Tech & AI

The Most Influential Turntables of All Time: 15 Record Players That Changed Hi-Fi

Published

2 weeks ago

15 September 2026

While listening to a record with my youngest daughter the other day, the conversation turned to why anyone still listens to vinyl when streaming is “clearly so much better.” As a committed Lana Del Rey fan, she then explained that the long and somewhat operatic wait for Stove is apparently proof that records still matter, because vinyl takes months to press and Lana is not going to rush the thing merely because the rest of us have jobs and limited attention spans.

This was followed by a pointed discussion of the price of concerts, which was less philosophical.

Living at the Shore has its advantages. PNC Bank Arts Center, the Count Basie Center, and Asbury Park are all close enough that a good show can become a family night without requiring a hotel, airport security, or a second mortgage. That does not mean every artist announcement is an automatic yes. A Lana Del Rey tour, should one arrive anywhere within reasonable driving distance, would almost certainly trigger negotiations normally reserved for hostage situations.

There are limits. Even in a household with multiple turntables, more records than shelf space, and a somewhat elastic definition of “necessary.”

“Do you know who invented the turntable?” I asked as she wandered around the den holding the jacket for Craft Recordings and Bluesville’s recent reissue of Albert King’s I’ll Play the Blues for You.

“Not Taylor Swift.”

“That would be correct.”

“My teacher told us that it was Thomas Edison. Or maybe Billy Madison. I’m confused.”

TikTok needs to be banned.

“Thomas Edison did not invent the turntable. Edison did make significant contributions to sound recording and playback, including the invention of the phonograph, but he did not invent the turntable as we understand it today.”

“Edison’s phonograph, patented in 1878, was a mechanical device that used a rotating cylinder covered in tinfoil to record and reproduce sound. It had a hand-cranked mechanism to rotate the cylinder, and a stylus traced the grooves on the cylinder, producing sound vibrations that were amplified by a horn.”

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“The turntable, on the other hand, refers to the rotating platform on which vinyl records are played.”

“So how do you know it wasn’t Taylor Swift?”

“Have you ever heard of Emile Berliner?”

“Is he on TikTok or YouTube?”

Emile Berliner

Emile Berliner (1851-1929) was a German-born inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur who made significant contributions to the fields of sound recording and communication. He is best known for his invention of the gramophone, a device that played flat disc records.

Born on May 20, 1851, in Hanover, Germany, Berliner immigrated to the United States in 1870. He initially worked as a merchant and bookbinder but soon turned his attention to inventing. In 1887, Berliner developed a new method of sound reproduction, which he named the gramophone.

Emile Berliner with Phonograph — Emile Berliner

Berliner’s gramophone used flat disc records made of a zinc disc coated with a compound called shellac. The records had spiral grooves that were created by a cutting stylus. The sound vibrations from the stylus were transmitted through a diaphragm and a horn, resulting in amplified sound. The gramophone offered several advantages over Edison’s cylinder-based phonograph, including easier production, longer playing time, and the ability to mass-produce records.

In addition to the gramophone, Berliner also made notable contributions to the development of the microphone and telephone technologies. He invented the carbon microphone, which became widely used in telephony and early sound recording. Berliner’s improvements to the telephone transmitter greatly enhanced its performance and efficiency.

Berliner was also an astute businessman and established the Berliner Gramophone Company in 1895. The company later merged with the Victor Talking Machine Company, forming the Victor Talking Machine Company, which became a major player in the phonograph industry.

Emile Berliner held numerous patents throughout his career and made significant advancements in sound recording and communication technologies. His invention of the gramophone and disc records laid the foundation for modern turntables and the widespread consumption of recorded music. Berliner’s contributions to the field of audio technology continue to influence the way we enjoy and experience music today.

The Most Significant Turntables

Do you remember your first turntable?

I inherited a Thorens TD-145 from my parents in 1983 as part of my Bar Mitzvah gift and it gave me over a decade of service before I upgraded to an Audiomeca Romance table designed by Pierre Lurne of Goldmund.

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Looking back I’m not entirely convinced that it was an upgrade but I did trade it in when I purchased a Michell Orbe SE in 1998; that table absolutely was a significant improvement and a great platform for a Wilson Benesch ACT 0.5 Tonearm and Benz Micro H2.0 high-output cartridge.

My ex-wife forced me to sell it during our rather quick and bloody divorce and it was painful to let that one go. I have never owned anything better and it’s unlikely that I would ever spend that kind of money on a turntable and cartridge again; especially not with college and private school tuition.

Three restored Thorens tables create wonderful music at home now and I’m not entirely sure that changing them would make a lot of sense. I also own a Yamaha YP-701 and NAD C 588.

Listening to records with my daughter sparked a different kind of conversation with some of our staff and my circle of audiophile friends.

Which tables were truly significant? We’ve included some tables from the late 1900s and the first part of the 20th century because they were indeed, very significant.

We could easily publish a list of the “best” turntables available right now but 99% of the planet could never afford them and will never have the opportunity to listen to one. This feels like a more interesting discussion.

What are we missing from this list? Please let us know.

Edison Phonograph

Thomas Edison’s 1877 phonograph was not a turntable in the modern sense, but it was the first practical machine designed to both record sound and play it back. Built at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey, the original device used a hand-cranked cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, rather than the wax cylinders that arrived later. A diaphragm and stylus translated sound into physical indentations in the foil; reversing the process allowed the machine to reproduce those vibrations as audible sound.

It was crude, fragile, and hardly hi-fi, but Edison’s invention established the essential idea that recorded music and speech could be captured, stored, and replayed at will. The flat disc record and the turntable would come later, but the phonograph was where the whole strange, expensive, shelf-consuming affair began.

Victor Talking Machine

Introduced by the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1906, the Victor Victrola was not the first disc phonograph, but it helped turn one into a desirable piece of furniture rather than an awkward mechanical contraption parked in the parlor. Its spring-wound motor rotated flat shellac discs without electricity, while the key innovation was the horn: Victor concealed it inside a handsome wooden cabinet instead of leaving a large external horn perched on top. That made the machine easier to live with and far more socially acceptable in the increasingly style-conscious American home.

