My cover story for WIRED magazine about Foxconn, the spate of suicides last year, and what it means for the consumer of the goods these workers make is now online. (The URL still reflects the work-in-progress name of the piece, which is about as accurate as they come: “Joel In China”.

It’s hard not to look at the nets. Every building is skirted in them. They drape every precipice, steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk, loosely tangled like volleyball nets in winter.

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

My tour guides don’t mention the nets until I do. Not to avoid the topic, I don’t think—the suicides are the reason I am at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city in southern China—but simply because they are so prevalent. Foxconn, the single largest private employer in mainland China, manufactures many of the products—motherboards, camera components, MP3 players—that make up the world’s $150 billion consumer-electronics industry. Foxconn’s output accounts for nearly 40 percent of that revenue. Altogether, the company employs about a million people, nearly half of whom work at the 20-year-old Shenzhen plant. But until two summers ago, most Americans had never heard of Foxconn.

That all changed with the suicides.

The wild card, as usual, is Apple’s willingness to play nice with non-Apple standards. Since Apple has to approve the licensing for every AirPlay certified device—just like the lucrative “Made for iPod” scheme of years past—they could, in theory, require manufacturers to disable any streaming protocol except AirPlay.

I think Apple might refrain for two reasons: Third-party manufacturers still have to sell their hardware—the more capability a device has, the better—so I expect there may be some push back if Apple becomes too covetous; Device-to-device streaming isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence for most consumers. Apple, with millions of iOS devices already in hands of customers, might not need to disrupt other streaming standards if AirPlay becomes the dominant format quickly. History implies a better than average chance.

Still, it will be hard to fight Apple if they turn the screws. As BridgeCo’s Gene Sheridan said to me, “Just to participate in the Apple ecosystem is a big opportunity by itself.” There are companies out there making millions just by selling Apple accessories. Being first in the AirPlay market—docks for content—might be worth billions.

John McAfee might be his own worst enemy—at least when it comes to the press. When I arrived in Belize, Quorumex staffers were still reeling from what they felt was a hit piece of McAfee in Fast Company, which painted McAfee as an arrogant huckster on the run from lawsuits in the United States, including one lawsuit that poses that McAfee’s recklessness caused the death of two men in a flying accident.

McAfee had donated a boat valued at one million dollars to the Belizean Coast Guard. Fast Company implied this was to prevent the Coast Guard from harassing his fledgling water taxi service.

This accusation was one of the first things that McAfee brought up to me after my arrival in Belize. But first: John McAfee’s wig.

By far my most ambitious reporting project, I consider this piece about a new biotech startup in Belize to be fundamentally a failure, as I was unable to prove one way or another the fundamental efficacy of their product. It was a good experience, but ultimately inconsequential.

I did learn one new lesson: working with a great illustrator can make even a mediocre piece shine.

“Disabled Explorers In the World’s Most Badass Short Bus” [Gizmodo]

“Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.”

* * *
The old woman looks up from her brush pile. “My husband has to redo that roof every year.” Her husband is crawling around their roof, sweeping pine needles from the angles to the ground below. “We’ve been here fifty years. You see these two pines?” They’re impossible to miss, at least eighty feet tall. “When we moved in to this house we planted those.”

* * *
The second of June, a couple of years back. A 27-year-old man is biking in downtown Eugene, Oregon. David’s a clumsy, funny man. Easy to love. Lived here his whole life. He’s unsure of what he’s going to do with his Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies—maybe become an activist?—but for now he’s managing this restaurant that also does live music and maybe it’s not what he wants to do forever, but it’s pretty great right now.

He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.

Fire was not the first technology. It was the alphabet. By allowing us to tell a story, the transmission of knowledge blossomed, from myth to story to joke. And despite what some may think, that’s what our gadgets do today.

My brain has been trying to close the chapter on this decade, because that’s what it is built to do. Is what we do important? Does helping to create a site like Gizmodo move our culture forward? Or are we simply acting as agents to uncheck consumption?

On the last point, I must concede. We’re probably harming as much as we’re helping, albeit no worse than any catalog or social gathering where one can show off a new toy or talk shop about the next.

But I’ve noticed for a long time a reticence by my peers—by which I mean the average yapping fuckhole on the internet, myself included—to adopt a position of post-innovation hipsterism. To express an attitude of so-over-it before things have barely begun.

Take Twitter. (Please!) Is it a distraction? It can be. Better to acknowledge it as protocol, the latest vector through which we communicate, regardless of what story we choose to actually tell.

It’s the story that matters. And our technology, our internet—or our gadgets by which we interface that internet—are tools for telling stories. Big stories. Little stories. And with the blossoming of sensors and passive collection of our personal data, stories that lie in wait, that won’t even be told until someone else recognizes they are there to tell.

Forgive me some dreaming. What will our gadgets look like in the next decade? It is certain they will be less and less visible. The smartphone lump will get more powerful and more aware of its surroundings, communicating data passively at all points. If I want to know the air quality around you and whether or not you’re still smoking, I’ll just ask your phone.

