Technology | The Guardian

Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behindLast year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig. Continue reading...

The European Union fined Google after accusing it of ‘serious illegal behaviour’, but investors shrugged off the fineGoogle parent company Alphabet reported a sharp drop in profits on Monday as the company absorbed the likely $5bn cost of a record-breaking fine from European regulators.The European Union fined Google earlier this month after accusing it of “serious illegal behaviour” to secure its dominance in mobile search. The company is appealing the decision but included the charge in its latest quarterly earnings report. Continue reading...

Flanders tourist board chides firm for removing ads featuring the Flemish master’s worksRubens nudes have entranced those visiting the world’s great art galleries for some 400 years. Contemporaries on whom the Flemish master is said to have had a profound impact include Van Dyck and Rembrandt … but none of this has passed muster with Facebook’s censors.

No more searching down the side of the sofa – Sky’s new voice-activated device could consign the device to historyName: the TV remote control.Age: About 75 years old. Continue reading...

At this year’s expo, the games giant ditched flashy promotional press conferences for elaborate film sets. PlayStation’s EU boss Simon Rutter believes the approach will pay dividendsLast month’s E3 video game expo was a strange one for PlayStation. Traditionally, video games’ biggest companies use the annual Los Angeles conference as an opportunity to bombard attendees and fans watching online with new games. For rival consoles Xbox and PlayStation, ostentatious showcase press events are especially important and competitive: once a customer chooses between the two, they are likely to play on that console for years to come.Microsoft showed 50 games at its Xbox press conference at E3 2018, on a big stage with lots of fancy lighting. By contrast, Sony constructed several elaborate sets on an LA film lot, each themed around a different forthcoming PlayStation 4 games: The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man and Death Stranding. Fans already knew about all of these, but they were shown in more detail over 10 or 15 minutes of footage, alongside a smattering of smaller new announcements and some unexpected live music performances. Continue reading...

The rehearsed smugness of the presenters puts me off the content – which is all about making the simple sound profoundPicture this. A darkened auditorium, an attentive, cult-like audience staring ahead expectantly, hardly daring to breathe; a huge screen on which there is an image no one can decipher. And then, the person everyone has been waiting for strides confidently on to the spotlit stage, wearing a headset and carrying a PowerPoint remote, dressed immaculately and sporting a brand-new haircut. You can hear a pin drop as the presenter begins, “You think the world is round, but I am going to tell you to begin to believe it is actually square.”Predictable, false and embarrassing; how I hate TED talks. And it’s not even because they’re named after a man. What I can’t abide is the way presenters pace around the stage, I hate the gravity with which they deliver their message, and being patronised by a smug, overconfident “thought leader” is pretty intolerable. Continue reading...

Tom Baldwin’s account of the abusive relationship with the truth in media and politics is lucid, punchy and often funnyLet’s begin with the parable of the triple-breasted woman. A couple of years in advance of Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House and before the term “fake news” had caught on, a Florida woman calling herself Jasmine Tridevil made headlines around the world by posting pictures of herself with a third breast. Claiming she had undergone this unusual implant surgery in the hope of landing a reality TV show, her story was propagated by a spectrum of media including New York magazine, BuzzFeed, the New York Post, the Toronto Sun, Fox News, CBS Tampa, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph.As you will have surmised, the story was an invention by a woman whose website boasted that it was the “provider of internet hoaxes”. Tom Baldwin remarks: “The reason why so many respectable news organisations would run it anyway is because it was flying around the internet and the prospect of a few hundred thousand clicks was too tempting to waste time with checks.” This is one of many arresting examples that he cites in support of his contention that the battle for our eyeballs has debased a click-chasing media and led to even worse from vote-chasing politicians. Continue reading...

