THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

At the age of 14, Braden Peters began injecting himself with mail-order testosterone to make himself into something he wasn’t. By his account, the experiment ended when his parents, Kenneth and Lauren, discovered his supply and trashed it. Young Braden was apparently undaunted. He set up a post-office box and began ordering new chemicals—he’s since claimed to have taken crystal meth to stay lean—anything that would catalyze his transformation. He began tapping his face with a hammer in pursuit of perfect cheekbones. The goal was entirely superficial: to reshape his physical form so that other men would feel inferior in his presence, and so that women would want to have sex with him.This, at least, is the origin story he’s told and retold over hundreds of hours of livestreams and interviews. In the pre-internet age, Peters might have passed through the world without notice, or at least without fame. But in 2026, at age 20, he is a popular influencer who calls himself Clavicular, after the span of his collarbones. He is among the most recognizable adherents of the radical-self-improvement project known as looks-maxxing. Hew closely to the credo, which includes all sorts of steroids and therapies, and you might even ascend. That’s looks-maxxing terminology for becoming really, really hot.Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.[Read: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes]As his live videos have been clipped and reposted on more mainstream parts of the internet, Clavicular has continued to gain widespread attention. There’s been a temptation among observers, including the media outlets that have covered this story over the past few months, to understand Clavicular as, essentially, a curiosity. He is a strange, attention-hungry young guy—the latest addition to a streaming ecosystem that celebrates extreme provocation. His peculiar online lingo, derived from the looks-maxxing community, has seeped into the culture. Mogging, meaning “outclassing someone,” and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When I opened Sora this morning, I was met with a flood of strange and disturbing AI-generated videos. On OpenAI’s video app, I scrolled through fabricated scenes of the Iran war and a barrage of fake Donald Trumps blabbering about Jeffrey Epstein. In my least favorite clip, I watched a man deep-fry an infant. The app lets users create fairly realistic-looking AI-generated clips—including of their own likeness—and then post them on a TikTok-like feed. Not all of them are so unsettling, and for better or worse, Sora has been a steady source of internet virality. Within days of its release, it skyrocketed to the top of the App Store.Now Sora will soon be dead. Yesterday, OpenAI said that it was shutting down the app and terminating public access to its video-generating technology. The decision was seemingly abrupt: Just a few months ago, Disney announced plans to invest $1 billion in OpenAI as part of a licensing deal to bring its characters to Sora, and earlier this week, workers from both companies were apparently still collaborating. (Disney has since retracted its investment plans.) Even some Sora staffers themselves were reportedly caught off guard by the announcement. Online, people eulogized Sora by posting their favorite videos—such as one featuring a column of spinning penguins and another in which Jesus walks on water to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.After OpenAI launched the Sora app in September, Sam Altman predicted that society was about to undergo a stunning artistic revolution. “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion,” he wrote online. But such a revolution never materialized. It’s not that people hate AI slop. In fact, if anything, people seem to have a surprising appetite for it—the latest TikTok trend is raunchy telenovelas starring AI-generated fruit. In response to a request for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to a public statement that cites “compute demand” as a key factor in the company’s decision. Generating videos is much more costly than generating text is, and Sora has likely been a real financial drain: In the fall, Forbes estimated that Sora might be costing OpenAI millions of dollars daily, and Bill Peebles, who leads Sora, said that the economics were “completely unsustainable.” (OpenAI declined to comment on Forbes’s estimates at the time.)The decision to quickly spin up a project and then suddenly pull the plug has become a classic OpenAI move.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet?Earlier this month, San Francisco’s de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” which is dedicated to the impressionist painter’s beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show’s lead sponsors. Through tomorrow, visitors are able to partake in a temporary “interactive experience” that Anthropic set up in a room adjacent to the galleries. Essentially, the AI firm turned two typewriters into interfaces to chat with Claude. You type in a question about the exhibition, and Claude, based on information about Monet that the museum provided, such as exhibit labels, punches out an answer onto the same sheet of cream cardstock.When I approached one of the Claude typewriters, which were placed next to art books and paintbrushes on top of wooden desks, an employee instructed me on how to proceed and stressed, repeatedly, that I should not prompt the bot with more than eight to 10 words. To get things started, Claude typed onto the paper, “What caught your eye in Monet and Venice? Type a word or short phrase and I’ll tell you more.” Questions I really wanted to ask—about the intentions behind and effects of the seemingly coarse weave of the canvases, or how Monet, obsessed with color, selected his pigments—were hard to pare down on the spot. I wrote that I noticed “shimmering water in varying lights.”[Read: The human skill that eludes AI]Claude paused for several seconds, then typed a response about Monet’s approach to painting water that restated, in many instances verbatim, information that I’d learned from wall text throughout the galleries. I had follow-up questions, but the paper ejected too quickly for me to ask them. In theory, Claude the AI was supposed to deepen my knowledge of Claude the painter. But all the typewriter added to my experience was ink and, I suppose, a piece of reprocessed dead tree to take home.Anthropic’s sponsoring of and installation alongside “Monet and Venice” is the latest in a litany of attempts by AI companies to purchase cultural cachet. Typewriters, stationery, fine-art museums, the quintessential impressionist painter—these are all associated with taste, beauty, and craft, as well as with intentionality and care, the opposite of the ruthless technological efficiency that repels… [TheTopNews] Read More.

