The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward
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The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely. Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.

  1. 21 HRS AGO

    Zuckerberg's Testimony: What to Watch For

    For the first time in his life, Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions under oath — not to a Senate subcommittee where politicians perform for their clips, but to a jury of regular people whose only job is to decide whether he's telling the truth. This is a genuinely different situation, and here's how to watch it. The real danger for Zuckerberg isn't his testimony — it's the internal documents already in evidence that will be put in front of him. A 2018 Meta strategy document saying "if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." Emails from Meta's own tech chief reporting back to Zuckerberg about plastic surgery filters, with Zuckerberg's response being that he needed "more data" before acting on known harm. Internal communications in which Meta employees referred to themselves as "basically pushers." These don't sound like a company run by a thoughtful parent. The third thing to watch is Section 230 — the 1996 law that gives platforms blanket immunity for what users post. The plaintiffs' argument, which the judge has already allowed the jury to consider, is that this trial isn't about content. It's about design. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. The Like button. If design liability succeeds here, it blows a hole in the legal shield that has protected every major platform for decades. The question at the heart of this trial — who makes these decisions, who profits, and who ends up paying — is one I've been covering for years. Wednesday gives us a jury's answer. Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.substack.com

    11 min

  2. 1 DAY AGO

    The Social Media Trial Explained

    A 20-year-old woman started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine. She's now suing both companies, and her case has just become the most important tech trial since the DOJ went after Microsoft in 1998. Here's what's actually at stake — and why it matters whether you're a parent or not. The trial isn't just about one person's mental health. It's a bellwether case for more than 1,500 similar lawsuits waiting in the pipeline, and the first time CEOs of major social media platforms — including Mark Zuckerberg, who testifies this week — have had to answer questions in front of a jury rather than a Senate subcommittee. The internal documents already in evidence are extraordinary: YouTube memos describing "viewer addiction" as a goal, Meta's Project Myst finding that traumatized kids were especially vulnerable to the platform and that parental controls made almost no difference, and a strategy document laying out a pipeline designed to bring kids in as tweens and keep them as teens. The central legal question is whether Section 230 — the 1996 law that has shielded every major platform from liability for nearly 30 years — protects design decisions like infinite scroll, autoplay, and the Like button. The judge has already ruled that the jury can consider design liability. If that argument wins, it changes the legal landscape for every platform that has ever made an engineering choice optimized for engagement. Nobody voted on infinite scroll. No regulator approved autoplay. A small group of engineers and executives made those decisions, and billions of people — including six-year-olds — inherited the results. A Los Angeles jury is now being asked to weigh in on that. Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.substack.com

    11 min

  3. 9 FEB

    Social Media's Big Tobacco Moment

    Opening arguments began this morning in two trials that could change social media forever—and they're not about what kids see online. They're about who decided to make these platforms addictive in the first place.Today in Los Angeles Superior Court, Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and YouTube are defending against claims that their platforms' design features—infinite scroll, auto-play, algorithmic recommendations—deliberately addict children and cause mental health harm. A 19-year-old plaintiff says these features caused her anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts starting at age 10.Simultaneously, New Mexico's attorney general is suing Meta for failing to protect children from sexual exploitation.THE STAKES:Bellwether trials affecting 1,500+ similar lawsuitsHundreds of school district claimsCases from 40+ state attorneys generalMeta warned damages could reach "high tens of billions of dollars"Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri (Instagram), and Neal Mohan (YouTube) expected to testifyTHE KEY DIFFERENCE:These lawsuits sidestep Section 230 (which protects platforms from liability for user content) by attacking the design of the platforms themselves—not the content posted on them. They argue companies used "behavioral and neurobiological techniques borrowed from slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry."WHY THIS MATTERS:This isn't about censoring social media or protecting kids from "bad content." It's about whether companies can knowingly build products designed to addict children, even when internal research shows the harm being caused.FROM MY ANALYSIS:How adolescent brain development makes kids vulnerable to designed addiction (10-12 years old: all gas pedal, no brakes)What internal documents already show companies knewWhy Section 230 won't protect them this timeThe shift from "physical harm" to "behavioral harm" in American regulationWhat happens if plaintiffs winThis could be social media's Big Tobacco moment. Watch to understand what's really happening in that courtroom today.SOURCES:NPR: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5684196/social-media-kids-addiction-mental-health-trialCNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/meta-big-week-in-court-opening-arguments-in-new-mexico-la-trials.htmlABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/arguments-begin-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-set-129983976Read the full analysis at TheRipCurrent.com#SocialMedia #Meta #YouTube #BigTech #Regulation

