is The Verge’s se­nior AI re­porter. An AI beat re­porter for more than five years, her work has also ap­peared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other out­lets.

is The Verge’s se­nior AI re­porter. An AI beat re­porter for more than five years, her work has also ap­peared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other out­lets.

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will in­stead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co­founder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D em­ploy­ees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf an­nounced Friday.

Mohan and the Windsurf em­ploy­ees will fo­cus on agen­tic cod­ing ef­forts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any con­trol over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-ex­clu­sive li­cense to some of Windsurf’s tech­nol­ogy.

Effective im­me­di­ately, Jeff Wang, Windsurf’s head of busi­ness, has be­come in­terim CEO, and Graham Moreno, its VP of global sales, will be Windsurf’s new pres­i­dent.

“Gemini is one of the best mod­els avail­able and we’ve been in­vest­ing in its ad­vanced ca­pa­bil­i­ties for de­vel­op­ers,” Chris Pappas, a spokesper­son for Google, told The Verge in a state­ment. “We’re ex­cited to wel­come some top AI cod­ing tal­ent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to ad­vance our work in agen­tic cod­ing.”

“We are ex­cited to be join­ing Google DeepMind along with some of the Windsurf team,” Mohan and Chen said in a state­ment. “We are proud of what Windsurf has built over the last four years and are ex­cited to see it move for­ward with their world class team and kick-start the next phase.”

Google did­n’t share how much it was pay­ing to bring on the team. OpenAI was pre­vi­ously re­ported to be buy­ing Windsurf for $3 bil­lion.

Earlier this week in Geneva, around 50 lead­ing global ini­tia­tives and or­gan­i­sa­tions ded­i­cated to open-source LLMs and trust­wor­thy AI con­vened at the International Open-Source LLM Builders Summit. Hosted by the AI cen­tres of EPFL and ETH Zurich, the event marked a sig­nif­i­cant step in build­ing a vi­brant and col­lab­o­ra­tive in­ter­na­tional ecosys­tem for open foun­da­tion mod­els. Open LLMs are in­creas­ingly viewed as cred­i­ble al­ter­na­tives to com­mer­cial sys­tems, most of which are de­vel­oped be­hind closed doors in the United States or China.

Participants of the sum­mit pre­viewed the forth­com­ing re­lease of a fully open, pub­licly de­vel­oped LLM — co-cre­ated by re­searchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and other Swiss uni­ver­si­ties in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with en­gi­neers at CSCS. Currently in fi­nal test­ing, the model will be down­load­able un­der an open li­cense. The model fo­cuses on trans­parency, mul­ti­lin­gual per­for­mance, and broad ac­ces­si­bil­ity.

The model will be fully open: source code and weights will be pub­licly avail­able, and the train­ing data will be trans­par­ent and re­pro­ducible, sup­port­ing adop­tion across sci­ence, gov­ern­ment, ed­u­ca­tion, and the pri­vate sec­tor. This ap­proach is de­signed to fos­ter both in­no­va­tion and ac­count­abil­ity.

“Fully open mod­els en­able high-trust ap­pli­ca­tions and are nec­es­sary for ad­vanc­ing re­search about the risks and op­por­tu­ni­ties of AI. Transparent processes also en­able reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance,” says Imanol Schlag, re­search sci­en­tist at the ETH AI Center, who is lead­ing the ef­fort along­side EPFL AI Center fac­ulty mem­bers and pro­fes­sors Antoine Bosselut and Martin Jaggi.

A defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of the LLM is its flu­ency in over 1000 lan­guages. “We have em­pha­sised mak­ing the mod­els mas­sively mul­ti­lin­gual from the start,” says Antoine Bosselut.

Training of the base model was done on a large text dataset in over 1500 lan­guages — ap­prox­i­mately 60% English and 40% non-Eng­lish lan­guages — as well as code and math­e­mat­ics data. Given the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of con­tent from all lan­guages and cul­tures, the re­sult­ing model main­tains the high­est global ap­plic­a­bil­ity.

The model will be re­leased in two sizes — 8 bil­lion and 70 bil­lion pa­ra­me­ters, meet­ing a broad range of users’ needs. The 70B ver­sion will rank among the most pow­er­ful fully open mod­els world­wide. The num­ber of pa­ra­me­ters re­flects a mod­el’s ca­pac­ity to learn and gen­er­ate com­plex re­sponses.

High re­li­a­bil­ity is achieved through train­ing on over 15 tril­lion high-qual­ity train­ing to­kens (units rep­re­sent­ing a word or part of the word), en­abling ro­bust lan­guage un­der­stand­ing and ver­sa­tile use cases.

The LLM is be­ing de­vel­oped with due con­sid­er­a­tion to Swiss data pro­tec­tion laws, Swiss copy­right laws, and the trans­parency oblig­a­tions un­der the EU AI Act. In a ex­ter­nal page re­cent study, the pro­ject lead­ers demon­strated that for most every­day tasks and gen­eral knowl­edge ac­qui­si­tion, re­spect­ing web crawl­ing opt-outs dur­ing data ac­qui­si­tion pro­duces vir­tu­ally no per­for­mance degra­da­tion.

The model is trained on the “Alps” su­per­com­puter at CSCS in Lugano, one of the world’s most ad­vanced AI plat­forms, equipped with over 10,000 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips. The sys­tem’s scale and ar­chi­tec­ture made it pos­si­ble to train the model ef­fi­ciently us­ing 100% car­bon-neu­tral elec­tric­ity.

The suc­cess­ful re­al­i­sa­tion of “Alps” was sig­nif­i­cantly fa­cil­i­tated by a long-stand­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion span­ning over 15 years with NVDIA and HPE/Cray. This part­ner­ship has been piv­otal in shap­ing the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of “Alps”, en­sur­ing it meets the de­mand­ing re­quire­ments of large-scale AI work­loads, in­clud­ing the pre-train­ing of com­plex LLMs.

“Training this model is only pos­si­ble be­cause of our strate­gic in­vest­ment in ‘Alps’, a su­per­com­puter pur­pose-built for AI,” says Thomas Schulthess, Director of CSCS and pro­fes­sor at ETH Zurich. “Our en­dur­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with NVIDIA and HPE ex­em­pli­fies how joint ef­forts be­tween pub­lic re­search in­sti­tu­tions and in­dus­try lead­ers can drive sov­er­eign in­fra­struc­ture, fos­ter­ing open in­no­va­tion — not just for Switzerland, but for sci­ence and so­ci­ety world­wide.”

In late sum­mer, the LLM will be re­leased un­der the Apache 2.0 License. Accompanying doc­u­men­ta­tion will de­tail the model ar­chi­tec­ture, train­ing meth­ods, and us­age guide­lines to en­able trans­par­ent reuse and fur­ther de­vel­op­ment.

“As sci­en­tists from pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions, we aim to ad­vance open mod­els and en­able or­ga­ni­a­tions to build on them for their own ap­pli­ca­tions”, says Antoine Bosselut.

“By em­brac­ing full open­ness — un­like com­mer­cial mod­els that are de­vel­oped be­hind closed doors — we hope that our ap­proach will drive in­no­va­tion in Switzerland, across Europe, and through multi­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tions. Furthermore, it is a key fac­tor in at­tract­ing and nur­tur­ing top tal­ent,” says EPFL pro­fes­sor Martin Jaggi.

Bill Atkinson, the vi­sion­ary Apple en­gi­neer be­hind much of the orig­i­nal Macintosh, passed away on June 5, 2025, at age 74, from pan­cre­atic can­cer—the same ill­ness that claimed his friend Steve Jobs. Obituaries across the tech world ho­n­oured his pi­o­neer­ing role in per­sonal com­put­ing. At Apple, he de­vel­oped QuickDraw, the graph­ics en­gine be­hind the Mac’s in­ter­face; in­vented MacPaint, the first widely adopted dig­i­tal draw­ing tool; and cre­ated HyperCard, the ground­break­ing soft­ware that an­tic­i­pated the in­ter­ac­tive, hy­per­linked struc­ture of to­day’s web.

Yet within OneLight, a pri­vate psy­che­delic com­mu­nity, a dif­fer­ent legacy qui­etly un­folded. Members of OneLight knew Bill Atkinson by his pseu­do­nym, “Grace Within.” He was a joy­ful, gen­er­ous pres­ence who spent his fi­nal years re­fin­ing and openly shar­ing the tech­nol­ogy be­hind the LightWand, a vape pen for ad­min­is­ter­ing the psy­che­delic Jaguar (5-MeO-DMT).

“Of all the things I’ve ac­com­plished, noth­ing sur­passes the need to care­fully and thor­oughly share Jaguar with the world.” — Bill Atkinson

Bill’s dual life as Grace Within re­mained hid­den among a tight-knit cir­cle. Now, ho­n­our­ing his fi­nal in­struc­tions, we at The Pattern Project can now share how he helped un­lock and in­spire the next gen­er­a­tion of psy­che­delic in­no­va­tion.

Jaguar—the un­der­ground term for the pow­er­ful psy­che­delic 5-MeO-DMT—is best known for rapidly dis­solv­ing the ego and de­liv­er­ing an over­whelm­ing sense of unity, awe, or tran­scen­dence. Before the ad­vent of the LightWand vape pen, smok­ing large con­scious­ness-ex­pand­ing doses was the norm. In these brief but in­tense ses­sions, some de­scribed sud­den en­coun­ters with the sa­cred, mo­ments of un­ex­pected re­lief from child­hood wounds, or a depth of aware­ness com­pa­ra­ble to ad­vanced med­i­ta­tion—all un­fold­ing within just a few pow­er­ful min­utes.

But these high-dose ex­pe­ri­ences also carry real risks: too much, with­out proper sup­port, or use by those with spe­cific health con­di­tions can lead to psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress or last­ing trauma. Still, more than 10 ac­tive or com­pleted clin­i­cal tri­als are ex­plor­ing 5-MeO-DMT’s ther­a­peu­tic po­ten­tial for treat­ing ad­dic­tion, de­pres­sion, and other con­di­tions.

In 2018, Bill Atkinson first en­coun­tered the LightWand vape pen at a cer­e­mony hosted by Majus OneLight (pseudonym)—a pi­o­neer in us­ing 5-MeO-DMT for heal­ing, and in­ven­tor of the first LightWand. Majus vividly re­calls Bill’s re­ac­tion:

“Jaguar res­onated deeply with Bill’s life­long quest to un­der­stand con­scious­ness. From neu­ro­science stud­ies to Mac in­ter­face de­sign to na­ture pho­tog­ra­phy, he was al­ways map­ping the deeper pat­terns. Jaguar did­n’t flip his world up­side-down—it con­firmed what he’d qui­etly sensed for decades.”

Though Bill ini­tially wor­ried that the LightWand’s ease of use might cheapen the sa­cred in­ten­sity of the Jaguar ex­pe­ri­ence, he quickly came to ap­pre­ci­ate how its de­sign al­lowed users to gen­tly nav­i­gate Jaguar’s po­tency through care­ful, di­luted doses. For Bill, this meant safer, more mind­ful jour­neys.

Eventually, Bill’s ini­tial con­cerns about shar­ing the LightWand were eclipsed by his be­lief that its ben­e­fits far out­weighed the risks. So, in early 2021, Jaguar (5-MeO-DMT) Vape Pens: How They Are Made by Grace Within, was pub­lished on Erowid.org. There he wrote: “My in­ten­tion with this ar­ti­cle is to as­sist peo­ple in hav­ing safe, beau­ti­ful, and heal­ing ex­pe­ri­ences with this amaz­ing med­i­cine.” His open-source ap­proach de­moc­ra­tized psy­che­delic ex­plo­ration, shift­ing power away from costly re­treats and elite gate­keep­ers to­ward broader ac­ces­si­bil­ity.

