A dystopia that is going to be okay

The crash we’ve been bracing for hasn’t come.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

This is just like when I walked out of Twisters to see Biden had dropped out. —Kate

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For a variety of reasons, these past few years felt like they were teeing us up for something truly awful. Artificial intelligence promised to render artists, writers, and even human relationships obsolete, and whatever remained would be further usurped by a metaverse whose only selling point was that one day we could have legs in it. And yet, there was nothing for us to do but watch as Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk battled for the driver’s seat of a Cybertruck headed for the edge of a cliff. 

And then, one day this summer, I realized: The crash we’ve been bracing for hasn’t come. Instead, something peculiar has been happening. The 2024 Cybertrucks were recalled. The AI threatening our existence is only doing so by erroneously saying we can eat glue. The Meta Horizon account bragging about legs hasn’t tweeted since 2022. Are we…a dystopia that’s going to be okay?