The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over

As Instagram has grown to more than 1 billion monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular look: bright walls, artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast, and Millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. Even if you don’t use the app, you’ve undoubtedly encountered an “Instagram wall,” a pop-up experience like the Museum of Ice Cream, or a brightly patterned restaurant bathroom just made to be photographed.

No one has capitalized on this look’s popularity more than influencers. Some have even started to make thousands of dollars on photo presets that warp anyone’s pictures to fit this mold. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post,” said Claire, a 15-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because of her age. “It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”

Fast-rising young influencers such as Emma Chamberlain, Jazzy Anne, and Joanna Ceddia all reject the notion of a curated feed in favor of a messier and more unfiltered vibe. While Millennial influencers hauled DSLR cameras to the beach and mastered photo editing to get the perfect shot, the generation younger than they are largely post directly from their mobile phones. “Previously influencers used to say, ‘Oh, that’s not on brand,’ or only post things shot in a certain light or with a commonality,” says Lynsey Eaton, a co-founder of the influencer-marketing agency Estate Five. “For the younger generation, those rules don’t apply at all.”

In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.”

Take Reese Blutstein, a 22-year-old influencer who has amassed more than 238,000 followers in just over a year by posting unfiltered, low-production photos of herself in quirky outfits. (A recent flash photo into a mirror with her dog picked up more than 5,000 likes). She, like many members of her generation, doesn’t stress about posting almost the exact same photo twice in a row, something first-generation influencers wouldn’t dream of. “I’m not afraid to over-post. I don’t think, Oh, will this mess up how my feed looks,” she says. “I don’t think too much about it. If I like an image, I just post it.”

Anything that feels staged is as undesirable for Blutstein’s cohort as unfiltered or unflattering photos would be for older influencers. “For my generation, people are more willing to be who they are and not make up a fake identity,” she says. “We are trying to show a real person doing cool things as a real person, not trying to create a persona that isn’t actually you.”

Matt Klein, a cultural strategist at the consultancy Sparks & Honey, also says he’s seen a gradual shift away from the rainbow-colored preplanned photos that dominated the platform in late 2017. “We all know the jig is up,” he says. “We’ve all participated in those staged photos. We all know the stress and anxiety it takes. And we can see through it. Culture is a pendulum, and the pendulum is swaying. That’s not to say everyone is going to stop posting perfect photos. But the energy is shifting.”

Over the past year, “Instagram vs reality” photos have grown in popularity as influencers attempt to make themselves seem more accessible. Earlier this month at Beautycon, a beauty festival, Instagram stars spoke about moving away from ring lights and toward showing off their faces in sunlight. As the public becomes more aware of the prevalence of sponsored posts, beauty influencers are abandoning branded shots for ones that show off their “empties” (empty bottles of product they actually use). A growing number of accounts are dedicated to calling out the various cosmetic procedures celebrities and influencers have had. Influencers have also been actively speaking out themselves about burnout, mental health, and the stress that comes with maintaining perfection.

[Read: The post-Millennial generation is here]

“Everyone is trying to be more authentic,” says Lexie Carbone, a content marketer at Later Media, a social-media marketing firm. “People are writing longer captions. They are sharing how much money they make … I think it all goes back to, you don’t want to see a girl standing in front of a wall that you’ve seen thousands of times. We need something new.”

James Nord, the CEO of Fohr, an influencer-management platform, says he sees this shift play out in his clients’ numbers every day. “What worked for people before doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “For the first time, influencers are coming up against this problem of, How do I continue to grow as tastes change?” A year ago, an influencer could post a shot with manicured hands on a coffee cup and rake in the likes—but now, people will unfollow. According to Fohr, 60 percent of influencers in his network with more than 100,000 followers are actually losing followers month over month. “It’s pretty staggering,” he says. “If you’re an influencer [in 2019] who is still standing in front of Instagram walls, it’s hard.”

The platform itself could be partially responsible for how things have evolved. Whereas Instagram started as a purely visual feed of filtered photos, it has morphed into a messy, tangled social network where photos fight with stories, IGTV, GIFs, and video clips for attention. For many users, a photo itself is just a way to vent in the captions or comment section.

According to Taylor Cohen, a digital strategist at the advertising agency DDB, the Instagram aesthetic’s saturation point came sometime in mid-2018. “It’s not the same as it was even a year ago,” she says. Consider, for example, the Happy Place, an Instagram museum that opened to great fanfare in Los Angeles in 2017 and bills itself as the “most Instagrammable pop-up in America.” When it opened, people were thrilled to fork over the nearly $30 admission price ($199 for a VIP pass). But when it arrived in Boston this month, it landed with a thud. “I would not go,” said Claire, the 15-year-old. “I’d rather take pics in front of a library or something.”

Instagram museums and walls were built to allow normal people to take influencer-quality photographs—but they worked so well, those types of photos became common enough that they don’t resonate like they used to. In the beginning, “you had everyone posting these normal photos, and so that rainbow-food photo stood out,” Klein says. “But because so many people adopted that aesthetic, that has become passé. We’re living in influencer overload.”

[Read: Custom photo filters are the new Instagram gold mine]

Plus, all that perfection is a grind. “I spent so many months looking for a wall that was a certain color,” says Sarah Peretz, a Los Angeles–based influencer known for her stylized, hyper-saturated feed. “There came a point in my life where all I’d be looking for was walls, walls, walls. I was like, Guess what day it is? It’s another wall.” After interrupting a vacation to take a picture against a roadside casino’s perfect orange wall, she decided enough was enough. She began pivoting her feed away from the traditional Instagram aesthetic and started experimenting with drone photography and more creative formats. She says wall photos had become boring to her audience anyway, who are more interested in entertaining Instagram Stories than flat photos.

Last year, Kristin Ruby, the president of Ruby Media Group, a public-relations consulting firm, splurged on a blowout and waiting in an endless line at an Instagram museum—but now, she says, she doesn’t think the pop-ups are worth it. These days, like many users, she doesn’t think too much about her feed and posts more frequently on Instagram Stories. “You don’t have to think about colored walls, the filter, or the people in the background in the way of your perfect candytopia photo,” she says.

As the ideal Instagram look shifts, brands are, as ever, eagerly trying to catch the next wave. “For brands to seem cutting edge, they can’t paint a wall and say that’s what they’re doing,” Nord says. “That aesthetic … is no longer viable.” Cohen points to Glossier as an example of a brand that’s using Instagram in a more modern way. The beauty brand shares a mix of memes, natural-looking close-ups, and recently, a cute video of a sloth “just because.”

Ultimately, Eaton says, “people are just looking for things they can relate to.” And “the pink wall and avocado toast are just not what people are stopping at anymore.”

When a Country Bans Social Media

In the aftermath of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks Sunday, Sri Lanka blocked social-media sites in the country. According to The New York Times, the move was “a unilateral decision” on the part of the government, made out of fear that misinformation and hate speech could spread on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and sow confusion or even incite more violence. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe pleaded with Sri Lankans to “please avoid propagating unverified reports and speculation.”

This wasn’t the first time Sri Lanka had cut access to social media. Last March, after anti-Muslim riots struck the predominantly Buddhist nation, the government initiated a similar information blockade for the same reasons. Since then, scrutiny on the services and their global reach has only intensified. Last November, Facebook admitted that its service had been used to foment brutal ethnic violence in Myanmar. And last month, the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter live-streamed his rampage on Facebook; it reappeared continuously on that service, YouTube, and elsewhere, stymieing tech companies’ efforts to stop the spread. These countries didn’t ban the services, but Australia and New Zealand did call for stricter regulation of social-media companies.

[Read: Social-media silence in Sri Lanka]

Sri Lanka’s ban on social media carries an implicit, and crucial, assumption: that the internet can produce good and ill effects, but its fundamental structure—a global information network that works more or less the same anywhere on Earth—is an unimpeachable given. But what if it’s not? What if the very fact of a global social network is impossible?