Bill did­n’t stop there—he per­son­ally gifted over 1,000 LightWand sets and pa­tiently men­tored other cre­ators on OneLight. With an en­gi­neer’s pre­ci­sion, he doc­u­mented how vari­a­tions in vape pen hard­ware and liq­uid car­ri­ers af­fected 5-MeO-DMT va­por­iza­tion and dosage. Using him­self as the test sub­ject, he tracked blood pres­sure, EEG data, and other phys­i­o­log­i­cal sig­nals.

“Without Bill’s open-source tek, LightWand vape pens might still be lim­ited to ex­pen­sive re­treats and ex­clu­sive cir­cles of psy­che­delic elites,” says Majus.

Bill did­n’t just open-source a new psy­che­delic tech­nol­ogy—he helped em­power a new gen­er­a­tion of in­no­va­tors and ther­a­pists. They saw the LightWand’s po­ten­tial for low doses: to en­cour­age in­sight, heal­ing, and bal­ance, with­out the high costs and ex­haus­tion of marathon psy­che­delic ses­sions. We at The Pattern Project see this low-dose ap­proach as one of the most re­search-wor­thy paths for mak­ing psy­che­delic ther­apy both safer and more prac­ti­cal at scale.

Bill’s ge­nius lay in trans­form­ing com­plex in­no­va­tions—from com­put­ers to psy­che­delics—into in­tu­itive, ac­ces­si­ble tools. The LightWand con­tin­ues this rad­i­cal legacy, em­pow­er­ing more peo­ple—not just sea­soned psy­cho­nauts or spir­i­tual elites—to con­nect with emo­tion, mem­ory, and mean­ing.

Your sup­port—whether by shar­ing this ar­ti­cle or be­com­ing a Pattern Project paid sub­scriber—con­tin­ues Bill’s mis­sion. It pow­ers our vol­un­teer team’s work to re­search and share sto­ries that pro­mote safe, re­spon­si­ble ex­plo­ration of Low-5 (low-dose 5-MeO-DMT).

A few months ago, I up­graded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of in­ter­nal stor­age, us­ing a then-$269 DIY up­grade kit from ExpandMacMini.

At the time, there was no op­tion for up­grad­ing the M4 Pro Mac mini, de­spite it also us­ing a user-re­place­able, sock­eted stor­age drive.

But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if I’d be will­ing to test out one of their new M4 Pro up­grades, in this case, up­grad­ing the mini I use at the stu­dio for edit­ing from a stock 512 GB SSD to 4 TB.

I said yes, and here we are!

I doc­u­mented the en­tire up­grade—along with tak­ing my old M4 mini 1TB SSD and putting it in my Dad’s M4 mini—in to­day’s video:

But please con­tinue read­ing, if you pre­fer text over video, like I do :)

The up­grade process it­self is straight­for­ward (if you’ve ever worked on lap­top hard­ware be­fore, at least), though re­mov­ing the rear plas­tic cover (which also has the power but­ton at­tached) is a bit an­noy­ing.

There are four metal pegs that are re­tained in clips in the bot­tom metal cover, and you have to slide a thin piece of metal / pry tool into the very min­i­mal gap be­tween the plas­tic bot­tom cover and the alu­minum case, then pry it up. And if you’re not care­ful on that step, you’ll not only scratch the alu­minum (and maybe crack the plas­tic bot­tom), but there’s a good chance you rip the frag­ile (and tiny) power but­ton con­nec­tor too!

Besides that, it’s a mat­ter of re­mov­ing a num­ber of small torx screws; all the bits I needed were pre­sent in the cheap­est iFixit as­sort­ment I have at my desk.

The only sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence be­tween the M4 and M4 Pro mini SSD is the size and rel­a­tive lo­ca­tion—the M4 Pro has a much longer slot, a lit­tle more than a stan­dard 2242-size NVMe SSD, while the M4 has a shorter slot, closer to a 2230.

Speaking of stan­dards… you have to do a full DFU (Device Firmware Update) re­store, be­cause un­like con­ven­tional M.2 NVMe stor­age, the M4 uses a pro­pri­etary con­nec­tor, a pro­pri­etary-sized slot, and splits up the typ­i­cal lay­out—the card that’s user-re­place­able is ac­tu­ally just flash chips and sup­port­ing power cir­cuits, while the stor­age con­troller (the NVMe ‘brains’) is part of the M4 SoC (System on a Chip). Apple could use stan­dard NVMe slots, but they seem to think the con­troller be­ing part of the SoC brings bet­ter se­cu­rity… it cer­tainly does­n’t bring any cost sav­ings, re­siliency in terms of quick re­cov­ery from fail­ure in the field, or per­for­mance ad­van­tage!

Since DFU re­store is nec­es­sary, in my ear­lier video, I sug­gested you need an Apple Silicon mac (M1 or later) as the other com­puter.

But I was cor­rected by my view­ers, who men­tioned you can use many Intel Macs as well—I be­lieve as long as a T2 chip is pre­sent, you’re good to go. Just con­nect to the mid­dle Thunderbolt port on the rear of the Mac mini, then press and hold the power but­ton while plug­ging it into AC power. The other Mac should pop up an ‘Allow this de­vice to con­nect?’ di­a­log and then you can pro­ceed to the DFU process from there.

As far as I’m aware, no Hackintosh or other com­puter can be made to do a DFU re­store.

I’ve done three up­grades (two on M4 minis, one on an M4 Pro mini), and all three were easy. The sec­ond one, I thought I had an is­sue, but it was just a con­fir­ma­tion di­a­log that wound up be­hind the ac­tive win­dow.

I de­cided to also use an ex­ter­nal Thunderbolt 5 NVMe en­clo­sure from M4-SSD along with my (rather ex­pen­sive) 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q SSD, and do a per­for­mance com­par­i­son.

See the video at the be­gin­ning of this post for some more de­tail (like all the num­bers from AmorphousDiskMark and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test), but here are the raw num­bers for large file copy per­for­mance:

The up­graded 4TB mod­ule per­formed no­tice­ably bet­ter in writes, likely be­cause it has more flash chips on it to spread out the write ac­tiv­ity. Reads were pretty close to the same, with mi­nor vari­ance in per­for­mance across dif­fer­ent file sizes and ac­cess pat­terns.

The ex­ter­nal TB5 drive was the lag­gard, but is still ridicu­lously fast (by my stan­dards, edit­ing 4K video). And it would likely be faster if I used a good PCIe Gen 4x4 drive (the Rocket Q is Gen 3x4).

But the in­ter­nal stor­age on these Mac minis is very fast, and even bet­ter, very con­sis­tently fast. The ex­ter­nal Thunderbolt drive would slow down briefly every minute or so, af­ter 100+ GB were copied—and I ver­i­fied both with smartctl and my ther­mal cam­era that the drive was not over­heat­ing.

This is likely due to the in­ter­nal DRAM cache on the NVMe SSD not be­ing able to keep up with the high trans­fer speeds over long pe­ri­ods of time.

I was pro­vided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD up­grade by M4-SSD. It’s quite ex­pen­sive (especially com­pared to nor­mal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)…

But it’s not nearly as ex­pen­sive as Apple’s own of­fer­ing, which at the time of this writ­ing is $1,200!

“It’s the crime of the cen­tury,” says Bruce Lanphear.

He’s not talk­ing about a mur­der spree, a kid­nap­ping or a bank heist.

Lanphear — an en­vi­ron­men­tal epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Simon Fraser University — is re­fer­ring to the fact that an es­ti­mated 800 mil­lion chil­dren around the world are poi­soned by lead — lead in their fam­i­ly’s pots and pan, lead in their food, lead in the air. That’s just about half of all chil­dren in low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries, ac­cord­ing to UNICEF and the non­profit Pure Earth.

For decades, very lit­tle has been done about this. But this is the story of how two women — a New York City de­tec­tive and a California stu­dent — fol­lowed the data and helped crack a puz­zling case that spanned the globe in the on­go­ing “crime” of lead poi­son­ing.

Next to a row of cour­t­houses in down­town Manhattan, there’s an im­pos­ing gray build­ing. On the 6th floor is an of­fice that houses about 50 de­tec­tives. They work for New York City’s health de­part­ment. They tackle thou­sands of cases a year in­volv­ing kids ex­posed to toxic el­e­ments. And many of those cases are chil­dren who have too much lead in their blood.

The de­tec­tives’ job is to find the cul­prit. Could it be old chip­ping paint that’s cre­at­ing lead dust that kids are breath­ing in? Could the lead be com­ing home on a par­en­t’s clothes from, say, a fac­tory or con­struc­tion work­site and, then, the child breathes it in? Perhaps it was a toy from over­seas, dec­o­rated with lead paint, that the kid re­peat­edly puts in their mouth?

The city de­tec­tives of­ten search the child’s home armed with a de­vice that re­sem­bles a radar gun — point it at, say, a wall, hold the trig­ger and you get a lead mea­sure­ment of its paint.

Every time you go on such a mis­sion, “it is ab­solutely a lead de­tec­tive mys­tery,” says Paromita Hore, who over­sees the de­tec­tives as di­rec­tor of en­vi­ron­men­tal ex­po­sure as­sess­ment and ed­u­ca­tion in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

When the mys­tery is solved — when they find the source of the lead — Hore’s team helps the fam­ily avoid ad­di­tional ex­po­sure.

In the early 2000s, New York City’s health de­part­ment no­ticed a per­plex­ing blip: A sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of Bangladeshi chil­dren in New York City were show­ing up in their lead data­base.

“This is a prob­lem,” Hore re­calls think­ing through­out the multi-year, multi-coun­try ef­fort to un­earth the root cause.

As Hore’s team of lead de­tec­tives busily col­lected and an­a­lyzed sam­ples from items found in the homes of New York’s Bangladeshi fam­i­lies, a stu­dent in California stum­bled on a sim­i­lar mys­tery.

Jenna Forsyth was a Ph. D. stu­dent in 2014 when her ad­viser gave her data on over 400 preg­nant women in rural Bangladesh. He’d no­ticed that about half of the women had high lev­els of lead in their blood.

“I was kind of like, ’Lead? I don’t know. Is that re­ally still that big of a prob­lem?” she re­mem­bers think­ing to her­self. “‘We don’t hear about it much any­more.’”

Then, she started read­ing the lit­er­a­ture. And she quickly un­der­stood the sever­ity of the Bangladesh lead lev­els. Lead can dam­age nearly every or­gan — from the kid­neys to the heart — of­ten ir­re­versibly. In this case, both the woman and the fe­tus would be af­fected.

Perhaps lead’s biggest im­pact is on the brain. Exposure can lower a child’s IQ and spur cog­ni­tive de­cline in adults. It can cause long-term prob­lems with im­pul­siv­ity, at­ten­tion and hy­per­ac­tiv­ity. When you look at the gap be­tween what kids in up­per-in­come and lower-in­come coun­tries achieve aca­d­e­m­i­cally, about 20% can be at­trib­uted to lead. Treatment can in­volve vi­t­a­min sup­ple­ments or pre­scrib­ing an agent that binds to the lead and helps re­move it.

Lead ex­po­sure is also linked to car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, kid­ney dam­age and fer­til­ity prob­lems, to name a few. It’s es­ti­mated that lead kills 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple each year in ad­di­tion to those marked by dis­abil­ity and dis­ease. Plus, a se­ries of stud­ies have linked in­creased lead ex­po­sure to so­ci­etal ills, like higher crime rates and more vi­o­lence — likely be­cause lead has been linked to re­duced brain vol­ume and im­paired brain func­tion.

The World Bank took a stab at es­ti­mat­ing how much this all costs — in­clud­ing the lost IQ points, the pre­ma­ture death and the wel­fare costs. They found the world’s price tag for lead ex­po­sure is a whop­ping 6 tril­lion dol­lars an­nu­ally — nearly 7% of the global gross do­mes­tic prod­uct.