From the limits of machine learning to a novel exploring human prejudices – Nick Harkaway shares his favourite books about artificial intelligenceThe problem with AI is that while it’s relatively easy to define the “A”, the “I” remains elusive. We don’t know what our own intelligence is, nor how we generate our familiar conscious experience, so it’s tricky to know how we might create an artificial consciousness, or indeed recognise it if we did. Algorithms can knit together plausible conversation by sampling enormous numbers of exchanges between humans, but they have no greater understanding of those exchanges than would an enormous set of punch cards speaking through a bellows and a brass trumpet. The old Turing test now looks sadly inadequate. A machine-learning program might well counterfeit human speech and yet fail to recognise a snow leopard standing on green grass because the image contains no actual snow, and therefore the cat does not meet the definition.That distinction between true AI and the powerful machine learning tools of Google and Amazon is tackled head-on by Hector Levesque in Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI. A professor emeritus in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, Levesque fearlessly zips us through John Searle’s “Chinese room” argument and the problem of common sense before delving deeper to the complexities of the “Winograd Schema”. Don’t be alarmed: this book makes everything clear. Continue reading...

After photographs go viral, your child becomes a social-media influencer and a celebrity on Instagram. Should you step in? Parents reveal the contrasting conflicts of instant fameWhen Charlotte D’Alessio was 16 she accidentally became a social media influencer. The Canadian-born teen had recently moved from Toronto to Los Angeles with her family when, in the spring of her first year in LA, she attended the music festival Coachella with a few of her new mates.While at Coachella, Charlotte and her friend Josie changed outfits several times, taking a few pictures of themselves in bodysuits, bikini tops and jean shorts (the typical Coachella nouveau-boho uniform) and posted them on social media. So far so normal. But when the successful LA photographer Bryant Eslava took some photos of the girls and tagged them on his account, their images began to go viral. Soon the girls were seeing themselves everywhere, featured in roundups of the festival and in the “popular” galleries of Tumblr and Instagram. They were gaining hundreds and thousands of followers by the minute and being followed by strangers who’d comment “I found them!” and then tag their image to their followers in turn. Continue reading...

Many foods that are now commonplace were being prepared by our ancestors long before modern agriculture or industrialisation beganOn Monday, archaeologists revealed they had found the earliest known example of bread. The charred remains, just a few millimetres in size, were recovered from a pair of ancient fireplaces in the Black Desert, north-east Jordan. Radiocarbon dating of plant materials within the hearths revealed the fireplaces were used just over 14,000 years ago. Continue reading...

Dependence on complex hi-tech networks means western democracies are bound to feel the effects of cyberattacks far more keenly than any rogue stateIn their book, The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum point out that one of the things that made the Roman empire so powerful was its amazing network of paved roads. This network made it easy to move armies relatively quickly. But it also made it possible to move goods around, too, and so Roman logistics were more efficient and dependable than anything that had gone before. Had Jeff Bezos been around in AD125, he would have been the consummate road hog. But in the end, this feature turned out to be also a bug, for when the tide of history began to turn against the empire, those terrific roads were used by the Goths to attack and destroy it.In a remarkable new paper, Jack Goldsmith and Stuart Russell point out that there’s a lesson here for us. “The internet and related digital systems that the United States did so much to create,” they write, “have effectuated and symbolised US military, economic and cultural power for decades.” But this raises an uncomfortable question: in the long view of history, will these systems, like the Roman empire’s roads, come to be seen as a platform that accelerated US decline? Continue reading...

The latest addition to the Audi line-up may not be the biggest or the most practical, but it will sit at the top of the brand’s pyramidAudi Q8

An article we published last week about links between mobiles and cancer proved highly controversial. Here a cancer expert and physicist argues that it misrepresented the research and that fears are ill-founded

Tom Edwards from Colorado, who challenged Musk’s use of motif without attribution, reaches agreement with Tesla tycoonA Colorado artist says he has reached a settlement with Elon Musk after challenging the Tesla tycoon’s use of a farting unicorn motif that he had drawn as an ironic tribute to electric cars.Musk used the cartoon image on Twitter, without attribution, to promote his Tesla electric car range, and ignored Tom Edwards’ attempts to come to a licensing arrangement, telling the artist’s daughter it would be “kinda lame” to sue. Continue reading...

