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The Great Memory Robbery

For forty years, the computer business kept one promise better than any industry has ever kept any promise: memory got cheaper. Every year brought more bits for fewer dollars, so reliably that the whole culture of computing leaned on the assumption. Software bloated because RAM would cost less next year. Photographs went uncompressed because storage would cost less next year. Then, late in 2025, the promise snapped. A 32-gigabyte kit of DDR5 desktop memory, the sensible middle of the market, sold for under ninety dollars in early 2025. By December, listings touched five hundred. By the second of September, 2026, the builders’ forums had settled on 375 to 400 dollars as the going rate, and the daily trackers showed the price still climbing this week, up ten percent in seven days. One index of the broad market moved from 445 percent above its old baseline to 486 percent in a single month this summer. The entire digital world has been repriced, and the repricing took about ten months.

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Free Buses, Dark Screens

On the Thursday before Labor Day, the principals of New York City’s public schools opened a memo from the Education Department. The free T-Mobile internet service built into 350,000 student Chromebooks would end that Sunday, August 31. Classes begin September 10. Four days of warning, ten days of scramble, and then the school year opens on machines that still power up, still glow, and can no longer reach anything. The laptop survives. The world inside it has been repossessed. During the pandemic the city handed out some 725,000 devices and never tracked how many still function; the Chromebook program was the sequel, the do-over, the one arriving with a plan attached. The plan lasted a year.

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The Chain of Custody for Reality: Why Every Public Image, Voice, and Document Must Prove Its Origin

The next decisive recording will arrive before our institutions are ready for it. It may show a governor accepting a bribe, a police officer issuing an unlawful command, a physician altering a chart, a candidate confessing contempt for the voters, or a military official announcing an attack that has not occurred. The image will be clear. The voice will be familiar. The setting will be plausible. Millions of people will see it before any newsroom, court, agency, or laboratory can establish where it came from. The accused will call it artificial. Supporters will not require proof. Opponents will not trust any proof offered in reply. Platforms will attach hurried labels. Forensic vendors will issue competing percentages. Partisans will treat technical uncertainty as political permission. By nightfall, the artifact will no longer be evidence of an event. It will be an instrument for measuring allegiance.

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Swimming the Author

England tested witches with water. The suspect was bound, right thumb to left toe, looped to a rope, and lowered into the village pond. Pure water was believed to refuse the devil’s servant, so a body that floated was guilty and a body that sank was innocent, and the innocent were hauled up half-drowned to receive the town’s apology. The procedure was called swimming a witch, and its genius was architectural: it could only convict. Whatever the water did, the crowd on the bank went home with the verdict it had carried down to the shore. Four centuries on, the pond fits in a browser tab. Paste the chapter. Click the button. Let the water decide.

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