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In early 2013 a rigid 30 second video format swept the world. One helmeted person dances alone to Baauer's trap track Harlem Shake while everyone nearby ignores them. At 15 seconds the bass drops, the shot cuts, and the whole room erupts in costumes and flailing. YouTube creator George Miller, later known as Joji, sparked it on January 30, and five Australian teenagers fixed the template days later. It had nothing to do with the original 1980s Harlem street dance.

This episode treats the meme as more than a joke. With one locked camera and one jump cut, anyone could take part, and by February 10 new versions were appearing at 4,000 a day. Sports teams, armies, The Simpsons, and 60 ad agencies joined in. Schools, employers, and governments answered with suspensions, firings, and arrests, protesters adopted the format in Egypt and Tunisia, and the music industry had to change how it counts a hit.

• The meme passed one billion cumulative views in 40 days, half the time Gangnam Style had needed.
• Fifteen Australian miners were fired for filming underground, an Oxford librarian lost her job, and two Israeli soldiers were sentenced to prison.
• Billboard began counting YouTube streams in the Hot 100, and Baauer's track debuted at number one. Without that data it would have only reached the top 15.
• Label Mad Decent left fan videos up and used YouTube's Content ID to collect ad revenue from them instead of issuing takedowns.
• In December 2017 Baauer and his label finally took legal action when FCC chairman Ajit Pai danced to the song in a video promoting net neutrality repeal.

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The early web had no memory. HTTP was stateless, so every click arrived as if from a stranger. In 1994 the telecom company MCI, working with Netscape on an online store, wanted a shopping cart without the cost of storing every half-finished order on its own servers. Netscape programmer Lou Montulli borrowed a Unix idea called the magic cookie: have the server hand the browser a tiny piece of text, and have the browser hand it back with each request.

This episode follows that small text file, capped at about 4096 bytes, from convenience to controversy. It explains session and persistent cookies, the security flags that guard them, and why a stolen cookie works like a stolen backstage pass. Then it turns to third-party cookies that follow people across unrelated sites, zombie cookies that respawn after deletion, the European consent rules behind every pop-up, and the fingerprinting methods now replacing cookies.

• Browsers accepted cookies silently by default, and the public only learned of them from a Financial Times article in February 1996.
• The White House drug policy office in 2000, the CIA in 2002, and the NSA in 2005 were each caught leaving persistent cookies on visitors' computers.
• A study of 10,000 UK websites found only 11.8 percent met minimal legal requirements for cookie consent.
• The SameSite flag exists to stop cross-site request forgery, in which a hidden link on another page sends commands to a bank using the victim's own cookie.
• A 2010 Electronic Frontier Foundation study found browser fingerprinting yielded 18.1 bits of entropy, enough to single out one browser among roughly 280,000.

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Grumpy Cat was born Tardar Sauce on April 4, 2012, in Morristown, Arizona, to an ordinary calico mother. Feline dwarfism, a flattened face, and a pronounced underbite gave her a permanent scowl, though her owner Tabatha Bundesen described a sweet, docile pet. On September 22, 2012, Tabatha's brother Bryan posted a photo to Reddit. Users buried the fluffy kitten under pessimistic captions, and within months the family was running a company.

This episode traces how that happened. Tabatha took leave from waitressing at Red Lobster, and meme manager Ben Lashes helped the family form Grumpy Cat Limited and license an image the internet felt it already owned. What followed was a Friskies sponsorship, bestselling books, plush toys, a comic, a Lifetime holiday movie voiced by Aubrey Plaza, and a federal court fight over coffee. It is a case study in harvesting attention before it fades.

• Her South by Southwest appearance came with first-class airfare, a chauffeur, a king-size bed, a personal assistant, and unlimited Friskies.
• By 2018, Grumpy Cat Limited held eight trademarks and its online store listed over a thousand items.
• Grenade Beverage was licensed for Grumppuccino iced coffee but also sold roasted ground coffee and T-shirts, prompting a 2015 lawsuit.
• In January 2018 a federal jury awarded $710,000 for copyright and trademark infringement, plus one dollar for breach of contract.
• Tardar Sauce died on May 14, 2019, at age seven from complications of a urinary tract infection, and the Wall Street Journal ran a stipple portrait in her honor.

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In June 2012, skydivers jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed their descent live to the Moscone Center through the glasses on their faces. Google Glass had arrived. Born in the Google X lab, the 2011 prototype weighed eight pounds. A year later it was a 36 gram titanium frame with a prism that floated a display in the wearer's view, a bone conduction speaker, and a voice command woken by tilting the head 30 degrees and saying OK Glass.