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When tragedy raises concerns about technology, we typically weigh the technology’s benefits against its costs. There’s no question that Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have helped spread misinformation and incite violence. But as those services become communication infrastructures, they also help people find aid or connect with family in the aftermath of a tragedy. That reasoning is sound but also circular: It’s cold comfort to celebrate social media’s ability to help clean up the mess it also helped create.

In Sri Lanka, some people credit social media as an essential tool in sustaining democracy after the nation’s 26-year civil war between its Buddhist majority and Tamil minority. Democracy relies on a flow of information sufficient to allow citizens to make choices, after all.

But Sri Lanka’s social web has been indelibly shaped by Facebook and its internet.org effort, which brought access to certain internet services to developing nations—and effectively made Facebook-owned products, especially WhatsApp, the core of online access across vast swaths of the developing world. In the West, internet proponents accuse bans such as Sri Lanka’s of stripping away “internet freedom.” That notion is ideological under the best of circumstances, but it makes sense only in regions such as North America, Europe, and East Asia, where social media are just a part of the internet (even if an important one). In the developing world, they are nearly coextensive with the internet. Being online just means using Facebook or WhatsApp.

That makes an outright ban more significant, for good and for ill. As my colleague Graeme Wood argues, even well-meaning and seemingly justified government suppressions of speech risk deepening authoritarianism. In Sri Lanka’s case, past restrictions on the import of Tamil-language media helped deepen the separatism and isolation that incited the civil war in the first place. History and present circumstances make a media ban riskier in Sri Lanka than in Australia or the United States. As Wood puts it, “The risks to Sri Lanka are much greater. You have not been stunned until you have been stunned by genocide.”

Part of the problem with social media is that users in the West tend to construe them as a fixed and singular affair. Facebook is Facebook in Topeka, Kansas, and Los Angeles; Instagram works the same in Paris, France, or in Paris, Texas. Tech companies’ social and economic promise relies largely on the homogeneity of their offerings. The same smartphone operating systems deliver the same interfaces all around the world. The experience of posting updates seems identical, inspiring a common formal foundation for understanding someone utterly foreign. And the financial leverage associated with creating software in Silicon Valley and delivering it all around the world makes for enormous profits on historically tiny capital and human-resource investments.

It is a convenient myth that social media are monolithic. These services don’t really operate globally, even if the apps download and the posts upload anywhere. Paris, Texas, and Paris, France, aren’t the same, even if Instagram is. Social media are but one part of complex sociopolitical circumstances that demand more deliberate action. Calls for regulation of Facebook, YouTube, and others are really just desperate pleas from people on the ground everywhere, from Sri Lanka to New Zealand, for these global services to work as local ones too.

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That’s a complex challenge. It doesn’t just involve bowing to local wishes, as risks in Sri Lanka, China, and elsewhere attest. But it does demand a lot more than just better monitoring for hate speech, false news, or incitements to violence, as Facebook promised to do in Myanmar, and after the Christchurch shooting, after the reports of Russian-election interference, and countless other times.

[Read: The education of Mark Zuckerberg]

It’s hard to know whether such a challenge has any solution. Never before in human history have billions of people had direct access to one another in real time. Never before have governments had to preside over the instantaneous influx of media across their borders. Never before have corporations, no matter their wealth, had to address such a disparate and diverse set of people. Mark Zuckerberg has always called Facebook a “community,” but it isn’t and never was one. It intersects with communities—millions of them—and it creates thousands of others within its virtual walls. It’s easy to scorn the Sri Lankan government for censoring social media after the Easter attacks, an act that would be both illegal and impossible in the United States. But it’s also difficult to argue that a free flow of information has been an unalloyed good for that country, or the region.

Each time a problem arises for Facebook, the same solutions tend to arrive on its heels, along with the same obstacles to their realization. Better self-governance and accountability—so long as growth and profitability are not affected. More engagement with local stakeholders—so long as they embrace the underlying promise of social media. Openness to regulatory reform—knowing that the political quagmires that technology companies have helped establish reduce the likelihood that new policy will come to fruition, along with the threat that local regulation becomes de facto global policy.

This pattern shrouds an obvious question that nobody wants to ask, let alone answer. Bracketing for a moment the question of whether the internet is a tool for democratic good or not, is it even a viable one? A global information network—one that connects the world and all its citizens in more or less the same way, with minor tweaks through effective management—could simply be unattainable.

The Mystery of Business Casual

The first time I tried on a pair of Allbirds sneakers, I was in the brand’s San Francisco boutique, sitting on a gently curved wooden stool designed to tip forward in aid of shoe-changing. The stool was created by the same people who design the start-up’s shoes, and it made me feel the same combination of familiarity and irritation: Do we really need tech to disrupt the established technology of stools and sneakers?

My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.

Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.

In theory, I should be the brand’s ideal customer: I hate uncomfortable shoes, I work in an office with a vaguely casual dress code, and I’ve owned several pairs of Roshe Ones. I’m a member of the digital creative class in which Allbirds has found its most dedicated market, which includes the Silicon Valley tech workers often characterized as the brand’s biggest fans. When I look around at work or in my neighborhood in New York City, I often spot a pair.

[Read: Why women’s shoes are so painful]

Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”

Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp.

Structurally and philosophically, the fashion industry isn’t great at dealing with change. American life has been casualizing since the 1990s, and nowhere is that clearer than in offices. The trend has left both designers and shoppers confused about what people should be wearing for jobs that were very different (or entirely nonexistent) before the advent of the cellphone.

Now Silicon Valley is stepping into the rift it helped create. Start-ups want to help people get dressed—and they might beat fashion at its own game.

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In another time, developing manufacturing or textile technologies and licensing them to existing brands might have been the whole story of these new companies. But the upheaval in the American wardrobe has let outsiders into fashion’s territory, according to the fashion historian Nancy Deihl. “The idea of ‘careerwear’ is so dispersed and a little less determined,” says Deihl, a professor at New York University. “The career office [at NYU] has these little workshops on what to wear to interviews and things because there isn’t this kind of monolithic style guidance out there.”

Not only has the American office gone more casual, but work itself has changed since Dockers started pushing business-casual dressing in 1992. More women than ever before are living full professional lives, and they need shoes that do much more than just look appropriately conservative with a skirt suit.  “It isn’t like, ‘Oh, I wear sneakers while I commute and then I put my heels on in the office,’” says Kerry Cooper, the president and chief operating officer of Rothy’s, a start-up that specializes in women’s shoes and rivals Allbirds in newfound prominence. “That’s just sort of a silly, nonmodern way of thinking.”

Six months ago, I bought a pair of Rothy’s. Nothing about start-up shoes had changed, but my job had: When The Atlantic hired me, I left the fashion world and found myself in a realm of indeterminate business-casualness. In spite of years spent writing about how people shop, I had no idea what I was supposed to wear. The harder I looked for an answer, the clearer it became that no one else did, either.

Rothy’s is a 3-year-old start-up that makes women’s flats from recycled plastic. The shoes are bright and feminine, which has made them common in the aesthetically pleasing environs of Instagram, where women post about their colorful collections. Instead of the leathers or textiles common in footwear manufacturing, Rothy’s knits its uppers (the part of the shoe that covers the foot) from soft, durable thread made from recycled plastic bottles.

Allbirds and Rothy’s have charted remarkably similar paths: Both companies started selling their shoes in 2016, and they say they’ve each pulled in more than $100 million in revenue and sold more than a million pairs of shoes. Both brands emphasize their sustainable materials and manufacturing practices. Although the companies are based on the same street in San Francisco, they do their biggest sales numbers on the East Coast: Allbirds sells better in New York City than anywhere else, while Rothy’s colorful flats are a hit in D.C.

In charting a way forward in textiles and manufacturing, both Rothy’s and Allbirds offer something valuable to fashion that the industry itself has repeatedly declined to pursue. For traditional fashion brands, which usually use third-party textiles and factories, designers have to start guessing what shoppers might want as much as a year in advance. Rothy’s says that its three-dimensional knitting process dramatically shrinks both the amount of material waste from manufacturing and the timeline between when the company places an order and when those shoes can be put up for sale.

