Screwed

With their folksy DIY tracks about the minutiae of love and life, Melbourne duo Good Morning is a band that might have stayed one of Australia’s best-kept secrets – were it not for a series of unexpected co-signs.First there was Tyler, the Creator sharing an early single – the rueful, self-effacing Warned You – to his Instagram story. Then A$AP Rocky sampled one of their tracks in 2018 (“in a truly fucked development”, they called it at the time). Then Warned You went viral on TikTok during the pandemic, soundtracking the…

Just days after people gleefully posted their Spotify Wrapped, bad news came for the music streaming giant. Spotify announced Monday it would cut 17 percent of its workforce, a chunk that equates to an estimated 1,500 people. It’s the third time the world’s largest music streamer has cut jobs this year.The news came after Spotify posted its first profitable quarter since 2021. In a memo to staff, CEO Daniel Ek said the company had expanded its workforce and offerings significantly throughout 2020 and 2021 thanks to…

For-you-pages aren’t just for selling half-price hair straighteners and ill-advised parasite cleanses anymore. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, a “growing share” of adults in the U.S. are getting their news directly from TikTok, at a time when other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X are seeing a rapid decline in news and journalism engagement. It’s a direction viewed with skepticism by organizations that have failed to gain significant followings on short-form video platforms. Rolling…

Entrepreneur Ankur Nagpal raised a $70 million venture fund last year, called Vibe Capital, from over 200 investors. But now, as the market shifts and LPs are less interested in venture capital, the Ocho founder is shrinking the fund side by roughly 43%, canceling capital calls, and, ultimately, sending back money that had already been wired to the fund. The contraction, Nagpal told TechCrunch, occurred because he’s busy building his own startup and the funding environment has shifted to more realistic expectations:…

Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)In 1982, the Department of Justice wrapped up a 13-year antitrust case against IBM. The DOJ lost, but so did IBM. The tech landscape changed, and IBM was distracted and had to move slowly under the increased scrutiny. Microsoft and Apple swooped in and knocked IBM off its perch. 20 years later, the same thing happened to Microsoft. The DOJ launched an antitrust investigation, and ultimately Microsoft wasn’t broken up. But Apple, Google, and social media companies like Facebook left…

Image via Lucasfilm Star Wars: Return of the Jedi opens by resolving the cliffhanger ending of The Empire Strikes Back. Han Solo has been imprisoned in carbonite and is on display in Jabba’s throne room, with Luke, Leia, and Lando on a mission to save him. Leia’s plan to sneak in disguised as a bounty hunter fails, resulting in her humiliating time as a gold-bikini-clad slave girl. Luke tries a different tactic, marching straight into Jabba’s Palace and demanding her release in exchange for C-3PO. Jabba isn’t…

Hello, friends. My name is Kate Knibbs, and I’m a senior writer at WIRED covering culture and media. I’ll be your substitute Plaintext guide this week, as my colleague Steven Levy has generously lent me his newsletter. “Have fun doing my newsletter, please don’t go off on a tangent about the Kardashian-Jenner Industrial Complex,” he said before heading out, if I remember correctly. My bad!The Plain ViewInstagram sucks now. What was once a repository for photos of friends and family is now a junkyard stuffed with knockoff…