The Victrola became one of the defining music machines of the early 20th century, and the company’s Nipper “His Master’s Voice” trademark became one of the most recognizable images in recorded sound. It was not high fidelity by any modern definition, but it brought the disc record, the home playback system, and the idea of owning music into the mainstream long before anyone argued about Bluetooth codecs or whether the pressing was “AAA.”

Philips 212 Electronic Turntable — Philips 212 Electronic

Philips 22GA212 Electronic

Introduced in the early 1970s, the Philips 22GA212 Electronic was one of the more distinctive belt-drive turntables of its era. Its appeal was not that Philips had somehow invented electronic speed control, but that it combined a tacho-generator-regulated DC motor, floating subchassis, touch-sensitive 33, 45, and stop controls, and photo-electronic automatic shutoff in a relatively affordable domestic turntable.

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The 212 used feedback from its tacho generator to help maintain speed under changing load, while separate fine-speed controls and a stroboscopic platter ring allowed owners to make small adjustments. Philips claimed low wow and flutter, low rumble, and stable operation; the important point is that the deck tried to bring electronic control and convenience to a traditional suspended belt-drive design without making it look like laboratory equipment. The illuminated touch buttons were gloriously early 1970s, and remain one of the reasons the 212 has developed something of a cult following.

Garrard Model 301 Turntable — Garrard Model 301

Garrard 301

Launched in 1954, the Garrard 301 did not invent idler-wheel drive. That basic arrangement, in which a small rubber wheel transfers power from the motor to the platter’s inner rim, had already appeared in earlier phonographs and record changers. What Garrard did was apply the system to a serious transcription motor unit built for broadcasters, studios, and the growing number of home listeners who wanted something more substantial than a changer with a chrome arm and optimistic specifications.

The 301 used a powerful four-pole induction motor, a heavy platter, and an idler-drive system that delivered quick start-up, strong torque, and stable speed at 33⅓, 45, and 78 rpm. It was usually sold without a plinth, tonearm, or cartridge, allowing owners to build a system around it rather than accept a complete package chosen by someone in a sales office. The result was one of the first truly iconic high-fidelity turntables: industrial, durable, endlessly restorable, and still capable of sounding superb when properly rebuilt. A neglected example can be noisy and temperamental; a well-sorted one explains why the 301 has never really left the conversation.

Acoustic Research XA

Introduced in 1961, the AR XA was only $58 and what made it unique was how it handled vibration and how low its rumble measured. The package did not come with a cartridge but the price included the table, tonearm, stylus gauge, and dustcover.

The most interesting aspect of the design was its mounting system; Edgar Villchur realized that instead of attaching the motor, tonearm, and lightweight platter to the table’s top plate, it made more sense to mount the platter and tonearm to a sub platform which was suspended underneath the top plate at 3 very distinct points with damped springs with a low resonant frequency.

By doing so, the tonearm and record were isolated from footfalls and other acoustic vibration. Thorens and Linn would incorporate these concepts into their future tables.

Thorens TD-150

Introduced in 1965, the Thorens TD 150 was a compact and rather unflashy turntable that changed the direction of serious belt-drive design. It was not the first commercially viable suspended-subchassis deck; that distinction belongs to the Acoustic Research AR XA of 1961. But Thorens took the basic idea of isolating the platter and tonearm from the motor and plinth with a three-point spring suspension, paired it with a belt-driven inner platter, and turned it into something more refined, more adaptable, and considerably more influential.

The TD 150 was also Thorens’ first true belt-drive turntable, replacing the belt-and-idler arrangement of the earlier TD 124 with a cleaner and more modern engineering approach. Its suspended subchassis helped reduce the transmission of motor vibration and external disturbance to the cartridge, while its removable armboard made it possible to fit alternative tonearms rather than live forever with the factory choice. That combination became the blueprint for a long line of Thorens models and, more importantly, helped inspire the Linn Sondek LP12 and much of the suspended-chassis cult that followed. Small, slightly wobbly when improperly set up, and far more important than it first appears, the TD 150 was one of the key turntables of the modern hi-fi era.

Thorens TD-124

Introduced in 1957, the Thorens TD 124 was one of the great transcription turntables of the postwar hi-fi era: overbuilt, mechanically ingenious, and aimed at studios, broadcasters, and serious home listeners rather than anyone looking for a tidy all-in-one record player. Its most unusual feature was not a conventional idler drive, but a hybrid belt-and-idler system. A compliant belt linked the motor to a separate stepped pulley, which then drove the platter through an idler wheel. Thorens designed the arrangement to retain the torque and rapid start-up of idler drive while reducing the motor-borne vibration that could otherwise work its way toward the cartridge.

The TD 124 also used a substantial two-piece platter with a removable aluminum top section and a heavy main platter beneath, along with variable pitch adjustment, four speeds including 78 rpm, and interchangeable armboards for owners who wanted to fit their preferred tonearm. It was not a suspended-subchassis design; that came later with the TD 150. Instead, the TD 124’s reputation rests on its precision engineering, flexibility, and sheer durability. Properly restored and mounted in a serious plinth, it remains one of the most compelling vintage turntables ever made, with enough torque and authority to make many modern decks seem slightly apologetic.

Technics SP-10

Introduced in 1970, the Technics SP 10 was the first commercially available turntable to use a direct-drive motor, and it changed the industry almost immediately. Rather than relying on a belt or idler wheel to transfer power from the motor to the platter, the SP 10 placed the motor directly beneath the platter itself. That eliminated an entire chain of mechanical compromises and delivered unusually quick start-up, very low wow and flutter, and the kind of speed stability that broadcasters and mastering engineers could trust without keeping one eye on the strobe.

The original SP 10 was sold as a motor unit, leaving broadcasters, studios, and ambitious home listeners to supply the plinth, tonearm, and cartridge. It was built for work, not Instagram, and its plain industrial appearance gave little indication of how important it would become. The SP 10 helped establish direct drive as a serious alternative to belt and idler systems, and its successors became fixtures in radio stations and professional installations around the world. The SL 1200 may have become the cultural icon, but the SP 10 was the machine that opened the door and made precision direct drive impossible to dismiss.

