When millions of AT&T customers across the country briefly lost their cell phone service last month, Francella Jackson, 61, of Fairview Heights, Illinois, said she picked up her worn Southwestern Bell push-button landline and called her friends “just like that.” we could laugh at the people who couldn’t use their phones.”

“Why, isn’t it great that we can talk and have a good conversation?” she remembered saying. “We had a good laugh.”

Derek Shaw, 68, of York, Pennsylvania, said he has an Android cell phone but prefers to talk on his black wireless landline at home. The sound quality is better, he says, and the phone is easier to hold during long calls. Mr. Shaw said he also enjoys talking to people face-to-face rather than over Zoom, and never got rid of his vinyl record collection when CDs became popular in the 1990s.

“I never even thought about giving up my landline,” he says. “I’ll kick and scream if I have to.”

For many, in the smartphone age, landline phones have become as essential as steamships and telegrams. But for those who still use them, they offer clear benefits. Following the AT&T outage on February 22 and a pressure from AT&T to phase out traditional landlines in California, those who have them are speaking out in defense of their old phones.

For them, the landline is a lifeline during power outages, a welcome return to the era before doom scrolling and push alerts, and a more comfortable, better-sounding alternative to tinny, flimsy smartphones.

“I love my landline,” said Ms. Jackson, who has had hers since the 1980s. “People call me old-fashioned, but I’ll be old-fashioned.”

She has a cell phone, but no internet at home, she said. She likes that she still remembers her friends’ phone numbers and a call is never dropped. “I’m a little nostalgic,” Mrs. Jackson said. “While I embrace technology, there are some things I like to hold on to.”

Some younger people also see benefits to landlines. Cory Sechrest, 32, of Chicago, said he and his girlfriend received a pink landline phone in case the power goes out. He said he doesn’t know anyone else his age who has one.

When friends visit, “they pause for a moment, look at it and say, ‘What is that?'” he said. “It gets a few laughs.”

Landlines can feel like a portal to the pre-internet age. Many Americans grew up with the classic rotary telephone on the kitchen wall that the entire family had to share, offering reliability but no privacy. Some got the civilian phone in their teenage room after weeks of begging their parents. Some coveted the football phone which came free with a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

The writer Charli Penn wrote in Apartment therapy that as a millennial she got a landline because it gives her a break from her cell phone, is easier for her father to use and takes her back in time.

“If plaid miniskirts, ivy streamers, and thick-soled combat boots are enjoying a welcome comeback, why can’t I happily chat for hours on my cordless home phone, just like I did in my teens and early twenties? ?” Mrs. Penn wrote.

Some also like landline phones for aesthetic reasons. Mark Treutelaar, co-owner, with his wife Galina, of the Old Phone Shop, which sells and repairs landline telephones in Franklin, Wisconsin, said he has noticed an increase in sales of brightly colored wall and desk chairs with rotary dial telephones from the sixties and seventies.

“We have recently been selling more phones than ever before,” said Mr Treutelaar. “People like them because they remember them from when they were younger, and even if they don’t have a landline, they just buy them as decoration or pair them with mobile phones via Bluetooth.”

Others rely on landlines in rural areas with poor mobile coverage. Yet landline users are a distinct minority in the United States.

About 73 percent of American adults in 2022 lived in a household without a landline but at least one cell phone. the most recent data collected by the federal government. Not surprisingly, age was a key factor in phone use. Nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 report using only cell phones, compared to less than half of Americans over 65.

Citing the plummeting popularity of landlines, AT&T asked California regulators last year to be relieved of their obligation to maintain the traditional copper wire network, the kind that has connected American households for most of the last century.

AT&T said the number of copper landlines, known as plain old telephone service, or POTS, it offers in California fell 89 percent between 2000 and 2021. Customers generally pay about $34.50 per month for that service, according to the California Public Advocates Office. . But even most landline users rely primarily on their cell phones, AT&T said.

“Like Blockbuster rentals and Kodak movies, POTS has fallen from technological primacy to effective obsolescence over the course of a generation,” AT&T wrote in its filing with the California Public Utilities Commission.

