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On Sunday night, a crane arrived in downtown San Francisco to take down the Twitter sign from the company’s office building. The crane’s arrival marked the death of Twitter, the brand, and the start of X, Elon Musk’s everything app. Today, why Elon’s acquisition feels more and more like cultural vandalism and what, if anything, will replace the global town square.

Then, is Sam Altman’s universal basic income cryptocurrency app Worldcoin an iris scanning tool to save humanity, or just another attempt to get rich on crypto?

Plus: a trip to Google’s robotics lab, where artificial intelligence models are creating breakthroughs.

Additional reading:

• Casey breaks down Twitter’s rebrand.

• The launch of Worldcoin — and the story of how it recruited the first half a million users.

• Kevin’s column is a deep dive into Google’s new robotics model, which melds A.I. with robots.

Credits

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano, Sophia Lanman and Rowan Niemisto. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti and Jeffrey Miranda.