This episode follows what happened when that hardware met the public. Google sold it through a contest, charging 8,000 winners $1,500 each for the Explorer Edition and fitting them in person at pop-up shops. The exclusivity bred resentment, and the always-ready camera bred fear. Bars, casinos, and movie theaters banned it, and wearers earned a new insult. Consumer sales ended in January 2015, yet the device quietly found work in hospitals and factories.

• In February 2014 a woman wearing Glass in a San Francisco bar said she was attacked and had the device ripped from her face by patrons who assumed she was recording.
• University of Massachusetts researchers showed Glass could steal passcodes by tracking the shadows of fingers typing on a phone.
• A driving simulator study found Glass users were cognitively impaired even when not actively using the display.
• Augmedix used Glass to stream doctor visits to remote scribes, saving physicians up to 15 hours a week of record keeping.
• An Australian trial let lactation consultants see a new mother's point of view from as far as 3,500 kilometers away. Google ended enterprise sales in March 2023.

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Before Gangnam Style, Park Jae-sang, known as Psy, was no rookie. He was a veteran South Korean artist working on his sixth studio album, with national hits like Champion and a home audience that expected a fresh, memorable dance every time. To deliver one, he and his choreographer went without sleep for 30 nights, testing panda moves and kangaroo bounces before landing on the invisible horse trot. The goal was simply to make local fans laugh.

This episode explains the joke and how it escaped. Gangnam is a wealthy Seoul district that Psy likened to Beverly Hills, and his target was the posers who go into debt to look refined. His rule was dress classy and dance cheesy. The video was shot in 48 hours, mostly outside Gangnam, and released in mid-July 2012. Then celebrity tweets carried it abroad, and a satirist found himself treated as a diplomat, a stock market force, and the face of the Korean wave.

• The video drew about half a million views on its first day, then spread after T-Pain, Robbie Williams, Katy Perry, and Tom Cruise shared it, peaking at over 9 million views a day.
• Psy flew to Los Angeles, met Scooter Braun, and signed with Schoolboy Records by early September.
• It became the first internet video to reach one billion views, overtaking Justin Bieber's Baby.
• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the dance as a force for world peace and performed the horse trot for cameras.
• Shares in DI Corporation, the semiconductor equipment company owned by Psy's father, rose more than 500 percent as retail investors piled in.

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In the early 1950s, Santa Clara County was the Valley of Heart's Delight, home to nearly 40 fruit canneries and the largest fruit packing region in the world. This episode explains how that farmland became Silicon Valley. The first ingredient was the military: Moffett Field, commissioned in 1933 as a Navy blimp base, later drew aeronautics research and contractors like Lockheed. The second was Stanford, where engineering dean Frederick Terman set out to stop his graduates from leaving for the East Coast.

Terman's 1951 Stanford Industrial Park tied companies to campus research, and Hewlett-Packard brought a flatter style of management. Then William Shockley arrived in 1956, betting on silicon over germanium, and proved such a terrible boss that eight of his researchers quit to found Fairchild Semiconductor. From there the story runs through Intel, venture capital on Sand Hill Road, the Homebrew Computer Club, Xerox PARC, and the housing and inequality problems the boom left behind.

• Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, moved to Mountain View simply to be closer to his sick mother in Palo Alto.
• California's limits on non-compete clauses let engineers leave on Friday and start a rival on Monday, which made the spin-off the valley's standard path to growth.
• Because banks would not lend to engineers with no assets or revenue, venture capital grew up instead, and Silicon Valley Bank formed in 1983 to lend to pre-profit startups.
• Between 2010 and 2015 the region added 400,000 jobs but permitted only 60,000 housing units, and a $96,000 salary now counts as low income in Santa Clara County.
• Less than 1 percent of the valley's population holds 36 percent of its household wealth, which recently passed $1.1 trillion.

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Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in Mountain View in March 2002, naming it after a mashup of friend and Napster. At a time when people hid behind screen names, his Circle of Friends idea asked users to map their real relationships. It went live in 2003, reached 3 million users within months, landed on magazine covers, and inspired copycats like Dogster and Elfster. That same year, management refused a $30 million buyout offer from Google.

This episode traces how the pioneer of social networking lost its lead. Every profile view forced the servers to calculate chains of friends of friends, and pages took 30 to 40 seconds to load. Venture funding from Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital at a reported $53 million valuation brought pressure instead of a fix, and Abrams was removed as CEO in April 2004. The story continues through an accidental second life in Asia, a patent sale to Facebook, and a 2026 relaunch.