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Linn LP12

Introduced in 1973, the Linn Sondek LP12 became one of the most influential turntables in high-end audio, not because it invented the suspended belt-drive turntable, but because it turned that established idea into a long-running argument about where sound quality actually begins. Its three-point suspended subchassis, belt-driven inner platter, single-point bearing, and separate armboard followed principles already explored by Acoustic Research, Thorens, and Ariston. Linn’s contribution was to refine the formula, make it modular, and insist that the source component mattered more than the hi-fi industry had previously been willing to admit.

That “source first” philosophy became the LP12’s real legacy. Ivor Tiefenbrun and Linn persuaded a generation of dealers and listeners that a better turntable could extract more musical information from the record before the signal ever reached the amplifier or loudspeakers. The LP12 also became famously upgradeable, with improved bearings, subchassis designs, power supplies, tonearms, and cartridges allowing owners to keep updating the same basic deck over decades. It was expensive, fussy about setup, and capable of developing a bounce that could make a wooden floor feel like an enemy combatant, but it became a benchmark for musical timing, long-term ownership, and the modern high-end turntable market.

Technics SL-1200

Released in 1972, the Technics SL 1200 began as a serious consumer direct-drive turntable, not as a purpose-built DJ tool. Its high-torque motor, heavy platter, die-cast chassis, stroboscope, and fine-speed adjustment gave it fast start-up and strong speed stability, qualities that quickly caught the attention of club DJs looking for a deck that could cue records precisely and survive a room full of bass, smoke, and people making bad decisions.

The version that truly changed music culture, however, was the SL 1200MK2 in 1979. Technics redesigned it with input from disco DJs, adding quartz-locked speed control, a more robust chassis and damping system, improved torque, and the familiar ±8 percent pitch slider that made beatmatching practical and repeatable. The MK2 became the working standard for clubs, radio stations, hip-hop DJs, and turntablists around the world. The original SL 1200 opened the door; the MK2 turned the turntable from a playback device into an instrument. It was rugged, precise, and so durable that many examples have outlived the clubs, DJs, and questionable carpet they were originally purchased to endure.

Rega Planar 3

Arriving in the late 1970s, the Rega Planar 3 became one of the defining affordable audiophile turntables because it refused to confuse complexity with progress. Its formula was almost aggressively simple: a light, rigid plinth, belt drive, 12 mm glass platter, straightforward manual operation, and a tonearm designed to do its job without adding a small engineering department’s worth of unnecessary parts. In an era when many manufacturers were loading decks with controls, mechanisms, and enough brushed aluminum to open a minor space program, Rega focused on keeping energy where it belonged: in the record and cartridge.

The original Planar 3 was developed from Rega’s earlier Planet and Planar 2 designs, and later versions benefited enormously from the company’s RB300 tonearm, introduced in 1983. Rega has refined the platform repeatedly through the P3, P3 24, RP3, and current Planar 3 generations, but the core philosophy has remained remarkably stubborn: low mass, high rigidity, sensible engineering, and sound quality that does not require a second mortgage or a plinth the size of a dining table. It helped make serious vinyl playback attainable for a far broader audience and remains one of the few turntables that can reasonably claim to be both an entry point and a lifelong habit.

Dual 1219

Introduced in 1969, the Dual 1219 was not the first automatic turntable, but it proved that convenience and serious record playback could coexist. Its idler-drive system, substantial platter, 33, 45, and 78 rpm capability, and gimbal-bearing tonearm gave it genuine hi-fi credentials, while its automatic mechanism could start a record, return the arm, and shut the machine down at the end of play.

It could be used for single records or as a changer for a stack of discs. Complex, sturdy, and very German, the 1219 remains proof that an automatic turntable did not have to sound like furniture with a motor.

Pro-Ject Debut Carbon

Introduced in 2012, the Pro Ject Debut Carbon became one of the defining entry-level audiophile turntables of the vinyl revival. It did not invent the affordable belt-drive deck, and it was not the first Pro Ject Debut; that model had been around since 1999. What the Debut Carbon did was add a one-piece carbon-fiber tonearm to an already proven, sensibly priced platform, giving buyers a feature normally associated with considerably more expensive turntables.

Manual operation, belt drive, a steel platter, and a pre-fitted Ortofon 2M Red cartridge kept the formula straightforward. The Debut Carbon was never designed to impress people who enjoy polishing machined aluminum for sport. It offered an honest route into proper vinyl playback at a price that did not require the sale of a kidney or a second listening room. For a generation of listeners moving beyond suitcase players and all-in-one systems, it became a legitimate gateway to better analog sound.

Goldmund Studio

Introduced in 1979, the Goldmund Studio helped define the modern high-end turntable as something more ambitious than a conventional record player on a well-made plinth. Goldmund combined direct drive, an acrylic platter, and its “Mechanical Grounding” approach, which focused on controlling and draining unwanted vibration through a rigid mechanical structure rather than simply trying to isolate everything from everything else.

The Studio was often paired with Goldmund’s servo-controlled T3 tonearm, and the combination looked unlike almost anything else on the market. It was expensive, unconventional, and not especially interested in winning over people who believed a turntable should resemble furniture. Its importance lies in how it pushed analog playback toward the modern cost-no-object era, where materials science, vibration control, industrial design, and tonearm geometry became part of the same rather elaborate argument.

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Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference

Introduced in 1964, David Gammon’s Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference was one of the most visually radical turntables ever made. This was a manual belt-drive design with a synchronous AC motor, a machined aluminum platter, and six conspicuous gold-plated brass inertia weights that made the whole thing look less like a domestic appliance than a piece of kinetic sculpture from a very well-funded Bond villain’s living room.

The “Hydraulic” name came from its unusual speed-control system: a vane interacted with silicone fluid in a well beneath the platter to provide fine regulation. The exposed acrylic, aluminum, and brass construction made the mechanism part of the experience rather than something to hide under a wood veneer. Its engineering was genuinely inventive, but its broader importance was cultural and aesthetic. The Hydraulic Reference appears in A Clockwork Orange, and a 1964 example sits in MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection. It did not create a dominant turntable template in the way the Thorens TD 150 or Technics SL 1200 did, but it permanently expanded the idea of what a record player could look like.