“If there’s something bananas that no one could have predicted, we’d rather not overproduce colors we have to bet on. It’s such a waste,” says Erin Lowenberg, the Rothy’s creative director.

Allbirds, for its part, uses wool and eucalyptus textiles for its sneakers, and it worked with a Brazilian chemical company to develop foam soles made from the waste of sugarcane processing. In conventional sneakers, that foam is made with fossil fuels.

For any of the existing players in the fashion supply chain, there’s little incentive to invest in new materials or techniques. If a textile company develops a waste-reducing product, there’s no promise that brands will order it or their factories will be able to process it. If no one ever develops or orders new textiles, factories won’t shift to accommodate them. It’s a standoff, and it makes fashion allergic to innovation on a structural level. Manufacturing waste, combined with the overproduction that happens when designers inevitably make a wrong guess about consumers’ future whims, account for a huge portion of the fashion industry’s well-documented harm to the environment.

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As I tried on sneakers in the San Francisco Allbirds shop, I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. I looked for the sense of aesthetic doom that critics assured me the shoes’ popularity promised. Instead of the suffocating sameness or joyless efficiency that critics have ascribed to the shoes, I saw just a small, conventional boutique in which a handful of customers ranging from teen boys to female retirees were trying on sneakers.

Tim Brown, Allbirds’ co-founder, seems aware of—and chafed by—the insinuation that his shoes are boring, or only for tech bros. “I actually think there is excitement in the simplicity and calmness, which belies an enormous amount of work,” he says of the design. He also says that women have always made up the majority of Allbirds’ customers.

I was having trouble remembering what so many fashion people found threatening. Upstairs from the shop, in an impromptu studio, some Allbirds employees were photographing the simple sneakers against an Instagram-friendly peachy background with giant Monstera leaves as props. On the feet of the young women who worked in the office, the shoes were free of the jarring, swagless business-athlesiure aesthetic I’d always associated them with.

Fashion’s acceptance of Allbirds, like Uggs, Birkenstocks, Crocs, and Tevas before it, has started to seem both inevitable and, at worst, completely fine. All it takes for any particular shoe to make the crossover is for some already-cool people to decide it should. (Case in point: New Balance sneakers are currently having a moment.)

[Read: Sneakers have always been political shoes]

Silicon Valley has done more than enough to earn knee-jerk skepticism. For all the middle-class conveniences its new technologies and platforms have offered us, its tools have also been used for disseminating propaganda, inciting genocide, and destabilizing whatever notions of privacy most Americans might have had in the 1990s. Allbirds found its first audience on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, so the associations between the brand and internet behemoths were probably unavoidable, even if improving fashion manufacturing isn’t quite as questionable as anything Facebook might be up to on a given day. The fashion industry has long been selling vaguely harmful cultural influence, too, but it benefits from how much people want to be cool, and how well it has managed to be a gatekeeper to the designation.

If you don’t like the idea of wearing the same shoe for all occasions, Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds’ other co-founder, says that you can blame a familiar modern villain: your smartphone. “Everyone works on their phones now, and maybe in different chunks of the day and over the weekend,” he says. “It’s a different experience, and you’d expect the wardrobe to evolve so it can float in and out of those activities more fluidly.” A certain portion of the population doesn’t have an opportunity to go home and change into a dinner outfit after work, or a clear border between work and not-work at all. If your head’s always in the office, maybe you feel like your feet should be, too. And if that’s the case, the shoe isn’t the problem.

On the subway home from work recently, I looked at my fellow riders’ feet, as I had been for weeks while thinking about this story. I spotted a pair of Allbirds on an unfashionable Millennial man in dress pants, sure, but there were also two identical pairs of Gucci loafers on women wearing post-gym mixtures of athleisure and work clothing. Another rider was wearing a pair of Adidas Superstar sneakers exactly like my own. In San Francisco, I had seen plenty of Superstars while I was getting to the bottom of whether new start-ups were conspiring to make us all wear the same shoes.

I no longer have much of a grasp on what made the ubiquity of my sneakers or those Gucci loafers shoes less troubling than the ubiquity of Allbirds or Rothy’s, which now mostly just seem like a comfortable, useful tool to have in a busy person’s wardrobe, even if they don’t really meet my personal definition of “cool.” It all suddenly feels a bit Chicken Little. Maybe the sky wasn’t really falling. But if there’s one thing the fashion industry loves more than uncomfortable shoes, it’s a bit of drama.

Nobody Uses Dental Dams

The students have survived watching their teacher demonstrate how to put a condom on a “wooden penis model.” They’ve been assigned homework to find examples of contraception use in sex scenes in movies or TV shows. But before they go, they have one final lesson, one last barrier method for their teacher to sheepishly explain: the dental dam, a latex sheet used as a barrier during oral sex.

According to a sex-education curriculum used by school districts in San Diego, Boston, Portland, and elsewhere, their teacher would show them how to remove a dam from its package and place it over genitalia by forming an “O” with their hand. The instructor would inform the students that dental dams are flavored, and that they should only be used once and then thrown away. Most important, the teacher would instruct them to always use dental dams when performing oral sex on women, or they’ll be at risk of transmitting STIs.There’s just one problem: The pupils are unlikely to ever take their teacher up on the suggestion. Even the teachers, preaching about the dangers of STIs, have probably never bought one themselves.

[Read: The enduring unpopularity of the female condom]

Carol Queen, a staff sexologist for the sex-shop chain Good Vibrations, says the company sells less than 600 dams per month in the United States, across 13 stores and its website. Mary Jane Minkin, a clinical professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the Yale University School of Medicine, puts it more simply: “Nobody is using them.”

It might seem like that would spell doom for the dental dam. But it has managed to live on: first as a staple of sex education, but now as a symbol of sex positivity for queer women—whether or not anybody ever uses them.

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Sanford Barnum invented the rubber dental dam in 1864 to isolate individual teeth from saliva during dental surgery. For more than a century, the product’s use seems to have been limited to dental operations. But in the late 1980s, as millions of gay men began dying of AIDS, safe-sex advocates adopted the dental dam for an entirely new purpose.

It’s not clear who initiated this reinvention, which appears in records of gay media and activism as early as 1988. Clive Woodworth, the managing director of the Australian condom-manufacturing company Glyde Health, claims he invented the modern dental dam in 1993 after lesbians asked him for their own safe-sex product.

“They didn’t understand why companies like mine were selling sexual-health products for everyone but lesbians,” Woodworth says. “They were tired of cutting up condoms and saran wrap because they didn’t like the idea of fluid being transmitted without a barrier.”

At this time, there was no scientific consensus around HIV transmission, so as the epidemic killed millions of gay men, gay women thought they might be next.

“Lesbians were like, ‘Hey, we need services too! We don’t know what we need them for, but we need them,’” says Katie Batza, the author of Before AIDS.

In the nearly four decades since, science has shown that HIV is practically impossible to transmit between women, and dental dams were more a product of AIDS panic than of genuine medical necessity. But dental dams are still around, even if not because of consumer demand.

Their potential to prevent more common STDs has gone largely unrealized. Juliet Richters, a former professor of sexual health at the University of New South Wales, is one of few researchers who have performed quantitative research on dental-dam use. In one of her studies, she found that among 330 Australian women who had sex with women, only 9.7 percent had ever used a dental dam, and just 2.1 percent used them often. In another study, Richters found that only 4 percent of women prisoners in New South Wales had used the device. For context, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 93 percent of American women who have had sexual intercourse have used a condom at least once, though just 17 percent of people had used a condom for oral sex.

Richters wasn’t surprised by the results; she had never thought that dental dams were widely used. “They used to give out dental dams at lesbian events, but nobody took them,” Richters says. “You’d find them all left on the floor.”

From a medical perspective, it makes sense that dental dams aren’t highly sought after. Cunnilingus is one of the safest forms of sex in terms of STD transmission. Minkin, the Yale School of Medicine professor, says this is likely because the labia tissue is more similar to external skin than the internal tissue exposed during anal or vaginal sex, and thus less susceptible to STD transmission.