After deliberating for nine days—and emerging at one point to tell the judge that it was having a difficult time reaching a decision—a jury in Los Angeles finally returned its verdict today, finding both Meta and Google liable for creating addictive products that caused a young woman’s mental-health problems.  The two companies were ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages: 70 percent by Meta and 30 percent by Google. (Meta-owned Instagram played a larger role in the complaint than Google-owned YouTube, which explains the split.) This is hardly any money to either of these companies—Meta alone brought in nearly $60 billion in revenue over the last three months of 2025. But the verdict will lead others to pursue similar cases against tech companies (thousands are already pending), and possibly result in changes to the design of social-media apps.Following the verdict’s announcement, Matthew Bergman, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers and the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, sent a lengthy statement to reporters. “This verdict carries implications far beyond this courtroom,” it read in part. “It establishes a framework for how similar cases across the country will be evaluated and demonstrates that juries are willing to hold technology companies accountable when the evidence shows foreseeable harm.” A Meta spokesperson sent a shorter statement: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options.” And the Google spokesperson José Castañeda said that Google will appeal the verdict, adding, “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”The plaintiff in this case, a 20-year-old named Kaley, was referred to in case documents by her initials, KGM, because the events she was suing over happened when she was a minor. She originally filed against TikTok and Snap as well but settled with them before the trial.The core questions of the case were whether the social-media platforms had been designed to be addictive, and whether a social-media addiction could be said to have played a direct role in causing the mental-health issues that KGM experienced as a child. In her complaint, she said she had a “dangerous dependency” on the platforms and that they had contributed to her “anxiety, depression, self-harm, and body dysmorphia.”Today’s news comes right on the heels of a verdict against Meta in another case, brought by the New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, which was announced yesterday. The jury… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In 20 seconds on the night of March 22, the seamless sequence of arrivals, departures, and holds at LaGuardia Airport—along with all their required calls and responses—was upended. In that brief period, a Port Authority fire truck was cleared to cross runway 4, Frontier Flight 4195 was told to stop taxiing, Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was landing, and the fire truck was frantically told to stop—before it collided with the Air Canada flight, killing the pilot and co-pilot.In air-traffic-control audio, the same controller is heard communicating with the aircraft and with the ground vehicles. Yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a news conference that two controllers were in the tower at the time of collision: a controller who was assigned to handle communications within the immediate airspace and for operations on the active runways, and a controller-in-charge who was providing clearance instructions for all departing aircraft. This was standard operating procedure for LaGuardia and other airports for the midnight shift—but which of the two controllers was responsible for ground-control duties, and whether that controller was also handling arrivals in the minutes surrounding the accident, remains unclear. The NTSB noted in the news conference that it has received conflicting information concerning who was covering ground control.​​Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB’s chairperson, cautioned against attributing the collision to a controller being distracted. But, she said, the conditions at LaGuardia were “a heavy workload environment,” and the NTSB has raised concerns in other accident investigations about fatigue during lightly staffed midnight shifts.However standard a two-person shift might be, that a single controller was responsible, even for a short time, for directing so many simultaneous operations is a stark reduction in acceptable safety margins for the airport. An environment like that, especially when diverse events occur in rapid succession as they did Sunday night, can cause what aviators know as “task saturation.”There are moments in aviation called “critical phases of flight,” such as takeoff and landing, when flight crews have numerous tasks to precisely complete in rapid order. The addition of other duties or unexpected complications—no matter how small—can cause a crew to be overwhelmed and struggle to manage their duties. Air traffic controllers can experience the same sense of being overwhelmed as they direct a varying type and number of activities and operators; a rapid cascade of tasks can quickly become difficult, or even impossible. In these moments of saturation, accidents… [TheTopNews] Read More.