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Tech & AI

Metal Gear Solid Moves From PlayStation To ESP32

Published

34 minutes ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, but the real rise to fame probably started with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998. What needed a hefty console in 1998 can comfortably fit on a microcontroller in 2026, though, as [David Montero Crespo] demonstrates with his port of MGS to the ESP32-S3.

[David] is — as we always are — standing on the shoulders of giants with this hack. Most specifically, the project relies entirely on the [FoxdieTeam] MGS Reversing decompliation project. Of course what one team decompiles, another can recompile, and in this case [David] chose to recompile the game for Expressif’s exceptional ESP32. It wasn’t quite as easy as just forking the repo and compiling with the ESP32 as a target though, as the blog post explains.

We won’t spoil it, but [David] did have to make some changes to account for the different quirks the MIPS processor in the PlayStation has compared to the Xtensa cores on the microcontroller. Then to make it playable, he put the ESP32-S3 module onto some perfboard with an analog stick from a drone controller, an ILI9341 LCD panel, and a resistor ladder to run the buttons for a barebones handheld.

Fans of MSG and its many sequels may appreciate this replica of the codex communicator. Fans of the ESP32 may remember the Wipeout clone we featured earlier, which already proved the popular microcontroller could handle PlayStation-level graphics. If you were hoping for actual solid metal gears, you can cut your own at home.

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OpenAI cancels its next AI model because it couldn’t be trusted to play by the rules

Published

2 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

OpenAI was gearing up to release GPT-6.1 Astra, its next AI model, with an October launch in its sights. That’s no longer happening. The company pulled the plug after its own researchers spotted worrying behavior while testing it internally.

What went wrong with GPT-6.1 Astra?

On paper, Astra-6.1 was an upgrade over the current GPT-6 Astra. It wrote better, handled complex jobs all on its own, and showed less “model laziness” than before.

However, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said the model slipped in two important areas. First, it sometimes misled users about what it had actually done. Second, it would occasionally carry on with a task without checking with the user first, and even tap into outside tools and services when doing so could be risky.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade-off,” Jain said. The goal is a model that respects its boundaries but still keeps working when a task gets hard. Astra fell short of OpenAI’s bar, so the public launch was called off.

Why is OpenAI hitting the brakes now?

AI agents have had a messy few months. Earlier this summer, hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents ended up breaking into Hugging Face while running a cybersecurity test. The Australian government and the United Nations later found OpenAI’s agents had used similar, though less extensive, methods on their websites.

Last week, OpenAI also halted training on its most powerful models after one agent found a loophole in its internet restrictions and queried a public chatbot. OpenAI says Astra is a separate case. Lawmakers are watching, too. According to WSJ, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing on rogue AI agents this week, and Florida’s Attorney General has been suing OpenAI since June.

What does this mean for you?

You won’t be getting GPT-6.1 Astra anytime soon. OpenAI hopes to reuse its base model to build future GPT-6 models and is digging into what caused the problems. Personally, I’d rather wait for an AI that’s honest about its work than use one that goes off and does its own thing.

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Microbes Could Survive On Saturn's Moon Enceladus

Published

3 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

New research suggests Enceladus may be an especially promising place to search for extraterrestrial life: microbes similar to those found near Earth’s hydrothermal vents survived in lab conditions designed to mimic the Saturnian moon’s subsurface ocean. A separate study also found that material blasted from Enceladus’ plumes may naturally separate and concentrate salts, organics and potential biosignatures into individual ice grains, potentially making them easier for future spacecraft to detect.

“That is great news in the search for life,” Frank Postberg, lead author of one and co-author of the other of these new studies and professor at Freie Universitat Berlin, said in a statement. “Future spacecraft will have to analyze many individual ice particles in the plume. But if they come across one with microbial material in it, they could identify biosignatures in the particle relatively easy with already available technology.” Space.com reports: Enceladus isn’t the only place in our solar system with water — so, why is it so exciting in the search for life? Well, it has to do with the seafloor of its extensive, liquid ocean. Down deep at the bottom of this body of water, scientists think hydrothermal processes, or movement or reactions with hot water under the surface, are taking place. The plumes shooting upward from the ocean also contain trace amounts of salts and organic compounds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found these traces when it flew through the plumes over a decade ago. Between the hydrothermal activity and the organics and minerals in the water, this moon’s ocean has a number of aspects that could be involved in supporting life.

What’s more, using a combination of Cassini data, theoretical models and laboratory experimentation, in Postberg’s new study the team found that the plume’s water droplets blasting out into space at up to 621 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour) don’t freeze as quickly as expected. Before, scientists thought the freeze would happen instantaneously once the droplets reached space, but Postberg and fellow researchers say they found the freezing would actually happen much slower.

They also found that during this freezing process, the salt, organic compounds (and maybe possible signs of life) in the water droplets separate from one another. Not only that, but the team says that as the particles are blasted out into space, they should often collide with the icy cracks of the planet’s surface. This ultimately would leave behind tiny shards of frozen droplets with individually separated out components. Essentially, it’s like the planet has organized its oceanic ingredients into tiny, frozen particle fragments. This work is described in two new studies published in the journal Science Advances here and here.

Tech & AI

Nothing’s new Headphone (1) Pro wants to rival Bose and Sony, not just look cool doing it

Published

4 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

In context: Android smartphone maker Nothing has launched the Headphone (1) Pro, its new flagship audio product, which it claims combines an elevated listening experience for consumers with studio-grade production and mixing features for professionals. It succeeds last year’s Nothing Headphone (1), which TIME named one of its Best Inventions of 2025.

The biggest change in the new model is a three-driver audio system. It includes a bass dynamic driver designed to add more punch and sensitivity to low frequencies, a precision dynamic driver that adds more texture to vocals and instruments, and a new treble xMEMS driver that Nothing says delivers crisper highs.

Nothing also worked with London’s Metropolis Studios to tune the Headphone (1) Pro, with the collaboration focused on professional audio tools and soundstage characteristics.

The company also highlights an improved adaptive active noise cancellation system that uses a 10-microphone array to more accurately filter ambient noise than the first-gen model. With claimed noise reduction of up to 46 dB, Nothing is positioning the Headphone (1) Pro against premium rivals from Bose and Sony.

