exist as an antithesis to progress. Trump's is a gospel of negation: At best, it is to live in the complicity of false equivalences, to shroud one's scope in unsafe fabrications like "alt-left," and to willfully color malice as virtue.

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The malice is all around. Such fervent investment, when it moves beyond the fictionalized territories of TV or gaming that many fanbases rally around, becomes much more fraught with real-world risk. Consider the bloody indignation that arose from Charlottesville. Or Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Or the implementation of a travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries, which the Supreme Court upheld, even if narrowly. Or the cancellation of the Trans-Pacific partnership. His never-ending demonization of the free press, his constant Twitter attacks on figures both private and public, the erection of internment camps near the US-Mexico border, where children and babies were cruelly ripped from their parents. All of it—all of it— is stoked by Trump true believers.

The micro- and macro-dramas of the Trump era are nothing if not undying and brattish, the outbursts of spoiled children who choose defiance even when they know its costs to be perilous. Matters are only made worse by the extreme fandom that surrounds and emboldens Trump, a congregation ever ready to spew tales of conservative victimhood: spineless Republican legislators who back destructive policy; TV pundits like Sean Hannity skilled in the dark arts of media distortion; supporters who believe division, fear, and racial persecution are ingredients needed to Make America Great Again (according to one scholar, whiteness sources power through narratives of self-victimization).

Among the list of calamities, last week's press conference in Helsinki and its aftermath registers among the most grave. In one of the most shocking public testimonies ever to be given by a president, Trump sided with Vladimir Putin and denied reports of Russian interference in US elections. (At first blush, it made sense for Trump to do so; an admission of foreign meddling would imply that he unfairly won the presidential election against Hillary Clinton.) The backlash was immediate and swift. Politicians and citizens called treason. Former President Barack Obama, during a speech in Johannesburg, cautioned that the denial of facts would help undo democracy as we know it. Trump's response? Inviting Putin to the US this fall—just in time to watch the midterm elections.

With perfect timing, The Onion responded with an article titled: "Supporters Praise Trump For Upholding Traditional American Value of Supporting Murderous Dictators For Political Gain." But the headline was terrifyingly close to the echo chamber in which Trump fandom thrives. On Fox News, host Tucker Carlson said that Mexico was, in fact, doing more to tamper with US elections than Russia by "packing our electorate." Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio thought Trump's meeting with Putin was helpful in strengthening foreign ties. "I think it's always patriotic to pursue peace," he said. "Trump went out of his way to pull Russia into the community of nations." The claim was backed by Ohio representative Jim Jordan, who said of his constituents: "People are pretty darned pleased." In its most disorienting state, this is how Trump fandom works—it endows one with blind faith so poisonous all they understand are dysmorphic ideas like "Muslims are bad!" or "Women should not have a right to their bodies."

As it turns out, all fandoms, even those in Trump's club, have certain limits. The following day, under internal pressure from chief of staff John Kelly and close allies, Trump amended his initial remarks. The distance he attempted to carve out between himself and Putin, however, was pure illusion. When asked, he refused to answer where his faith lay: in the Russian president or in his own intelligence officials. "I have confidence in both parties," he told the press.

But the fact of fandom is that fans can never completely break from their roles. A source close to the White House told BuzzFeed News that there is no ceiling to what Trump can do or say: "Long-term there is no such thing as a last straw. When he's back talking about the Supreme Court or regulations, they will be back publicly supporting him." There were also several GOP lawmakers who disagreed with the president—Marco Rubio, Bob Corker, Rand Paul, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, among them—all of whom released statements denouncing Russia, the bulk of which avoided criticism of Trump head-on. Fandom, of course, is not a neat science. But it does obey a reliable logic: surrender. A surrender to one's morals, to actuality, to simple reason—all in the name of a person, an entity, some higher power.

These are indeed strange times. What's turned out to be one of the strangest aspects of Trump fandom is how it curdles in online ports. Aside from out-and-out white supremacists, Trump supporters include internet trolls who use white supremacist language and dog whistles to whip up a slice of his base. There are the legislators who kowtow to Trump out of pure fear of losing their power or facing the wrath of a constituency they might not understand. There is the anti-Hillary, anti-establishment contingent who merely wanted "something new" in Washington. And there are the sort of half-fans who blindly champion Republican values no matter what, voting for leaders regardless of what evils they incite.