AT&T described the proposal as part of a multi-year effort to eventually transition landline customers to cellphones or to fiber-optic cables that carry Internet and landline phone services. It says 20 other states have already allowed this transition.

“No customer will be left without a voice or 911 service,” Susan Johnson, executive vice president of wireline transformation at AT&T, said in a statement. “For customers who do not yet have alternative options available, we will continue to offer their existing voice service for as long as necessary.”

Still, the proposal has sparked a fierce backlash, with hundreds of landline users signing up public comments Urge California to reject it. Many say that because the copper wire system is generally self-sufficient, it is the most reliable way to reach emergency services if power goes out during a flood, wildfire or storm. AT&T says fiber optic cables are more resilient and easier to repair, although a fiber optic phone will fail if a backup battery is not installed.

“Especially when we have health problems, being able to use our rotary phone is the most important thing,” says Francesca Ciancutti, who lives in Mendocino County, California. “It’s absolutely crucial. And all our neighbors think the same.”

It’s a concern that has led many people across the country to keep their landlines.

Katie Lanza, 37, of Fort Worth, said she was once waiting for an insurance replacement for her cell phone, which was chewed by her dog, when she got sick in the middle of the night. Unable to call for help, she knocked on the neighbors door at 2 a.m. That was about fourteen years ago, she said, and she’s had a landline ever since.

“I was always afraid that if something happened to my cell phone, I wouldn’t be able to call anyone,” Ms. Lanza said.

Ms. Jackson said she is concerned about cyberattacks disrupting her cell phone service. But most of all, she said, her landline is just a nicer way to talk to people after work.

“I just like to relax and remember things how they were,” she said. “It’s relaxing for me to pick up and have a long conversation with my friends on my landline.”

The erratic course of internet-fueled culture is churning out more protagonists, apocrypha, and relics than we can handle. Remember when the Canadian musician known as Grimes former partner of one of the world’s most powerful men, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk – brought a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The image of a futuristic pop star dragging a medieval knife (made from a melted AR-15, no less) across the red carpet summed up the mysterious way in which contemporary culture seems to be running in all directions, chasing both new and ancient myths.

Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of technology companies. In two simultaneous shows in Manhattan, he has used omens as a knife to explore the sociopolitical consequences of the tech industry’s preference for medieval knowledge. According to Denny’s, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and damp castles constitute the latest digital realms.

“Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth show with Petzel Gallery in New York features a kind of heaving shrine to Grimes: puffs from an automatic steamer inflate a black “Game of Thrones” T-shirt once owned by the star, installed in a plexiglass case like a take shield. The statue is plugged into a power strip that Denny acquired from a liquidation sale on Twitter during Musk’s mandated transition to X.

Centre, “Read Write Own,” Denny’s first show with Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run space in the financial district, features recent paintings from his “Metaverse Landscape” series alongside sculptures created using whiteboards auctioned by Twitter after Musk took control. The work suggests that internet culture, and by extension our highly networked society, resembles the fantasy landscapes conjured up by Dungeons & Dragons, or ‘The Lord of the Rings’. In other words, technology-enabled life can be conceived as a vast role-playing game, where physical and virtual domains merge, and Musk et al. make the rules. (Denny also curated a current group exhibition at Petzel, featuring like-minded artists exploring fantasy genres with new media such as 3D printing.)

“Dungeon” features a new series of paintings featuring overhead views of various role-playing maps – actual digital prints on canvas, smeared with oil pigment, for a photorealistic but decaying effect. In a rendering of a HeroQuest board, gray, blue, and green stones simmer in the blocky darkness like a geometric abstraction. Other paintings deepen the idea of ​​’dungeon’: a nasty figure eight is the board for a Hannah Montana version of the tabletop game Mall Madness. An enticing iridescent pattern in another painting might be a row of columns or shelves, but the company name Nvidia in the corner tells you it’s actually a graphics card of the kind often adapted for handling cryptocurrency transactions.

