“Now I’m being taught how to do it the right way,” Ryan says. “And I’m being paid to do it.”

Ryan hopes Enhanced can pave the way for a separation of truly “clean” events and transparently juiced competitions. He even calls on events like the Olympics to increase testing strictness.

“What we’re doing is completely separate,” Ryan said during Friday’s media availability. “It’s marketing, it’s show business. And it should be separate.”

The financial argument and the idea of helping aging athletes prolong their careers make up the most compelling case I hear for Enhanced on its face—at least in terms of athletes’ motivations. But it’s the business side of the organization where some conflicts of interest become tougher to ignore.

Head to the products page of the Enhanced website and you’ll find what appears to be the organization’s spinoff of telehealth company Hims, but for PEDs. Products like copper peptides, sermorelin and testosterone injections are available alongside GLP-1s, semaglutide, and tadalafil.

Martin is open about the mission: To bring these products to the masses. He talks up required medical intake forms and regular check-ins with certified company doctors to avoid risks of mis- or over-use.

But if the Enhanced mission is successful, and PEDs become a bigger and more financially appealing part of sports, assuming these products will only be sought after and used in responsible ways is just as naïve as pretending doping hasn’t happened in the past at supposedly “clean” events. If anything, athletes in particularly disadvantaged financial situations might prioritize doping even more.

That’s where the dystopian feel bubbling below the surface becomes more palpable. There’s a distinctly MAHA undertone here, from investors like Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. to Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza describing RFK Jr. as “pro–human enhancement.”

While organizers wouldn’t give me any specifics on how much of Enhanced’s future will rely on product sales to fund prize pools and operations, it’s probably safe to assume investors like these will expect returns to remain involved.

It’s fair to wonder whether this is truly an attempt to remove stigmas and change sport. The overconfidence on display prior to the actual contests only drove home the feeling that this was more an elaborate money-making scheme than anything else.

So will the Enhanced Games usher in a new era of athletic capability and prowess? Maybe—at least if you can afford it.

I’ve been covering deals since 2013, and I still think Memorial Day sales are worth checking out. There are so many made-up shopping holidays these days that it can be difficult to ascertain when items are actually cheaper than usual. Now is one of those times. To help you out, I’ve scoured through our buying guides full of hand-tested items to find gadgets and gizmos that are discounted—and worth buying. If you’re in the market for something we’ve tested, keep checking in through May 26 to see if you can snag a deal. We’ll update this post again between now and then.

Make sure to check out our various buying guides for recommendations on the best laptops, the best printers, and more. You might also be interested in the rest of our Memorial Day deals coverage.

Updated May 25: I’ve added 5 new deals, removed expired discounts, and checked for accuracy throughout.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Birdfy Lite Smart Bird Feeder (Lifetime AI, No Solar) for $120 ($110 off)

A few different combinations of our favorite smart bird feeder are on sale. You can choose a version with or without solar charging. There’s also the option of buying a model that comes with lifetime AI bird identification; otherwise, if you decide you want it later, it’ll cost you $5 per month, but it isn’t required for enjoyment. This bird feeder is equipped with a 1080p camera that can capture decent footage of whoever comes to snack. It has a wide field of vision as well, and the feeder is easy to clean and refill.

You could argue, and people have, that the top gay dating apps are now optimized for monetization and juicing engagement loops. Increasingly overrun with bots, they are at times even devoid of actual connection.

Grindr, with its 15 million monthly active users, is drowning in ads while pushing expensive upsells on users. (In February, as part of its “gAI” overhaul, the company announced a new premium monthly subscription tier for $500.) Sniffies was beloved by cruisers until the seismic reaction in April to Match Group’s $100 million investment sparked concerns that another queer space could get absorbed into a larger dating conglomerate.

As public backlash against popular queer apps continues to mount, a batch of tech entrepreneurs are scrambling to meet the demand by doubling down on privacy-conscious, community-driven alternatives.

Calum Bowden, who posts under the internet persona @donjackoghue, launched MeetMarket in March. Currently only available as a web app, MeetMarket includes all the core features of your typical hookup app—a customizable profile, a grid of nearby users—with one major difference. It was built on a decentralized identity system, meaning MeetMarket doesn’t store users’ emails, passwords, or personal information. Users store everything on their device, giving them full control and ownership over their data and how it’s shared. Messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, and Bowden says it will always be ad-free, even for nonpaying members. (A monthly membership costs €12, or $13.99.)

“Decentralization and data privacy make a lot of sense for queer people in general, and especially in hostile legal environments or in the US right now, where you don’t really know what digital platforms actually have your best interest in mind,” says the 34-year-old PhD student in Berlin who studies the sociology of technology and organization.

Within the first 48 hours of MeetMarket’s launch on March 24, over 12,000 people had signed up, and some 60,000 people have used it since. The app averages 5,000 weekly visitors, according to Bowden, though there is not a lot of concurrent activity in the same cities. “It’s become more social than necessarily driving an immediate hookup.” But casual encounters do still happen, he says. “The Midwest bottom jockeys are eating meet market up,” one user noted on X.

Bowden didn’t anticipate public sentiment would sour on Sniffies just a few weeks after his launch. Still, the timing of it couldn’t have been more serendipitous. “When Sniffies announced their investment from Match Group, I was like, how are they fueling my fire?” he asks. “This is exactly the model that venture capital leads to. This is exactly why these economic models for technology are so bad, because they basically force the gentrification of a digital platform.” Sniffies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A self-described “utopian conspirator,” Bowden is the cofounder of Trust, a nonprofit that operates as a kind of incubator to prototype ideas “as a critique of technology and the status quo,” he says. With MeetMarket, he wanted to create an app that gave users more agency over their experience without cheapening it.

It can sometimes seem like Big Dating wants people to believe that it is the only answer to cure their romantic woes—Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recently told Axios that there isn’t much longevity in niche apps—but the opposite is proving just as true, as people seek out more specificity and intention in their online dating experience.

“Gay men have tribes, subcultures, aesthetics, and different ways they want to be seen,” says Justin Finnegan, a 35-year-old software engineer in Toronto who last year created Chunkr, a gay hookup app that has resonated with bears, chubs, cubs, and their admirers despite originally being for all gay men.