All these fans are far more interconnected now thanks to Twitter, the president's preferred megaphone. The once disaggregated network is now bound together, creating a thorny gordian knot. If fandom subsumes, Trump's is one that has pulled in all manner of subgroups with varied agendas, which is the exact opposite of positive fandom, where a group collectively comes together for a greater good to celebrate something bigger than themselves. Trump fans celebrate Trump, only this time that celebration is leading to national decay.

But that is the thing with fandom—it's laced with disappointment. Think of storied sports franchises like the Lakers or Knicks. To love just about any genre show is to resign oneself to heartbreak, whether due to untimely death (cancellation) or qualitative decline. To their own disappointment, fans may soon realize that the man they elected to transform the country for the better instead accomplished the very opposite. Only, by then, it will be too late.

Music written by teams, David Byrne once wrote, is arguably more accessible than that written by a sole composer. Collaborations, he mused, may result in more "universal" sentiments. But what if your partner isn’t human at all, but artificial intelligence? Now music producers are enlisting AI to crank out hits.

Style Counsel

Created by Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories, Flow Machines analyzes tracks from around the world, then suggests scores that artists—including electropop musician ALB and jazz vocalist Camille Bertault—interpret into songs. For its debut album, Hello World, the AI also surveyed syllables and words from existing music to create original (albeit gibberish) vocals.
Recommended track: The Beatles-­inspired "Daddy’s Car"

Mood Music

Jukedeck was originally developed to compose background tracks for user-­generated videos; now it’s being adopted by K-pop stars like Kim Bo-hyung and Highteen. Using deep neural networks, the AI predicts note sequences to compose brand new songs. After users select parameters such as mood, genre, and beats per minute, the AI cranks out a track that artists can embellish.
Recommended track: Highteen’s ultra-­processed hit "Digital Love"

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Classical Decomposer

The Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist, aka Aiva, combs through the works of composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart and uses
the principles of music theory to make predictions and generate musical models. The program, developed by computer scientist Pierre ­Barreau, reconfigures those models into an original piece and arranges new sheet music.
Recommended track: "Among the Stars," in the style of composer John Williams

Mix Master

Landr automates the audio mastering process in minutes. The AI compares nearly finished tracks to a database of 7 million already mastered singles and tweaks each song based on previous adjustments. By processing the tracks as a batch, Landr hones a unified sound.
Recommended track: R&B single "Your World," produced by Kosine

Beats by Watson

YouTube personality Taryn Southern used IBM’s Watson to make her debut album, I AM AI. Watson Beat studies patterns among keys and rhythms
in 20-second clips of existing songs, then translates its findings into new tracks. Artists can use the open source application to layer their own instrumentals on top of the AI composite.
Recommended track: Southern’s synth-pop track "New World"

More Great WIRED Stories

This article appears in the May issue. Subscribe now.

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The M Machine's iPad-Controlled 'M' Machine

San Francisco electronic group The M Machine built a giant illuminated "M" to sit on stage while they play. The "M" is controlled by a laptop and iPad during shows.

Click:心理治疗

2017 was an incredible year for videogames—a mixed bag of genre, style, and mood. The best titles ranged from sweeping adventures to tense shooters to meditations on the existential burden of life. Some of the games released this year will go on to be lauded as the most important, profound videogames of this generation. If you don't know how to dive into videogames in the coming days, here is where to start.

10. Lone Echo

Virtual reality's great promise has always been that of escape, and nowhere has that been put to better use than in Ready At Dawn's captivating, compelling space adventure. Half puzzle-heavy exploration, half zero-G playground, Lone Echo delivers what traditional gaming cannot: a truly embodied adventure. Most of that is due to an ingenious locomotion mechanic, which eschews the all-but-default teleportation to lets you move through the game via combination of thrusters and pushing off solid surfaces. The disc-golf-in-space multiplayer companion, Echo Arena, has become a fan favorite, but it's Lone Echo that will be remembered as a singular, medium-defining game.