“I was like, ’Wow! Lead is just in­cred­i­bly toxic,’” Forsyth re­calls. “It’s one of the most toxic el­e­ments in the pe­ri­odic table.”

And so, she dug into that data from Bangladesh.

“The preva­lence of el­e­vated blood lead lev­els in those women was about six times higher than those in Flint, Michigan, at the peak of the wa­ter cri­sis,” she says, re­mem­ber­ing how Flint’s sit­u­a­tion was con­sid­ered hor­rific. “There was just this puz­zle: Why would there be re­ally high lev­els of lead poi­son­ing in rural Bangladesh with no ob­vi­ous source?”

Forsyth be­came so cu­ri­ous that she got on a plane and went to Bangladesh, where she teamed up with a renowned health re­search in­sti­tute based there called icddr,b — for­merly the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh. Together, they in­ter­viewed the preg­nant women with high lead lev­els and came up with a num­ber of pos­si­ble causes:

Perhaps the lead came from agri­cul­tural pes­ti­cides? “We sam­pled hun­dreds of agro­chem­i­cals. Did not find lead in them,” Forsyth says.

Could it be lead in paint? “These women were liv­ing in pri­mar­ily un­painted tin homes,” she says.

Perhaps it was lead-sol­der­ing on cans used to store food that can flake off into the food? It hap­pens but it was­n’t com­mon enough to ex­plain the data.

None of the in­ves­tiga­tive work led to a clue that would solve the puz­zle. “So, we went back to square one,” Forsyth re­mem­bers.

She re­viewed all the stud­ies done on this pop­u­la­tion in case there was a hint that had been missed. Poring over sci­en­tific pa­pers, she found one small study of 28 kids that looked at heavy metal ex­po­sure and found lead in turmeric, the bright yel­low pow­der that’s used as a spice and is one of the most com­mon in­gre­di­ents in Bangladeshi cui­sine.

Forsyth’s team started do­ing a bunch of test­ing and found there was in­deed lead in both turmeric pow­der and turmeric roots they’d ob­tained in lo­cal mar­kets. What’s more, the chem­i­cal fin­ger­print of the lead they found in the turmeric matched the lead in the wom­en’s blood. Since there are four dif­fer­ent types of lead, that was a eu­reka mo­ment.

“It was like, ’Okay! Yes! Now, we can fo­cus [our at­ten­tion],” Forsyth re­calls. But there were lots more ques­tions. One of their biggest: How could lead have got­ten into the spice?

Forsyth and her col­leagues set out to talk to turmeric farm­ers — in­clud­ing a man in his 70s. His an­ces­tors were turmeric farm­ers and he’d been har­vest­ing the root all his life. He knew the pro­cess­ing steps in­ti­mately — from the boil­ing and dry­ing of the root to pol­ish­ing off the outer layer and then even­tu­ally grind­ing, all to make a bril­liantly yel­low pow­dered spice.

“I re­mem­ber we were sit­ting in the car — there was mon­soon rain, splash­ing out­side — and that’s when the per­son said, ‘Yeah, back in the 1980s, there was a huge flood,’ ” Forsyth re­mem­bers.

With so much rain, the farmer told her, turmeric roots would­n’t dry prop­erly in the sun. Instead of turn­ing their usual bright yel­low, the roots be­came black-ish. The farm­ers were des­per­ate to re­store the color so they could sell their crop. They went in search of a so­lu­tion.

“They found the cheap­est yel­low pig­ment avail­able at that time,” Forsyth says.

The vi­brant yel­low pig­ment was lead chro­mate. It’s of­ten used in in­dus­trial paints — think of the yel­low of con­struc­tion ve­hi­cles.

The farm­ers made a fate­ful de­ci­sion: They started sprin­kling lead chro­mate on the turmeric roots when it was be­ing pol­ished to make them look bet­ter. The lead chro­mate turned the roots a bright yel­low. It worked so well it be­came com­mon prac­tice. The farm­ers kept us­ing the lead chro­mate even af­ter the flood wa­ters re­ceded since the lead-laced-roots were more ap­peal­ing in the mar­ket­place.

“They don’t know that this is harm­ful for hu­man health,” says Musa Baker, Forsyth’s col­league and a re­search in­ves­ti­ga­tor at icddr,b. “Rather, they want to ex­pand their busi­ness” since their turmeric could now fetch a higher price.

This dis­cov­ery that lead was rou­tinely added to turmeric came as a shock, es­pe­cially since the spice is part of daily fare for Bangladeshis, says Baker.

“It was re­ally alarm­ing,” says Dr. Mahbubur Rahman, the pro­ject co­or­di­na­tor at icddr,b.

Their team gath­ered all the data they could, pub­lished it and brought it to the au­thor­i­ties in 2019.

“The chair­man of the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority, she took it very se­ri­ously,” says Baker.

What the chair­man knew from their trav­els is that this is­sue was­n’t lim­ited to Bangladesh. It had reached halfway across the world to New York as well.

That same year, in 2019, those New York City de­tec­tives had also fig­ured out that spices — and par­tic­u­larly turmeric — played a ma­jor role in lead poi­son­ing in New York’s Bangladeshi com­mu­nity and in other South Asian com­mu­ni­ties. In their in­ves­ti­ga­tions, they’d tested lots of con­sumer prod­ucts used in Bangladeshi house­holds and found that lead in spices emerged as the top cul­prit. Generally, these spices did­n’t come from the U. S. Instead, most had been pur­chased over­seas and brought to New York in un­marked con­tain­ers tucked in­side per­sonal suit­cases. Hore’s team alerted Bangladeshi au­thor­i­ties.

It turned out that Bangladesh was not the only source of lead-con­t­a­m­i­nated spices.

In 2017, the New York City Health Department helped un­cover a ma­jor lead poi­son­ing cri­sis in the coun­try of Georgia that linked back to spices. Testing from New York’s Georgian pop­u­la­tion had set them on that “crime” trail. And their team, and other lead ex­perts, have found wor­ri­some spices in other South Asian coun­tries. While Consumer Reports test­ing shows that spices in the U. S. can con­tain lead, Hore’s team found the high­est con­cen­tra­tions of lead came from spices pur­chased abroad.

What sets Bangladesh apart is how quickly of­fi­cials acted. In 2019, they met with Forsyth and her icddr,b col­leagues. And they also flew to New York City to en­ter that im­pos­ing gray build­ing and meet with the city’s health de­part­ment.

Before the year was over, they’d put out pub­lic no­tices in the top news­pa­pers warn­ing the pub­lic and ven­dors not to buy the brightly col­ored root — in­stead buy the duller look­ing turmeric. (It’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence in color with the pow­dered form.) They dis­trib­uted 50,000 fliers with a sim­i­lar mes­sage post­ing them in mar­ket places and else­where.

They also reached out to ma­jor turmeric farm­ers and held work­shops with mill own­ers, ex­plain­ing the dan­gers of adding lead both bi­o­log­i­cally and legally.

And then in October of 2019 came a scene that seems de­signed for a fu­ture Netflix se­ries on “The Turmeric Mystery.” The Bangladeshi Food Safety Authority in­vited TV crews to bring their cam­eras to the main spice mar­ket in the cap­i­tal city of Dhaka. A crowd of peo­ple watched as of­fi­cials bran­dished one of those radar-gun-look­ing lead-mea­sure­ment-de­vices. They pointed it at heap­ing sacks full of turmeric roots.

There was even a judge pre­sent to is­sue a rul­ing on the whole­sale shop own­ers right there on the spot. The find­ings of this so-called “mobile court”: $9,288 were im­posed in fines and nearly 2,000 pounds of turmeric were con­fis­cated for their lead con­tent.

Since then, Forsyth and icddr,b have reg­u­larly col­lected and tested dozens of sam­ples of turmeric pur­chased from the main whole­sale mar­ket in Dhaka. And, in the wake of this pub­lic cam­paign to ex­punge lead from turmeric, they’ve found that turmeric sam­ples test­ing pos­i­tive for lead dropped from 47% to 0%.

They also tested the blood of lo­cal turmeric farm­ers as well as preg­nant women in the same Bangladeshi com­mu­ni­ties that had given those ini­tial blood sam­ples that set the whole in­ves­ti­ga­tion in mo­tion. Here too, Forsyth says, they found a dra­matic drop in blood lead lev­els.

“Honestly, we were so ex­cited to see this,” she says.

Today, Jenna Forsyth runs a global lead ini­tia­tive at Stanford School of Medicine. She still teams up with icddr,b and, she says, they’re re­ally busy.

“In Bangladesh, the case is closed on turmeric,” says Forsyth. “But when my friend was like, ‘You should take a break.’ I said, ‘No way. There’s more to be done.’ ”

Forsyth has found lead in spices in other coun­tries, in­clud­ing parts of India and Pakistan. And in Dhaka, de­spite the lead-free turmeric, 98% of the kids she’s tested have lead poi­son­ing by the U. S. CDC stan­dard. “It’s wild,” she says.

“It’s enough to de­stroy a na­tion,” says icddr,b’s Rahman.

She and icddr,b are in the process of teas­ing apart all the pos­si­ble cul­prits that still lurk in Dhaka and in so much of the world: lead acid bat­ter­ies that are im­prop­erly re­cy­cled; pots and pans made with scrap metal that con­tains lead; cook­ware glazes where it’s not fired to a high enough tem­per­a­ture and lead can leach into food; cos­met­ics — like the eye make-up surma and sin­door, the tra­di­tional pow­der used in Hindu prac­tices — have been found to con­tain lead.

Paromita Hore’s team of lead de­tec­tives are hot on the case too. They’re gath­er­ing data about cos­met­ics, among other things. She meets with Forsyth — and other lead ex­perts — monthly to com­pare notes and piece to­gether the next mys­tery.

And re­cently they are cel­e­brat­ing some big news on the lead fight­ing front: This week, UNICEF and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) an­nounced a new $150 mil­lion ini­tia­tive to com­bat lead poi­son­ing.

“There’s been so lit­tle done for so long, that this is re­ally huge,” says Lanphear of Simon Fraser University.

The money — most of it from Open Philanthropy — will go to more than a dozen coun­tries from Indonesia and Uganda to Ghana and Peru. And there will be a new pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship aimed at boost­ing gov­ern­ment buy-in, in­ter­na­tional co­or­di­na­tion and jump start­ing an ef­fort to get lead out of con­sumer prod­ucts.

“It is long over­due that the world is com­ing to­gether,” says Samatha Power, who runs USAID.

“There is a broad per­cep­tion that it re­quires bil­lions of dol­lars to trans­form a na­tional or mu­nic­i­pal in­fra­struc­ture … to ad­dress lead poi­son­ing. But in fact, there is an aw­ful lot of low hang­ing fruit,” she says. “There is lead right now in paint, in spices, in cos­met­ics in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries. We think within just a few short years we can make sure that that lead has been elim­i­nated and that kids are safe to play with their toys, to go to their schools.”

But Forsyth is­n’t ready to re­tire. She keeps look­ing for lead in the usual (and un­usual) places. She’s mo­ti­vated, she says, be­cause “it’s just re­ally hard to tell a par­ent their kid has lead poi­son­ing.” One day, she dreams that she’ll never again have to de­liver such dev­as­tat­ing news.

I started last year with one clear goal: 2024 was go­ing to be the year that I fi­nally did so­cial me­dia. Regular post­ing, a con­tent cal­en­dar, a strat­egy, a plan for growth — all of that. And yet I ended the year pretty cer­tain that I never wanted to open those apps again, let alone post my pho­tos and words to them. How?

