- All articles

All articles

- The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer

- The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote Machine

- Would You Ditch All This Chaos for a Country in the Cloud?

- My 4 Days in Fake Gay-Conversion Therapy

- Inside the Shadow Evacuation of Kabul

- Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You

- What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software

- The Vast Wasteland of Internet Television

- Am I Wrong to Judge People for Talking to Me in Emoji?

- Sayaka Murata Inhabits a Planet of Her Own

- What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?

- The Family That Mined the Pentagon's Data for Profit

- The Secret to Being Lucky

- Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability

- After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance

- The Big Business of Burying Carbon

- Am I an Idiot for Wanting a Dumber Phone?

- The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs

- How the Secret ‘Project Galileo’ Gave Rise to the MoonSwatch

- Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

- Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans

- The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach

- Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization

- This Designer Guitar Is Made From a Bent Sheet of Steel

- A Photographer Captures Earth as a Strange New World

- After Layoffs, Crypto Startups Face a ‘Crucible Moment’

- When Covid Came for Provincetown

- The Genre-Transcending Mastery of The Staircase

- Life Is Great in the Age of No Secrets

- Prediction Engines Are Like Karma: You Get What You Stream

- The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

- Volodymyr Zelensky on War, Technology, and the Future of Ukraine

- It's Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message

- The Multifarious Multiplexity of Taika Waititi

- The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

- ‘How Are They Weapons? That’s Only a Flashlight!’

- Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story

- The US Military Is Building Its Own Metaverse

- Bill Gates Is So Over This Pandemic

- Can Social Media Be Redeemed?

- Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution

- Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise

- With the Clock Running Out, Humans Need to Rethink Time Itself

- Broken Charging Stations Could Be Stalling the EV Movement

- Welcome to Janelle Monáe’s Dreamworld

- Do I Really Need to Back Up All My Data?

- The Intoxicating Pleasure of Conspiratorial Thinking

- Extreme Heat Is a Disease for Cities. Treat It That Way

- The End of Alcohol

- Time Got So Much Weirder. The World Needs a New Lexicon

- This Startup Wants to Get in Your Ears and Watch Your Brain

- A Farmer’s Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge

- The Bitcoin Bust That Took Down the Web’s Biggest Child Abuse Site

- A Million Little Pieces: The Race to Rebuild the World’s Reefs

- If Someone Is Typing, Then Stops … Can I Ask Why?

- I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For?

- The Enduring Legacy of Clubhouse’s Chatty Revolution

BACKCHANNEL

The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer

Tom Simonite  October 13, 2022 10:10 AM

People have been searching for a fountain of youth for thousands of years. Celine Halioua thinks she’s found one—for canines. Be patient, we’re next.

A startup called Loyal is developing drugs to slow down the aging process in dogs, potentially adding a few years to their lifespans. PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

celine halioua drops into a crouch and greets Bocce, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix with soulful brown eyes, like a long-lost friend. “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful!” she chirps. The two have just met in an upstairs room at Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, where light streams in through the open windows and urine occasionally streams onto the floor. About a dozen elderly dogs, none taller than a kneecap, putter around on the gray linoleum or nap on blankets. When Halioua kneels, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, Bocce rests his head blissfully in her lap.

A tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is old, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. Bocce is one of the lucky ones. Many dogs can only dream of living as long as he likely will, because dog lifespan is inversely correlated with body size. It’s the opposite of the wider pattern in the animal kingdom, where elephants easily outlast mice, which in turn outlive mosquitoes. A Chihuahua can expect roughly 15 years of life; an Irish wolfhound or Great Dane around seven or eight.

Halioua hopes that the startup whose name is emblazoned on her slim black T-shirt—Loyal—can start to fix this bug in humanity’s 14,000-year-plus wolf bioengineering project. The company, which she founded in 2019 and leads as CEO, is developing drugs to delay aging in dogs and extend their healthy lifespan. She has raised around $58 million and has two drugs in development. In a few years, she hopes to have the first commercial drug—for any species—to state on the label that it delays aging or extends lifespan. That alone would be a triumph, but Halioua sees it as a springboard to a still greater feat: creating similar drugs for humans.