Nothing says the improvement in noise reduction should be particularly noticeable in strong winds or noisy traffic. The headphones also feature redesigned ear cushions with an 8mm silicone baffle wall inside, creating a stronger sound barrier and improving the seal around the ears.

The Headphone (1) Pro supports Hi-Res wireless audio and wired playback over USB-C at up to 24-bit/192 kHz. It also offers five modes of Dynamic Spatial Audio with head tracking, along with five new custom EQ profiles. A separate Flat EQ switch is designed to give producers and creators a more neutral sound profile.

The Headphones 1 Pro is built out of aluminum and titanium to provide a durable shell while creating a premium look and feel. It also retains Nothing’s transparent design language, using shatter- and scratch-resistant 9H Panda Glass on both ear cups to reveal parts of the triple-driver architecture.

Despite the increased use of metal, Nothing has reduced the headphones’ weight to 327 grams through a redesigned internal architecture, including replacing steel arms with titanium. Other changes intended to improve comfort over longer listening sessions include a wider headband with thicker padding and softer ear cushions.

The Headphone (1) Pro is positioned to compete with premium models such as the Sony WH-1000XM6, Bose QuietComfort Ultra, and Apple AirPods Max. It is priced at $399 and will be available beginning September 29 through Nothing’s official store at nothing.tech, Amazon, and Best Buy stores across across the US and Canada.

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How brain stimulation could impact how we develop new skills

Published

5 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Ned Jenkinson of the University of Birmingham and Matthew Weightman of the University of Oxford discuss how advancements in brain research might affect how we learn and grow our skillsets.

Whether learning a new piano piece or adapting your tennis serve, acquiring physical skills depends on your brain’s ability to strengthen and refine neural connections. Researchers are exploring whether this process can be accelerated with technology.

Scientists are particularly interested in the potential of non-invasive brain stimulation, a group of techniques that can alter brain activity without surgery.

Some deliver weak electrical currents to the brain through electrodes placed on the scalp. Others use magnetic fields or focused ultrasound waves. Although they work in different ways, they all aim to temporarily change the activity of neural circuits.

If these techniques can successfully enhance neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganise and form new connections during learning, then they could be of use anywhere where performance depends on learning complex movements, from sport and music to surgery and beyond. Researchers are also seeing if these technologies could help with learning non-physical skills, such as picking up a foreign language.

Elite sport, professional gaming and high-performance workplaces could all become targets for these enhancements if they prove effective. Brain stimulation could also have a big role to play in medicine, helping patients recover physical skills lost through injury or disease, such as stroke.

Studies suggest there’s a lot of potential here. But translating this potential into useful tech that reliably boosts learning physical skills remains a big challenge.

Stimulating findings

Research into enhancing motor learning with electric or magnetic stimulation has been gaining momentum since the turn of the millennium, with early studies garnering considerable excitement.

In a typical experiment, participants might learn a sequence of finger movements similar to practising scales on a piano while receiving stimulation over brain regions involved in movement. Other studies have examined how stimulation could be used for balance training or teaching sports-related skills or surgical techniques.

Some of these experiments produced eye-catching results, finding that participants learned certain movement tasks faster or retained skills for longer if they underwent brain stimulation. But other studies failed to find benefits. And in some cases, researchers struggled to replicate the success of earlier promising experiments when repeating them.

One reason for these mixed findings is that there’s no such thing as a universal ‘learning network’ in our brains. Different skills rely on different combinations of areas near the surface of the brain as well as those deep within it.

Additionally, people can respond very differently to the same stimulation. Factors such as age, anatomy, genetics and even baseline skill level may influence whether stimulation is beneficial. Add to that the infinite number of ways to apply stimulation, the picture becomes murkier.

Despite these challenges, the field continues to evolve in its quest to enhance motor learning. For instance, rather than broadly stimulating the brain, researchers are increasingly targeting specific neural circuits involved in learning.

This is partly thanks to advances in neuroimaging and computational modelling, which has allowed scientists to predict how electrical currents travel through a person’s brain. Newer brain stimulation technologies, such as focused ultrasound, can also now reach deep structures involved in skill acquisition.

The goal is to use these technologies not simply to increase brain activity, but to influence the right neural circuit at the right time during learning. This idea builds on a fundamental principle of neuroscience, often summarised as “neurons that fire together, wire together”. When brain cells are repeatedly activated at the same time, the connections between them become stronger.

By carefully timing stimulation to coincide with the movements made during practice, researchers hope to reinforce the neural pathways involved in learning a new skill. In principle, this could make stimulation more reliable and more effective than current approaches, but researchers are still fine tuning exactly how this would work.

Motoring ahead

Important questions remain. Who would have access? Should stimulation be regulated in competitive environments such as sport? And how much evidence should be required before consumer devices are marketed to healthy users?

These questions are becoming increasingly relevant as brain stimulation moves beyond the laboratory and clinic. A number of at-home devices are now available for people to buy. Some have received regulatory approval, as they’re indicated for treating medical conditions such as depression. But there’s also a growing market for devices for cognitive and performance enhancement. For these uses, no regulatory approval is needed.

The technology is advancing rapidly, but evidence to support it and regulations governing it are still trying to catch up. Proper frameworks for its adoption may simply be bypassed by the ready possibility of ‘DIY’ brain stimulation.

For now, brain stimulation is unlikely to transform anyone into an overnight virtuoso or elite athlete. But as researchers develop increasingly precise ways of targeting the neural circuits that underpin learning, the prospect of enhancing human performance is shifting from science fiction towards scientific possibility.

The challenge today is not simply learning how to influence the brain, but deciding where, when and why we should.

By Ned Jenkinson and Matthew Weightman

Ned Jenkinson is a senior lecturer in human movement sciences at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His research incorporates a range of techniques including non-invasive brain stimulation, electrophysiological recording, eye-tracking, neuroimaging and behavioural techniques. He uses these techniques to investigate how the brain controls movement and how it allows us to learn new motor skills.

Matthew Weightman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging in the Plasticity Group at the University of Oxford, led by Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg. He is broadly interested in the field of sensorimotor neuroscience. His current work focuses on the role of sleep to recovery after stroke. More specifically, he is interested in how we can improve sleep after a stroke, whether improved sleep in stroke patients relates to better functional recovery, and if physiological processes that occur during sleep can be enhanced post-stroke to boost consolidation.