My main mo­ti­va­tion for want­ing to con­quer my long-held am­biva­lence about post­ing was be­cause I had a book com­ing out in April 2024. I was very anx­ious about this, in part be­cause A Body Made of Glass was not an ob­vi­ously easy sell. There are a few rea­sons for that: it blends sev­eral gen­res in a hard-to-cat­e­gorise way, it tack­les a sub­ject in which I am not a well-known or pre­vi­ously pub­lished ex­pert, and it is highly per­sonal. It had also, in quite a mod­est way, done well ac­cord­ing to the neb­u­lous pre-pub­li­ca­tion bench­marks that au­thors ob­sess over. It had at­tracted a “Big Five” pub­lisher in the US, some­thing I had not had be­fore, re­ceived a BBC ra­dio se­ri­al­i­sa­tion deal in the UK, and had re­ceived some de­cent early re­views from in­dus­try pub­li­ca­tions in both places. I felt I should be leav­ing no stone un­turned to sup­port the book’s suc­cess, since I had been gifted op­por­tu­ni­ties that many other writ­ers would love to have. Chances, too, that I may never have again.

There are very few things that an au­thor can prac­ti­cally do to make a book a suc­cess, es­pe­cially af­ter said book is writ­ten, edited and printed. Being a celebrity or per­son­al­ity with a pre-ex­ist­ing au­di­ence that adores you def­i­nitely helps, but is­n’t some­thing you can sud­denly de­cide to be­come four months be­fore your pub­li­ca­tion date. Catching a par­tic­u­lar trend or mo­ment that causes pub­lish­ers to in­vest heav­ily in pro­mo­tion and book­sellers to place large early or­ders is great too, but once the book is done that’s up to them, not you. Giving off that neb­u­lous aura of “I’m about to be­come a huge lit­er­ary suc­cess” that seems to cling to some peo­ple and not oth­ers would be good as well, but is also pretty hard to en­gi­neer de­lib­er­ately if that’s not your per­son­al­ity or pre­sen­ta­tion (and it is­n’t mine).

In that tense, quiet pe­riod af­ter the book has been fi­nalised but be­fore any­one can buy or read it, aug­ment­ing your per­sonal brand via the reg­u­lar use of so­cial me­dia feels like the only con­crete ac­tion you can take. Or at least it did to me, so I threw my­self into it. I at­tended some train­ing ses­sions on “social me­dia for au­thors”. I asked pro­fes­sional ac­quain­tances with ex­per­tise for tips. I learned that Instagram and TikTok were the best plat­forms to tar­get for book­ish fol­low­ers and that the al­go­rithms of these plat­forms were, these days, only in­ter­ested in ver­ti­cal videos. I com­piled lists of videos I could make and started film­ing mostly-daily up­dates about my ex­pe­ri­ence as an au­thor with a book com­ing out soon. I scoured the ac­counts of other au­thors who were more suc­cess­ful than me on so­cial me­dia for in­sights. I posted about every tiny bit of pub­lic­ity my book got or small win I achieved. I asked peo­ple to pre-or­der in as many ways as I could think of. I delved into the an­a­lyt­ics, search­ing for ways to op­ti­mise and im­prove. I spent a lot of time scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, hunt­ing for the “one weird trick” that would help me make a suc­cess of this.

I quickly be­gan to feel quite un­com­fort­able. I’m not a nat­ural on cam­era and I don’t have that tal­ent for talk­ing ef­fort­lessly and en­gag­ingly to a lens when alone in a room that suc­cess­ful so­cial me­dia per­son­al­i­ties need. I was forc­ing it all the time, mak­ing my­self record mul­ti­ple takes and do­ing things again and again un­til they looked “natural” (a highly un­nat­ural be­hav­iour). My video edit­ing skills are ba­sic, so turn­ing out reg­u­lar videos took me a long time. Worst of all, though, was the way in which this en­ter­prise be­gan to al­ter my mind­set about the nor­mal stuff of life. I never used to think very hard about what I wore for a ca­sual day of writ­ing at home, or worry about how clean the bath­room mir­ror was, or ob­sess over what nar­ra­tive or story might emerge from my gen­eral jum­ble of ac­cu­mu­lated tasks. It shocked me how quickly I started view­ing my own life as some­thing to film and share, rather than some­thing to just… live. I’ve seen this ef­fect de­scribed as “the devil had taken my eyes” and I feel that is ac­cu­rate. Something had taken over my gaze and it was­n’t some­thing good. A new and sin­is­ter lens had ap­peared be­tween me and the world. One evening, as I made my hus­band walk our dog past the same scenic view mul­ti­ple times so that I could get the best shot of it for a video, I ex­pe­ri­enced a sud­den wave of re­vul­sion for my­self and what I was do­ing. From then on, I be­gan to de­spise the way this sup­pos­edly nec­es­sary as­pect of mod­ern au­thor­ship was in­trud­ing on parts of me that I had never meant to be avail­able for pub­lic con­sump­tion.

Worst of all, per­haps, it did­n’t even seem to be do­ing any­thing. The TikTok and Instagram al­go­rithms were ut­terly dis­in­ter­ested in what I was post­ing. Some of my ex­ist­ing fol­low­ers saw my videos and in­ter­acted with them, but the promise that this kind of reg­u­lar video post­ing would ex­pose my work to lots of new po­ten­tial read­ers was never ful­filled. Instagram’s an­a­lyt­ics showed that al­though I had a cou­ple of thou­sand fol­low­ers, only a few hun­dred of them were even see­ing what I was post­ing. On Twitter, where I had nearly ten thou­sand fol­low­ers that had mostly been ac­cu­mu­lated dur­ing my pre­vi­ous work as a po­lit­i­cal jour­nal­ist, the fig­ures were even worse. Most of my TikToks barely made it to views in three fig­ures. Clearly, I was do­ing it wrong. But how?

I could­n’t find any an­swers, al­though there’s a seem­ingly in­ex­haustible sup­ply of in­for­ma­tion out there on this topic. Everyone in this space seemed to pub­licly agree that “social me­dia was re­ally im­por­tant for book pro­mo­tion” and pointed to the vi­ral suc­cess of var­i­ous books on BookTok, but no­body was able to go into more de­tail about how this was achieved, or if it was even ap­plic­a­ble to a non-fic­tion book by a non-celebrity au­thor. When I tried to ex­plore this world, it seemed to me like the old-fash­ioned word-of-mouth ef­fect was just be­ing chan­neled through a new medium. Books mostly weren’t gain­ing mo­men­tum on TikTok be­cause their au­thors were mak­ing top notch vi­ral videos, but be­cause read­ers and book­ish in­flu­encers were rec­om­mend­ing them to each other and post­ing about their ex­pe­ri­ences. It was the qual­ity of the book, the canny dis­tri­b­u­tion of ad­vance read­ing copies and mar­ket­ing ma­te­ri­als by pub­lish­ers, and the work’s abil­ity to speak to a mo­ment that made the dif­fer­ence. I did­n’t re­ally see how my own so­cial me­dia ac­tiv­i­ties could fit into this ecosys­tem. People would ei­ther find and like the book, or they would­n’t. Did I even need to be there?

Every time I posted, I felt worse. From the out­side, my at­tempts to “do” so­cial me­dia se­ri­ously prob­a­bly looked in­con­se­quen­tial, but they con­sumed a ma­jor por­tion of my thoughts. What I was do­ing felt in­au­then­tic and, as the book came out and started get­ting re­views, like boast­ing for no rea­son other than to boast. The choppy na­ture of the al­go­rithms meant that there was no con­sis­tent com­mu­nity on these apps with whom I was shar­ing my progress through the pub­lish­ing process and no guar­an­tee even that those were in­ter­ested would see what I was shar­ing. When I did in-per­son events about the book and spoke to read­ers over the sign­ing table, they would tell me that they had come be­cause they had liked my first book, or en­joyed my cur­rent pod­cast, Shedunnit, or had been a fan of my old one, SRSLY. One per­son drove sev­eral hours to see me at a lit­er­ary fes­ti­val be­cause I had put a link to the event in a post­script in my spo­radic email newslet­ter. Nobody I met had been mo­ti­vated by what I had been do­ing on so­cial me­dia, even though mak­ing those posts had been con­sum­ing the vast ma­jor­ity of the time and ef­fort I had to de­vote to book pro­mo­tion. This is anec­do­tal data, for sure, but so much of how the suc­cess or oth­er­wise of a book is de­fined is vibes-based that I felt fine about al­low­ing it to in­form me. It only backed up what the so­cial me­dia plat­forms’ an­a­lyt­ics had been telling me, any­way.

By the mid point of last year my book had been out for a cou­ple of months and the ex­pec­ta­tion to mar­ket it as much as pos­si­ble was dy­ing away. My anx­i­ety sim­mered down to the point where I could as­sess mat­ters more ob­jec­tively. This was sit­u­a­tion as I saw it: I had put a lot of work time and men­tal en­ergy into so­cial me­dia be­cause I had been told by lots of trust­wor­thy sources — like peo­ple who worked in pub­lish­ing, fel­low au­thors and my writ­ers’ union — that it was the best way to help my book reach as many in­ter­ested read­ers as pos­si­ble. In fact, my posts had reached very few peo­ple and con­tributed very lit­tle to the suc­cess of the book. Plus, they were very time con­sum­ing to make so had eaten up leisure time and my ca­pac­ity to do other work. There had also been neg­a­tive side ef­fects in the form of vastly in­creased screen time and that dis­agree­able men­tal habit of see­ing my en­tire ex­is­tence as po­ten­tial posts. There was only one pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: so­cial me­dia was not for me.

More than that, I felt that there was some­thing of an “emperor’s new clothes” sit­u­a­tion at work. Being a so­cial me­dia star is a skillset com­pletely dis­tinct from be­ing some­one who writes books — they may over­lap oc­ca­sion­ally, but it’s not the norm. Yet I sus­pect that every non-celebrity and midlist au­thor will have felt the pres­sure at some point to “be more ac­tive on so­cial me­dia” be­cause oth­er­wise they aren’t “pulling their weight” for their book. I was­n’t alone in find­ing that the ef­fort:re­ward ra­tio was en­tirely out of whack, ei­ther. Plenty of peers that I spoke to with on­line cre­ative busi­nesses were happy to share their ex­pe­ri­ences of with­draw­ing par­tially or fully from so­cial me­dia (for all sorts of rea­sons in­clud­ing ha­rass­ment, burnout and par­ent­ing) only to find that their sales were largely or even en­tirely un­af­fected the next time they had a pro­ject to pro­mote. One had closed an ac­count with a fol­low­ing in the six fig­ures and switched to com­mu­ni­cat­ing with cus­tomers only via an email newslet­ter, and busi­ness was even bet­ter than be­fore (likely be­cause all of those sub­scribed were ac­tu­ally re­ceiv­ing the emails they had signed up for). I be­gan to won­der. Was this all, in fact, non­sense?

The pub­lish­ing in­dus­try is go­ing through a pe­riod of great volatil­ity at the mo­ment, for many rea­sons in­clud­ing but not lim­ited to ris­ing pro­duc­tion costs, en­croach­ing celebrity cul­ture, cor­po­rate greed and the ad­vent of AI. Traditional pub­lic­ity op­por­tu­ni­ties like tele­vi­sion/​ra­dio in­ter­views and print re­views are be­com­ing less and less ef­fec­tive at get­ting the word out about books as fewer peo­ple tune in. The dig­i­tal al­ter­na­tives have, so far, not of­fered a like for like re­place­ment for the old mar­ket­ing ecosys­tem. From my per­spec­tive as a tra­di­tion­ally-pub­lished, non-celebrity au­thor, it feels like no­body re­ally knows what makes a book sell any­more. I think the per­sis­tent ad­vice to au­thors to “do so­cial me­dia” is, at best, part of a strat­egy that can be gen­er­ously de­scribed as throw­ing every­thing at the prover­bial wall in the hope that some­thing, any­thing, will stick. Being more cyn­i­cal, I think it might some­times be a way of keep­ing au­thors quiet, of trans­fer­ring the re­spon­si­bil­ity for their book’s suc­cess on to their shoul­ders and oc­cu­py­ing them do­ing some­thing that feels pro­duc­tive so they don’t ask too many awk­ward ques­tions. It’s busy work.