Augmented reality will work, and while I’m not convinced that mirrorshades will end up being the best solution, the technology to embed graphical overlays onto our glasses and perhaps even our contacts will advance at least to a point where we can try it on for size. If the price is right, every pane of glass or mirror will be double as a display.

The keyboard will probably become a specialized tool, much as we’re seeing the same happen to the mouse today. Cameras will eye us, microphones will listen to us, and together they’ll do their best to guess our meaning.

But more surely than anything, I expect our interface to the internet—through the internet—to our friends, family, and species will continue to flourish. Gadgets will provide increasingly granular elements of data, while engineers will dream up new ways to weave those bits into narratives that let us understand ourselves in new ways; or failing that, at least experience the banality of our fellow man with increased fidelity.

Stories are what matter. Stories are what make us human, what gives our outsized brain a reason to exist, even if our capacity to tell them, listen to them, and understand our existence through them is an accidental byproduct of an efficiency first developed to better hunt, feed, and reproduce.

Which is why, even though it may be lackadaisical or unprofessional to some for a simple gadget blog to stray beyond the bounds of firmware updates and product releases, I believe technology journalism remains one of the vibrant places to explore the human condition.

Any tool user can succumb to the navel-song of shop talk, if only to dream for a moment about the stories they might hear or tell if only their rock had a sharper edge or their pen a carbon-fiber quill. But to ignore the story of our storytelling—the exciting boundary where new technology lets new stories be uncovered and old stories told in a new way—is doing a disservice to everyone.

Because why are we here at all if not to tell our stories; and to braid ours with every new fiber we can invent?

In America, if we want to travel with the last scraps of class, we’re left with the train. I’m on one right now: Amtrak’s Coast Starlight, which runs the western ridges from Seattle to San Diego.

It’s not fast. To get from Eugene, Oregon—my current wet home—to Petaluma, California, will take about 18 hours. That’s at least eight more than I’d need to travel by car and something like 14 more than it would take by plane, even with security screenings and travel to and from the airports.

But one doesn’t take the train for speed, at least not in America. You take the train for comfort. And despite the best efforts of my fellow train travelers, there’s still no more welcoming way to get around than by train.

Compared to the typical airline seat, even the coach-class seats on a train are miracles. I’m 6’4″—on some airlines I literally do not fit into economy seats—but here my knees have at least six inches to go before they would rest on the seat forward. If I push a knob that looks like the gear shift on an old riding lawnmower I can extend a leg support, which when added to the seat backs which can recline past 45 degrees, make it possible to sleep in relative comfort.

The attendants—I’m not sure what they’re called on the railways—provide pillows that approach normal size. That’s a miracle unto itself.

But you aren’t confined to your seat. A snack bar is open for several hours, complete with bottle of cheap wine and cans of beer. Entire sections of cars are dedicated to lounges, with diner-style booths or individual seats that face the bay windows. It would be beautiful if it weren’t night; the lines of the Coach Starlight enter territory so remote that there’s not a single light to be seen out either window of the train.

It’s a shame, then, that so many passengers have forgotten how to act in a shared space. Families crowd around expensive cans of beers in the lounge, bragging about how they have enough money to buy every can of beer on board, but that they simply choose not to.

I wrote this piece for The Awl, about New York and my ejaculatory experiences thereon.

I was interviewed from the showfloor of CES by All Things Considered about the future of cars and gadgets.

I was also interviewed by BBC Radio 4′s Americana about sex and technology. (I haven’t heard this one yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly about how much I love porn.)

From my review of the Canon HF20 and WP-V1 underwater camcorder set on Gizmodo:

But once I got underwater and watched many of the divers struggling with their rigs, catching protuberances on errant kelp fronds, I felt a little better about wielding this simple Canon setup. As a point-and-shoot (and shoot and shoot) piece of equipment, the whole rig is simple, capable, durable, and—especially compared to similar underwater gear of just a couple years back—cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy when it gets lost at sea. The street price of the HF20 (an AVCHD camcorder with 32GB of flash memory) is $800; the WP-V1 can be found for around $400.

I reviewed the H2O Audio iDive 300 Deep Dive Waterproof Case for Gizmodo:

I affected an air of what I hoped would be perceived the other divers as seasoning before I jumped in with the iDive 300.

“Seems like a pain in the ass to me,” I groused. “Just one more thing to break.” The other divers on deck responded in kind, mostly preoccupied with their own pre-flight checklists. “Don’t know why you’d want to even listen to music, really,” I said to their backs.

And I was right—it was a huge pain in the ass. At least at first, with the headphone cords whipping around my head very much like kelp; the case itself trying to spring to the surface, twisting the screen of my iPhone upside down; the music at once blaring and then fading to muddled distortion as my middle ear pressure equalized. (Truth be told, I could never quite figure out why the volume would vary so much, as it would often fluctuate even while I remained at a consistent depth. There’s something about the way the speakers make pressure and sound that I don’t quite understand.)