System: Oculus Rift

9. Everything

You might begin life as a polar bear. Or a kangaroo. Or a twig. Maybe a mitochondria. Then you might grow and reach with your mind and perception until you're a galaxy, or the sun, or the magic of consciousness itself. In David O'Reilly's meditative masterpiece, you can be, literally, everything. Everything derives power from a logic of interconnectedness, weaving a philosophical fable about the nature of objects while teaching the player a mechanical dance that surprises and stir. You ever wondered what the world looked like from the perspective of a soda can? Now's the time to find out.

System: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows

8. Resident Evil 7

In Resident Evil 7, you open doors by pressing into them, face first. It's a neat little metaphor: the act of moving forward is an act of dogged, perhaps irrational, persistence. In this brilliant revival of one of gaming's originary survival horror franchises, it's the sort of subtle touch that goes a long way. And Resident Evil 7 is full of subtle touches: the scattered trash in the derelict rural manor your hero is trapped in; the unsettling, flowing, almost oil-y design of the game's monsters; the way videotapes are used to create a hallucinatory alternate reality experience while also playing with found footage horror tropes. Resident Evil 7 is two-thirds a brilliant horror adventure, and one-third a solid action game. It'll undoubtedly be frustrating when the horror starts to run dry, but every step taken on the way is more than worth it, if you have the courage to get that far. Play in VR at your own risk.

System: PlayStation 4, PlayStation VR, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

7. Yakuza 0

Taking place in Tokyo's Red Lights District during the late 80s and early 90s, Yakuza 0 is one of the most riveting, carefully crafted dramas ever put in front of a videogame controller. It's also a game where one of your main characters uses Street Fighter moves and random objects on the street to fight vengeful clowns. Yakuza 0 manages an impossible alchemy, merging a self-serious crime drama largely about real estate with some of the goofiest and off-beat supporting material the creators at Sega could come up with. It feels, on the whole, like a love letter to what videogames are capable of. Games are places where powerful, fascinating drama can happen. They're also places where a giant dude named Mr. Shakedown will chase you through the streets of Tokyo and try to steal your cash until you learn how to beat him up with a baseball bat. Yakuza 0 sees the dissonance, and it loves it. And you'll love it, too.

System: PlayStation 4

6. Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 is the rare multiplayer shooter that has the power to reach beyond the core "gamer" marketplace that those games usually cater to. Part of that is the platform: the Nintendo Switch is a console built for people who hate the nonsense of modern videogame consoles, and that gives any game on it an allure it might not otherwise have. But more than that, it's in the design. The squid-kid world of Splatoon is bright and playful, awash in colorful ink, aquatic pop stars, and Harajuku high fashion. And cleverly, the designers use this aesthetic to create a shooter that actually doesn't employ violence at all. Victory is a matter of covering as many surfaces and enemies with ink as possible. Nobody gets hurt. Splatoon 2 is a marginal refinement of the original game, and that might make it less compelling for returning players, but the core of the experience remains so solid and wholesome that not changing enough can hardly be considered a flaw.

System: Nintendo Switch

5. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a controversial game, largely because of a single page of text that appears before the experience even begins, claiming that Hellblade is a story about mental illness, specifically psychosis, and that care has been taken to make that representation thoughtful and accurate. Whether or not that's true, or to what extent telling that kind of story is appropriate in a game mostly about obscure puzzles and hack-and-slash combat, is a question worth debating. But Hellblade is, at its heart, a game that rises above those conversations, and above the sum of its own components. The story of Senua, a warrior journeying into the land of death in search of her lost love, is an uncanny screaming death knell of pain and perseverance. It's held together by the brilliant work of Melina Juergens, whose motion capture and vocal acting as Senua is possibly the best performance in the entire medium. Hellblade is flawed, sometimes monotonous and sometimes infuriating, but it's unlike anything else I've played this year, and its imagery and sound will stay with me for a long, long time.