Sexually transmitted diseases and infections such as gonorrhea, herpes, and HPV can still be transmitted via oral sex, though the HPV vaccine adds another level of safety against that virus; 66 percent of adolescents now get the vaccine, which should reduce the risk of exposure via oral sex over time.

“If we can’t even get people to use condoms all the time, even when pregnancy is at stake, dental dams are a tough sell,” Minkin says. And compared with condoms, which are ubiquitous in pharmacies and convenience stores, dental dams are generally only available online or in sex shops. They’re pricey, too—often more than twice as expensive as condoms.

They are also awkward, both to talk about and to use, says Chris Barcelos, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who researches safe sex in queer communities. “People say dental dams take the fun out of oral sex,” Barcelos says. “You lose a lot of sensation and pleasure when you give or receive oral sex with a dam.” Jay Botsford, the co-host of the Queer Sex Ed podcast, agrees. “The people I know who’ve tried them really hated them, because they were just uncomfortable and awkward to use. It’s obvious that they weren’t made for sex,” Botsford says. Some new, speculative designs for dental dams are trying to solve those problems; among them is a dam in the form of women’s underwear. But that product hasn’t yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a viable way to prevent disease.

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So if dental dams aren’t widely used, accessible, pleasurable, or necessary to protect against serious STD risk, it could make sense to leave them in the past, a footnote in the history of the 1980s. But young people often still learn about them in sex ed.

Students in Farmington, Michigan, learn about the proper use of dental dams for oral sex. Students in Washoe County, Nevada, are reminded to check the expiration date of their dental dams, and store them in a cool place. Students in Kentucky public schools learn that having oral sex without a dental dam is unsafe and that dental dams help prevent HIV transmission, and students in Los Angeles learn that Saran wrap can be used in a pinch as a dental-dam substitute.

The decentralization of American education makes it practically impossible to know how many schools across the country teach about dental dams, or when they entered the sex-education canon, explains Alexandra Lord, the author of Condom Nation. The Centers for Disease Control recommends dental-dam use, but it does not mention dental dams in its study of school sex-education-program curricula around the United States.

Planned Parenthood includes dental dams as a consistent component of its curricula. “A big part of Planned Parenthood’s sex-education value system is helping young people make their own decisions,” says Julia Bennett, the director of learning strategy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “For some people, dental dams might make a lot of sense, but for other people, other safer-sex methods might be more useful to them. It’s not up to us to make that decision for them.” The sex educator Karen Rayne agrees, noting that while she knows people don’t really use dental dams, she’s still wary of cutting them out of her curricula. “I would never want someone to contract an STI because I didn’t teach them about dental dams,” she says.

This is the common justification for including dental dams in sex ed: There’s no harm. But some people feel uncomfortable advocating for a product they know is rarely actually used. “There’s this inside joke among sex educators that part of our job is to tell people about dental dams, when nobody is actually using them,” Barcelos says. They worry they’ll be seen as hypocritical, advocating for a supposedly safer option while ignoring the fact that the option is rarely actually exercised. “We’re taught to impose this pressure to use dental dams, even though nobody does, including us,” Botsford adds.

Botsford believes sex educators are taught to emphasize STD prevention in this way because of a preoccupation with negative sex outcomes rather than pleasure. “We don’t blame people for getting cancer or getting the flu; we blame the existence of those illnesses. But with STIs, the problem isn’t the existence of the virus: It’s the fact that you had sex and you didn’t do the things you should have done.”

This fixation on the potential harms of sex is embedded in the basic structure of sex education, says Jessica Halem, who does outreach for the Harvard Medical School’s Sexual and Gender Minorities Health Equity Initiative.

“Sex education should center pleasure, and disease and infection conversations should happen with pediatricians,” Halem says. “Why don’t we talk about HPV alongside the flu? They’re both illnesses that can be vaccinated against, but only one of them is all wrapped up in anxiety about sex. If you reframe sex education [around] pleasure, a lot of this stuff just seems silly. Can people even achieve orgasm with a dental dam? I have no idea.”

Halem argues that dental dams should be struck from curricula entirely. “If you only have a short period of time to educate young people about sex, dental dams should not be taking up any of those precious moments,” Halem says. “I just really don’t want anybody not having oral sex because they can’t find a dental dam. My god, that’s a tragedy!”

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Even if no one uses them, dental dams can still serve a purpose. To some, the existence of dental dams is a validation of a type of sex often minimized or ignored.

“There’s a broader cultural idea that lesbian sex is a joke, and that when queer women have sex, they’re just gently rubbing up against each other or something,” Barcelos says. “Using things like dental dams is one way to establish that [lesbian] sex is really sex. If you need a product, that makes it real.”

[Read: LGBT students are not safe at school]

Maureen Kelly, the founder of Planned Parenthood’s LGBT Health & Wellness program, has noticed the impact of that validation firsthand. She’s had young queer people in her sex-ed classrooms come thank her for talking about dental dams, as even just mentioning the existence of dental dams acknowledges a type of sex that centers both women’s pleasure and queer identity.

“Young queer kids in particular are very attuned to whether or not their identities are being included in an education setting,” Kelly says. “When they notice that they are seen, that makes a huge difference and can go a long way in education.” For Kelly, that might be reason enough to keep dental dams around: They can be symbols of security and validation, even if nobody is actually using them.

Who’s Really Buying Property in San Francisco?

The Irony of Mueller-Report Profiteering

When the Justice Department releases Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report this morning, it will be published on the Special Counsel’s Office website. By federal law, it will be placed in the public domain. That means you’ll be able to download the report for free to read on your computer or smartphone, to print out, or to email to your friends who don’t know where to find it.

That’s not stopping Barnes & Noble, the bookseller, from offering its own version of the Mueller report as a free download on its Nook tablet-and-app ebook platform. “We’ve received strong demand from our customers for this report,” Tim Mantel, the company’s chief merchandising officer said in a statement, “and want to make it as easy as possible for them to access it for free as soon as possible.”

Barnes & Noble is also selling a print edition of the report, with an introduction by the famed constitutional-law expert Alan Dershowitz. The paperback costs $9.20. If Dershowitz isn’t your bag, don’t worry, there will be other options. The Washington Post’s edition, for sale on Amazon for $10.50, promises “exclusive analysis” by the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning staff, a prospect that the book’s publisher, Scribner, claims will make the edition “the most complete and authoritative available.”

[Read: The Mueller-industrial complex collapses]

This isn’t anything new. The Post also added its analysis to an edition of Kenneth Starr’s report on the Bill Clinton investigation in 1998. But back then, many Americans weren’t yet online, and they certainly weren’t glued to the internet like today’s citizenry. Ebook readers such as Kindles and Nooks didn’t exist. If you were lucky enough to have a brand-new 56k modem, downloading a large PDF could have taken an hour.

But today your grandfather and your 6-year-old both know how to find the report on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. So when Barnes & Noble offers a free download of the report, it’s mostly taking advantage of the opportunity to market the Nook e-reader and app, a platform that many might have forgotten about entirely in light of the Amazon Kindle’s market share. Attention is a powerful force, and marketers know that huge barrels of the stuff will be focused on all things Mueller today. Might as well take advantage of it. (Barnes & Noble declined to comment on the record.)

That’s nothing new, either. With consumer attention fragmented across the internet’s shrapnel, advertising has become about hitting countless narrow targets, which are then aggregated into a profitable market. So when something really does become a national or global phenomenon, attracting huge swaths of the population’s collective eyeballs all at once, marketers chomp at the bit to take advantage.

Earlier this week, Game of Thrones offered one such rare example. Improbably, the fantasy epic became an international sensation, making it a lusty mark for promotions and tie-ins. There were Game of Thrones Oreos. Duolingo, the naggy language-learning app, offered a course in High Valyrian. Adidas released a set of Ultraboost sneakers themed after the great houses of Westeros. The Mueller report is Game of Thrones for the real world—minus the dragons, but with all the political intrigue. It’s no surprise brands want to take advantage of it.

