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When I think of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, I think of Darth Vader. It’s not that Agrawal himself reminds me of the Star Wars protagonist, grave concerns over Twitter’s handling of free speech notwithstanding. I just can't help but think of the nervous imperial commander who receives Vader as he arrives to inspect the Death Star II at the opening of Return of the Jedi. “Lord Vader, this is an unexpected pleasure. We are honored by your presence,” the commander says, with a lump in his throat. The Dark Lord of the Sith flatly replies, “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I’m here to put you back on schedule.

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

Aimee Knight, previously known as Aimee Challenor, has been sacked by Reddit. But while Challenor has now gone, her reappearance in the headlines — and the way in which Reddit mishandled this story — is a revealing and disturbing insight into the transgender debate. It all began with an article I wrote for these pages on Green party gender madness in which I briefly mentioned Challenor’s suspension from the party in 2018. It was a scandal that Challenor did not wish to see dragged up. When a moderator of the popular UK politics community on Reddit shared that article, mentioning Challenor by name, the post was removed and the moderator banned. Had Challenor persuaded the powers that be at Reddit to prevent users from discussing her past?

When Croatian movie director Dario Jurican ran in the country’s presidential election in 2019, his campaign slogan, 'corruption for everybody', promised that normal people would also be able to profit from cronyism. The people reacted with enthusiasm although they knew it was a joke. A similar dynamic is present on the WallStreetBets subreddit, which subverts the financial system by over-identifying with it or, rather, by universalizing it and thereby revealing its in-built absurdity. The story is well-known already, but let's briefly recap. Wallstreetbets is an online group in which millions of participants discuss stock and options trading. It is notable for its profane nature and promotion of aggressive trading strategies.

What did you do this week? I spent it drenched in sweat, launching a vicious assault on Wall Street hedge funds which cost them $5 billion (£3.7 billion). And I didn’t even have to put my trousers on. Along with thousands of other degenerates, I bought shares in GameStop, a struggling US video game store whose value has soared by 2,000 per cent in the last four weeks. Behind the surge is a wild Reddit community called WallStreetBets, where bored young men gamble on barely researched stock tips and crack tasteless jokes. The community, whose tagline is ‘like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal’, has a long and hilarious history of aggressive stock market bets leading to eye-watering gains and losses.

We learned about journalists this past weekend. Specifically, we learned about tech journalists who aren’t particularly interested reporting or analyzing tech as much as they are committed to harvesting click revenue from a young audience engaged with tech and social media platforms. They proved, in other words, that their industry is broken beyond repair.You probably heard that President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was looking at banning the social media video app TikTok on Friday. TikTok has come under scrutiny in the past months over security concerns and its parent company ByteDance’s connections to China. It’s understood to be hacking and using data collected from its users’ phones.

As civil unrest reverberated throughout virtually every corner of American life, culture, and industry this week, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company’s board of directors. He hopes that his seat will be filled by a black person. ‘I’m doing this for myself, for my family, and for my country,’ Ohanian (who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams) wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks, “What did you do?”’Later, Ohanian tweeted, ‘I'm seeing more and more people in tech who are frustrated and have been hitting a wall in their companies leaving!