System: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows

4. Super Mario Odyssey

At its best moments, Nintendo's flagship Mario title for the Nintendo Switch feels like Super Mario at his best. His most surreal, his most silly, his most unpretentiously fun. Operating out of an effortless dream logic, Super Mario Odyssey is the story of Mario Mario (that's his real name, I swear) travelling across the multiverse to crash a wedding party with the help of his friend, a cap that has the power to possess anything in the world that doesn't have its own hat. The cap's name is Cappy. This premise doesn't require you to understand or accept it. You just have to follow it, jumping, flipping, and wah-wah-wah-hoo-ing to whatever unlikely, unpredictable turn it offers next. If it had Luigi, and left some of its insensitive cultural tendencies behind (Mario, take off that sombrero, please), Super Mario Odyssey would be perfect.

System: Nintendo Switch

3. PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds

I have spent roughly half my time with PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds hiding in a shed. Surprisingly, that's not a complaint. PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds has a simple premise, one with surprising power. Take a large map, a derelict Eastern European city, perhaps. Fill it with a hundred players. Litter weapons around, some vehicles, some traps for funsies. Last player alive wins. This straightforward idea, literally cribbed from a movie, imbues every single moment of Battlegrounds with tension. Every movement in the grass, every shadow out of the corner of your eye, could be one of 99 other players with you in the crosshairs. Under that kind of scrutiny, every single microdecision becomes terrifying. Which is how I find myself hiding in a shed, over and over and over again, aiming a shotgun at a door that may never open. But let me tell you: hiding has never been so riveting.

System: Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The commanding image of Breath of the Wild is a sweeping vista. Encountered roughly five minutes into the game, this vista–a wide shot of a whole continent's worth of wilderness, open and ready to be explored–is a promise. Lots of videogames offer this promise, of freedom, of unfettered and truly organic exploration, but most fail. So many game worlds feel empty, and dead, and basically constructed. Which, in a very real sense, they all inevitably are. But some special games have enough of their creators in them that their worlds feel real, and beautiful, and are able to pass off the illusion that you're not just running through handcrafted levels but through a full, living place. Breath of the Wild is one of those games, and it uses such a place to deconstruct and resurrect the mythology and ideas of The Legend of Zelda, a game that was originally very simple: a story of a boy, and a big, scary place, and the promise of someone he loves at the end of the journey. No sequel in this series' thirty years has so captured the elegance and joy of that story. And now it's hard to imagine how any other game after it could.

System: Nintendo Switch

1. Nier: Automata

WIRED made one significant mistake with its gaming coverage in 2017: we never reviewed Nier: Automata. This is my fault. I came to the game a month or two late, and there was no room for coverage in our calendar. And yet Nier: Automata is so excellent, such a significant contribution to the medium of gaming and to my own life that I cannot in good conscience place any other game in the #1 spot. It's the story of two androids caught in an ancient, horrible war, but that explanation doesn't do Nier: Automata justice. It is a genre-hopping, brilliantly written, intricately crafted magnum opus about persistence, and love, and hope in the face of absolute loss. Game director Yoko Taro has famously said he makes "weird games for weird people," but Nier: Automata might be for everyone.

System: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows

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David Cage scoffs at the notion that videogames are fun. “They should trouble you, move you, make you react,” he says. As founder of the studio Quantic Dream, the French developer has been stunning and confounding players for two decades with cinematic games that tackle heady issues of love, death, domestic abuse, oppression, and the afterlife. “Some people are shocked when a game evokes real-world issues,” he says. “But this platform is about becoming the characters, not just seeing them from the outside like in a film.”

Detroit: Become Human, slated for release this spring, is the auteur’s most ambitious work yet. Cage wrote the game’s 2,000-page script and employed more than 250 motion capture actors. Set in Detroit, the future capital of AI manufacturing, the plot revolves around three androids grappling with what it means to be human. Players make decisions to steer the story line; in one demo scene, an android tries to protect a young girl from her abusive father. It’s a gripping, unsettling project, one that Cage considers his most compelling.

DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN, BY THE NUMBERS

513 characters

2,000 script pages

35,000 camera shots

74,000 unique animations

5.1 million lines of code

For purists, Detroit is peak Cage, prioritizing dialogue and emotional gimmicks over gameplay. It’s a critique he considers myopic. “I disagree that injecting emotion into a game comes at the expense of the playing experience,” he says. For Cage, the future of the industry is in inciting pathos.

Whether Detroit is received as visionary or exhibitionist, Cage is confident developers will soon embrace the potential of hyperrealistic interactive gaming. The question is whether we’re ready for it.

Who:
David Cage, videogame developer

Previous Titles:
Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls

Favorite game:
Rick Dangerous

Favorite movie:
2001: A Space Odyssey

Notable collaborators:
David Bowie, Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe

Gaming hero:
Tekken’s Paul Phoenix. “He survived 20 years in this industry with the same haircut, which says a lot.”

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

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Oh, fandom. So passionate, so partisan—and, too often these days, so prolifically peevish. From Tumblr and Wattpad to more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Instagram, online communities have served as rallying points for stan armies: obsessives who comb over every interview and shred of non-news for information about the object of their adoration. But increasingly, fandoms' emotions have been curdling into a different kind of potion; something petty, entitled, conspiratorial, even abusive. So on the occasion of San Diego Comic-Con, one of the biggest fan events in the world, it's time for some tough love.

First, a note: this is a look at toxic strains that exist within a larger fandom, not an indictment of a given artist or person. Fandom is a pure and precious thing, and no one should feel conflicted about being invested in a pop-culture figure or property. If you express that investment by being a worse person, though—treating appreciation like warfare, demanding dogmatic purity tests, attacking people, or seeing yourself as some kind of a crusader—than it's probably time to take some time and re-assess things. We're sure nothing in the following catalog sounds like anything you've done in the name of fandom, right? Enjoy Comic-Con!

10. Barbz (Nicki Minaj Fandom)

The Barbz are a fiercely loyal sort. Case in point: In April, upon the release of Invasion of Privacy, a writer for British GQ explained how Cardi B had adopted Nicki Minaj’s style in a much more accessible way. “Nicki intimidates; Cardi endears,” she wrote. Minaj disciples responded with an all-out attack. The GQ staffer was flooded with malicious tweets, ranging from the direct (“I will kill u bitch”) to even more direct (“You better to delete that before we get your address and start hunting you and your family down!!”) The following month, the Barbz turned on one of their own when a self-proclaimed fan wondered aloud on Twitter: “You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content? No silly shit, just reflecting on past relationships, being a boss, hardships, etc.” (Minaj took it further and DMed a disgustingly petty reply to the fan). For Barbz, fandom doesn’t allow for dissent—even when it's not dissent but a valid, healthy appraisal. This may come as a surprise, y'all, but love and criticism are not mutually exclusive.

9. Swifties (Taylor Swift Fandom)

Generally speaking, Taylor Swift’s fans aren’t bad—they just really love Swift and tend to be a little over-the-top about it. And most of the time, that’s what fandom is. (Also, this is a pop star who sends holiday presents to them; she’s earned their devotion.) But within that group, the “Bad Blood” singer has a few bad apples. There are those who go after Hayley Kiyoko for daring to point out that she shouldn’t be criticized for singing about women when Swift sings about men all the time. (Swift actually agrees with Kiyoko on that point.) There are Swifties who get bent out of shape when she doesn’t get nominated for enough awards. And then there are the white supremacists—fans Swift seems to have done nothing to court, but pop up anyway. Yeah, the ones who call her an “Aryan goddess”? Those are the ones who give her a bad reputation.

8. Zack Snyder Fans

Look, Zack Snyder's hardcore supporters have it rough. Or, well, they think they do. They’ve hitched their wagon to a star that occasionally blinks out. He’s made some OK movies (Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen) but he’s made even more that have been trashed by critics: Sucker Punch; Man of Steel; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That's led to a persecution complex among more than a few of his stans. While this kerfuffle has died down a bit with Snyder's step back from the spotlight—recently, he has shifted focus to make iPhone movies and produce the DC movies rather than direct them—the coming years represent a reckoning. James Wan’s Aquaman and Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman sequel are headed to theaters, and the receptions they get may determine whether critics have complaints with all DC movies, or just the ones with Snyder behind the camera. In the meantime, though, his own personal justice league will be there to defend it.