    15 min

  4. 2 FEB

    Why ICE Agents Wear Masks: Inside the Billion-Dollar Surveillance System Targeting Us All

    Ever wonder why ICE agents cover their faces during raids? They know exactly what surveillance technology can do when your face is captured in public. And they should know—they’re operating the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus ever deployed on American soil. With a $75 billion budget from last year’s reconciliation process, ICE has gone on a shopping spree that would make China’s “Safe Cities” program jealous. Iris scanners from BI2 Technologies. Facial recognition from Clearview AI. License-plate tracking systems from Thomson Reuters that can establish your daily travel patterns. Cell phone location tracking purchased from commercial data brokers. A $30 million enforcement platform from Palantir that draws on everything from Medicaid records to IRS data. The technology doesn’t stop at identifying immigrants. Body cam footage shows agents using ChatGPT to write reports. “Stingray” devices impersonate cell towers to grab a protester’s unique phone identifier—often without warrants. And ICE, like other agencies, sidesteps the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision by simply buying from commercial data brokers what they can’t legally obtain with a warrant. And here’s the kicker: DHS is now using at least 200 AI systems—a 37% increase since July 2025—with virtually no oversight because agencies self-report whether AI is their “primary” decision-making tool. Watch the full breakdown to understand what this means for everyone’s civil liberties, both Americans and those hoping to be.

    18 min

  5. 28 JAN

    We're a Match Flare in an Infinite Darkness — And We're Wasting It Fighting Each Other

    It’s a dark time. We have an unaccountable federal police force killing Americans in the street. Heather Cox Richardson, the foremost historian of the American political moment, ended her show in tears. The American experiment feels more experimental than ever. So here I want to step back and think about something much, much larger than us. Not to minimize our problems, but because understanding how impossibly small we are might help us stop fucking around and take care of one another. In 1964, a Soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev detected a regular signal from deep space. To his ears, it had to be aliens — some mechanical device creating this extremely repetitive, measurably consistent pulse. It turned out to be a pulsar, a naturally occurring phenomenon. He was disappointed. But the experience obsessed him, and he created what’s now called the Kardashev Scale, a way of measuring the sophistication of civilizations. Level one: a civilization that has harnessed the available power of its own planet. Level two: harnessed the power of its nearest star. Level three: harnessed the power of its galaxy. We’re not even a one. We’re maybe a 0.4. We’re primitive. There’s a comedian on TikTok named Vinny Thomas who does this great bit about humanity being interviewed by some intergalactic HR person for admission into the larger club of civilizations. We’re bombing the interview. “Have you colonized any other worlds?” No. “What about Mars? It’s right down the street.” This gets at something Enrico Fermi famously asked while building nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. At lunch with colleagues, he’d talk about the math: so much space, so many stars. Where is everybody? The Fermi Paradox has been kicked around for decades, but the solution I find most compelling came from European researchers: It’s not that we’re alone. It’s that even if other civilizations exist across the vastness of the universe, they don’t exist at the same time as us. The universe isn’t just unimaginably large. It’s also unimaginably old. We’re a fraction of an instant in its history — a match flare struck in the darkness. The idea that two matches would happen to be lit at the same moment, such that they’d see each other’s light in all that vastness? Ludicrous. Here’s how alone we are. The Kepler telescope searched for exoplanets — planets with the right ratio of size and distance from their star to potentially support life. The closest one to us is Proxima Centauri b, 4.2 light-years away. That’s right down the block in universal terms. The news coverage at the time was breathless: we might go there someday! I was one of those breathless reporters. It felt like a civilizational shift! But then I began asking about the distances involved, and that’s where the story fell off the front page. At the fastest speed we can get a rocket to travel, it turns out it would take 2,000 human generations to reach Proxima Centauri b. That’s 200,000 years of travel. Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years. Getting to that planet would mean bottling up the entirety of human history, jamming it into a tube, and sending it off into the unknown. We’re not doing that, whatever Elon Musk tells you. We are on the generation ship right now. This is it. Planet Earth. Astronauts talk about the overview effect — this euphoric epiphany that grips them when they see Earth from space. They come back describing the specialness of life here, how incredibly fragile and precious this delicate little vessel is. And so when I think about how much we’re lying to each other and being angry at one another at the behest of companies that profit from it, killing people for objecting to political decisions, taking people from safety to harm to remain in power — all these sins we’re committing in the face of the vastness of the universe and how fragile we are on our tiny speck. We’re a match flare. We get this brief moment. Let’s make it count.