Crimson Hexagon suspended as concerns surface over company’s federal contracts and ties to Russia and TurkeyFacebook has suspended a social media analytics firm from accessing user data while it investigates potential violations of its policy barring surveillance.The firm, Crimson Hexagon, boasts an impressive list of blue chip clients and claims to have collected more than 1tn public social media posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sources. It uses artificial intelligence and image analysis to monitor social media and provide customers with insights into public sentiment about their brands. Continue reading...

The use of Chinese-made equipment in Britain’s broadband infrastructure demands, and gets, careful scrutinyHow far can we trust Chinese companies to supply our critical national infrastructure? The question was raised by the Hinkley Point power station, but is even more pressing in the telecoms business. Broadband internet is now as critical a part of the infrastructure as the road or rail network. So the question seems to answer itself. Many countries are extremely reluctant to allow two Chinese telecoms companies in particular, Huawei and ZTE, to do business with them. They view both of them as arms of the Chinese state, even though Huawei is legally a private company. In fact the US government nearly shut down ZTE altogether this year by forbidding its American component suppliers to deal with it, although it was later allowed to resume operations on payment of a $1bn fine. The British National Cyber Security Centre has already warned telecoms companies against the use of ZTE equipment or services.Huawaei had already abandoned the US market in 2013, but in the UK it has had a central position in BT’s broadband operation since 2010, having won its first contract in 2005. A 2013 report by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee was extremely critical of the way in which that deal had been nodded through without any ministerial input at all. Partly as a result, an arrangement was reached that allowed experts from GCHQ to examine the code in Huawei equipment used in Britain. The latest report from the oversight committee, which watches the progress of monitoring, suggests that there is more work to be done in some areas, mostly to do with third party components. This is not very alarmist language, and the company claims that it shows the process is working as designed. But it still reminds us of the inherent dangers of an obscure situation. Continue reading...

The pair have been verbally sparring for months – soon they will face off at Manchester ArenaYork Hall, in London’s Bethnal Green, is one of Britain’s oldest boxing venues. Opened in the 1920s, it still hosts professional bouts in front of audiences of 1,200 people.But in its near-century, the venue has never seen anything like the event that took place on Wednesday, when more than 1,000 teenagers queued to watch two of YouTube’s biggest stars – and rivals – trade insults ahead of their highly publicised boxing match next month. Continue reading...

Facebook-owned messaging service wants to crack down on viral spread of hateful misinformationWhatsApp’s users will only be able to forward messages to 20 people, as the Facebook-owned messaging service attempts to crack down on the viral spread of hateful misinformation.In India, where false rumours about child abduction spread virally over WhatsApp, leading to several vigilante murders over the past year, the new limit will be even stricter: each message can be forwarded just five times. In that country, where according to Facebook “people forward more messages, photos, and videos than any other country in the world”, WhatsApp is also removing the “quick forward” feature, a button that appears next to photos, videos and links. The previous forwarding cap, rarely hit by users, was more than 250. Continue reading...

Strong results attributed to reorganizing the company’s priorities to cloud computing and artificial intelligenceMicrosoft’s revenue exceeded $100bn for the first time in fiscal year 2018, the company reported Thursday, as the legacy software company’s efforts to reinvent itself as a major player in cloud computing continued to pay off.Microsoft stock jumped more than 4% in after-hours trading as the company beat analyst expectations with earnings for the quarter of $8.8bn, or $1.14 per share. Continue reading...

In July 2018 a Dutch company showcased what it calls the first ever flying car already fit for purpose, at the Farnborough Airshow. But do we need flying cars in our lives?Subscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, AudioBoom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter, or email us at chipspodcast@theguardian.com.Any time technology throws up a new problem for society, you’re guaranteed to see someone say, “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got this.” Continue reading...