And then, of course, there’s what comes next: Once the report is released, anyone is free to use it for any purpose, including commercial use. That means you can do whatever else you want with the report—no copyright restrictions prevent you from making motivational posters, screen-printing T-shirts, or embroidering baseball caps with excerpts. You could also market your own print-book edition of the report to compete with the one Barnes & Noble is selling.

But, of course, this isn’t a prestige TV show; it’s a years-long investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And unlike all the votive candles and Mueller Time T-shirts people made to stir up juju for Mueller indictments, this is the report itself we’re talking about. The end result of an investigation into the possible corruption of the highest U.S. office by a foreign power, cut apart and sold off for scrap.

The whole maneuver makes for a funny echo of the possible corruption the special counsel set out to investigate. Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents. The former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.

[Read: The Trump Organization says it’s “not practical” to comply with the emoluments clause]

Even if the contents of the Mueller report don’t snare the president for conspiracy with a foreign power, Trump has profited personally from his presidency anyway. His 2017 travel ban excluded nations where he has investments. A $60,000 Kuwaiti consular party was moved to the Trump International Hotel, reportedly due to political pressure. He makes frequent use of his organization’s properties, including the Trump National Golf Club and Mar-a-Lago, spending millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. The initiation fees at Mar-a-Lago doubled to $200,000 after Trump’s election, signaling to some a direct intention to use the club as an ante for political access to the president.

Efforts like these are abnormal at best and unconstitutional at worst. But they also represent an extreme version of the same logic that lets Barnes & Noble hawk its e-reader app by means of the taxpayer-funded Mueller report. If the government produces raw materials that citizens can exploit for profit if they choose, then why not take advantage of the opportunity? The analogy is a false one, of course—commercializing public-domain documents is not the same as profiting from public office in violation of the emoluments clause. But the spirit of the free ebook download risks advancing the same end, one in which the government is not a civic organization that serves its people and asks nothing in return, but just another resource to mine for profit.

Instagram Memers Are Unionizing

The Images That Could Help Rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral

Before the tragedy seen all around the world, flames leaping from the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral, there was a smaller one, thousands of miles away in upstate New York.

Andrew Tallon, a pioneering architectural historian and father of four, died on November 16, 2018, from brain cancer. He was 49. He had dedicated his life to the study of medieval architecture, its mysteries and resonances, blending in his interest in technology to create novel ways of studying centuries-old buildings.

“When you’re working on medieval buildings, it’s difficult to have the impression you can say anything new. They’ve been looked at and written about for ages,” Tallon told a documentary crew in 2015. “So I’ve been using more sophisticated technology these days to try to get new answers from the buildings.”

And so it was that in 2010, Tallon, an art professor at Vassar, took a Leica ScanStation C10 to Notre-Dame and, with the assistance of Columbia’s Paul Blaer, began to painstakingly scan every piece of the structure, inside and out. They mounted the Leica on a tripod, put up markers throughout the space, and set the machine to work. Over five days, they positioned the scanner again and again—50 times in all—to create an unmatched record of the reality of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring buildings, represented as a series of points in space. Tallon also took high-resolution panoramic photos to map onto the three-dimensional forms that the laser scanner could create.

“Andrew was relentless at scanning full buildings,” his colleague John Ochsendorf, of MIT, told me. “He would get on top of the vaults and under the roofs to capture the geometry.”

(A year before he died, Tallon posted a brief tour of the upper parts of the choir as a 3-D video to YouTube, embedded below.)

Now, with the building having sustained untold but very substantial damage, the data that Tallon and Blaer created could be an invaluable aid to whoever is charged with rebuilding the structure. Ochsendorf described the data as “essential for capturing [the structure] as built geometry.” (He added, however, that the cathedral, no matter what happens now, “is irreplaceable, of course.”)

Tallon and Blaer’s laser data consist of 1 billion data points, structured as “point clouds,” which software can render into images of the three-dimensional space. Stitch them together, inside and out, map the photographs onto the precise 3-D models, and you have a full digital re-creation of incredible detail and resolution.

“I saw this happening, and I had two thoughts,” Blaer told me of watching the cathedral engulfed in flames. “One thought was that I was kind of relieved that he didn’t actually have to see this happen. But on the other hand, he knew it so well and had so much information about how it’s constructed, he would have been so helpful in terms of rebuilding it.”

Laser scans like Tallon and Blaer’s represent a significant development in the restoration of historic buildings. “Having the scans is incredibly important in any kind of reconstruction,” said Raymond Pepi, the president of Building Conservation Associates, which was the restoration consultant for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Megan Rispoli is a specialist in restoring religious buildings and ruins; she also worked on the St. Patrick’s project with her previous firm, Murphy Burnham & Buttrick. She said the value of the laser-scanning data is that they capture the buildings as they really are.

“It would capture the cathedral in all its true dimension and imperfection,” Rispoli told me. “When you draw a building, you tend to make things perfect right angles, and it helps you make sense of the building. But that isn’t actually what exists.”

For a structure such as Notre-Dame, built over hundreds of years, it’s almost certainly the case that any drawing or archival material about its construction would be incomplete or incorrect, the preservationist and architectural historian Lindsay Peterson told me. Given that, the laser data might be the ground truth in a way that nothing else is.

“Historic drawings or even modern drawings are only accurate up to a certain degree,” said Peterson, now with the preservation consultancy Higgins Quasebarth & Partners. “Laser scans get you accuracy up to the millimeter.”

But there’s a problem with all that detail: That much data requires massive storage and processing power to use. So it tends to be stored quite locally, by just a small number of people. Pepi, for example, said that his firm tends to hold on to the laser data for its project partners, primarily because its clients (such as churches) just don’t have the infrastructure to use it.

The work at Notre-Dame has not yet begun, but it will be a long, long process. Rispoli thought the first step might be emergency shoring for the walls, as the roof has endured so much damage. Then the rebuilding firms will have to assess the integrity of the stone in the rest of the structure. Pepi said that they’d drill holes in the stone to get core samples, and then they’d look at them alongside known good stone from the cathedral to get a sense of “the physical condition and mineralogical properties of the stone.”

But as the cathedral officials and architectural authorities in France and around the world begin to consider what to do, they will come looking for the laser-data files that Tallon created. Blaer estimated that, despite the high resolution of the scans and panoramic photographs, the files would be roughly a terabyte, small enough to fit on a single hard drive, but unlikely to be stored in the cloud. All those data now exist on a single disk, a tiny portal into the past, which is sitting somewhere on Earth. Blaer thought it might be in the hands of Tallon’s students at Vassar. But Ochsendorf thought the data were most likely with the rest of Tallon’s archive, in the possession of his widow, Marie, who held Andrew in her arms as he died.

A cathedral calls us to consider time beyond the boundaries of one life, enclosing us in a grand view of what humanity can do that humans cannot. Andrew Tallon will not reappear among the living, but the work he put into recording stone and wood as it was built by countless hands over time may restore that creation—and embed the man into the place he venerated.

Behind Every Robot Is a Human

Hundreds of human reviewers across the globe, from Romania to Venezuela, listen to audio clips recorded from Amazon Echo speakers, usually without owners’ knowledge, Bloomberg reported last week. We knew Alexa was listening; now we know someone else is, too.

This global review team fine-tunes the Amazon Echo’s software by listening to clips of users asking Alexa questions or issuing commands, and then verifying whether Alexa responded appropriately. The team also annotates specific words the device struggles with when it’s addressed in different accents.

According to Amazon, users can opt out of the service, but they seem to be enrolled automatically. Amazon says these recordings are anonymized, with any identifying information removed, and that each of these recorded exchanges came only after users engaged with the device by uttering the “wake word.” But in the examples in Bloomberg’s report—a woman overheard singing in the shower, a child screaming for help—the users seem unaware of the device.

“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system,” Amazon said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg, noting that only an “extremely small” sample of records are annotated.