7. Rick and Morty Fans

Yes, Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland created a funny, smart, challenging (god, those burps) cartoon. Yes, it delivers a bizarro Back to the Future ride through both spacetime and genre tropes. Yes, it's the most STEM-conscious animated show since Futurama. But sweet tapdancing Pickle Rick, you've never seen a TV fandom more noisome than this one. There's the "this show is so smart normies don't get it" self-congratulation that's so over-the-top it became a copypasta meme; there's the propensity to doxx the show's female writers and generally be such venal stains that Harmon despises them; there's the mass freakout after McDonald's ran out of limited-edition Szechuan dipping sauce. (Yes, that's correct.) While Adult Swim recently renewed the show for 70 new episodes, there's going to be quite a lull before anyone sees a new episode—here's hoping the fans grow up a little bit in the meantime.

6. #TeamBreezy (Chris Brown Fandom)

It’s been almost a decade since reports first surfaced of Chris Brown’s violent abuse of then-girlfriend Rihanna. Since then, Rihanna has rocketed to pop superstardom while Brown’s career has strided along, aided by a loyal following that borders on enablers. Despite an earnest-seeming redemption tour, reports of Brown’s violent behavior continue to bubble up: Brown’s ex-girlfriend filed for a restraining order; Brown went on a homophobic Twitter rant; Brown punched a fan in a nightclub; Brown locked a woman in his home, without a cell phone, so she could be sexually assaulted. (Brown’s camp denies that last accusation.) Yet, Team Breezy generally attributes such reports to misinformation and "haters." Fandoms are built on stand-by-your-man loyalty, but at some point it becomes impossible to love the art in good conscience. If the #MeToo movement is any indication, the times have changed since Rihanna’s bloody face headlined gossip sites. Willful ignorance is no longer an acceptable choice.

5. XXXtentacion Fans

On June 18, outside of a Broward County motorcycle dealership, 20-year-old Jahseh Onfroy was fatally gunned down by two assailants. At the time of his death, Onfroy, who rapped under the moniker XXXTentacion, had already amassed a rare kind of fame: He attracted deep love and even deeper hate with a ferocious mania. The allure of Onfroy’s dark matter inspired the type of fandom that spills into violent obsession. A recurring source of vitriol for the rapper, and an easy target for his rabid fanbase, was his ex-girlfriend, Geneva Ayala, who filed multiple charges against the rapper (including aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, and witness tampering). When it came to light that Ayala created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for hospital bills due to damage inflicted by Onfroy, his fans bullied her into exile: forcing her to delete Instagram, hacking her Twitter account, harassing her at work to the point that she was left with no option but to quit, and shutting down her GoFundMe (it was later reopened). Having made a name for himself on Soundcloud, where he often engaged issues of mental health in his music, Onfroy willingly embraced his demons (he once called himself “lil dylan roof” on Twitter, referencing the Charleston shooter who murdered nine parishioners in South Carolina in 2015). But even now, in death, XXX is a reminder that extreme fandom has the power to blind people to the blood on their own hands.

4. Logang (Logan Paul Fandom)

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Many, even most, of Logan Paul’s fans are literal children. And so if you ask us who is really responsible for their bad behavior, we’re going to have to say the fault is predominantly with Paul and, you know, other adults. But the Logang (or the Logangsters, depending on who you ask), like Lil Tay, are inventing a new category of internet villain: the terrifying baby troll. They do all the things adult trolls do—parrot back the sexist and racist things Pauls says, stalk him outside hotel rooms, and harass and troll the “haters” daring to criticize their deeply problematic idol—but they’re kids! So you can’t really fire back at them without being a jerk yourself. Listen, Logang: all Logan wants to do is sell you merch. He’s not really your friend. Can I interest you in a puppy video?