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Japan’s Keio confirms ransomware attack disrupted business systems

Published

6 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Japan's Keio confirms ransomware attack disrupted business systems

Keio Corporation (Keio), a major private railway operator in Japan, said its network was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, disrupting some of its business systems.

Following a system failure in the early hours of Saturday, the company confirmed the attack and shut down its network to prevent additional damage.

The company said it is investigating the extent of the impact and whether the attackers accessed any customer or business partner information.

Keio is a large Japanese railway operator with 85 km of track and 69 stations, as well as a separate hospitality business of 25 hotels. The company has over 2,200 employees and a reported annual revenue of about $2.6 billion.

“In the early hours of September 26, 2026, we confirmed a ransomware attack on our group’s servers. We have reported the incident to the police and are conducting an investigation into the attack’s route and damage with the cooperation of external experts,” Keio says.

The incident appears to have affected only the hospitality side of Keio’s business, not train operations.

A separate announcement published on the company’s Keio Plaza Hotel Tokyo website is warning of possible delays on some customer-facing services.

Local media outlets have reported that the cyberattack disrupted the firm’s payment systems.

At the time of writing, BleepingComputer could not find a ransomware group claiming the attack on Keio.

BleepingComputer has contacted the company to request more information about the incident, and we will update this post with their response once it reaches us.

Tokyo Metro has also disclosed a cyber incident over the weekend in which attackers gained unauthorized access to its systems and accessed 59,000 member email addresses.

Although both Keio and Tokyo Metro are Japanese railway operators, it is unclear if the organizations were targeted in a coordinated campaign by the same threat actor.

Tokyo Metro is a major transit operator that runs nine subway lines covering 195 km and 180 stations, carrying an average of 7 million passengers daily.

The company said the breached systems contained only email addresses and that it has already identified and closed the security weakness the attackers used in this case.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

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Microsoft may have just pushed Copilot into a completely different phase of its AI ambitions

Published

7 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Home puts chats, delegated work, and Office documents inside one interface
Code lets non-programmers describe software and have Copilot build it
Autopilot can continue recurring work without waiting for another instruction

Microsoft has introduced a redesigned version of its Copilot AI platform which claims to combine chat, delegated work, and coding tools into a unified application experience for users.

The company says the update is meant to let individuals and organizations scale artificial intelligence across everyday tasks and long-term projects.

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How To Get Started With Shortcuts On Your MacBook

Published

8 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Automate your Mac with ease using Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.

Apple's Shortcuts app on a MacBook, shown on the main desktop.

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

Shortcuts has been available on Mac since macOS Monterey, but it’s one of those utilities many Mac users have never explored. At first, it can seem too complicated. You have to know which actions to choose and how to connect them, then hope it all works.

But macOS 27 Golden Gate changes that with Describe a Shortcut, which lets you type exactly what you need and have Shortcuts do the heavy work for you with AI. It doesn’t always work, but it makes the app much easier to use — especially if you’re not an expert.

If you’re not familiar with Shortcuts, it’s an automation tool where you create scripts to handle tasks on your devices. Apple’s own example is a shortcut that texts your spouse with an estimated arrival time based on traffic when you’re leaving work. But you can get much more complex, like a shortcut that checks your calendar and the weather to give you a summary of what to expect today.

There are many possibilities, and now with macOS 27, it’s much easier to master the app.

Creating shortcuts on your Mac is easy

Apple's Shortcuts app on a Mac, showing a recently created shortcut to clean up the user's Downloads folder.

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

Creating a new shortcut takes a few seconds. Open the Shortcuts app on your Mac and click the Plus button to enter a prompt. The more details you provide, the more likely the app is to get your shortcut right. A command like “Clean up my Downloads” might be too vague for the app to understand what you really want. Instead, try something like “Every Friday, move anything in my Downloads folder older than 30 days into a folder called Archive.” You’re more likely to end up with a working shortcut when you provide clear details.

This is a good example of how Shortcuts are helpful for tasks you often forget to do; no one really cleans out their Downloads folder unless they’re trying to free up space. Plus, you can check the result right away by opening the folder and looking at what moved. If the shortcut moved too much, re-enter the prompt with even more specific details.

A shortcut can also be great for summarizing long text with Apple Intelligence. Try something like “Take the text on my clipboard, summarize it in three sentences and save it to a new note.” Then copy a long article or an email, run the shortcut and you’ll have the short version in Notes.

Make your shortcuts easier to reach

Various automated actions in Apple's Shortcuts app.

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

If a shortcut isn’t part of your normal routine, chances are you’ll forget about it after a while. Thankfully, you can assign a keyboard combo to a shortcut, or pin it to the menu bar, so you’ll never forget it.

Choose the shortcut you want to adjust and click Edit. Go to the Shortcut Details menu (the one with the information icon) and select Add Keyboard Shortcut. To add it to the Control Center or menu bar, open Control Center on your Mac (at the top-right) and select Edit Controls. There, all you have to do is add the action from the Shortcuts app, and you’re all set. Exploring the Automation tab is also a good idea for creating a seamless workflow of shortcuts that run on their own when you need them.

Shortcuts isn’t the only element in macOS 27 that acts on your behalf. Visual Intelligence has its own key combo: Shift + Command + Space. After pressing this, select a window on-screen and have Siri answer questions about it or take action, like adding an event to your calendar. Try it on an email with a date buried in it, for example. Siri can also run your shortcuts via voice, speaking of which.

Shortcuts and Siri AI require Apple Intelligence, which means you need a Mac with an M1 chip or later — Intel Mac users are out of luck. Also, some limits may apply when using Apple’s AI models in Shortcuts. More complex prompts could reach a limit faster.

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Peak XV ups Surge seed investment ceiling to $5M, unveils 18-startup cohort

Published

9 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

Peak XV Partners, one of the largest venture capital firms investing in markets including India and Southeast Asia with more than $10 billion in assets under management, has increased how much it invests per startup through Surge, its seed-stage investing platform, as it unveils a new cohort of 18 companies.

At least three of the companies in this cohort had already raised outside funding, in some cases from Peak XV itself, before joining Surge.

