WIRED Middle East

Social media has transformed not only how Palestine is documented, but how it is consumed. Palestinians can now broadcast their own experiences directly from their phones rather than through traditional media gatekeepers. But the same platforms carrying that testimony also condition audiences to consume everything in increasingly brief fragments. Songs compete with dance trends. War footage appears between recipes and comedy sketches. Everything fights for the same attention. That tension also shaped “Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined”, leading Roger Waters and Mona Miari to eventually release three versions of the song, including a three-minute edit and a 40-second cut. Waters sees the shift through the lens of experience. “Back in the '60s and '70s, there wasn't any social media,” he says. Vinyl imposed its own constraints, but they were measured in album sides rather than seconds, giving musicians room to tell a story and develop themes across a full concept album. Read the full interview with Mona Miari and Roger Waters for our July digital cover, The Escape Issue: https://lnkd.in/gV5_S5c2 Words: Digital Editor, Dana Alomar Head of Editorial Content: Carla Sertin DP: David Barron Producer: Brandon White Video Producer: Tamanna Sajeed Audio: Sean Paulsen

Since October 2023, social media has become a living archive of Gaza, with ordinary people forced to document bombings, displacement and loss. Millions upon millions of views on videos of atrocities committed in Gaza have resulted in very little measurable action. For Mona Miari the surge in attention after 7 October produced two conflicting outcomes. It encouraged people to question long-held narratives around Palestine. It also gave others an opportunity to treat the cause as another online trend. But she also watched others use Palestine as a route to online relevance, capitalising on what she describes as the “online wave”. Her concern isn’t that people discover Palestine through social media. It is what happens when online attention becomes confused with meaningful action. Read the full interview with Mona Miari and Roger Waters for our July digital cover, The Escape Issue: https://lnkd.in/gV5_S5c2 Words: Digital Editor, Dana Alomar Head of Editorial Content: Carla Sertin DP: David Barron Producer: Brandon White Video Producer: Tamanna Sajeed Audio: Sean Paulsen

Nearly half a century after Pink Floyd first released "Comfortably Numb", Roger Waters believes the mechanisms have changed, but the outcome hasn’t. Social media, he argues, is turning distraction into a form of emotional anaesthesia. “They numb us out with TikTok,” he says. Read the full interview with Mona Miari and Roger Waters for our July digital cover, The Escape Issue: https://lnkd.in/gV5_S5c2 Words: Digital Editor, Dana Alomar Head of Editorial Content: Carla Sertin DP: David Barron Producer: Brandon White Video Producer: Tamanna Sajeed Audio: Sean Paulsen

A recent case involving a UAE influencer offered a reminder that there can be a legal difference between consumer criticism and a reputational attack. According to local reports, citing the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department, the influencer posted a video criticising a well-known restaurant and questioning the owner’s integrity and business practices. Authorities concluded that the content had moved beyond a review of the dining experience and into personal defamation, targeting the owner rather than the service itself. The court imposed a AED 30,000 fine, ordered the video removed, confiscated the phone used to film and publish it and awarded the restaurant owner AED 51,000 in civil compensation, bringing the total cost of the upload to AED 81,000 – that’s around $22,000. The internet may feel borderless, but the laws governing it rarely are. In the UAE, actions that feel like ordinary internet behaviour elsewhere – posting a review, forwarding a screenshot or sharing a message – can carry very different legal implications. 🔗 in bio to read in detail, six everyday online habits worth knowing about before you hit send. Words: @oxplores

Minting a verb is a rare honour. People Google things, Uber home and, increasingly across the Gulf, ask whether they should just “Tabby it”. The “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) platform has over 20 million active users in the Middle East, and has just launched Tabby Cash, a fee-free spending account and cashback card that pushes the company into everyday money management. “Tabby started off trying to fix payments at checkout,” cofounder and CEO Hosam Arab says. He argues the opportunity existed because access to traditional credit products in the region was uneven. Tabby Cash offers many of the same features of a bank account without the salary requirements and minimum balances. Arab is quick to reject the idea that Tabby is trying to replace banks altogether. Instead, he says he is addressing problems in the system – regulation rarely feels frictionless. Read the full interview with Dana Alomar: https://lnkd.in/dt3GQAk9

SUVs are increasingly expected to do everything. They need to handle daily commutes, weekend road trips and the occasional off-road adventure while packing in the technology, comfort and efficiency drivers now expect from modern vehicles. Positioned as an “Urban Adventure SUV”, the Ti 7 arrives at a time when automakers are increasingly experimenting with different approaches to electrification. Rather than presenting itself as either a traditional SUV or a fully electric vehicle, the Ti 7 sits somewhere in between, and focuses entirely on practicality and capability. “We see that many customers are now switching to vehicles that are more versatile, offering all the attributes of an SUV while also being better suited to urban environments,” says Lucas Bellieud, Managing Director, Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility. “With the new Ti 7, we are right at the heart of what these customers are looking for.” Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/dm--gn5R Presented by: BYD UAE

Apple built a tool for people with cognitive disabilities, but it’s also the best kids’ phone set-up no one is talking about – not even Apple. It essentially turns an iPhone into the perfect trackable dumbphone for your kids. The best part? It’s totally free. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/gQQCcywu Video Producer: Tamanna Sajeed

The founder of UpScrolled, Issam Hijazi, says the algorithms behind mainstream social media were built to keep you addicted. So he built a platform without one. Instead of a feed shaped by machine learning, he says Upscrolled runs chronologically by default, showing posts from the people you follow in the order they were posted. He says it does not use algorithms to control reach, and moderates only illegal content, with humans making the final call. The platform surged this year, going from around 150,000 users to 2.5 million in a single week, according to Hijazi. He says it has since faced criticism over antisemitic content, which the platform is working to address, adding there is no place for hate speech on Upscrolled. Read the full interview with Carla Sertin: https://lnkd.in/gJBFk_ey

In Ukraine, birds are building their nests out of fibreoptic cables left behind by the war. According to a Reuters report, these are the control lines for attack drones, used by both Ukrainian and Russian forces because a physical cable cannot be jammed electronically. When Russia invaded in February 2022, the fighting was led by tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery. Ukraine turned to drones, which now dominate the battlefield. Once used, these ultra-thin fibreoptic cables are left across the landscape. The report states that Ukrainian servicemen found the nests in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Two of these nests were passed to Kyiv‘s War Museum, where they are kept as objects of the war. While one will stay in the collection, the other is going to the Netherlands, where a biologist who studies artificial nesting materials will examine it and test for DNA to work out which birds built it. For more stories, head to wired.me. Footage: Reuters Producer: Tamanna Sajeed

Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team in the occupied West Bank to build something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory. “Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, a prominent visual artist and general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory – it’s not something theoretical.” Shomali says that roughly 80% of the country’s national collections have been looted, destroyed or remain under Israeli control. Against that backdrop, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit has become both a physical repository of Palestinian heritage and the centre of an increasingly ambitious digital preservation effort. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/g7q3w2NK Video producer: Tamanna Sajeed Words: Tamara Davison