That’s all with­out con­sid­er­ing the role of the plat­forms them­selves in this. I spent sev­eral months last year feel­ing grim about the amount of free con­tent I had up­loaded to plat­forms owned by the likes of Meta and Elon Musk. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — these are all out­lets that pur­port to cap­ture and ma­nip­u­late their users’ at­ten­tion, mean­ing that, as a “creator”, if you catch the wave of the al­go­rithm just right you can surf it all the way to a huge fol­low­ing, then fame and for­tune. I don’t doubt that the se­lect few who make this equa­tion work for them do get well paid for their work once they be­come suc­cess­ful. Everyone else, though, is just up­load­ing for free so that there is enough stuff on the app to keep users scrolling for­ever. Infinite scroll means in­fi­nite ad in­ven­tory. The plat­forms also in­vest in pro­mot­ing the idea that be­ing a “full time cre­ator” is an at­tain­able goal and in­cen­tivise their top cre­ators to sell the idea that any­one can achieve their suc­cess, if they just start now and work re­ally hard for noth­ing as long as is nec­es­sary. The more I thought about it, the harder it be­came not to view the so-called cre­ator econ­omy as a bla­tant pyra­mid scheme un­der­writ­ten by some of the worst cor­po­ra­tions in the world. The way to suc­ceed is to get in early, then be­come an as­pi­ra­tional fig­ure to those who come along later.

I’m be­ing de­lib­er­ately blunt to make my point. If you en­joy watch­ing happy videos of dogs and up­load­ing pic­tures of your hol­i­days for your friends, I’m de­lighted for you. If mak­ing videos and shar­ing them on­line is your hobby, all power to you. As part of a vi­able cre­ative ca­reer, though, where a liv­ing wage and sus­tain­able work­load is the goal, so­cial me­dia now feels to me like a long con that just has­n’t been ex­posed yet.

I’ve never been a whole-hearted lover of so­cial me­dia, nor a great adept at it. I only signed up for Facebook at uni­ver­sity be­cause it was nec­es­sary for be­ing in­volved in the stu­dent news­pa­per, and then I deleted my ac­count a few years later when I had a scary ex­pe­ri­ence with a stalker. I re­joined when I moved out of London, naively be­liev­ing it would help me make new lo­cal friends, which it did not. I got Twitter when some­one on my jour­nal­ism train­ing course laughed at me be­cause I did­n’t al­ready have an ac­count and then al­most never posted on it, even when the plat­form was at its dizzy­ing heights of rel­e­vance for those in the me­dia. I once went mildly vi­ral for a snarky tweet dur­ing a tele­vised elec­tion de­bate and found the ex­pe­ri­ence so hor­ri­fy­ing that I never wanted to re­peat it. Instagram was bet­ter, for a while — my cor­ner of it was mostly friends and dogs and knit­ting — but then the feed be­came al­go­rith­mic in­stead of chrono­log­i­cal and I al­most never saw the things I liked in a sen­si­ble or­der.

Social me­dia was never a wholly cosy or use­ful place for me, al­though I was ut­terly ad­dicted to it for a num­ber of years be­cause “being a jour­nal­ist” in the 2010s felt syn­ony­mous with “being on so­cial me­dia all the time”. This idea was so deeply rooted in me that when I worked some­where with such ter­ri­ble com­put­ers that they could­n’t even han­dle re­fresh­ing a Twitter feed, I bought an iPad with my own money so that I could have a de­vice next to me all day that was con­tin­u­ally show­ing the lat­est posts. At the time, I barely made more than the London Living Wage, rent took three quar­ters of my monthly pay af­ter tax, and I walked an hour to work every day be­cause I could­n’t af­ford to take the Tube. In those cir­cum­stances, buy­ing an ex­pen­sive tablet just so I never had to be sep­a­rated from the lat­est tweets is ab­surd, even ir­re­spon­si­ble. And yet I did it, be­cause I had ut­terly in­ter­nalised the idea that so­cial me­dia was the route to writ­ing suc­cess. Years later, even know­ing what I now knew, it took months to work my­self up to quit­ting and even longer to say out loud what I had done and why.

Once I had made up my mind to men­tally un­cou­ple my­self from so­cial me­dia, it was shock­ingly easy to do. I deleted the apps from my phone and changed the pass­words to my ac­counts, record­ing them some­where in­con­ve­nient so that I could log in via the desk­top ver­sions if nec­es­sary but it took more than a cou­ple of taps or clicks. A few weeks in, I took stock of what I felt like I was miss­ing and the list was sur­pris­ingly short: Taylor Swift con­tent, chats with friends, the oc­ca­sional funny pic­ture of a dog. I re­placed all of these pretty eas­ily: I signed up to a cou­ple of mu­sic pod­casts and Patreons, made an ef­fort to be more reg­u­lar about phon­ing and tex­ting peo­ple, and just en­joyed the dogs that I saw out and about in the world. The ben­e­fits were just as quick to come. That feel­ing of see­ing the world only as po­ten­tial fu­ture con­tent re­ceded, I started read­ing more books, and my screen time fell dras­ti­cally. I felt re­leased from a bur­den I had­n’t no­ticed I was car­ry­ing. I had be­come so ac­cus­tomed to the sense of shame at not be­ing bet­ter at of­fer­ing up my life for suc­cess­ful con­sump­tion that I only re­alised how acute that feel­ing had been now that it was gone. I kept wait­ing for the other shoe to drop, for some­one very in­flu­en­tial in my in­dus­try to swoop down and rep­ri­mand me for my ac­tions, to de­clare that I had ir­rev­o­ca­bly failed at “being a writer”. But noth­ing bad hap­pened. At all. Those apps had be­come so bar­ren of joy or pur­pose for me that I did­n’t miss the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing on them, ei­ther as a cre­ator or a user, at all.

By the end of the year, pack­ag­ing chunks of my­self to share on ques­tion­able cor­po­rate plat­forms for strangers to watch and judge felt like a re­ally weird thing to do. I talked about it in ther­apy and imag­ined try­ing to ex­plain this prac­tice to my eleven-year-old self who had re­ally wanted to spend her life writ­ing sto­ries. The more time that passes, the odder it feels that I spent a decade and a half of my life be­liev­ing that so­cial me­dia was a vi­tal part of be­ing a writer. Others may have dif­fer­ent ex­pe­ri­ences, but be­cause I was never a con­sum­mate poster I never re­ceived work op­por­tu­ni­ties or made friends or found a part­ner through these apps. Maybe if I had, I would feel like there had been more of a fair ex­change. I just al­lowed them to oc­cupy a large chunk of my brain for noth­ing.

Where does this leave me? I ended 2024 ab­solutely sure that so­cial me­dia was not for me, a com­plete re­ver­sal of my po­si­tion at the start of the year. I’m not mov­ing to the woods and throw­ing my phone in the bin, though. Beyond the re­as­sur­ingly steady drip of Taylor Swift videos, there was one over­ar­ch­ing ben­e­fit to be­ing ac­tive on so­cial me­dia as a writer that I want to re­tain, and that is hav­ing a way to be in touch with those who are in­ter­ested in my work. I’ve spent most of 2025 so far work­ing out what that might look like. I still like the in­ter­net and what it can do for us — quite hon­estly, I don’t think I would have a job at all with­out it — but I want to use it on my terms and in a way that feels good for me rather than harm­ful. If that means that my po­ten­tial au­di­ence is much smaller, so be it. After much re­flec­tion dur­ing, I have come to re­alise that I’d rather talk to a small num­ber of peo­ple and be happy do­ing it than try to reach a huge au­di­ence but be mis­er­able.

I started small, mak­ing the change for my pod­cast. I did a “farewell” post on the show’s ac­counts and re­placed them with an en­hanced email newslet­ter. I ex­pected some push­back and braced my­self for a dip in lis­ten­er­ship, which I de­cided that I was will­ing to ac­cept as the price I paid for in­de­pen­dence and greater peace of mind. Neither ma­te­ri­alised. I re­ceived lots of sup­port­ive mes­sages from peo­ple with their own grow­ing reser­va­tions about so­cial me­dia. The pod­cast’s newslet­ter now has more ac­tive sub­scribers than we ever had fol­low­ers. There has been no dis­cernible fall in au­di­ence, vin­di­cat­ing my sus­pi­cions that our posts had­n’t re­ally been do­ing any­thing to di­rect peo­ple away from the apps and to­wards the pod­cast any­way. Best of all, I’m en­joy­ing writ­ing to the pod­cast’s lis­ten­ers every week. I am no longer guiltily push­ing the “do pod­cast so­cial me­dia” tasks to the bot­tom of my to do list all the time.

Taking this step for the pod­cast first has al­lowed me to come to some de­ci­sions about my per­sonal in­ter­net pres­ence, too. I have re­alised that I only want to post on a plat­form where I have con­trol, with no al­go­rithms or any­thing else com­ing be­tween me and the peo­ple who want to see what I’m do­ing. I’m a writer and I think in para­graphs and chap­ters, not in videos or cap­tions. I think it’s about time I played to my strengths, rather than try­ing to fit my­self into a for­mat that I’ve never found to be com­fort­able. So, I de­cided to add a blog to my web­site and that will now be my home on the in­ter­net. I gave it a tagline that hope­fully re­flects this new stage of my on­line life: “A blog by a writer at­tempt­ing to live the lit­er­ary good life on the in­ter­net”. Because that’s what I’m try­ing to do now. The qual­ity of the life now is more im­por­tant than any po­ten­tial re­ward in the fu­ture.

Although the blog will be the main home for all my stuff (you can fol­low it via RSS and I think you should, be­cause RSS is pos­si­bly the best and purest tech we still have) I’ll still be send­ing some posts out as newslet­ters too. Personal es­says where I think out loud (like this one), my Thursday links round up, read­ing re­flec­tions, and a new se­ries I’m about to start ti­tled “Caroline Writes a Novel” (!). Because lots of peo­ple have been in touch to say they miss the pho­tos of my dog I used to post on Instagram, there will be a spo­radic “photo di­ary” mail out too where Morris will fea­ture heav­ily. If you’d like to re­ceive those you can sign up here, or if you al­ready sub­scribe you can use this menu to ad­just which types of posts you re­ceive. I have no plans at the mo­ment to put up a pay­wall or make ex­tra pre­mium con­tent, but I do have the sub­scrip­tion fea­ture turned on so if any­one re­ally wants to make a fi­nan­cial con­tri­bu­tion, they can. I must stress that you won’t re­ceive any ex­tra ma­te­r­ial or ben­e­fits if you do so. For now, this is a Medici-style “patron of the arts” sit­u­a­tion. Everything is free for every­one, sup­ported by those who have the means and de­sire to do so. I also want to stress that I ab­solutely do not need your con­tri­bu­tions for ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties or sur­vival — this is just a way for those who can to sup­port work that they like if they so choose. There’s also an op­tion for a one-off tip if you feel in­clined to give one. You should feel no pres­sure or oblig­a­tion to do so, though. If you’re more into a “extra con­tent for a fee” model, then you might want to con­sider join­ing the paid mem­ber­ship el­e­ment of my pod­cast.

