The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell the story now, and whether or not it was right to air what many consider family secrets, crept into the back of my mind. But I knew this story deserved to be told.
When I set out to chronicle Black Twitter in April 2021—charting its rise, power, and what I felt was its unquestionable cultural impact—I was, admittedly, attempting to define a community that defies easy definition. In truth, Black Twitter is more than a community. It is an ever-growing, always-evolving force that has influenced nearly every aspect of modern life.
Black Twitter is the birthplace of all your favorite memes, hashtags, and trends. It is more than that, too: Black Twitter doesn’t simply make culture, it shapes society. From the history-setting presidency of Barack Obama to hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackLivesMatter, Black Twitter is both the extraordinary and the everyday. It is, as I wrote in 2021, all the things: news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one.
Even as other platforms like TikTok have attempted to capture what made Twitter what it is—in my estimation, the most significant social platform of the 2010s—Black Twitter endures as the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter, now X, but of the wider social internet (as last week proved, there was no better place to be than Black Twitter as the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef played out).
What’s more, so much of Black life in public view is misrepresented and appropriated. It’s twisted into fantasy, festish or worse—left for dead. The technologies available to us have magnified our connection just as they have quickened our erasure. Our stories are routinely stolen from us, if not deleted outright. Out of our hands, our history is flattened and repurposed into dangerous falsehoods by lawmakers who peddle misinformation for personal gain. The story of Black Twitter was one account I didn’t want to lose to the whitewashing of history.
I also knew that the reality of the social internet is one of impermanence. Once-crucial digital gathering spots from the 1990s and 2000s—NetNoir, Black Voices, MelaNet, Black Planet and others—had come and gone largely without proper contextualizing. So it was important that I give Black Twitter its flowers while it was still around, which now seems even more urgent under the ownership of Elon Musk. All that we built, and continue to build on the platform, could be gone tomorrow.
After WIRED published the people’s history of Black Twitter, I began working on a documentary based on the reporting in the oral history. The resulting three-part series, out today, expands on the original story, and also captures the very real fears surrounding what could lay in Black Twitter’s future.
So why this story, and why now? It’s simple, really. I didn’t want Black Twitter to be another footnote.
Supergiant Games is handing over the keys to the underworld early. Hades II, the sequel to the studios’ critically acclaimed roguelike, is now available to buy for $30 on PC via Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
Hades II follows Melinoë, underworld princess and sister to the first game’s hero, Zagreus, on her journey to kill the titan Chronos. The game features a rotating cast of Greek gods, from Aphrodite to Zeus, who assist Melinoë on her journey with powerups and special abilities. Although the version of the game that dropped Monday is not the full, finished title, Supergiant will allow players who purchase it to carry over their progress to the final game. The company expects development to continue “at least through the end of 2024,” with updates coming every few months.
On top of its stellar gameplay, the original Hades was also beloved for its hot gods and open sexuality; players could woo both female and male characters, together, for a threesome with the right attitude. The sequel is keeping up at least some of that tradition with more Greek gods whose beauty is on full display.
Hades II’s early release shouldn’t be a total surprise. Its predecessor was released before it was fully formed in late 2018; the completed version came out in 2020. “We designed the original Hades for Early Access from the ground up, and the same is true for Hades II, our first-ever sequel,” Supergiant wrote in its announcement. “We believe everything about this game benefits from ongoing feedback, from the balancing to the storytelling.”
Currently, the game has more levels, foes, and voiced characters than even the finished version of the original game, Supergiant says. Key areas, characters, story, and more are still being built.
The Early Access release follows a technical test by Supergiant last month, where members of the team played the game live on-stream. Interested players were allowed to sign up for the test. Hades II has already been in development for three years. Although there’s no word on when the final product will be ready, players who want the chance to help shape its development can do so through feedback. “We expect to make many changes and improvements inspired by our player community, and reflect these in our patch notes,” Supergiant wrote in a statement.
