BEFORE I SIT DOWN to talk to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, he apologizes for the noise. The evening’s guests have been doing sporadic sound checks all day: Peso Pluma running through his opening number, Offset ad-libbing over a backing track. I passed by throngs of One Direction fans to get into the park (Niall Horan for $25 is a solid deal). This isn’t where I imagined I’d be talking to the head of the most influential social media app on the planet, but the only way I could get on Chew’s calendar was by meeting him at TikTok’s first-ever music festival—a sold-out, two-stage program at the Cubs’ training facility in Mesa, Arizona.
The location makes no sense until you realize that for TikTok, location doesn’t matter. Only numbers do. The whole festival will be streamed exclusively on the app, for free (highlights would later air on Disney+ and Hulu); it’s the digits on the top left of everyone’s phone screen tonight that will be the ultimate metric of success or failure for this event.
I’m also here because it seems like Chew never really got to introduce himself on his own terms. When he stepped in as TikTok’s CEO in mid-2021, there was little fanfare; the official @TikTok account didn’t even make a TikTok about it. Instead, Chew’s introduction to the wider public took place during a barrage of questions at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC, last March. “It was a circus,” a TikTok employee tells me, speaking under condition of anonymity. “They didn’t even let him talk. They had the attitude of ‘You’re a Chinese spy, and we’re gonna beat the shit out of you.’”
この記事は WIRED の March - April 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は WIRED の March - April 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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A Full-Term Gig - Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business.
Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.
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Markdown is not just a piece of software. It's also a markup language it's used to format plaintext, which then appears the way you want it to on, say, the internet. Markdown the markup language was designed to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible, according to creator John Gruber's syntax guide. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Terminal Velocity - Murphy, a competitive runner since high school, was an avid user of the exercise app Strava, and he frequently checked the app while traveling to see where locals liked to run.
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