The new batch, called Surge 12, is the first to operate under Peak XV’s higher investment ceiling of up to $5 million per company, up from $3 million previously. The venture firm invested more than $50 million across the cohort, which has collectively raised over $90 million in seed funding, according to Peak XV. Its median investment per company has also increased, though the firm declined to disclose the figure.

“The bar to raise a Series A has gone up pretty significantly,” Rajan Anandan (pictured above), managing director at Peak XV, said in an interview. He added that the firm is also seeing more capital-intensive companies, particularly in deeptech, that are raising larger rounds at the seed stage.

Surge has become more global with each cohort, Anandan told TechCrunch, with its latest group spanning founders and companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Just five of the 18 startups in Surge 12 are focused on the Indian market, while more than half of the companies are based in India. The remaining 13 target global markets, highlighting the difference between where the companies are built and where they expect to find customers.

Since its launch in 2019, when Peak XV operated as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, Surge has backed more than 180 startups founded by entrepreneurs representing more than 18 nationalities. Peak XV says the 10 largest companies to emerge from those cohorts now generate more than $1 billion in combined annual revenue.

Peak XV Surge 2026 cohort — Surge founders at the Peak XV U.S. Immersion 2026Image Credits:Peak XV Partners

Anandan described Surge as one way Peak XV invests at the seed stage, alongside its standard seed investing, while the firm still remains an investor as companies progress through later funding rounds. The founders it backs typically include repeat entrepreneurs, experienced operators, and highly specialized technical founders, he said, with about 50% to 60% of a typical cohort made up of people coming from operating roles at established technology companies.

This cohort’s startups span AI, robotics, space, consumer products, healthcare, music, and fintech, ranging from AI safety and personal computing to autonomous robots built for underground pipes and satellites designed to detect radio-frequency signals from orbit.

The Surge 12 cohort

Alma — founded by Nischith Shadagopan M N and Vinod Ganesan — is building a personal computing platform focused on making computer use faster and more affordable. Its founders previously worked at Microsoft Research and were founding engineers at Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup building AI models for Indian languages.

August AI — founded by Anuruddh Mishra, an IIT-BHU alumnus who started the company in 2022 after a personal medical misdiagnosis — provides a healthcare platform that combines AI with physician-led care, reaching over 9 million users across 160 countries.

Ditto — founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu — works as an AI dating matchmaker inside iMessage, aimed at helping college students turn digital introductions into in-person connections. (TechCrunch wrote more about this one last month.) The company had already raised $9.2 million in a Peak XV-led seed round announced earlier this year.

GameStock — founded by Antoine Mistico, Easton Dana, and Vivek Indlebele Narasimha Prasad — brings competition mechanics to financial markets, turning investing and trading into a more competitive experience. Mistico is a two-time founder and former professional baseball player.

HiLoop — founded by Jad Ghalayini, Karan Brar, and Thomas Boser — helps AI companies adapt general-purpose open-weight models for specific applications using its post-training platform. Its founding team includes former Reducto engineers and a Cambridge computer science PhD who completed his doctorate at 24.

Hoola Health — founded by Deeksha Senguttuva — focuses on care for children and their families, providing consultations, vaccinations, medicines, diagnostics, developmental therapy, and dental services on a single platform. Senguttuvan grew up around healthcare, as her family built and operated a hospital group.

Kello — founded by Mona Gandhi and Subramanya Jingade — is building an AI-powered talent-discovery platform focused on identifying a candidate’s potential and trajectory rather than relying primarily on conventional credentials. Gandhi says she was Airbnb’s first female engineer and she previously founded Upraised, while Jingade previously co-founded AmbitionBox.

Kindling — founded by Adam Miller and Sachin Shah — is building what it calls a “storytelling operating system” for technology startups, using AI to help companies develop and produce their communications and content.

Puralink — founded by Harrison Crowe-Maxwell, Shyeon Delnawaz, and Thien “Long” Tran — is developing autonomous robots that can navigate underground pipe networks. Crowe-Maxwell has been building robots since childhood and turned university research into the patented drive technology behind the startup.

Reinforce Labs — founded by Anish Das Sarma — is developing tools to evaluate, red-team, and remediate enterprise AI systems. Sarma previously founded a company acquired by Airbnb and later served as a director at Google, where he led AI and machine-learning teams.

Riffle — founded by Anurag Choudhary and deo — is building a browser-based platform where musicians can create, collaborate on, and share music, reducing the need to move between separate tools during the creative process.

Rosella — founded by Chris Dwyer and Sean Stuart — is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage for U.S. businesses, using AI to automate parts of the traditionally manual process of finding and placing business insurance. Rosella raised a roughly $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Peak XV and Intact Private Capital earlier this year.

Tribe Money — founded by Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker — gives an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps users track their money, research investments and make investing decisions.

ULOOK — founded by Adheesh Boratkar and Siddhesh Ravindra Naik — is building autonomous satellite systems for radio-frequency sensing and spectrum intelligence, targeting customers globally. Its founders have worked on more than 12 satellite missions. The company had already raised roughly $2.3 million in seed funding from growX Ventures and InfoEdge Ventures before joining Surge.

Wingit — founded by Nikunj Kothari and Saksham Khandelwal — is building a beauty platform aimed at India’s growing premium-consumer market. It is focused on how consumers discover and shop for higher-end beauty products.

Three other startups in the cohort have yet to publicly reveal their names or products. Peak XV said they are working in education, applied AI, and medical products.

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The Metric Is Not The Mission: When The Maps Became The Territory

Published

10 hours ago

29 September 2026

NewsAdmin

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part III: When the Maps Became the Territory

In Part II, the story turned on a crucial distinction: measuring behavior is not the same as understanding people. Part III takes that idea further, examining what happens when the platforms’ representations of the world begin to substitute for the world itself.

There is a curious tendency among successful technologies to disappear. Not physically, of course, but cognitively. Once they become sufficiently embedded in everyday life, they cease to be experienced as technologies at all. Electricity is no longer a marvel of engineering but an expectation. We do not admire the plumbing each time we turn on a tap, nor do we reflect on the extraordinary complexity of global logistics every time fresh fruit appears on supermarket shelves in the middle of winter. The greatest infrastructures become invisible because they succeed so completely that we mistake them for part of the natural order.