Denny’s skeptical view of the tech industry in “Dungeon” is a bit obvious; it becomes deeper when viewing the show at Dunkunsthalle, where the “Metaverse Landscapes” depict virtual real estate. One smooth earth-toned map marks a waterfront plot. Others resemble pixelated blueprints of streets and storefronts.

The idea of ​​metaverse “landscapes” plays on the history of landscape paintings, which in Europe historically served as a boast of royal possessions, and in the United States as an advertisement for westward expansion, using (false, romantic) images of virgin wilderness were offered for the taking. . By including the metaverse in this line, Denny underlines the bleak fact that today’s land grabs are often not about actual land. So many people can’t afford a real home that the idea of ​​investing in a digital lot is a bitter travesty. QR codes on the sides of the works link to blockchain data that tracks the current owners of these weightless packages. The visual charm of the paintings is second only to the intoxicating allure of owning a painting of someone else’s virtual property, and that, as Denny seems to emphasize, this canvas image is essentially the more real of the two.

Denny doesn’t push artistic style in new directions so much as he studies the aesthetics of the tech industry. Part of his 2015 fair-style exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Queens featured replicas of objects seized during the spectacular downfall of Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, a German-Finnish internet entrepreneur. Included was a huge statue of a Predator from the science fiction action films. Denny’s previous show at Petzel, in 2021, was about an Amazon patent for a comically spherical delivery drone.

When you look at these objects in the full light of reality, the aesthetics of technology look a bit sloppy. But the toy-like silliness of the future shouldn’t make us laugh, Denny suggests – it should make us nervous.

There’s also a sword at Petzel: On the other side of the room, next to the T-shirt shrine, hangs a replica of Anduril, an Elven sword from “The Lord of the Rings,” which Denny made from coffee-tinted resin. It is based on the sword of Palmer Luckey, the defense contractor and inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (he sold the company he founded to Facebook for $2 billion). Luckey once – as a joke – modified a headset with explosives so that if your avatar dies in a game, you die in real life. He also founded a defense technology company, Anduril Industries. (Several of his partners in that venture came from the big data company Palantir, also named after a “Lord of the Rings” treasure.)

That a VR guru would create very real military drones and robot sentries, under the brand name of an imaginary weapon, does not inspire confidence. This also applies to the slogan, which at Petzel is depicted on a shadowy UV print with an image of one of Anduril’s autonomous fighter jets: “Fight Unfair.”

Is it all a game for these digital pioneers? Do they know where virtual reality ends and… “meat room” begins? Denny reminds us that the more connected our lives are, the more the rules of technology bind our fantasies.

Dungeon

Through March 30, Petzel Gallery, 35 East 67th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.

Read Write own

Through March 31, Dunkunsthalle, 64 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan; 917-382-4744, dunkunsthalle.com.

For a growing number of young people, a wallet filled with cash and cards is as unfashionable as millennial socks, no-show socks and skinny jeans. For the cool kids, carrying only a smartphone is the solution. Iykyk – that’s “if you know, you know”, for those who don’t know.

I, Brian Chen, a graying 39-year-old tech columnist, am not among those who know. It is unfathomable for me to part with my wallet, which contains crucial items such as my driver’s license. So in an effort to be hip again, I recruited my 23-year-old colleague Yiwen Lu to ask the young people how they live like this, and then I took the plunge myself.

By ditching my physical wallet, I join the ranks of young people like Ruby Hegab, a 19-year-old college student from Fremont, California. As soon as she got her first credit card last year, she said, she went all-in on using her iPhone to pay for groceries, parking meters and restaurant meals, and on carrying insurance cards.

“If a store doesn’t accept Tap to Pay, I don’t give them business,” Ms. Hegab said. But that rarely happens, because the vast majority of merchants she visits, including major retailers and mom-and-pop stores, now accept some form of mobile payment from services like Apple Pay and Venmo.

In a digital payments survey of just over 2,500 Americans, about 80 percent of Gen Z respondents said they used mobile wallets, and of those, half wanted to use their phones for much more than just paying for things, according to recent data from Pymnts Intelligence, a research firm that studies trade.