If all of this — a non-fa­mous writer with a pod­cast de­cid­ing she’s re­plac­ing Instagram with blog­ging — feels too in­con­se­quen­tial to write 4,500 words about, then you’re not alone. I think so too, but I also could­n’t not write this. In fact, I’ve been tap­ping away at a draft of this post for months, try­ing to get my feel­ings about it straight. I might be well on the way to break­ing the habit of re­flex­ively view­ing the world around me as pos­si­ble nuggets of con­tent, but even af­ter the some­what bruis­ing ex­pe­ri­ence of putting out two au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal books, I still think best with my fin­gers on a key­board and a pub­li­ca­tion date in mind. In this in­stance, I do feel like I’m an­swer­ing a ques­tion no­body has asked, though. I think quite reg­u­larly about the, at the time very funny, ebook that Grace Dent pub­lished in 2011 ti­tled How to Leave Twitter: My Time as Queen of the Universe and Why This Must Stop, in which she lam­pooned her own so­cial me­dia ad­dic­tion and the ab­surd phe­nom­e­non of too-on­line peo­ple with tiny fol­low­ings grandil­o­quently an­nounc­ing that they would­n’t be on­line for the next three hours. What is this, if not that? It feels fit­ting, though, to mark the end of this chap­ter in a need­lessly per­for­ma­tive way. Even though I was ter­ri­ble at post­ing, I did spend fif­teen years watch­ing hu­man be­hav­iour evolve on these plat­forms. It was bound to rub off on me a bit.

I still don’t know if I will delete my old so­cial me­dia ac­counts. I want to, be­cause it feels more fi­nal that way, more like a de­fin­i­tive state­ment about who I am now and what I am do­ing. Maybe that’s why I should­n’t, though. That was a ver­sion of me too, the one who ag­o­nised over every an­gle and cap­tion, who could­n’t see the light hit­ting the wa­ter just so with­out imag­in­ing Instagram’s square frame around it, who be­lieved that all her dreams would come true if she could just crack Meta’s code. She was try­ing her best, just like I am now. She can live on as a ghost in that ma­chine for now, a bod­i­less re­minder of an ex­is­tence I never re­ally had.

When Badasab Syed, 59, went to of­fer prayers at his lo­cal mosque in Ahmedabad this morn­ing, fel­low wor­ship­pers told him about the newly re­leased re­port on the crash.

Syed, who lost his brother, sis­ter-in-law and their two chil­dren in the crash, re­turned home to see if the re­port of­fered any clues about what re­ally hap­pened to the ill-fated flight. But af­ter watch­ing the news, he was left with more ques­tions than an­swers.

“The re­port men­tions the pi­lots dis­cussing who turned off fuel and a pos­si­ble is­sue with the fuel con­trol switch. We don’t know what that means? Was it avoid­able,” he asks.

His brother, IT pro­fes­sional Inayat Syed, 49, had come to India to at­tend a fam­ily wed­ding. He was trav­el­ing back with his wife and their two adult chil­dren.

Badasab says the in­for­ma­tion in the re­port is for the ex­perts to de­ter­mine if it was a tech­ni­cal or hu­man er­ror.

But he is dis­ap­pointed that there are no rec­om­men­da­tions yet for Air India or Boeing to pre­vent such in­ci­dents.

“We may have to wait for the fi­nal re­port.”

Welcome to Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous! We’re glad you’ve found us, and we hope our com­mu­nity can be as help­ful to you as it has been for us. ITAA is a Twelve-Step fel­low­ship of in­di­vid­u­als who sup­port each other in re­cov­er­ing from in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion. This in­cludes so­cial me­dia ad­dic­tion, phone ad­dic­tion, video ad­dic­tion, tele­vi­sion ad­dic­tion, gam­ing ad­dic­tion, news ad­dic­tion, pornog­ra­phy ad­dic­tion, dat­ing apps, on­line re­search, on­line shop­ping, or any other dig­i­tal ac­tiv­ity that be­comes com­pul­sive and prob­lem­atic.

Regardless of how large or small you feel your prob­lem may be, we en­cour­age you to try at­tend­ing one of our daily meet­ings to see whether ITAA can be help­ful for you. Our meet­ings are free and open to any­one who strug­gles with com­pul­sive in­ter­net use. Meetings are safe, se­cure, and anony­mous. ITAA is highly di­verse, and our meet­ings in­clude mem­bers of all ages, gen­ders, and eth­nic­i­ties from around the world. In ad­di­tion, we also have meet­ings in French, Span­ish, Russ­ian, Ger­man, Dutch, He­brew, Ara­bic, and Pol­ish. You may also find a lo­cal, in-per­son meet­ing in your city.

Despite how new AI is as a tech­nol­ogy, it’s just as pos­si­ble to be­come ad­dicted as to any other dig­i­tal be­hav­ior. Specifically, AI ad­dic­tion is the com­pul­sive and harm­ful use of AI-powered ap­pli­ca­tions. It can in­volve AI-powered chat­bots like ChatGPT, video or im­age gen­er­a­tion apps, al­go­rithm-dri­ven so­cial me­dia plat­forms, AI-powered gam­ing, AI com­pan­ions, AI role­play­ing, AI-generated pornog­ra­phy, or any other gen­er­a­tive AI or LLM (large lan­guage model) ap­pli­ca­tion that be­comes com­pul­sive and harm­ful. As a sub­set of in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion, AI ad­dic­tion can lead to changes in the brain that over time com­pro­mise our abil­ity to fo­cus, pri­or­i­tize, reg­u­late our mood, and re­late to oth­ers.

Those of us who have come to iden­tify as AI ad­dicts ex­pe­ri­enced sev­eral com­mon symp­toms. We used AI ap­pli­ca­tions for longer than we in­tended, de­spite at­tempts to con­trol or cut back our use. Even when we were aware of the con­se­quences and wanted to stop, we were un­able to do so. We in­creas­ingly found our sense of val­i­da­tion and emo­tional reg­u­la­tion was tied to our use of AI mod­els. When we weren’t con­nected to our AI ap­pli­ca­tions, we ex­pe­ri­enced dis­trac­tion, anx­i­ety, and ir­ri­tabil­ity. We were un­able to en­joy and be pre­sent with our of­fline lives. We used AI to al­ter our moods and es­cape our prob­lems. Our ad­dic­tive be­hav­iors jeop­ar­dized our re­la­tion­ships, ed­u­ca­tional pur­suits, and ca­reer op­por­tu­ni­ties. We felt shame and de­mor­al­iza­tion about our use of AI.

When we first no­ticed these trou­bling ex­pe­ri­ences, we be­gan to ac­knowl­edge that some­thing was­n’t right. But many of us still ques­tioned whether we re­ally had an ad­dic­tion, es­pe­cially given that this is such a new tech­nol­ogy. For those of us still won­der­ing, the fol­low­ing ques­tions may help us bet­ter iden­tify whether there are signs of an ad­dic­tion to AI ap­pli­ca­tions in our lives.

Do I ever use AI ap­pli­ca­tions to quickly check some­thing and then dis­cover that hours have passed?

Do I ever swear off or set lim­its around my use of AI, and then break my com­mit­ments?

Do I have binges on AI ap­pli­ca­tions that last all day or late into the night?

Do I turn to AI when­ever I have a free mo­ment?

Does my use of AI lead me to ne­glect my per­sonal hy­giene, nu­tri­tional needs, or phys­i­cal health?

Do I feel iso­lated, emo­tion­ally ab­sent, dis­tracted, or anx­ious when I’m not us­ing my AI ap­pli­ca­tions?

Does my use of AI con­tribute to con­flict or avoid­ance in per­sonal re­la­tion­ships?

Have my dig­i­tal be­hav­iors jeop­ar­dized my stud­ies, fi­nances, or ca­reer?

Do I hide or lie about the amount of time I spend us­ing AI or the kinds of AI-generated con­tent I con­sume?

Do I feel guilt or shame around my use of AI?

Nobody should have to suf­fer due to their tech­nol­ogy use. If you’ve an­swered yes to sev­eral of the above ques­tions, we en­cour­age you to con­sider get­ting sup­port.

AI ad­dic­tion is a sub­set of in­ter­net ad­dic­tion dis­or­der (IAD), which was first in­ves­ti­gated by the psy­chol­o­gist Dr. Kimberly S. Young, who pub­lished the orig­i­nal di­ag­nos­tic cri­te­ria for this men­tal health dis­or­der in 1998. Today there is still an open dis­cus­sion in the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity re­gard­ing how to de­fine, qual­ify, and study the var­i­ous forms of in­ter­net ad­dic­tion dis­or­der, and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) has be­gun to ac­knowl­edge the sever­ity of this class of ad­dic­tions through its in­clu­sion of in­ter­net gam­ing dis­or­der. There is wide­spread con­sen­sus from both re­searchers and clin­i­cians that the prob­lem­atic and com­pul­sive overuse of the in­ter­net, dig­i­tal me­dia, and smart de­vices has been ris­ing over the past two decades, and that the preva­lence of this be­hav­ioral ad­dic­tion is as­so­ci­ated with a va­ri­ety of men­tal, emo­tional, phys­i­cal, in­ter­per­sonal, and pro­fes­sional prob­lems.

Perhaps most sig­nif­i­cantly, the dopamine re­leases trig­gered by in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion have been shown to cause struc­tural changes in the brain very sim­i­lar to the changes ex­pe­ri­enced in peo­ple with al­co­hol or drug ad­dic­tions. These changes lead to im­pair­ments in our de­ci­sion-mak­ing, rea­son­ing, re­ward ex­pec­ta­tion, ex­ec­u­tive func­tion, cog­ni­tive func­tion, emo­tional pro­cess­ing, and our work­ing mem­ory. A va­ri­ety of stud­ies have shown that ac­cess to tele­vi­sion and video games de­creases the amount of pain med­ica­tion needed by hos­pi­tal pa­tients.

Of course, the ef­fects of in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion are not only re­flected in the struc­ture of our brains, but in our daily lives as well. Internet and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion is strongly as­so­ci­ated with im­pulse con­trol dis­or­der, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), anx­i­ety, in­creased sub­stance use, and de­pres­sion. In ad­di­tion to these co-oc­cur­ring dis­or­ders, it’s as­so­ci­ated with a higher risk of car­diometa­bolic dis­ease, lower sleep qual­ity, in­creased fa­tigue, and symp­toms of in­som­nia, all of which are cor­re­lated to a higher mor­tal­ity rate. Perhaps most trag­i­cally of all, in­di­vid­u­als with in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion have much higher rates of sui­ci­dal ideation, plan­ning, and at­tempts—roughly three times the av­er­age. These find­ings are cause for se­ri­ous con­cern. While some might min­i­mize the im­pact of in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion in com­par­i­son to chem­i­cal sub­stances, the truth is that in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion changes our brains in a man­ner sim­i­lar to the ef­fects pro­duced by an ad­dic­tion to al­co­hol, heroin, or other drugs.

AI ad­dic­tion is a con­di­tion that can af­fect peo­ple of all ages, from chil­dren and teenagers to those later in life. Our meet­ings in­clude young adults, col­lege stu­dents, work­ing pro­fes­sion­als, par­ents, and re­tirees, with mem­bers of all ages, gen­ders, and eth­nic­i­ties from around the world. While the risk fac­tors are var­ied, in­ter­net ad­dic­tion does not dis­crim­i­nate based on age, ed­u­ca­tional level, so­cio-eco­nomic sta­tus, ge­og­ra­phy, race, or eth­nic­ity. Its neg­a­tive ef­fects im­pact not only the ad­dict them­selves, but also their fam­ily mem­bers and friends. By dam­ag­ing our po­ten­tial, self-es­teem, and qual­ity of life, ex­ces­sive use of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence can im­pair our lives. Additionally, by con­tribut­ing to de­pres­sion and sui­ci­dal ten­den­cies, our ad­dic­tion can be life-threat­en­ing. Regardless of our back­ground, if our use of AI is caus­ing us to ex­pe­ri­ence dis­tress or dif­fi­cul­ties, there are ac­tions we can take to im­prove our sit­u­a­tion and find re­lief.