Murray and Hello Games coded a near-infinite universe and survived a harassment ordeal. For two years, they’ve stuck by the game that put them on the map – and led to death threats

Social media company to provide details of spending on ads targeting Irish votersFacebook is to publish comprehensive data on political advertising during Ireland’s abortion referendum campaign, giving an unprecedented insight into targeting of voters on social media, and setting a powerful precedent for election transparency.The US company has told Irish politicians it will provide anonymised details of the amount spent on targeting Irish voters on its platform between 1 March and 25 May, and the number of referendum-linked ads that had been purchased. Continue reading...

Thousands of people from more than 140 countries submitted their iPhone pictures to the annual iPhone Photography Awards. Here’s a selection of the winning entries Continue reading...

Michael and Heather Martin were sentenced to five years of probation last year for treatment of children in videosYouTube has banned a family of vloggers from its platform, after the parents were convicted of child neglect in the course of filming their popular “prank” videos.Michael and Heather Martin,who post videos under the name FamilyOFive, were sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect in September last year, after viewers raised alarm over their treatment of their children in videos. Continue reading...

Facebook founder had suggested site did not need to remove ‘unintentional’ denialMark Zuckerberg has been criticised by Jewish groups and anti-racism organisations for suggesting Holocaust denial should be allowed on Facebook because it could be unintentional.In an interview on Wednesday, the Facebook founder said he found Holocaust denial “deeply offensive”, but added: “I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong … It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.” Continue reading...

New version of Gorilla Glass used in iPhone and Samsung devices could help make smashed screens a thing of the pastGlass-maker Corning has unveiled a new version of its Gorilla Glass used in the majority of smartphone displays, which it says is twice as likely to survive being dropped.

Jacy wants a laptop to run Excel spreadsheets but her budget is only £300. What are the best options?What’s the best laptop for £300?

A low-budget follow-up to the 2014 horror, taking place entirely on a laptop screen, isn’t always convincing but boasts some inventive suspenseIf you were to guess which 2018 film contained references to student gun reform, Cambridge Analytica, Flint’s ongoing water problem and the Iranian nuclear deal, I’m going to take a big leap here and assume that you wouldn’t have predicted a sequel to 2014’s laptop-based cyber-horror Unfriended.Related: The First Purge review – patchy, dour prequel is a nihilistic Trumpian horror Continue reading...

CEO explains decision not to censor conspiracy theories but says the platform will try to ‘reduce distribution of content’Mark Zuckerberg defended the rights of Facebook users to publish Holocaust denial posts, saying he didn’t “think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”.In an interview with Recode published on Wednesday, the CEO also explained Facebook’s decision to allow the far-right conspiracy theory website Infowars to continue using the platform, saying the social network would try to “reduce the distribution of that content”, but would not censor the page. Continue reading...

A measure that would have split the state into separate parts will no longer appear on the ballot

Industry analysts fear action against anti-competitive behaviour will punish consumers more than GoogleThe European commission has fined Google £3.8bn for anti-competitive behaviour regarding its Android mobile operating system. It’s looking to force the company to cede some control, but is it too little too late?The record fine is not to be dismissed, but for Google it is the EU’s suggested remedy – the prising loose of its tight grip around Android – that may have the largest impact. Continue reading...

Firm to launch appeal because ‘Android has created more choice for everyone, not less’Google has been hit with a landmark €4.34bn (£3.8bn) fine by the European Union over “serious illegal behaviour” to secure the dominance of its search engine on mobile phones.The European commission imposed the record penalty after finding that the US tech firm required smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Google’s search and browser apps on devices using its Android operating system, which is used on 80% of all phones. Manufacturers that refused Google would not be allowed to use its Google Play online store and streaming service. Continue reading...