Younger people are increasingly using their phones for purposes that older adults would use a traditional wallet for, such as carrying documents such as driver’s licenses, boarding passes and event tickets. Some of these digital items can be added to Apple and Google’s wallet apps, while others, such as insurance cards, can be downloaded through third-party apps.

The change in behavior is a reflection of how far mobile wallets have come. About a decade ago, when I reviewed the emerging mobile payment apps, most people shrugged at the technology because tapping a phone on a scanner was no more convenient than swiping a credit card. In recent years, amid a global pandemic that pushed people to make contactless payments, Apple and Google expanded their software to support digitized driver’s licenses and transit cards, a perfect storm that has made mobile wallets more useful.

I braved it for a week without a wallet and only used my phone to run errands; going to bars, eating out and going to the movies; and even buy crab from a fishing boat. The phone sufficed in almost all of these situations, although paying for dinner was more complicated and using a digital driver’s license to buy wine at a supermarket was a nonstarter.

If you’re hoping to throw away your wallet or just want to reduce some bulk in your pocket, here’s what you need to know.

Payments

Many stores allow Android and iPhone users to use Google Pay and Apple Pay by tapping their phones on readers next to the cash register. Many small businesses, such as food trucks, accept payments through third-party apps such as Venmo, which allow you to scan a barcode to send money.

Still, there is an inherent risk in relying entirely on a mobile wallet. Abi Hoyer, 21, from Punta Gorda, Florida, said she didn’t carry a wallet for security reasons: in the event of a robbery, a thief would only get their hands on her phone. Still, thieves may be able to make payments and withdraw money from your account if they do has forced you to share your passcode.

That is why it is important that iPhone users activate a new security feature in the so-called settings Protection against stolen devices, which prevents access to data such as passwords and stored credit cards when the device is in an unknown location. And Android users should be aware of the steps to lock and clean data of the device in case of theft.

Furthermore, not all companies accept mobile payments. Ms. Hoyer learned this the hard way at Walmart when she discovered she was unable to pay for her items and did not have her full credit card number to sign up for the store’s wallet, Walmart Pay. One solution: Password management apps like 1Password and Bitwarden can securely store sensitive data, including credit card numbers, in case you need to look them up.

Jillian Gillespie, 27, of Chicago, switched to Apple Pay after losing her wallet more than a year ago, she said. This works fine for fast-casual restaurants where you pay at the counter, but at sit-down restaurants where waiters hand over a bill and expect to use a credit card, you may occasionally have to rely on friends to pay. In those cases, she typically uses Venmo to pay her friends back.

“I don’t really carry my wallet with me because it can come and bite me in the butt sometimes,” Ms. Gillespie said.

I encountered similar problems. Of the three restaurants, only one brought a reader that allowed me to tap my phone to pay, while the others asked for a credit card, which my wife had to pay for.

Insurance cards and other documents

Digital scans or photos of important documents such as health and car insurance cards are now widely accepted as a substitute for the real thing. Some insurers, such as State Farm, Aetna and Anthem, make their digital cards available through their apps, which can be added to your mobile wallet. However, not all insurance cards work this way, and it can be difficult to find those cards at a moment’s notice. You don’t want to be stuck searching through photos or finding the right app to load your insurance card after a car accident. , for example.

I found that the easiest method to easily look up insurance cards is to add images of them all to one digital note saved on your phone. On iPhones, open your insurance card photo, tap the button in the bottom left corner and select the Notes app to save the image to a new note. Then rename the note ‘Insurance Cards’.

Likewise, Android users can use the Google Keep note-taking app. In Keep, tap “Add Image” at the bottom. Then choose the photo of your insurance card and label the note.

Other types of cards and documents, like my Clipper transit card, movie tickets, and gift cards, were all easy enough to digitize: Tapping the Add to Apple Wallet button loaded them into my Apple Wallet app.

Identification

Digitized versions of driver’s licenses still exist relatively new and being tested in several states, including California, Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah. This is where the mobile wallet falls short.