3. Bro Army (Pewdiepie Fandom)

First rule of non-toxic fandoms: Don’t call yourselves "bro," don’t call yourselves an "army," and definitely don’t call yourselves the Bro Army. People might assume you’re a bunch of flame-war-loving trolls who think girls are icky—and where YouTuber PewDiePie’s fans are concerned, everyone would be absolutely right. It’s not just that they’ve stuck with the Swedish gamer/alleged comedian as he peppered his videos with racial slurs, rape jokes, anti-Semitism, and homophobia for nearly a decade (though that’s bad enough). It’s also that they insist that PewDiePie somehow isn’t being hateful at all. Oh, and if you quote their hero back at them, they’ll wallpaper your social media accounts with thoughtful messages about how you suck—for years.

2. The Dark Side of Star Wars Fandom

The most recent eruption has been a hilariously non-ironic campaign to remake The Last Jedi, but that's sadly just the latest in a long line of online grossness from the entitled Sith-heads who are so keen on reclaiming the Star Wars universe . Somehow, Gamergate has come to a galaxy far, far away; hectoring, harassment, even death threats aimed at director Rian Johnson. To be clear, this is a tiny (if vocal) subset of Star Wars fandom, which on the whole is as joyous and inclusive as the universe is finally becoming. But to to quote our own Adam Rogers:

"Everyone has a right to opinions about movies. Everyone has a right, I guess, to throw those opinions in the face of the people who make those movies, though it does seem at minimum impolite. Everyone has the right to ask transnational entertainment companies to make the movies they want, and if those companies don’t respond, to stop giving the companies money. But harassment, threats, jokes about someone’s race or gender? A Jedi would fight someone who did that stuff. The Force binds us all together. Hatred and anger are the ways of the Dark Side; they may bring power, but at a cost. It harms individuals, debases the people who do it, and it breaks the Fellowship. In the end, the cost of that power will be powerlessness."

1. Elon Musk Acolytes

"Always punch up" is a good life motto. You’ll accomplish a lot by speaking truth to power; dissecting the misdeeds of a relative unknown, though, makes you look like a tool. That’s why, despite the plethora of dark and toxic fandoms that flourish on the fringes of the internet, the group that tops our list of nasties is devoted to a person at the internet's very center: Elon Musk. To his fan club, Musk is so much more than a charismatic artist, a talented musician, or, hey, a flawed but successful tech entrepreneur—he’s a messiah, a vestige of an age of retrograde masculinity, when a reasonably successful man could expect his ideas to remain unchecked and his words be read as gospel. And Musk wields his one-man metaphor status (and his 22.3 million follower army) to whack out any dissenting opinions. “Because before he commented on my tweet, it was floundering in relative obscurity,” science writer Erin Biba wrote in a piece for the Daily Beast. But after Musk’s dismissive response, Biba found herself drowning in hate mail and abuse. By letting his mob pick over opinions he does not like, Musk is able to control the narrative, playing up investigative reporting on Tesla’s poor labor practices as a misinformation campaign—or even, in some recent deleted tweets, insinuating that one of the people involved with the Thai cave rescue efforts is a pedophile. It’s bad to be thin-skinned, and terrible to play the underdog, but playing it while you ignite a million-man bullying campaign is reprehensible.

Ever since news broke of Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting and misuse of Facebook user data, numerous politicians, technologists, and everyday people have offered opinions on how best to respond. Many have suggested users leave the platform; others have called for government regulation. Still more have advised on ways users should lock down their privacy settings and delete content. While I’m sympathetic to all of the above suggestions—and I have even deleted my account, at least for now—there are more effective steps users can take to protect their data and privacy. It just means breaking the rules a bit.

WIRED Opinion

About

Lil Miss Hot Mess (@LilMissHotMess) is a drag queen by night and a PhD student in media studies by day. She cofounded the #MyNameIs campaign, reads to children as part of Drag Queen Story Hour, and has performed on Saturday Night Live with Katy Perry.

Some backstory: I’m one of the drag queens who protested Facebook a few years ago after several of us were booted from the platform for having names on our profiles that didn’t match our driver’s licenses.

