THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me. But, he added, “we see the usefulness of working together on broad things.”It was a noticeably different tone for Bannon. In recent months, he has taken every opportunity to bash Musk. In January, Bannon said that the billionaire is a “truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and that he’d have Musk “run out” of Trump’s inner circle by Inauguration Day. Musk and other “techno-feudalists,” Bannon said later that month, “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.” In February, he called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.”… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In Los Angeles, where I live, you don’t expect to be heckled while driving an electric car to the grocery store. But on a recent afternoon, a couple of men on bikes saw the Tesla logo on the front of my car and shouted, “Fuck you, Tesla guy” as I rolled by with the windows down.I bought my Tesla Model 3 in 2019, after my wife and I moved from New York to L.A. and needed a car. Not willing to burn gasoline, we got the most practical EV we could afford. Six years later, that car carries a different connotation.In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s MAGA embrace and his scorched-earth tactics running DOGE, Tesla has become a primary target for protests. On Saturday, demonstrators marched outside all 277 Tesla showrooms and service centers in the United States; Teslas across the country have been vandalized and even destroyed in recent… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Kent NishimuraOn the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.  The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver’s license.This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O’Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of “JFK Assassination… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.