For example, here in California you sign up for the digital driver’s license via the California Department of Motor Vehicles app. The app generates a temporary barcode that can be scanned to verify your age and identity. Airports in some states are now displaying signs saying they will accept the digital ID of those who have signed up for the Transportation Security Agency’s PreCheck program — but many states have yet to participate in this experimentmaking it impractical to leave your driver’s license at home.

The digital ID is also not yet an acceptable replacement for a physical driver’s license. The California DMV says law enforcement cannot accept the mobile driver’s license if you are pulled over, and Arizona’s Motor Vehicle Division says people should still carry a physical ID.

When purchasing alcohol at several supermarkets last week, cashiers were unfamiliar with the digital California driver’s license and did not have a scanner to check the barcode. And at a cocktail bar, a bouncer refused digital IDs and demanded physical cards.

In the event of an emergency, it may also be difficult for someone to identify you. Apples Medical ID card and Google’s Personal safety Features can be set up to show people your name, age, and emergency contacts by pressing a shortcut on the phone, but medical providers need to know how to use the feature.

So it is best to carry a physical ID with you. To do that without carrying a wallet, you could do what some younger people do: place the ID between your phone and the phone case. I found that to be an imperfect solution because the card brings the phone closer to the edges of the case, making the screen more susceptible to damage if dropped.

After a week, I decided on what I thought was the best solution: a magnetic wallet that attaches to the back of my phone and only holds two cards: my ID and one credit card.

That felt like cheating. But Ms Hegab, the 19-year-old, admits she uses a similar card holder just to carry her driver’s license.

Once digital driver’s licenses work everywhere, she says, she will get rid of them.

Media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI on Wednesday for copyright infringement, adding to a growing chorus opposing the company’s methods of scraping content from the internet to support its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to train.

The online publications sued OpenAI in two separate cases in a federal court in New York, saying ChatGPT’s creator trained its chatbot using journalists’ copyrighted works without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are seeking damages of at least $2,500 per violation, and asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from data training sets.

The Intercept also sued Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that developed its own chatbot called Bing using the same copyrighted information, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s time for news organizations to fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetize the work of others,” John Byrne, CEO and founder of Raw Story, which owns Alternet, said in a statement. “Big Tech has decimated journalism. It is time for publishers to take a stand.”

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But OpenAI has done that in the past said that it wanted to work with publishers to ensure they too could benefit from AI and new revenue models. Microsoft said in September that it would cover legal costs when customers’ use of its AI products caused copyright issues and reiterated its commitments to authors’ protected works.

The Intercept also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuits follow The New York Times’ own lawsuit in December against OpenAI and Microsoft on similar grounds. On Monday, OpenAI filed a motion with the court to dismiss key elements of The Times’ lawsuit.

Generative AI has made waves in the past year, as new text and image generators have created increasingly realistic or human-like text, images, and video. But it also raises major concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train the AI ​​algorithms, and its ability to mimic artistic performances.

The technology became a hot topic for actors and writers during union negotiations in Hollywood last year, and authors and others have sued the AI ​​companies over their practices.

The three publications suing OpenAI on Wednesday are digital-only, raising the stakes, the media said in their lawsuits. They cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents the removal of information such as author and title from protected works.

“Raw Story’s copyrighted journalism is the result of significant efforts by human journalists who report the news,” Roxanne Cooper, publisher of Raw Story, said in a statement. “Rather than licensing that work, OpenAI ChatGPT has learned to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide the use of copyrighted material.”

The Australian letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. This week's issue is written by Natasha Frost, a Melbourne-based reporter.

In August 1972, a collective of writers, mainly from Melbourne, released the first issue of a fortnightly magazine that would chronicle a particular corner of Australian countercultural life – starting with a scathing piece on the 'young press baron' Rupert Murdoch.

Over a period of about forty months, The Digger newspaper featured fervent opinion columns, extensive reviews and cultural lists, as well as what it described as “gonzo accounts” of Australian life. It covered topics such as sex education, Aboriginal rights, republicanism (“It's time we threw the Queen of Oz and her GG,” short for Governor General, “into the sea”) and the joys of cycling.