But while the protest started with drag performers, we quickly learned that the impact of Facebook’s real names policy went far beyond our community: We received emails from LGBTQ people, domestic violence survivors, Native Americans, political activists, professionals who worked in healthcare or the criminal justice system, and many more who used non-legal names as a means of better expressing their identities or ensuring their safety.

For many, Facebook was a lifeline, a means of connecting with communities or resources they couldn’t otherwise find close to home. But unfortunately, while Facebook offered some cosmetic improvements following our protest, it still retained the policy.

After reports of Russian interference with US and other elections and the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, many have asked me whether I have regrets about advocating against the real names policy. My answer is a firm no.

Many believe that Facebook’s policy is a safeguard against bad actors who might hide behind a fake moniker to cyberbully or harass people. However, I (and many others) have always argued that using a chosen name is not inherently deceitful and the benefits of being able to self-identify outweigh the costs. Moreover, bad behavior should be prohibited and punished on the grounds that its intent and impacts are harmful—not because of the name someone uses while doing it.

In fact, I would argue that in our current political and media climate, all users should take a cue from drag queens and employ pseudonyms and find creative ways of obfuscating or confusing companies’ data. Yes, these tactics may violate Facebook’s terms of service, but the platform (like many social media services) offers limited tools for controlling what information is accessible—your name, photo, location, and networks are always public—and how that data is used. And its recent updates are more of a redesign than a rethinking.

Below are a handful of tactics everyone can use to pollute their own data and protect their privacy.

Change Your Name: Using a chosen name allows you a bit more control over how your data is collected, stored, and used. By adopting a chosen name, it’s possible to stay in touch with friends who can decode who you really are, while avoiding exes, clients, and colleagues, or bad actors who you’d rather not be able to find you. Plus, using a different name on different platforms makes it just a bit harder for trackers to connect the dots between your accounts, activity, and behaviors. But, as those of us who’ve struggled with this policy know, it’s not always easy to change your name; you may have better luck starting with a new account or using a name that sounds “normal” to an American ear.

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“Like” Like Everyone’s Watching: Another easy way to make it more difficult for companies to paint a clear picture of you is to give them false, misleading, or simply too much information. For example, if you don’t want to be targeted by manipulative political ads, perhaps try “liking” some pages or politicians who don’t fully match your values; the same goes for favorite brands, places, celebrities, or anything else you can support. Think of this as throwing the company off the scent. Similarly, try “liking” every post or comment you come across, or reacting with “wow” or “sad” when you don’t really mean to. You can also use Ben Grosser’s Go Rando browser extension, which automatically randomizes your reactions whenever you click “like.”

Tag Photos Incorrectly: Similarly, try mis-tagging photos of friends—or use photos of celebrities, cartoons, or inanimate objects—to confuse Facebook’s facial recognition and computer vision algorithms. We’ve probably all seen Facebook mess up in its own suggestions (that happens all the time for drag queens), so let’s give them something else to laugh at.

Click All the Ads: You may also want to try clicking all the ads Facebook and other platforms deliver to you—especially the ones you’re not actually interested in. Again, this effectively hides your real interests within a sea of not-quite-real information. Also check out the browser extension AdNauseum, developed by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum, which will automate this for you.

Share Accounts: Finally, for those of us trying to curb our social media addictions, another option is to share an account with friends or family. That way, you can still make sure you don’t miss important updates or events, while making it harder to trace you personally.

Are these foolproof? Certainly not. There are still many creepy forms of high-tech tracking and big data analysis that allow social media platforms to put the pieces together, but these suggestions make the companies do the work—and ideally, force them to justify to us why they’re doing what they’re doing in the first place. Are they ethical? I think so. Until companies come clean about their motives and give us real options to present ourselves authentically, to control the flow of our data, and to opt out of particular kinds of tracking, I’d say we’re justified in taking steps to protect ourselves, even if that means stretching the truth.

Finally, will this confuse your friends? There’s no doubt about it. But that’s another thing everyone can learn from drag queens: Sometimes playing with who we are and what’s expected of us can make life a lot more interesting.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.

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