While in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy ad­dic­tion has only be­gun to re­ceive at­ten­tion in re­cent years, the dis­ease of ad­dic­tion is not new. Millions of peo­ple have found sus­tain­able, long-term free­dom from their ad­dic­tive be­hav­iors through mu­tual aid sup­port groups mod­eled af­ter Alcoholics Anonymous. A re­cent sys­tem­atic re­view con­ducted by Stanford pub­lic health re­searchers de­ter­mined that par­tic­i­pa­tion in Alcoholics Anonymous was nearly al­ways found to be more ef­fec­tive than other ther­a­pies in achiev­ing con­tin­u­ous ab­sti­nence from al­co­holism. The AA model has been suc­cess­fully adapted to help peo­ple suf­fer­ing from a va­ri­ety of ad­dic­tions, in­clud­ing nar­cotics, mar­i­juana, nico­tine, sex, pornog­ra­phy, and food, among oth­ers. In con­tin­u­a­tion of this tra­di­tion, Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous ap­plies the proven model of AA to help those who are suf­fer­ing from an ad­dic­tion to tech­nol­ogy find long-term free­dom from their self-de­struc­tive be­hav­iors. We share our ex­pe­ri­ence, strength, and hope with each other through group meet­ings and one-on-one re­la­tion­ships, and we work a re­cov­ery pro­gram based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Our meet­ings are free and anony­mous, and we wel­come any­one who thinks they may ben­e­fit from sup­port to visit one of our meet­ings.

While there is no per­ma­nent or quick cure for AI ad­dic­tion, there are con­crete ac­tions we can take to re­cover from our com­pul­sive be­hav­iors and re­store our emo­tional and men­tal well­be­ing. We have found the fol­low­ing ac­tions to be of sig­nif­i­cant help in find­ing long-term, sus­tain­able free­dom from our com­pul­sive and prob­lem­atic use of AI.

Attend daily meet­ings. In ad­di­tion to a grow­ing num­ber of face-to-face meet­ings around the world, ITAA has daily on­line meet­ings where our global fel­low­ship meets to share ex­pe­ri­ence, strength and hope with each other. We are en­cour­aged to try at­tend­ing six meet­ings in a short time frame to help de­cide whether ITAA may be help­ful to us.

Make daily out­reach calls. Our im­pul­sive buy­ing de­pen­dence drew us into iso­la­tion and self-re­liance. As we be­gin to re­cover, we learn that we can trust oth­ers and be vul­ner­a­ble. Calling other mem­bers out­side of meet­ings helps us stay con­nected, sup­ported, and sober, and it gives us an op­por­tu­nity to share in greater de­tail than we might dur­ing a meet­ing.

Abstain. With the help of other mem­bers in re­cov­ery, we iden­tify and ab­stain from the spe­cific ad­dic­tive be­hav­iors which are caus­ing the great­est dif­fi­cul­ties in our lives. We rec­og­nize that this is a process that un­folds over time, and we make use of the sup­port avail­able to us in ITAA to re­main sober one day at a time.

Learn more about the re­cov­ery process. Our web­site has many re­sources about the na­ture of our ad­dic­tion and how we might best chart our re­cov­ery jour­ney, nav­i­gate with­drawal symp­toms, and re­spond to crav­ings. In ad­di­tion, there’s a rich body of lit­er­a­ture from other 12 Step pro­grams that we can lean on to bet­ter in­form our heal­ing process and to learn more about the time-tested meth­ods which have helped mil­lions of other ad­dicts re­cover.

Find a spon­sor and work the steps. We have ben­e­fit­ted from ask­ing some­body we res­onate with to in­for­mally men­tor us as a spon­sor and work­ing the Twelve Steps to­gether with them, which is the vi­tal and trans­for­ma­tive ba­sis of our long-term re­cov­ery from our ad­dic­tion. A great way to con­nect with po­ten­tial spon­sors is to make out­reach calls with other mem­bers who are sober and work­ing the Steps.

Make use of out­side help. Many mem­bers sup­ple­ment their re­cov­ery with a va­ri­ety of re­sources be­yond ITAA, such as cog­ni­tive be­hav­ioral ther­apy (CBT), psy­chother­apy, group ther­apy, psy­chi­a­try, in­pa­tient or out­pa­tient ad­dic­tion treat­ment cen­ters, other 12 Step fel­low­ships, spir­i­tual coun­sel, or other men­tal health well­ness re­sources. While we do not en­dorse any one treat­ment op­tion or in­ter­ven­tion in par­tic­u­lar, we en­cour­age all mem­bers to avail them­selves of any out­side help that can sup­port them in their re­cov­ery jour­ney. A health­care or men­tal health pro­fes­sional may be able to give ad­vice tai­lored to your sit­u­a­tion.

Sobriety in ITAA is a process of dis­cov­ery that looks dif­fer­ent for each of us. As part of this process, we iden­tify and ab­stain from the spe­cific be­hav­iors which trig­ger our ad­dic­tion. We have also found it ben­e­fi­cial to es­tab­lish a pos­i­tive vi­sion for our in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy use. For ex­am­ple, we may prac­tice us­ing tech­nol­ogy pur­pose­fully, min­i­mally, or only as nec­es­sary. Some of us have found it to com­pletely ab­stain from AI chat­bots and AI tools, while oth­ers of us learn how to en­gage with AI sys­tems only as needed for our work. We treat AI tech­nol­ogy with cau­tion and placed greater em­pha­sis on our hu­man in­ter­ac­tions, at­tend­ing ITAA meet­ings to help use heal from our ad­dic­tion.

We re­spect each mem­ber’s dig­nity to dis­cover their own path to re­cov­ery, and we work with other ex­pe­ri­enced mem­bers to help de­fine what so­bri­ety means for each of us as in­di­vid­u­als. As part of this process, we lean on meet­ings and phone calls to help main­tain our so­bri­ety com­mit­ments. Rather than us­ing AI for dis­trac­tion or to numb our emo­tions, we seek to use tech­nol­ogy as a tool for meet­ing our goals, liv­ing in align­ment with our val­ues, and de­vel­op­ing flour­ish­ing lives.

While we all suf­fer from a com­mon dis­ease, it ex­presses it­self in dif­fer­ent ways for each of us. The fol­low­ing are some com­mon com­pul­sive in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy be­hav­iors. It’s im­por­tant to keep in mind that this list is nei­ther com­pre­hen­sive nor pre­scrip­tive—it is es­sen­tial to iden­tify our own per­sonal com­pul­sive or un­nec­es­sary in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy be­hav­iors with the help of other mem­bers.

Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous is a Twelve-Step fel­low­ship based on the prin­ci­ples pi­o­neered by Alcoholics Anonymous. Our or­ga­ni­za­tion is en­tirely vol­un­teer-based and self-sup­port­ing. The only re­quire­ment to par­tic­i­pate in ITAA is a de­sire to stop us­ing in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy com­pul­sively.

We have no opin­ions on out­side is­sues, and we nei­ther con­demn nor con­done any par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­ogy. We are not af­fil­i­ated with any po­lit­i­cal agenda, re­li­gious move­ment, or out­side in­ter­ests. Our sin­gle pur­pose is to ab­stain from com­pul­sive in­ter­net and tech­nol­ogy use and to help oth­ers find free­dom from this ad­dic­tion. We are a US 501(c)(3) fed­eral tax-ex­empt non­profit in­cor­po­rated in the state of Colorado.

If you’ve won­dered how much a solo dev can build for seam­less C++ in­terop on a quar­ter, you’re about to find out. In April, jank was un­able to reach into C++ at all. Toward the end of this post, I’ll show some real world ex­am­ples of what works to­day. Before that, though, I want to say thank you for the spon­sor­ship this quar­ter, not only by all of my in­di­vid­ual Github spon­sors, but also by Clojurists Together. I also want to say thank you to Vassil Vassilev and Lang Hames for build­ing the nec­es­sary tech in Clang and LLVM for jank to ac­tu­ally do all of this magic. Let’s get into it!

In the past month, I have im­ple­mented man­ual mem­ory man­age­ment via cpp/​new and cpp/​delete. This uses jank’s GC al­lo­ca­tor (currently bd­wgc), rather than mal­loc, so us­ing cpp/​delete is­n’t gen­er­ally needed. However, if cpp/​delete is used then mem­ory col­lec­tion can be ea­ger and more de­ter­min­is­tic.

The im­ple­men­ta­tion has full bd­wgc sup­port for de­struc­tors as well, so both man­ual dele­tion and au­to­matic col­lec­tion will trig­ger non-triv­ial de­struc­tors.(let [i (cpp/int. 500) p (cpp/new cpp/​int i)] (assert (= i (cpp/* p))))

To avoid any im­plicit jank ob­ject cast­ing, we can now use cpp/​true and cpp/​false, which are straight up C++ bools. These come in handy when try­ing to keep the gen­er­ated IR as lean as pos­si­ble, com­pared to us­ing true or false and hav­ing jank do au­to­matic con­ver­sions from Clojure land into C++ land. Going for­ward, jank will add sup­port for #cpp reader macros, as an easy way to get C++ lit­er­als, sim­i­lar to #js in ClojureScript and #dart in ClojureDart.

It’s pos­si­ble to rep­re­sent a lot of pos­si­ble types us­ing nor­mal Clojure syn­tax. This month, I also ex­tended that to in­clude pointer types within sym­bols. For ex­am­ple, cpp/​int** will give you a C++ int ** type. However, when spaces or com­mas are re­quired, such as with tem­plates, Clojure’s sym­bols be­come too lim­it­ing. In those cases, we can now use (cpp/type “std::map. This will eval­u­ate to a type which can be used in type po­si­tion for cpp/​cast, cpp/​new, and so on.

With the new com­plex type syn­tax, we run into a prob­lem. Clojure uses a . suf­fix to con­vey a con­struc­tor call, but we don’t want to in­clude a . suf­fix in cpp/​type strings since that’s not valid C++ syn­tax. To rem­edy this, jank now treats the . suf­fix on types to be op­tional. If you call a type, it’s con­sid­ered a con­struc­tor call. Shout out ClojureDart for do­ing this first.(let [l1 (cpp/long 5) l2 ((cpp/type “long”) 5)] (assert (cpp/== l1 l2)))

In the JVM, every class im­plic­itly in­her­its from Object. This al­lows Clojure’s data struc­tures to just store Object and not need to worry about all of the pos­si­ble types which could be used. In the na­tive land, how­ever, every type is stand­alone by de­fault. Even if you have a base ob­ject type in your own code, none of your de­pen­den­cies will use it. The only way to re­fer to any type would be a void*. When we do this, though, the type in­for­ma­tion about that data is lost. It’s up to the de­vel­oper to cor­rectly add that type in­for­ma­tion back at a later time, by cast­ing that void* back to some other pointer.

This month, I built a struc­ture for this, called opaque boxes. The idea is that you can take any raw na­tive pointer and box it into a jank ob­ject us­ing cpp/​box. From there, that ob­ject can be used with jank’s data struc­tures, passed around, com­pared (by pointer value), etc. When you want to pull it back out, there is a spe­cial cpp/​un­box form to do so while spec­i­fy­ing the type of the data. It’s en­tirely up to you to do this cor­rectly, as it is in C or C++. Here’s what it looks like, com­bined with cpp/​new, for some pre­tend C++ k/​v store. Note that we don’t need to spec­ify the type to cpp/​box, since the com­piler al­ready knows the type.(ns ex­am­ple.kv)

(def db (delay (cpp/box (cpp/new cpp/​my.db))))

(defn get! [k] (let [db (cpp/unbox cpp/​my.db* @db)] (cpp/.get db (str k))))

Seamless C++ in­terop with the jank run­time re­quires Clang to JIT process jank’s C++ head­ers. This is costly and can af­fect startup time, so I’ve set up pre­com­pi­la­tion of those head­ers. This needs to be done per-ma­chine, so jank will do it af­ter in­stall, when you first run jank. As jank is up­dated, it will au­to­mat­i­cally re­com­pile the PCH as needed.