The search for an antiaging elixir goes back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even today the most far-out ideas for thwarting death—freezing people for eventual revival, reincarnating them digitally—sound an awful lot like technological fairy tales. But in the world of lab animals, life extension is already here, with studies boosting or even doubling the lifespans of worms, flies, and mice. Regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration, though, have not yet recognized aging as a condition that can be treated.

Celine, human. Age: 28. Lifespan: 79.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

Halioua, a fast talker who speaks in a confident, sometimes bewildering mix of Silicon Valley and biotech jargon, believes that starting with dogs puts her on the best and cutest path to the first aging treatments for people. There’s no escaping the poor odds of any treatment succeeding—about 90 percent of new drugs crash out of clinical trials as failures. But running a doggie clinical trial is cheap compared to a human one, and the animals’ shorter lives mean it won’t take decades to know whether a pill boosts longevity. Plus, the lifespan and lifestyle of a pet dog are more humanlike than a lab mouse’s is, so Halioua argues she’ll be in a good position to leap from pups to people.

For Halioua, who survived a toxic stint in academia before founding her company, Loyal is a way to work against aging on her own terms. That it happens to involve dogs—animals she has loved since her upbringing in suburban Texas—is canine kismet. It gives her an excuse to hang out at Muttville, for one, where Loyal has worked with the staff to recruit owners and their dogs into two studies of aging.

Dog's Name: Wolfie. Age: 10. Breed: Husky. Lifespan: 12–14. Wolfie loves horses and is as independent as a cat.

Halioua has tattoos of a worm, a mouse, and a dog: organisms used in aging research.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Halioua can imagine Muttville caring for a more diverse crowd if Loyal’s drugs work. “In that world, the age of dogs here would maybe go out from 10 to 12 or 14,” she says, as a glossy black spaniel mix with a grizzled muzzle named Snoop Dawg methodically licks her right arm.

For many dogs lucky enough to have homes, life has never been better. Pet parents invest more cash and emotion in them than ever and grant them a social standing that creates what sociologist Andrea Laurent-Simpson calls multispecies families. A drug to lengthen their time together would seem to be an easy sell. And should dogs end up delivering more years to humans? You couldn’t ask a best buddy for more.

halioua was a sophomore majoring in neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin when she discovered aging research. In a departmental newsletter, she spotted an ad for summer internships at leading labs working on age-related diseases, decided to apply, and got a position at a prestigious independent stem cell lab in La Jolla, California. She’d never heard of the internship’s sponsor—a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit called the SENS Research Foundation, whose mission was to “help build the industry that will cure the diseases of aging.” Its cofounder and scientific mastermind was a Merlin-bearded computer scientist turned aging researcher named Aubrey de Grey. He was a fringe but high-profile voice in a corner of biology that itself was not fully established.

In 1993, shortly before Halioua was born, a team of molecular biologists at UC San Francisco, led by Cynthia Kenyon, showed that partially disabling a single gene in the millimeter-long nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans could double its lifespan. For the worms in Kenyon’s lab, that equated to an additional 24 days spent eating E. coli bacteria, but the title of the group’s report in a nematode newsletter drew a provocative analogy to humans: “A Mutation Which Doubles C. elegans Life Span (Imagine Being 140).” The study helped ignite a new field dedicated to unpicking, and wresting control of, the biological mechanisms of aging.