When the open-world pirate adventure launched in March, every voyage seemed to end in a fight to the death. So the developers ripped up their plans – and summoned an old legless monster-hunter and a fleet of skeleton shipsSoon after the online pirate adventure Sea of Thieves was released in March, it had become a war zone. The game sees small groups of players board ships and setsail on the open ocean in search of treasure, but every time you spotted another boat, the result would be a fight to the death, cannons blazing and swords swirling. Games developer Rare had hoped that some encounters would be peaceful and cooperative, but the innate competitiveness of the online multiplayer arena seemed to have won out.Then the studio released the game’s first major update, The Hungering Deep, and for a few days everything changed. Player ships made their way to Shark Bait Cove to receive a time-limited challenge from a hoary old monster-hunter who had lost both legs to a gigantic sea creature, and now wanted players to work together to find and destroy it. So they did. Ships anchored, crews alighted, and – united by an interesting common goal – they didn’t brawl: they communicated, messed around, played their musical instruments and formulated plans. Then they went off together to track down and slaughter the terrifying Megalodon. It was the scenario Rare had dreamed of. Continue reading...

Tesla billionaire says his remarks about Briton Vernon Unsworth were unjustifiedThe tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has apologised to a Briton who helped to rescue a group of boys and their football coach from a cave in Thailand last week, after calling him a “pedo” on Twitter.Vernon Unsworth had said he was considering legal action and was “astonished and very angry” about the slur. Continue reading...

Damian Collins questions whether Russians used knowledge to run US election ads

After announcing three huge games at E3 expo – Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield – Bethesda stalwarts Todd Howard and Pete Hines explain the importance of staying relevantIn the early 2000s, game publisher Bethesda was best known for its Elder Scrolls series of technologically ambitious fantasy games. In the last 15 years, however, it has expanded greatly, snapping up several legendary video game franchises as well as starting an original series of its own. The company now produces the Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing games; the iconic, hellish shooter Doom; tongue-in-cheek Nazi-killing romp Wolfenstein; supernatural steampunk assassin sim Dishonoured; and Rage, a Mad Max-style romp around a devastated world.At its E3 press conference last month, after showing new Doom, Rage, Fallout and Wolfenstein titles, Bethesda teased the next entry in its Elder Scrolls series as well as a new sci-fi role-playing game called Starfield. For both, 100 hours is a conservative playtime estimate. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO called immature after attacking Vernon Unsworth, who rescued trapped childrenTesla investors have demanded an apology from CEO Elon Musk after he lashed out at a British cave diver who rescued children in Thailand.Musk’s posts on Twitter sparked backlash from shareholders and Silicon Valley analysts, who called his behavior immature and an impediment to the car company’s success. Continue reading...

Morris Travellers | Birthdays column | Children’s books | ‘Gordon Bennett’ | BadgersNext time: the presidential motorcade to be Morris Minor Travellers (Letters, passim).

Today’s the day to celebrate the little pictures that changed the way we talk onlineToday is the fifth World Emoji Day – a day to celebrate the tiny images on our phones that have transformed the way people chat online. Here are some things you need to know about those funny little pictures : Continue reading...

The co-founder of the most downloaded iOS app of 2017 welcomes competition from big techIt might not be marked in your diary, but 17 July is World Emoji Day. Why? Because, if you’re on an Apple or Google platform, that’s the date the calendar emoji shows.To mark the occasion, Apple replaced all of its executive headshots with cartoony “memoji”, a new feature coming in iOS 12 for iPhone X users, which lets them create custom avatars and ping them over to friends and family. Continue reading...

A researcher has analysed millions of public transactions to prove just how much the app reveals about our life and habitsAnyone can track a Venmo user’s purchase history and glean a detailed profile – including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments – because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.This was the finding of a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, who analysed the more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017. Her aim was to highlight the privacy risk from using a seemingly innocuous peer-to-peer app. Continue reading...

Bethesda’s Todd Howard explains why post-apocalypse simulator Fallout is becoming an online multiplayer game, and why he is just as scared of it as the playersWhile billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after “the event” – that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios’ Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs.Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don’t recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants. But developer Bethesda surprised fans this year by announcing Fallout 76, an online multiplayer game set in the same universe. As one of the first survivors to emerge from the vaults, you’ll be up against other players as well as the usual mutants, monsters and hazardous environments. Continue reading...