The revelation tells us a lot about how “smart” devices really work. Alexa-enabled speakers can and do interpret speech, but Amazon relies on human guidance to make Alexa, well, more human—to help the software understand different accents, recognize celebrity names, and respond to more complex commands. This is true of many artificial intelligence–enabled products. They’re prototypes. They can only approximate their promised functions while humans help with what Harvard researchers have called “the paradox of automation’s last mile.” Advancements in AI, the researchers write, create temporary jobs such as tagging images or annotating clips, even as the technology is meant to supplant human labor. In the case of the Echo, gig workers are paid to improve its voice-recognition software—but then, when it’s advanced enough, it will be used to replace the hostess in a hotel lobby.

A 2016 paper by researchers at Stanford University used a computer vision system to infer, with 88 percent accuracy, the political affiliation of 22 million people based on what car they drive and where they live. Traditional polling would require a full staff, a hefty budget, and months of work. The system completed the task in two weeks. But first, it had to know what a car was. The researchers paid workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform to manually tag thousands of images of cars, so the system would learn to differentiate between shapes, styles, and colors.

It may be a rude awakening for Amazon Echo owners, but AI systems require enormous amounts of categorized data, before, during, and after product launch. The ideal state is a feedback loop: The Echo performs decently, voice data from customers are collected and used to improve the service, and then more people buy it as it improves and more data are collected, further refining it. This is true for very different types of AI products.

For example, human workers watch and manually tag footage uploaded from Amazon’s Ring products, surveillance cameras that homeowners can install on their doorbells and front porches. Facebook’s content-moderation AI relies on thousands of people across the globe teaching software what counts as objectionable in different contexts. Another loop: Humans flag content, the AI gets better at detecting it, more people use Facebook as it gets safer, and the AI gets smarter as more content is flagged. In all cases, Silicon Valley would have us believe that AI is smart enough to replace humans, when in reality it only works because of the role of hidden human labor in creating and maintaining these loops. AI is always a human-machine collaboration. It can accomplish incredible feats, but rarely alone.

Astra Taylor, a writer and documentary director who studies what she calls “the automation charade,” notes that companies have a vested interest in obscuring the role of humans in automation’s last mile. “If ‘friction’ is actually knowing it’s a human being on the other side of your smart speaker,” she says, “then that’s a discomfort we have to face.”

The Bloomberg report also featured a harrowing account of Amazon’s global team overhearing what might have been a sexual assault or violent encounter. Workers reported to Bloomberg that Amazon superiors told them to ignore the sounds and not file a police report. (When reached for comment, Amazon referred The Atlantic to statements emphasizing encryption and the security of its cloud storage.) Taylor notes this is another of automation’s paradoxes: To make machines smarter, the humans that train them have to act dumber.

“What is so tragic about that piece is, it’s also forcing the humans to be less intelligent, to be less empathic,” she says. “They have to be trained basically to say, ‘Oh, that’s not relevant. I’m going to be less human, less affected by that.’”

Taylor argues that hiding human labor means people act more like machines, without personal ethics or empathy. In a more extreme case, obscuring humans means removing choice entirely. In February, The Intercept reported that Google contracted with the Department of Defense to augment government drones’ computer vision systems, outraging employees. Drones with computer vision systems are capable of “seeing” their targets—but they still need refinement and precision, so Google contracted hundreds of human workers to manually tag items and help create its data set. According to The Intercept’s report, they had no idea what their labor was being used for.

Humans are part of what makes any AI system work, and they bring all their dumb, human baggage with them: privacy and eavesdropping concerns, potential biases, individual preferences and judgments. That doesn’t always serve the interest of making society frictionless, smart, or convenient. But hiding their role—essentially trying to make the human-machine systems that engineer AI less human—only serves Silicon Valley’s fiction that AI is powerful, rational, and inscrutable; the same fiction the industry tells about itself. Exposing the human labor of advanced technology uncovers both.

The Uber IPO Is a Landmark

Silicon Valley Wants to Be Destroyed by Aliens

In the 1996 Roland Emmerich film Independence Day, a powerful alien civilization attacks Earth. Huge saucers 15 miles across lurk over major cities, literally foreshadowing their destruction. When the attack finally arrives, the vessels focus their power, signaled for cinema as an aquamarine glow, onto major monuments in each urban location. All are synecdoches for the cities and their cultures: The White House explodes, and with it the promise of representative democracy. An explosion radiates down the Empire State Building, an icon of industrial humanity’s rejection of impossibility.

One of them is not like the others. In downtown Los Angeles, the Library Tower (now known as the U.S. Bank Tower) took the hit on the city’s behalf, its windows shattering as the alien beam pummeled through it. Once the tallest building in the city, the postmodern skyscraper bore negligible emotional value for Angelenos, whose urban glory was never defined by tall buildings anyway. But a more culturally relevant target, such as the Hollywood sign, wouldn’t have offered sufficient carnage for a big-budget action film. When the Getty Center opened at a Santa Monica Mountain precipice overlooking Brentwood, Bel Air, and Westwood the next year, in 1997, one critic noted that finally Los Angeles might have a landmark worth destroying in film, the city’s native medium.

Today, the same problem faces Silicon Valley. Flooded with wealth and influence, the array of South Bay cities that make up the high-tech business sector have few meaningful architectural features to mark their cultural importance. That’s why the San Jose City Council will consider a proposal this month to launch a design competition for a landmark “that symbolizes its power and reach,” as The New York Times put it. The plan reveals the hidden terror of a region driven by the immaterial nature of the software business. A monument’s purpose is to make permanent something transient. And to be truly eternal, any good landmark must also invite, and even desire, its own destruction. In pursuing one, Silicon Valley makes an unusual concession. It too is mortal, and fears death as much as anyone.

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San Francisco has monuments worthy of destruction, accomplishments of architecture and engineering both that tug heartstrings and record human accomplishment directly in the built environment: the Golden Gate Bridge, of course, which has been destroyed repeatedly in film. Or the Transamerica Pyramid, a distinctive, white-quartz landmark in the financial district that was the city’s tallest skyscraper until Salesforce Tower captured that laurel in 2018.

[Read: The myth of Apple’s great design]

The latter structure was called Transbay Tower until Salesforce signed a lucrative long-term lease to become the structure’s anchor tenant. It too has not achieved landmark status. Salesforce is one of only a few children of the dot-com economy that didn’t burn out as an adult; it’s still technically called Salesforce.com Inc., a vestige of the days when a URL marked a distinction. But the company couldn’t produce a more boring product: customer-relationship-management software, an Information Age approach to a problem as old as modern industry. That this particular big-tech company would name the tallest building in San Francisco, rather than Facebook or Google or Uber, testifies to the anodyne aspirations of even bigger tech. When it comes to making a mark on the world, the tech sector prefers to do it through its products and services, not through its physical plants.

That’s a history as old as Silicon Valley itself. When the region, once known as Santa Clara Valley, transitioned from an agricultural and packaging economy to semiconductors, and then to information, it grew haphazardly. Famously, the sector celebrates the suburban garage where Hewlett-Packard was started (and later, Apple’s copycat) as its birthplace. As hobby became industry, low-profile, tilt-up buildings were constructed to accommodate the growing need for office space. Forgettable and ugly, these structures persist, with occasional efforts to make them slightly more attractive and sustainable going unnoticed.

Eventually, the tilt-ups evolved into corporate campuses, like those of Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park. Here, the box of architectural pedigree gets ticked (Frank Gehry drafted Facebook’s campus; Bjarke Ingels will design Google’s new Sunnyvale campus), but few will ever notice—partly because they aren’t allowed inside. Apple’s new campus in Cupertino is an exception: a giant, obsidian torus that strongly resembles the alien craft that destroyed the globe in Independence Day. Even there, the architectural sublime quickly gave way to the slapstick, as employees and guests reportedly injured themselves walking into the building’s glass walls and doors.

[Read: Even amid scandal, Facebook is unstoppable]

It’s no accident that this would be the year Silicon Valley became eager to cement its legacy in the built environment. A “techlash” has swept the sector, driven by startling revelations about the role of companies like Facebook and Google in undermining public life. Despite the outcry, big-tech firms like these remain largely unaffected, pulling in record profits even as they seem to preside over a burning world.