“The combination of our impressions as a development team, feedback we’re hearing from our player community, and gameplay data we’re collecting from players all should help us form a more complete picture of how we can make Hades II the best it can be.”
Though ideas at Disney aren’t always developed in a linear fashion—a prototype of an invention might be started years before the company finds the place to put it into action, or an idea for something artistically cool might germinate for a bit before Research figures out the technology—Smoot has worked on a few things with a hard deadline, including the lightsabers for the Star Wars Launch Bay in 2015 and the Galactic Starcruiser in 2022.
While one could argue that not everything Disney makes is pure, inspirational magic, Smoot designs everything he works on to either entertain or spark joy. “There are engineers that have to work on things that can hurt people or that aren’t necessarily that good, and that’s never something I have to worry about,” Smoot says. Instead, he jokes, he just concerns himself with how Madame Leota will “float” through her seance room every few minutes for years on end. (He also had a hand in the operation of the Haunted Mansion’s stretching paintings, which were refurbished a few years back.)
Citing Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Smoot says part of his work is about conveying a smooth and perfect sheen of surprise. When parents take their kids to a Disney park, they want those kids to have the same experience they did, even if all of the tech has been replaced.
Smoot points to Madame Leona as an example. Online, people had all kinds of theories about how Disney made the Haunted Mansion character fly—proof that Smoot’s tricks worked. “I read some descriptions from people who loved it and how they thought it worked, and without going into too much detail, I’ll say they were completely wrong and completely simplistic,” he says. “That’s when I said, ‘OK, yeah, what we did was good.’”
It’s this kind of impact that moves Smoot’s work beyond the realm of cool gadgetry. Paiva says that “when we look at potential inductees, we’re looking for inventors who have US patents that cover their work, which certainly Lanny has, but beyond that, we’re looking for inventors whose work has made societal, economic, and cultural impact.”
While Smoot’s Disney career has certainly wowed and enriched the lives of park goers and cruise ship passengers over the years, his work on teleconferencing at Bell was also an important factor into his induction, as was his work with aspiring young inventors.
“I’ve become a bit of a role model for young Black kids and people of color and women who have been looked over or not been in the room where things are done,” Smoot says. “I came from Brownsville, and I didn’t have a lot of money. Even today, I am one of the most thrifty people when it comes to building things. Some people say, ‘I can’t start my work unless I have this much money,’ but I’m like, ‘OK, I have a broomstick and I can take the keyboard apart…’”
You can get a crash course in Nick Hornby’s work in the span of an hour-long London walk. The artist has three permanent sculptures installed across the city, metal silhouettes that start off familiar but transform depending on your vantage point. In St. James, his conquering equestrian, modeled on Richard I, becomes an amorphous squiggle as you circle; while in Kensington, his take on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer turns abstract; and a bust of Nefertiti doubles as the Albert Memorial.
Raising questions about power and the role of the monument, the trio are a clever combo of craft and concept. They’re also feats of digital innovation. The equestrian, for example, started out as a digital model scripted in Python. It was then unrolled into individual components to be laser-cut from metal, then assembled by fabricators. “It was a lovely, seamless relationship between concept, digital processes, and mechanical fabrications—165 pieces manipulated into the six-and-a-half ton object,” says Hornby from his studio in northwest London. “But when people look at it, they don’t see that at all.”
“I like to think that one of the distinctive features of my work is its ambition to capture the imagination of anyone, not limited to the art world; to try to address complicated ideas in plain English. Anyone will recognize the trope of the man on the horse and will have a reaction to how I have manipulated it.”
Resting Leaf (Joe) is from a set of autobiographical works created using hydrographics—each resin sculpture is dipped into a wet medium containing an image transfer.
Photograph: Benjamin Westoby
This kind of technical-conceptual wizardry is Hornby’s calling card. Favoring the screen over the sketchpad, he uses 3D modeling as the foundation for abstract sculptures that reference the art-historical canon and challenge notions of authorship—contorted mashups of works by Hepworth, Brancusi, Rodin, and more; the profile of Michelangelo’s David extruded to a single point, legible only from above.