The energy used in our digital consumption is set to have a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industryIt was just another moment in this long, increasingly strange summer. I was on a train home from Paddington station, and the carriage’s air-conditioning was just about fighting off the heat outside. Most people seemed to be staring at their phones – in many cases, they were trying to stream a World Cup match, as the 4G signal came and went, and Great Western Railway’s onboard wifi proved to be maddeningly erratic. The trebly chatter of headphone leakage was constant. And thousands of miles and a few time zones away in Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the world’s largest concentrations of computing power was playing its part in keeping everything I saw ticking over, as data from around the world passed back and forth from its vast buildings.Most of us communicate with this small and wealthy corner of the US every day. Thanks to a combination of factors – its proximity to Washington DC, competitive electricity prices, and its low susceptibility to natural disasters – the county is the home of data centres used by about 3,000 tech companies: huge agglomerations of circuitry, cables and cooling systems that sit in corners of the world most of us rarely see, but that are now at the core of how we live. About 70% of the world’s online traffic is reckoned to pass through Loudoun County. Continue reading...

AI and robotics forecast to generate 7.2m jobs, more than will be lost due to automationArtificial intelligence is set to create more than 7m new UK jobs in healthcare, science and education by 2037, more than making up for the jobs lost in manufacturing and other sectors through automation, according to a report.A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers argued that AI would create slightly more jobs (7.2m) than it displaced (7m) by boosting economic growth. The firm estimated about 20% of jobs would be automated over the next 20 years and no sector would be unaffected. Continue reading...

C4 Dispatches documentary finds moderators left Britain First’s pages alone as ‘they generate a lot of revenue’Leading far-right activists have received special protection from Facebook, preventing their pages from being deleted even after a pattern of behaviour that would typically result in moderator action being taken.The process, called “shielded review”, was uncovered by Channel 4 Dispatches, after the documentary series sent an undercover reporter to work as a content moderator in a Dublin-based Facebook contractor, Cpl. Continue reading...

Accommodation service told it needs to be clearer on total cost including fees and chargesAirbnb has been found in breach of EU law and given until the end of the summer to ditch a range of practices, including that of belatedly applying additional fees to the prices it promotes online.The accommodation service has been accused by the European commission and national regulators of failing its customers and making the mistake of many global digital firms of “forgetting its responsibilities”. Continue reading...

Teardown exposes new silicone skirt around keys that could stop debris from blocking themDespite Apple stating that new 2018 MacBook Pro keyboards were not designed to alleviate key failures due to dust, a teardown has revealed a new barrier under the keys that could stop them getting clogged up.

Vernon Unsworth ‘astonished and very angry’ after Tesla owner makes baseless remarkA British cave diver who was instrumental in the rescue of 12 children trapped in a northern Thailand cave says he is considering legal action after the inventor Elon Musk called him a “pedo” on Twitter.

From books and films to TV shows and video games, the last-man-standing trope is massively popular. Is it a reflection of our dog-eat-dog free-market ideology?You are dropped on to a remote island with only your wits. You are going to have to scavenge weapons, ammunition, first-aid kits and the like, while 99 other people do the same. And then, at some point, the shooting will start, because this is a contest of elimination. As the old Highlander movies had it, there can be only one. The last person left alive wins the game. Welcome to the battle royale.Such is the basic idea behind the staggeringly popular “Battle Royale” version of the world-beating video game Fortnite, which has 40m players logging in every month, and grossed $223m in March of this year alone. Its success has inspired a slew of other battle-royale games, including a mode in the forthcoming instalment of the juggernaut Call of Duty franchise. A fight to the death among many contestants, until one victor emerges, is also the setup of the Hunger Games trilogy of books and films (from 2008), in which 24 young people from the poverty-stricken Districts are selected every year as “tributes”, to participate in an obsessively televised fight to the death, for the enjoyment of the decadent inhabitants of the Capitol. Continue reading...