And yet, it doesn’t literally burn like New York or Paris does in Independence Day. In the movie, destruction’s impact is made of real fire, or at least the visual-effects equivalent. Technology’s apocalypse is a modest one. It leaves no traces worth fictionalizing or committing to film. As privacy erodes, as democracy unravels, as wealth concentrates, and as comfort abrades, it’s still hard to point a finger at the cause. Zuckerberg at a desk in Menlo Park? A sea of anonymous Google servers in a rural Oregon data center? Government and industry alike once recorded their power and influence in the material world, with bridges and skyscrapers meant to bear permanent testament to human impact on civilized life. Silicon Valley has realized that its impact is just as substantial, and whatever its pretensions to permanence, no less susceptible to decline.

Your Health Data Are a Gold Mine for Advertisers

Hospitals across the nation are piloting voice-enabled smart speakers in patients’ rooms, including Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Boston Children’s Hospital. These institutions are hoping that smart speakers will make patients more comfortable, help staff stay organized, and, in some cases, keep people out of hospitals and emergency rooms altogether.

Early results are promising, but health-care providers are still figuring how to protect privacy once smart speakers know our intimate medical details. Searching online for medical help, even for common ailments, already reveals much more than people realize. That data has proved valuable both to health officials and to big businesses.

The Cedars-Sinai pilot will send more than 100 Amazon Echos to patients’ rooms. The devices will perform skills typical of the technology, such as playing music or changing the TV channel, and specific to the hospital, such as alerting nurses or caretakers that a patient wants help to get up to use the bathroom. Boston Children’s is trying out a different method, using Alexa-enabled speakers to help staff stay on top of their work by asking Alexa for information on staffing and bed availability.

Boston Children’s has also come up with an in-home application for voice-enabled health care, targeted to parents of young children. The hospital created an Alexa skill called KidsMD, which lets parents ask their speaker what to do when their children are sick. BCH has also developed a similar skill called Flu Doctor. John Brownstein, the hospital’s chief innovation officer, explains that the skills can save parents time and money.

“Oftentimes, [emergency rooms] are flooded with cases where an individual could be treated at home or they could wait the next day to go to a physician’s office,” Brownstein says. “These tools are helping triage people.” Keeping some patients out of the ER when they don’t need to be there could in turn keep diseases from spreading, Brownstein says.

Parents can ask KidsMD for help with cold and flu symptoms such as fever or stomachache. Brownstein explains that the skill follows a similar format to Thermia, a tool on the BCH website that allows parents to enter a kid’s age, weight, and symptoms to find advice on how to respond to a fever. “We just took that framework that we use at the hospital and put it into a chatbot,” he says.

[Read: Alexa wants to know how you’re feeling today]

But because consumer voice assistants are not HIPAA compliant, they can make only simple health recommendations. Health-care providers are exploring how voice assistants might become fully integrated in a medical environment, but these are early days. Each prospective use comes with prospective drawbacks. Doctors placing medical orders via speaker risk accidentally ordering the incorrect medicine or dosage if they’re misheard. Directly speaking with devices might be faster than reviewing paperwork, but could slow things down if Wi-Fi is spotty. And the risk of storing health records, lab tests, or medical bills on a private company’s non-HIPAA-compliant servers is huge.

“Privacy is one of our top concerns as we’re building tools,” Brownstein says. “We kept privacy in mind as we were building our KidsMD skills.”

Privacy foregrounds the conversation as providers explore voice-enabled health care and balance legal concerns with giving sound medical advice. This isn’t true for traditional online searches, where, as far as advertisers are concerned, seeking advice for dealing with cold and flu symptoms is the same as shopping for shoes. Online, everything is caught up in the same search-engine dragnet. Mucinex, for example, used Google’s browser data to target users with YouTube ads based on recent searches or a Google-determined “affinity” for healthy living.

Smart devices are becoming part of this trend as well. Amazon has filed a patent for a voice assistant that would recommend cold and flu medicine if it overhears you coughing. The health-care start-up Kinsa drew sharp criticism from privacy experts last year for selling illness data. Kinsa makes a smart thermometer that takes a user’s temperature, then instantly uploads it to a server along with gender and location information.

Kinsa used this data to create real-time maps of where people were getting sick and to refine its flu predictions for the season, with accuracy levels matching those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it also sold the information to Clorox, which beefed up its marketing of disinfecting wipes and similar products in zip codes where thermometers reported a spike in fevers.

Boston Children’s KidsMD skill is compatible with a different smart thermometer, Nokia’s Thermo, but Brownstein says the data isn’t shared for advertising purposes. Still, that doesn’t mean parents aren’t contributing to health-care data through all the other ways they try to find out what to do when their kids have a temperature.

Using smart devices or web searches to find quick advice can save time and money for patients, parents, and overburdened ERs alike. But doing so feeds into a far-reaching advertising network that turns those searches into lucrative data. No matter what you’re doing on the internet, it seems, someone, somewhere, is making money off of it.

‘The Internet Isn’t Interested in Nuance’

On April 4, 2015, Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a police officer who had stopped Scott for a nonfunctioning brake light. A shaky video taken by a witness revealed some essential facts: Scott had been running away when he was shot from behind, and Slager appeared to toss an unidentified object near Scott’s body following the shooting. But that was where the observable truth seemed to end.

Nearly 1,000 miles from the scene of the South Carolina incident, a Canadian college student watched the iPhone video. His name was Daniel Voshart, and his studies in cinematography focused on image stabilization. He applied his latest techniques to the footage and managed to stabilize a small section of the video. Suddenly, the previously blurry object was in clear view—and it appeared to be a Taser. When Voshart played back the stabilized footage, he could see Slager drop the Taser next to Scott’s body. It was potentially disturbing key evidence.

Voshart was outraged. Wanting to see Slager brought to justice for what he perceived to be a racially motivated murder and an attempted cover-up, he looped the footage into an animated GIF and posted it to Reddit. The community responded to his anger in kind. That’s when Rich Williamson, a close friend of Voshart’s, decided to start documenting the situation as it unfolded.

“The internet called for blood,” Williamson told me, “which pushed Daniel to look deeper. He felt partly responsible for the narrative of Slager planting evidence. He decided that the most complete narrative of what happened would only reveal itself by going frame by frame and taking the time to stabilize the entire video.”

Williamson’s short documentary Frame 394 bears witness to the moral quandaries that Voshart faced as a result of his efforts to elucidate the incident. When Voshart began to uncover a more ambiguous situation than the one his initial work had suggested, he found that “the internet wasn’t interested in a nuanced perspective,” Williamson said. The film lays bare the complexities of truth and justice in the age of viral media.

“We tend to focus on easily digestible nuggets of information at the expense of the bigger picture,” Williamson continued, “often ignoring detail and the historical context.” Williamson said he hopes that the film illuminates the systems “surrounding and protecting” the culture of policing and how they affect communities of color. He also hopes the film generates conversation about the nature of good and evil. “It’s easy to see Slager’s actions as evil,” he said. “It’s harder to reckon that his actions are partly a result of police training that churns out soldiers instead of community leaders. In equal measure, it’s important for someone who thinks that Scott was running based on some criminal intent to understand a reality in which running seems to be the only choice for some people.”

Following Voshart’s story closely has afforded Williamson a firsthand perspective on the way that the internet has shaped public opinion and discourse. “Technology has really pulled back the curtain on who we are, and it’s accelerated the conversation about every issue that exists today,” he said. “Whether we can grow together and make sense of all of the chatter is the question we have yet to answer.”

What Mark Zuckerberg Thinks People Want

Facebook has always been good at giving people what they want, whether they like it or not.

That was the premise of News Feed, the most successful attention sponge in internet history. When Snapchat’s vertical, ephemeral “Story” format took off, Facebook brought it to its core service, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Facebook doesn’t create new behaviors, but it ruthlessly and shamelessly optimizes itself for them, mutating them to suit its own purposes.