A great deal of work has gone into find­ing ways to break jank’s seam­less in­terop. C++ is such a large lan­guage, I have hun­dreds of in­terop tests. In the past month, I’ve found var­i­ous crashes re­leated to ar­rays, global point­ers, sta­tic ref­er­ences, func­tion point­ers, vari­adic C func­tion calls, and both Clang and LLVM-related is­sues re­gard­ing PCHs, IR op­ti­miza­tions, etc. This is an on­go­ing pur­suit, at the bleed­ing edge of in­terop tech and jank’s test suite is how I build con­fi­dence that the sys­tem works well.

As a side note, for any­one who had­n’t con­sid­ered this yet, every bit of jank’s seam­less in­terop is sta­t­i­cally typed. It is C++. There is no run­time re­flec­tion, no guess work, and no hints. If the com­piler can’t find a mem­ber, or a func­tion, or a par­tic­u­lar over­load, you will get a com­piler er­ror. I think that this is an in­ter­est­ing way to start think­ing about jank, Clojure, and sta­tic types. It also paves the way to start ex­pand­ing that type info into other parts of the jank pro­gram.

Before I show off some prac­ti­cal ex­am­ples of jank do­ing C++ things, please con­sider sub­scrib­ing to jank’s mail­ing list. This is go­ing to be the best way to make sure you stay up to date with jank’s re­leases, jank-re­lated talks, work­shops, and so on.

Now that seam­less in­terop ac­tu­ally works, we can try to do some things we might nor­mally do in C++. The hard­est part of this is com­ing up with good ex­am­ples which fit well in a blog post!

Basically every C++ de­vel­oper starts by in­clud­ing iostream and us­ing std::cout. Here, we don’t need to worry about op­er­a­tor << re­turn­ing a std::os­tream& and that not be­ing con­vert­ible to a jank ob­ject, since it’s in state­ment po­si­tion. If we did­n’t have the nil at the end of the func­tion, we’d get a com­piler er­ror, since jank would try to au­to­mat­i­cally box the std::os­tream& and would find that there is no way to do it.(cpp/​raw “#include

We don’t yet have the abil­ity to do #cpp “Hello, world\n”, to get a raw C string, but that’s com­ing soon. That alone will clean up a lot of com­mon string use cases.

Ok, crank­ing up the com­plex­ity a bit, let’s bring in a third party li­brary. JSON for Modern C++ is likely the most pop­u­lar C++ JSON li­brary there is. It’s header-only, so if we just down­load the stand­alone header, we can JIT in­clude it. To turn this into a full pro­gram, we can also reach into std::if­stream for file read­ing. This pro­gram will take a JSON file as an ar­gu­ment, parse it, and then out­put the pretty printed JSON to std­out.(cpp/​raw “#include

The thing I love most about this ex­am­ple is how we’re weav­ing be­tween Clojure and C++ on ba­si­cally every line. Yet it all just works.

I’m go­ing to crank things up one more notch, since things are get­ting fun. Here’s a work­ing pro­gram which uses ftxui to lay out ter­mi­nal out­put us­ing flexbox. However, in the Clojure way, we pro­vide a pure data hic­cup in­ter­face and the im­ple­men­ta­tion han­dles the rest. Here, we take ad­van­tage of opaque box­ing, to move ftxui ob­jects be­tween jank func­tions, we build up std::vec­tor ob­jects, and we rely on a ton of Clojure good­ies to clean it up. So cool!(cpp/​raw “#include “)

(cpp/raw “#include “)

(cpp/raw “#include “)

(declare vbox)

(declare hbox)

(defn hic­cup->el­e­ment [h]

(case (first h)

:text (cpp/box (->> (str (second h))

cpp/​ftxui.text

(cpp/new cpp/​ftxui. Element)))

:filler (cpp/box (cpp/new cpp/​ftxui.El­e­ment (cpp/ftxui.filler)))

:vbox (apply vbox (rest h))

:hbox (apply hbox (rest h))))

(defmacro def­box [name f]

`(defn ~name [& hic­cup#]

(let [elements# (cpp/ftxui.Elements.)]

(doseq [h# hic­cup#]

(let [e# (cpp/* (cpp/unbox cpp/​ftxui.El­e­ment* (hiccup->element h#)))]

(cpp/.push_back el­e­ments# e#)))

(cpp/box (cpp/new cpp/​ftxui.El­e­ment (~f el­e­ments#))))))

(defbox hbox cpp/​ftxui.hbox)

(defbox vbox cpp/​ftxui.vbox)

(defn ren­der-hic­cup [hiccup]

(let [document (->> (hiccup->element hic­cup)

(cpp/unbox cpp/​ftxui.El­e­ment*)

cpp/*)

screen (cpp/ftxui.Screen.Create (cpp/ftxui.Dimension.Fixed 60)

(cpp/ftxui.Dimension.Fixed 20))]

(cpp/ftxui.Render screen doc­u­ment)

(cpp/.Print screen)

(println)))

(defn -main [& args]

(render-hiccup [:vbox

[:hbox

[:text “north-west”]

[:filler]

[:text “north-east”]]

[:filler]

[:hbox

[:filler]

[:text “center”]

[:filler]]

[:filler]

[:hbox

[:text “south-west”]

[:filler]

[:text “south-east”]]]))

The OG in the C++ Lisp space is Clasp, cre­ated by Dr. Christian Schafmeister. Clasp also in­te­grates with LLVM and it uses MPS for a GC. Though jank and Clasp dif­fer greatly, both in that Clasp is Common Lisp and jank is Clojure as well in how they ap­proach C++ in­terop, they are two bold at­tempts to bridge two oth­er­wise dis­tant lan­guages. I reached out to Dr. Schafmeister sev­eral years ago, when I started on jank, and we dis­cussed C++ and Lisps. His work has been a big in­spi­ra­tion for jank.

Phew. I’ve ac­com­plished a ton this quar­ter and I’m ex­tremely pleased with what jank can do now. Still, the work on seam­less in­terop is­n’t fin­ished and more work will be needed on it be­fore jank can be re­leased. A big is­sue is that I did­n’t have time to tackle au­to­matic de­struc­tor calls for stack al­lo­cated C++ ob­jects. I have one of my mentees, Jianling, help­ing out on the work here, to en­sure that we can get it done soon.

On top of that, the largest is­sues comes from Clang and LLVM di­rectly. One of the in­di­ca­tors of jank’s seam­less in­terop be­ing un­prece­dented is the bugs and miss­ing fea­tures I’m find­ing in Clang and LLVM. These are gen­er­ally quite slow to ad­dress, since I’m re­ly­ing on the vol­un­teer time of the ex­perts in those ar­eas to help me out. jank would not ex­ist with­out them. There are still cases where some in­terop code can trig­ger a crash in Clang and we’ll have to tackle them as they come up. However, one of the best ways to speed this along is more fund­ing, so that I can pay these Clang and LLVM ex­perts for their time. Please con­sider be­com­ing a Github Sponsor to make this more fea­si­ble.

Looking for­ward to the new quar­ter, the main fo­cus will be pack­ag­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. I want to make jank easy to build every­where and even eas­ier to in­stall. On top of that, I need to ad­dress all of the small pain points, var­i­ous bugs, lack of tool­ing, etc. After pack­ag­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion is sta­bi­lized, the rest of the year will be spent on bug fixes, tool­ing, and doc­u­men­ta­tion. After that, we’ll have the al­pha launch!

Join the de­sign dis­cus­sions or pick up a ticket on GitHubBetter yet, reach out to dis­cuss cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship!

The state House has passed a pair of bills aimed at tamp­ing down on du­bi­ous sub­scrip­tion ser­vices — just as a fed­eral court moved to throw out sim­i­lar rules pro­posed by fed­eral reg­u­la­tors.

Earlier this month, the House ap­proved a bill crack­ing down on so-called “negative op­tion” agree­ments in which con­sumers are au­to­mat­i­cally en­rolled in a ser­vice un­less they opt out. This week, the cham­ber also cleared a sec­ond bill re­quir­ing that sub­scrip­tions or mem­ber­ships made on­line must also be able to be can­celed on­line.

The pro­posed state laws are vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to the “click-to-cancel” rules ap­proved last year by the Federal Trade Commission un­der President Joe Biden. The fed­eral rules orig­i­nally set to go into ef­fect in May, but were post­poned 60 days amid spec­u­la­tion that President Donald Trump’s FTC would al­ter them.

On Tuesday, how­ever, a fed­eral ap­peals court threw out the rules en­tirely, find­ing that the FTC had not fol­lowed pro­ce­dural re­quire­ments on eco­nomic analy­sis prior to fi­nal­iz­ing the rul­ing.

The suit against the FTC’s process was brought by busi­ness groups that stood to lose sub­scrip­tion-ser­vice rev­enue had the rule sur­vived.

The fact that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has stum­bled on the is­sue makes is all the more im­por­tant that state leg­is­la­tors act, Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery County, the spon­sor of one of the bills, said this week.

“We can take con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion quickly here in Pennsylvania, be­cause it is an is­sue,” Ciresi told PennLive. “Everyone can re­late to it some­how.”

The clas­sic ex­am­ple of a “negative op­tion” deal is a sub­scrip­tion that be­gins with a free trial but au­to­mat­i­cally con­verts to a paid ser­vice af­ter a pe­riod of time. A bill from Rep. Lisa Borowski, D-Delaware County, would put in place rules for no­ti­fi­ca­tion prior to re­newal, and re­quire that con­sumers be able to opt out of re­newal us­ing the same means they orig­i­nally used to sign up.

The bill would en­sure that busi­nesses “provide value to cus­tomers in­stead of sim­ply bet­ting they will forge to can­cel a sub­scrip­tion they don’t re­ally need,” Borowski said.

Ciresi’s bill would re­quire that all sub­scrip­tions be can­cellable on­line if the cus­tomer orig­i­nally signed up on­line. The bill even man­dates that in­for­ma­tion on re­newals and how to can­cel them be posted on web pages in a font size that is suit­ably large.

The idea came out of ex­pe­ri­ences from his con­stituents, staffers, and even his own fam­ily, Ciresi said, who had signed up for mem­ber­ships they found mad­den­ingly dif­fi­cult to stop get­ting charged for even af­ter the ini­tial con­tract had ended.

“We got push­back from some com­pa­nies, but we worked through it,” Ciresi said. “We’re not ad­vo­cat­ing for any­one to can­cel your ser­vice or to get out of your con­tract. I’m not here to hurt any busi­ness, I’m here to help the con­sumer.”

The House bills would not cover cer­tain ser­vices that are sep­a­rately reg­u­lated, such as util­i­ties cov­ered by the state Public Utility Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission.

The bills would also not cover gyms — no­to­ri­ous for ar­du­ous mem­ber­ship can­cel­la­tion poli­cies — which are con­trolled by the state Health Club Act. This could be amended into the leg­is­la­tion, which Ciresi said he was open to.

Both bills passed the House with broad bi­par­ti­san sup­port. If the leg­is­la­tion is agreed to by the state Senate and signed by Gov Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania would join sev­eral other states that have moved to cre­ate such laws over the past year since the FTC be­gan work­ing on its now-de­funct rule.

New York, California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Virginia have all en­acted state-level poli­cies that in­clude pro­vi­sions sim­i­lar to Ciresi and Borowski’s bills.