The article was associated with some of the most important names in Australian literature of the time, and was instrumental in launching Australian novelist Helen Garner's career as a writer. (The Digger went bankrupt in 1975 when, as founder Phillip Frazer wrote in 2018, it “ran out of money and lawyers.”)

Five decades later, another Australian publication channels some of that same irreverent spirit and commitment to, as the editors put it, 'reportage'.

The Paris End is a long Substack newsletter started about a year ago by writers Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz, whose ages range from about 25 to about 35. (Mr. Schwartz has previously contributed to The New York Times.)

The newsletter is named after the local nickname for the eastern end of Collins Street in central Melbourne – once upon a time home to the city's artistic community, and today the location of luxury hotels and glitzy international fashion boutiques. (The newsletter does not deal exclusively, or even primarily, in stories from that part of town.)

The area is “a soulless pastiche of an upscale part of any city,” Ms Olds said over coffee in Melbourne. “It's such a strange part of town, with such ideas about itself. So that's a really nice space to write in.”

“It's ridiculous to call it that,” Mr. Schwartz added. “If you have to call something the 'Parisian end' of your city, then you are not Paris.”

The Paris End does not aim to emulate any particular publication. But it does share some DNA with earlier versions of The New Yorker's “Talk of the Town,” with style inspiration from Ms. Garner (herself a reader of The Paris End) and the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and author Clarice Lispector.

Readership is being kept secret, although it is in the “thousands” range, Mr. Schwartz said. He describes it as the 'Darwin', Australia's eighth city, 'of newsletters'.

At least anecdotally, its impact among Melburnians is profound. Earlier this year I made a special pilgrimage to buy panettone from a small Italian pastry shop that The Paris End had recommended – only to receive the same panettone two nights later from a friend, who had made an identical trip after reading the same tip.

When I forward a favorite article, I am almost always told that the recipient has already read it. These included articles on the 'male lesbian' community, a 1966 UFO sighting in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs and a recent academic conference on 'Antipodean Modernism'.

“The Stars,” a monthly review column, rates a hodgepodge of things: cultural phenomena such as local and international films; the best legal and illegal nude swimming spots; mackerel dumplings; where Melburnians should spend the winter (Bali) or play summer evening tennis (Carlton). It's sometimes unapologetically niche, celebrating not just a scene, but a scene within a scene.

During the worst part of the pandemic, Melbourne spent more than 260 days in lockdown, and the return to normality was slow and painful.

“We really went through it,” Ms. Olds said. “For me it is a kind of project to give the city a boost, for myself: I want to re-enchant the city.”

Here are the stories of the week.

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The New York Times Company added 300,000 paying digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023, the company said Wednesday, pushing annual digital subscription revenue above $1 billion for the first time.

The Times reported total revenue of $676.2 million in the last three months of the year, essentially flat from a year earlier. Adjusted operating profit rose 8.5 percent to $154 million.

It was “a strong year for The Times, demonstrating the power of our strategy to be the essential subscription for every curious person who wants to understand and connect with the world,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, president and CEO of the company, in a statement. .

The company has focused in recent years on offering a bundle of products to subscribers: the core news report and games like Wordle and Spelling Bee; her product review site, Wirecutter; a recipe app; and The Athletic, the sports news website.

The Athletic, which bought The Times two years ago for $550 million, continued to lose money in the fourth quarter. But operating losses shrank to $4.4 million from $9.6 million a year earlier. The Athletic's revenue grew 31.3 percent to $38.5 million.

At year's end, The Times had 10.36 million subscribers, 9.7 million of whom were digital-only. The company has a target of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.

The company said it had $709.2 million in cash and marketable securities at the end of 2023.

Much of the news media industry is in turmoil, with publishers like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Business Insider firing or offering buyouts to journalists in recent months. Headwinds include a decline in readers reaching news sites through social media platforms, less user interest in news and a tough market for advertising.

Advertising was a weak spot for The Times in the fourth quarter. Total advertising revenue fell 8.4 percent to $164.1 million. Digital ads fell 3.7 percent and print ads fell 16.2 percent.

The number of print subscribers continues to decline. At the end of 2022 there were 730,000 and at the end of 2023 it was 660,000.