vice

A VICE on HBO segment in which Thomas Morton joins a tour of born-again Christians in the Holy Land. It examines the end-times beliefs behind evangelical support for Israel.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

Dan Olson's long Folding Ideas video on the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, its online community and the conspiracy thinking around it. It runs over two hours.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

Vice founder Shane Smith travels to North Korea, speaking with refugees in South Korea before crossing the DMZ. It is part one of a three-part documentary with rare on-the-ground footage.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.

A VICE report from 2011 in which Suroosh Alvi revisits the gun markets in Pakistan's tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban. It shows weapons being made and sold by hand and a country described as a powder keg.

VICE News reporter Elle Reeve investigates China's rollout of facial recognition and mass surveillance technology and what it means for citizens. The report originally aired on VICE on HBO.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

Techmoan's 45-minute retrospective on Sony's MiniDisc, covering the first and last machines, ATRAC, MD-LP, Net-MD and HiMD. It argues the format deserves more credit than its US failure narrative suggests.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Scotty Allen of Strange Parts travels through Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei markets and learns to upgrade an iPhone 6s from 16GB to 128GB by swapping its flash chip. It is part 3 of his custom iPhone series and shows the difficulty of the hands-on repair work.

Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning. He meets tech-fueled entrepreneurs working under an authoritarian regime.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

A 45-minute Flex Your Rights documentary on how to deal with police in three situations: traffic stops, encounters at home, and on the street. It presents practical advice on asserting constitutional rights and refusing searches.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

Dan Olson's 76-minute essay on flat earth belief, built around a hike to a lake to test earth's curvature. It examines the community, how YouTube promoted it, and how it connects to wider conspiracy thinking and QAnon.

Adam Curtis' multi-part documentary on how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays' public relations shaped consumer culture and political control. It argues that business and government learned to manufacture desires.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

A one-hour 2019 KOMO News documentary hosted by Eric Johnson on Seattle's homelessness and drug crisis, with interviews and looks at proposed solutions including a drug court program in Rhode Island. It argues addiction and mental illness are at the core of the problem.

A People Make Games follow-up investigation into Roblox, built on stories from players and creators after the channel's first video. It covers the platform's treatment of young developers and its moderation.

Kirby Ferguson's video essay series arguing that creativity is built on copying, transforming and combining existing work. It covers music, film and technology, then turns to copyright and patents.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, about 160 minutes long. It cuts together roughly forty years of politics, finance and technology to argue that people have retreated into a simplified fake world.

A documentary on the last day the New York Times was printed with linotype machines in 1978, following the process from the newsroom to the press. It marks the move to computerized typesetting.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

An Al Jazeera investigation into Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, featuring current and former engineers who voice safety concerns. It covers quality control problems at the South Carolina plant and the roots of the battery problems that grounded the plane.

A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.

A Gamers Nexus investigative documentary on the black market for Nvidia AI GPUs, following smugglers, middlemen, and buyers, including reporting from China. It examines how export-restricted chips reach their users.

A Bloomberg mini-documentary on how Vienna keeps housing affordable through large-scale public and social housing. It presents the city as a model strategy for others.

A 1945 US Army educational film that dramatizes how demagogues use prejudice and scapegoating to divide people. It opens with fake wrestling matches and crooked gambling games to show how con artists work, then applies the lesson to racial and religious bigotry.

Coffeezilla's investigation into the Counter-Strike 2 skin gambling ecosystem, covering casino sites, influencers and esports teams that profit from it. It is part of a multi-part series on Valve's skin economy and its effects on young players.

hbomberguy's long video dissects the anti-vaccine movement, analyzing Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR-autism study, the media's role and Wakefield's loss of his license. It combines detailed research with humor.