    14 min

  6. 27 JAN

    Big Tech Knew Exactly How Much It Was Harming Kids — The Documents Prove It

    This is a massive week for anyone who’s been watching Big Tech’s impact on kids. Internal documents from Meta, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok are being made public as part of major lawsuits, and what they reveal is damning. Two themes emerge. First: the business value of kids. A 2020 Google presentation literally says “solving kids is a massive opportunity.” An internal Facebook email from 2016 identifies the company’s top priority as “total teen time spent.” These companies clearly saw children as a pipeline of new users to be captured. Second: they knew about the harm. An Instagram internal study from 2018 documented that “teens weaponize Instagram features to torment each other” and that “most participants regret engaging in conflicts.” TikTok’s own strategy documents admit the platform “is particularly popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement and have minimal ability to self-regulate.” YouTube identified “late night use, heavy habitual use, and problematic content” as root causes of harm. They knew. As I discuss here, I want this moment to establish a new legal framework in America — one that recognizes behavioral harm the same way we recognize physical and financial harm. We’ve done it before with tobacco. We can do it again with social media. And this might be the beginning.

    14 min

  7. 23 JAN

    Wells Fargo Is Firing Thousands of Workers Because of AI — And Bank Tellers Are Unionizing for the First Time Ever

    I spent this week talking to bank tellers at Wells Fargo for a special report over at Hard Reset, and what they told me should alarm anyone who thinks their job is safe from AI. The bank has cut 65,000 jobs since 2019. CEO Charles Scharf just told investors more cuts are coming — permanently. Meanwhile, profits are soaring. Credit card accounts up 20 percent, auto lending up 19 percent, investment banking fees up 14 percent. Fewer people, more money. Branch employees describe what’s happening on the ground: three tellers became two, then one. Lines getting longer. Pressure mounting. Work that used to require human judgment now gets handled by an app, with AI guiding and surveilling every interaction. The jobs aren’t disappearing — they’re just getting piled onto fewer bodies, all of them working “at-will” with zero protection. And that’s why, for the first time in American history, bank tellers at a national institution are unionizing. Twenty-eight Wells Fargo branches across 14 states have voted to join the Communications Workers of America. Banking was always the stable, boring job that didn’t need a union. That deal is broken. Here’s what gutted me: the workers getting hit hardest are women without college degrees, especially women from Black and brown communities. Retail banking was a reliable path to middle-class stability for those folks. Now those jobs are being automated away, and as one banker pointed out, the money saved flows straight up to an overwhelmingly white, male executive class. This is the forecast. AI isn’t coming for jobs in some distant future. It’s here. It’s seeping into white-collar work that we assumed to be safe. And the only people who know it are the ones already being forced out the door. Read the full investigation at Hard Reset.

    11 min

  8. 22 JAN

    Davos Is Just a High School Reunion — And AI Companies are the Cool Kids

    Every January, the world’s wealthiest decision-makers descend on the World Economic Forum in Davos, and we’re told this is where the future gets negotiated. This year, while the world talks of Greenland, geopolitics, tariffs, and other surreal headlines coming out of the Alps — I’m thinking about the social dynamics on the literal streets of that mountain town. Like any professional convening that draws the powerful, Davos functions less like a sober policy conference and more like a global high-school reunion, complete with insecurity, status anxiety, and a desperate fear of missing out. And nowhere is that clearer than in the party scene. Big tech and AI companies are throwing the most lavish, impossible-to-get-into events, and global leaders and their staffers are lining up — literally — to get inside. A sharp New York Times piece captures this perfectly: initiatives focused on gender equity and public good sit empty, while neon-lit crypto lounges and AI cocktail hours pulse with attention. That imbalance matters. Parties shape conversations. Conversations shape priorities. Priorities shape policy. I’ve seen this dynamic before at places like Aspen, SXSW, CES — and it always works the same way. The room that feels important becomes the room that is important, regardless of what’s actually being said inside it. The unsettling part is this: these companies now wield the resources and influence of nation-states. When they dominate Davos socially, they dominate it politically. And that should worry anyone who still believes that regulation, caution, or democratic deliberation might matter in the age of AI.

    12 min
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About

The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely. Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.

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