Which is why it is worth paying attention to Mark Zuckerberg’s new note, describing the public rationale for his plan to create an integrated, encrypted messaging back end that unites his company’s products. While the former FCC technologist Ashkan Soltani called it “a competition play to head off any potential regulatory efforts to limit data sharing across services,” Zuckerberg painted it as a natural evolution of the Facebook Inc. communities’ desires.

In many ways, Zuckerberg’s new theories of privacy are a repudiation of his company’s long-established goals of increasing “openness” and “sharing” in the world. And it’s important to remember that Zuckerberg is talking to three audiences with a note like this: (1) his own employees, who see what their boss is publicly committing to; (2) investors, regulators, and other power players; and (3) Facebook’s billions of users.

While many Facebook users might have been skeptical of the company’s goals and stated intentions, insiders have tended to fully buy into the company’s mission. Before 2017, that was to “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” in which encrypted private messaging fits only after considerable ideological renovation. Since mid-2017, the mission has been “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” The current moves fit roughly within that framework—except that, unlike the past couple of years’ missives about building “community,” today’s post doesn’t contain a single instance of that word. The new rhetoric centers on “people,” a word that appears 66 times in the document, and what those people want.

[Read: Zuckerberg says balancing Facebook’s business and community is ‘quite easy’]

Zuckerberg needs to do this, for all his audiences, to show that Facebook is merely following the dictates of the people, rather than shaping usage to expand Facebook’s corporate power and profits, while cutting down regulators’ options. “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room,” he wrote, noting that “we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.”

But as he has long done, Zuckerberg easily tacks between description and prescription. “People should be comfortable being themselves,” he wrote, “and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later.”

Replace “People should” with “Facebook wants people to,” and it makes more sense that a CEO would write such a sentence. Having to actively evaluate the pros and cons of posting almost certainly drives down how much people post.

The solution, then, is to reduce the perceived downsides of posting to Facebook products, but also to make people feel as if posting is an indication of being comfortable being themselves.

Another con of communicating on the internet is that a multitude of hacks and other data exposures have shown the medium to be insecure. Thus, Zuckerberg argues for end-to-end message encryption, which ensures that not even Facebook can see the messages on its platforms. “Messages and calls are some of the most sensitive private conversations people have,” he wrote, “and in a world of increasing cyber security threats and heavy-handed government intervention in many countries, people want us to take the extra step to secure their most private data.”

Here, many civil libertarians would agree. They’ve argued for end-to-end encryption for many years. But the simple “people want” framing for this kind of issue doesn’t make sense. People might want their own messages to be secure while supporting law enforcement’s access to others’ messages. People might want their own messages to be secure while worrying that end-to-end encryption makes it more difficult to keep dangerous misinformation from spreading.

[Read: India’s lynching epidemic and the problem with blaming tech]

The version of “people want” that Zuckerberg uses here relates only to the atomized individual, the user, not the citizen or the person as part of any meaningful collectivity outside Facebook Inc.

If this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks people want, his company will try to build products that satisfy these desires.

“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

But Facebook’s execution on even venerable goals has always left the company open to criticism. Facebook always gets what it wants, but the people? Our trade-offs with the company have been much more complicated since the month it was founded.

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Pocket Offers a Glimpse Into a 15-Year-Old’s iPhone

Imagine you’ve hacked into someone else’s phone and are consuming all his texts, videos, Snapchats, and Instagrams in real time. Now imagine that someone is a 15-year-old boy, and you’re watching his life unfold entirely through the lens of an iPhone. That’s the premise behind Pocket, a captivating new short film starring the former Nickelodeon actor Mace Coronel. (Editor’s note: Pocket contains graphic sexual imagery.)

The film, which was shot vertically and is designed to be consumed on mobile, follows Jake Tillner (Coronel) as he navigates school, home, and social life. Parts of Jake’s days look familiar to anyone who has gone through puberty: the awkward social interactions with classmates, a history test, flirting. Throughout it all, Jake’s phone plays an outsize role and acts as the lens through which we see his world unfolding.

Jake uses his phone during school to make memes and videos mocking one of his classmates and share them in a group chat. He cradles it between his legs when he attempts to cheat on an exam. He uses it to escape confrontations with his mother, to frequently watch porn, and to creep on models’ Instagram photos.

To Jake, the phone is an extension of his body. It’s with him 24/7—at one point, he even pauses a shower to check a text. After Instagram-stalking and befriending his crush, Farrah, Jake exchanges sexts with her via Snapchat. But when he sees Farrah in person and finally gets the opportunity to have a conversation with her unmediated by a screen, he can’t.

[Read: When kids realize their whole life is already online]

In 2013, a film titled Noah debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and was heralded as a perfect encapsulation of “the way we receive information and the way we communicate now: constantly, simultaneously, compulsively, endlessly, and more and more often, solitarily.” The 17-minute film takes place entirely on a desktop screen and documents the life of a teenage boy as he grapples with being dumped by his girlfriend. The story is told through Facebook messages, Skype, video games, and Chatroulette. “Noah is unlike anything you’ve seen before in a movie—only because it is exactly like what many of us see on our computers all the time,” Fast Company declared.

Six years later, most teenagers—and many adults—wouldn’t think of touching Facebook, Skype, or any of the other desktop applications featured in Noah: In 2019, our social lives are manifested through our smartphones. Mishka Kornai and Zach Wechter, who directed Pocket, said Noah was a huge inspiration, but “the digital world in 2013 still felt like something we could plug into when we got home,” said Wechter. “Now the digital world comes with us wherever we go.”

That mobile transition has proved difficult for directors to capture—both because the nuances of communication have been upended in the past several years and because the medium has physically transformed. As our social lives are expressed through smaller and smaller screens, capturing daily interactions on film has been a constant challenge for directors. In 2010, the TV series Sherlock began showing text messages on-screen. Later, shows such as Glee and House of Cards followed suit. At the time, text messaging had been a prevalent form of communication for more than a decade, and show writers could no longer simply ignore it or rely on difficult-to-read, over-the-shoulder shots of phone screens.

In 2013, Facebook, then the dominant social platform, appeared more frequently on-screen, but most filmmakers still relied on filming the web version via laptop, or showing screenshots. Films such as Noah, and later Unfriended, Unfriended: Dark Web, and last year’s crime thriller Searching, are all part of a group of films that pioneered telling stories entirely through a desktop interface. While these movies do capture a fuller picture of how intertwined the internet is with our lives, they still rely on a desktop experience, not a mobile one.

[Read: Why modern human interactions are so hard to film]

Only in the past year or so have TV shows and movies actually made a notable effort to integrate modern, mobile-first social platforms into story lines. Some shows, such as Netflix’s social-media stalker drama You, feature characters scrolling on their phones with their Instagram feed hovering in space. Season 2 of American Vandal centers on an Instagram prankster. The movie Eighth Grade features an aspiring tween vlogger whose social anxiety is exacerbated by platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Last month, the television show Broad City even kicked off its new season with an episode told entirely through Instagram Stories.

Pocket feels different because it tells the story from the perspective of the phone itself, rather than an outside observer. The film seamlessly bounces the viewer from iMessage to Instagram, to Snapchat, to the selfie camera, to the Notes app, the same way we all bounce around in our normal lives. Kornai and Wechter said that this method of filming allowed them to capture subtleties of digital communication that can be lost on traditional film: the pain of watching typing bubbles appear and then disappear, being left on “seen,” pressing your finger down on a Snapchat photo so you can view it once more before it expires.

Telling stories this way is not easy. Kornai and Wechter had to construct and 3-D-print a custom rig in order to simultaneously record the phone’s screen and the view from the front- and rear-facing cameras. But Kornai says it was worth it: “We’re spending so much time in this digital space, but not enough people are telling stories that are set in that digital world and use the language and the methodology that we’re all immersed in.”

Both Kornai and Wechter said they didn’t think they could have done the plot justice without the extra effort. The directors, both in their 20s, said they wanted to make sure they portrayed teenage life accurately, and telling the story phone-first was a big part of that. “We wanted to explore the ways in which coming of age has been changed and disrupted by technology,” Kornai said. “We’re seeing these age-old impulses and desires and anxieties, but they’re just being expressed in a different way.”