He started young, creating life-size terracotta figures in school while his classmates labored over simpler pots. “But then I went to art school, and it was like, I didn’t want to do pastiche of Rodin. I wanted to be part of the future. I wanted to be innovative,” he says. “So I jumped on technology.”
At the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he enrolled in the late 1990s, Hornby thrived in the new. There were forays into video; a semester at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he joined the artist-hacker collective Radical Software/Critical Artware; and musical experiments with MAX MSP, the object-oriented programming language employed by Radiohead in the early 2000s. But it was only after pursuing a master’s in his thirties that his career took its current shape.
“I actually had quite a radical sea change in my relationship to tech,” he says. “I got quite frustrated by people saying, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. How did you do it?’ because I find that question really boring. I’m much more interested in the question, ‘What does it mean?’” So, over the past decade Hornby has eliminated “any form of human subjectivity,” he says. The wires and screens were obscured, the rough edges erased with laser precision. All the better to invite questions of substance rather than process.
#SwiftTok had a rough day. Early Thursday, after Universal Music Group and TikTok failed to reach an agreement on licensing music from UMG artists on the app, sounds from those artists—including Taylor Swift, Drake, and others—went silent.
“Some of my most viewed videos are ones talking about Taylor Swift that have Taylor Swift songs in the background,” says Savannah Delullo, a Wordle influencer on TikTok and a Swiftie. “So, them being muted is pretty sad, because we put in all of that work.”
Delullo notes that creators might switch over to alternative versions of the official songs or experiment with ways to avoid copyrighted music altogether, but still the mood on #SwiftTok is far from light.
“Half my drafts are muted now,” says Madeline Macrae, a Swift fan and TikTok creator. While initially frustrated by the change, Macrae thinks there might be positive impacts. Even though many ardent fans value the online community built through social media, some are also uncomfortable with the flattening of poetic songs into 60-second memes. “Songs that Swifties would usually gatekeep aren’t going to be TikTok-ified now,” she says.
It’s not just Swifties who are missing music on TikTok. Multiple videos posted on Olivia Rodrigo’s official account, including one with over 50 million views, are now quiet. Similarly, TikToks with UMG licensed music posted by Billie Eilish to promote her album display the message “This sound isn’t available.”
During recent years, UMG and other labels have built marketing strategies around getting songs to go viral with the TikTok algorithm. Younger users see the platform as a great way to discover their next favorite song and build out cool playlists. If TikTok and UMG don’t reach a new deal soon, the prohibition could dramatically alter how artists tease new music and connect with fans through social media.
In an email to WIRED, Barney Hooper, a global head of music communications at TikTok, indicated that the change impacts only music from UMG and confirmed that videos with previously licensed music will stay muted until another deal is closed. Soon, TikTok might also take steps to remove songs in the Universal Music Publishing Group catalog, which would increase the number of impacted artists.
So, licensed music from UMG artists is gone from TikTok, for now, but it remains unclear what will happen to unofficial remixes and mashups as the catalog is wiped from the platform. Viral sounds on TikTok are sometimes warped versions of an original song, with vocals frequently sped up, and while some of those sounds remained on the platform Thursday, they may not for much longer.
A well-known musician for almost two decades, Swift has seen her popularity skyrocket in recent years. Her Eras Tour is so massive it has the power to impact local economies and her appearances at NFL games to watch her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, play have altered football viewership this season. Losing her music as well as tunes from Drake and others in UMG’s lineup could alter the fabric of TikTok itself.
Swift’s songs may no longer be all over the platform, but music remains core to the user experience of scrolling through TikTok. The cascade of snippets from huge artists disappearing could even usher in a new era on the For You Page feed. “I feel like a silver lining to this is that smaller or independent artists can have their chance to go viral,” says Macrae.