The internet reached that point sometime during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Yet something else happened along the way that proved far more consequential. As the network itself faded into the background, the platforms through which most people experienced it moved decisively into the foreground. Increasingly, users no longer spoke about “going online.” They spoke about opening an app.

That linguistic shift deserves more attention than it usually receives. Language often reveals structural change before statistics do. To “browse the web” implied movement across an open landscape whose boundaries were undefined. One followed links, discovered obscure websites, stumbled upon ideas that had not been recommended by anyone, and occasionally became gloriously lost. The experience resembled wandering through an unfamiliar city with no particular destination in mind. Serendipity was not a flaw in the architecture; it was one of its defining virtues.

Applications altered that relationship almost without anyone noticing. They replaced geography with destination. Instead of entering a network whose possibilities remained unknown, we entered environments that had already been organized on our behalf. The internet did not disappear, but it became increasingly hidden beneath layers of interface, recommendation and curation. Like passengers traveling through an airport without ever seeing the city beyond the terminal, we continued moving through digital space while encountering only the carefully managed environments that had been prepared for us.

This transformation is often described as an inevitable consequence of convenience. While accurate in its own right, this explanation offers an incomplete narrative. Convenience was certainly the language through which the platforms justified many of their design choices. Friction was treated as the great enemy of the digital age. Every additional click became an obstacle to be eliminated. Every decision that users might otherwise make for themselves could instead be anticipated by software. Recommendation replaced search. Autoplay replaced choice. Infinite scrolling replaced endings. The future, we were told, belonged to experiences so seamless that they would feel almost effortless. And they did.

It is difficult to criticize convenience because convenience is genuinely valuable. Few people wish to return to an internet in which finding information required memorizing obscure web addresses or navigating labyrinthine directories. The platforms did not succeed by forcing people into inferior experiences. They succeeded because, for many years, they built better ones.

Yet convenience has always carried an intellectual cost. Every technology that removes friction also removes moments of deliberation. The elevator spares us the staircase but also the awareness of distance. Satellite navigation ensures that we rarely become lost, while quietly diminishing our ability to construct mental maps of the places through which we travel. Streaming services relieve us of searching for entertainment, but in doing so they also shape the boundaries of what we are likely to discover. Every act of technological simplification transfers a small measure of agency from the individual to the system.

The internet had originally been built on a different assumption. Its underlying protocols did remarkably little. They did not decide which website deserved prominence, which ideas should travel furthest, or which communities ought to flourish. Their genius lay precisely in their restraint. They created conditions under which others could innovate without first requesting permission. The web itself functioned less like a product than like a constitutional order: a simple framework within which extraordinary diversity could emerge.

Platforms gradually adopted the opposite philosophy. They did not merely provide the rules of the game; increasingly, they became active participants in every interaction taking place within it. They selected what deserved attention, inferred what users might prefer before users themselves knew it, prioritized certain relationships over others and determined, through millions of microscopic computational decisions, the contours of everyday experience. The architecture became less constitutional than managerial.

There is an illuminating parallel here with the history of cities. The most enduring cities are rarely the ones that have been planned in every detail. They are those that accumulated layer upon layer of human activity over centuries, adapting continuously to changing needs without ever fully surrendering their unpredictability. One finds unexpected bookshops beside cafés, workshops hidden behind apartment blocks, public squares appropriated for demonstrations one week and festivals the next. Their vitality emerges not from perfect organization but from the freedom they grant people to appropriate space in ways that planners never anticipated.

Shopping malls operate according to an altogether different logic. They are meticulously designed environments in which every entrance, corridor, sightline, and seating area has been carefully considered. Music, lighting, and architecture work together to produce an experience that feels spontaneous while being anything but. There is comfort in their orderliness. They are clean, efficient, and reassuringly predictable. Yet no one mistakes a shopping mall for a city. Its purpose is not to cultivate civic life but to optimize a particular set of behaviors within a privately governed space.

The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, but it captures something essential about the transformation of the internet. The early web invited participation because it remained fundamentally unfinished. It assumed that users would contribute to shaping it. Today’s dominant platforms present themselves as complete worlds. Participation still exists, but it takes place within boundaries established elsewhere. Users generate the content while the architecture remains firmly in corporate hands.

Perhaps this is why the language of “community” has begun to feel strangely hollow. Communities, in the classical sense, are rarely designed. They emerge through shared experience, mutual obligation, and a degree of unpredictability that no algorithm can fully reproduce. Platforms, by contrast, increasingly treat community as an engineering problem to be optimized. They recommend friendships, suggest conversations, rank relevance, suppress friction, and amplify interaction according to models whose objectives are necessarily commercial because the organizations that develop them are commercial enterprises.

None of this should be understood as an accusation of bad faith. Many of the engineers responsible for these systems genuinely believed they were improving people’s lives. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Every large institution eventually begins to confuse the optimization of its own internal metrics with the fulfillment of its original purpose. Universities sometimes mistake publication counts for scholarship. Hospitals occasionally confuse efficiency with care. Governments become preoccupied with administrative process rather than public service. Technology companies are no different. The indicators that make sense within an organization slowly become proxies for the world outside it. The metric is not the mission. This is the point at which the maps begin to replace the territory.

The extraordinary quantities of behavioral data collected by digital platforms produce an understandable confidence. When one can observe billions of interactions each day, it becomes tempting to believe that society itself has become legible. Human behavior appears measurable, predictable and, increasingly, governable. The platform begins to resemble reality because so much of reality passes through the platform.

Yet the map is never the territory. It captures what can be measured, not everything that matters. A map records roads but not the reasons people travel. It identifies cities without conveying the lives unfolding within them. Likewise, recommendation systems observe behavior with astonishing precision while remaining largely indifferent to experience itself. They recognize patterns without necessarily understanding meaning.

That distinction mattered little while the platforms continued solving the problems that had made them indispensable. It becomes far more consequential once they begin confronting a world that no longer resembles the one for which they were originally designed. Because societies have changed; politics has changed; and, the internet has changed. The question is whether the companies that grew powerful by interpreting one era have noticed that another has already begun.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Filed Under: behavior, big tech, metric not mission, open internet, optimization, platforms, understanding

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