• MySpace overtook Friendster in US page views by April 2004, only about a year after its mainstream breakout.
• By 2008 Friendster had 115 million registered users, with over 90 percent of traffic from Asia, partly because the servers ran smoothly while California slept.
• Malaysia's MOL Global bought the company in December 2009 for $26.4 million, less than Google had offered six years earlier.
• In 2010 Facebook paid $40 million for Friendster's patents covering social graphs, user connections, and compatibility scoring.
• After shutting down in 2015, the name returned under Friendster Labs with a 2026 relaunch that is private, ad-free, and free of algorithms.

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In 1985, while most American computers sat disconnected on desks, millions of French households were already online, buying train tickets, checking bank balances, playing games, and chatting with strangers. The network was Minitel, and it grew out of a crisis. In the late 1970s France had fewer than 7 million telephone lines for 47 million people, and the national telecom authority, the PTT, was spending 500 million francs a year on printed phone books and directory operators.

This episode explains the solution: an electronic directory, reached through a small terminal that the PTT loaned to households for free. That giveaway solved the chicken and egg problem of platforms and gave developers an instant audience. The story then follows what users really did with it, the billing trick that made thousands of services profitable, why Britain, Germany, and the United States failed to copy it, and how its own profits slowed France's move to the internet.

• The term telematics, coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, described the merger of telecommunications and computing that the government set out to build.
• By 1985 games and messaging made up nearly half of all traffic, and adult chat lines known as messageries roses were often staffed by men posing as women.
• Under the kiosk model, dialing 3615 added charges to the phone bill with no itemization, and service providers kept about two thirds of the hourly fee.
• The terminal downloaded at 1200 bits per second and uploaded at 75, a deliberate compromise because people read faster than they type.
• Minitel returned over a billion US dollars in 1998 and was not shut down until June 30, 2012.

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The 2017 Equifax breach exposed the Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and credit histories of over 147 million Americans, plus more than 1.5 million people in the UK. It was not a brilliant attack. A 2015 internal audit had already found a backlog of unpatched vulnerabilities, no complete inventory of the company's own systems, and a patching process that ran on an honor system. When a critical fix for Apache Struts was released on March 7, 2017, Equifax never applied it to its credit dispute portal.

This episode walks through what followed. Intruders entered on May 12, found internal accounts protected by the username and password admin, and spent 76 days pulling data out in small encrypted archives. It then turns to the response: a 38 day silence, executive stock sales, a help site that security tools flagged as a scam, and a buried arbitration clause. Finally it asks why the stolen data never surfaced for sale, and what the answer says about modern espionage.

• The theft was caught by accident on July 29, when staff renewed an SSL certificate on a traffic monitoring tool that had been expired for nine months.
• With no internal network segmentation, attackers who entered through one web portal could roam to the core databases and run over 9,000 queries.
• Weeks before the public was told, three executives including the chief financial officer sold almost $1.8 million in company stock.
• Equifax's own Twitter account linked at least eight times to a spoof of its help site built by software engineer Nick Sweeting, sending around 200,000 people to the wrong page.
• In February 2020 the Department of Justice indicted four members of China's People's Liberation Army. Equifax had agreed in July 2019 to a settlement of over $575 million.

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In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named a picture its word of the year: the face with tears of joy. The choice makes sense once you see what typing strips away, which is tone of voice, facial expression, and posture. The fix began in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed a sideways smiley as a joke marker on university message boards. Japanese phone companies then turned the idea into tiny 12 by 12 pixel pictures, well before the designer who usually gets the credit.

This episode follows emoji from those carrier-specific icons, where a wristwatch sent on one network could arrive as a convenience store on another, to the day Apple and Google pressed the Unicode Consortium for a single standard, accepted in 2010. It explains why the same emoji still looks different on every phone, how culture and courts read these symbols, and how skin tones and family groupings are assembled from hidden code.

• Shigetaka Kurita's 176 icons for Docomo in 1999 hang in the Museum of Modern Art, but SoftBank shipped a set in 1997, after Sharp in 1988 and NEC in 1990.
• Corporate investment in emoji support forced better Unicode systems overall, which improved digital support for historical, indigenous, and minority languages.
• In 2016 Apple turned its pistol into a green water gun just as Microsoft swapped its toy ray gun for a realistic revolver. By 2018 the major vendors had adopted the water gun.
• Linguists class emoji as a paralanguage that works like hand gestures, which is why people stack three laughing faces but never repeat a word three times.
• A family emoji is several characters fused by an invisible zero-width joiner, and pressing backspace once splits it back into individual people.