Name: Penny. Age: 14. Breed: Greyhound. Lifespan: 10–13. Trained as a professional racer, she competed in five races and never left the gate, so she was fired and picked up by a rescue organization.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

Kenyon and other researchers tracked down genes linked to longevity and traced the biochemical pathways they controlled. Intriguingly, some of the same mechanisms they identified in worms could extend life in flies and mice. In labs around the world, evidence began to mount that aging was not just inevitable degradation. It was another biological process with genetic controls and components that might one day be hacked. The long lives of some wild animals hinted at the possibilities. DNA repair mechanisms help one of the longest-lived mammals, bowhead whales, live to 200 or more. Naked mole rats and some tortoises appear to slow biological time, making them remarkably resistant to age-related disease.

De Grey was inspired by the science but irritated by what he saw as society’s indifference to the prospect of slowing or even reversing aging in humans. In 2003, he drew interest to his cause by celebrating a dwarf mouse known as GHR-KO 11C, who died at Southern Illinois University a week short of his fifth birthday—roughly double his expected lifespan—thanks to a tweak similar to what Kenyon had done to extend worm longevity. De Grey announced that 11C’s creator had won the first payout from the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a fund of about $33,000 for scientists who set new records for mouse longevity. When speaking about 11C’s achievement, de Grey took the opportunity to promote a program he had drawn up called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence that he claimed could eventually defeat aging, allowing a person who was 50 in 2030 to enjoy another 80 healthy years of life.

De Grey’s pronouncements charmed journalists but rankled many biologists, and in 2005, 28 distinguished researchers wrote a paper declaring his strategies—using genetic engineering, targeted toxins, and tweaks to the human immune system—a farrago in “the realm of fantasy rather than science.” This did little to hinder their target, whose eloquent but wild predictions continued to win media attention and who made headway with tech industry freethinkers. The next year, he received $3.5 million from Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal. In 2009, de Grey cofounded the SENS Research Foundation, headquartered in Mountain View, California, across the 101 highway from Google.

Names: Smitty & Louise. Age: Both 10. Breed: Chihuahua. Lifespan: 14–16. Smitty, who finds tummy tickles calming, likes to curl up under blankets and inside pillowcases. Louise was rescued with a broken jaw and three working legs. Now she loves to run across the room and dive into her bed.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

By the time Halioua started her internship in La Jolla, the foundation was providing small grants to researchers around the world and had labs of its own in Mountain View, directed by de Grey. The summer fellowship program was intended to incubate a new generation of scientists who would dedicate themselves to the organization’s vision.

As much by accident as by design, Halioua’s summer in California primed her to think more deeply about aging than most teens. She spent her days gazing through a microscope at cells harvested from patients who had died from aggressive brain tumors, which, as with most forms of cancer, become more likely with age as changes accumulate in a person’s DNA. In the evenings, she returned to a room rented from an elderly but lively veteran with a goofy smile and a hill-running habit. The vet befriended the nervous intern, showing her around La Jolla and inviting her along on dates with his girlfriend. It was her first personal connection with an elder outside her own family. “He helped me realize, ‘Oh, I will be this old one day,’” Halioua says.

At the end of the summer, Halioua flew to the SENS Research Foundation’s annual conference in San Francisco, where she met de Grey and received a full-immersion baptism in the antiaging Kool-Aid. The crowd mixed respected academic scientists with tech investors, a science adviser to Obama’s secretary of state, and, in Halioua’s words, “immortalists” hoping to see de Grey’s most far-out predictions come true.

Name: Odin. Age: 4. Breed: Great Dane. Lifespan: 7–10. His favorite toy is Harry Elephante, a stuffed elephant with crinkly ears.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

The idea that aging might one day be treatable, like a disease, was gaining ground in the world of medical research, and among Silicon Valley’s richest men. Shortly after turning 40, Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page announced that his company was backing a new venture called Calico that would work on aging treatments. It hired Cynthia Kenyon, the creator of the long-lived worms and just one of many academics changing the conception of aging. The US National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest public backer of medical research, created a “geroscience” initiative to investigate how the aging process contributed to chronic diseases traditionally seen as separate, such as Alzheimer’s and cancer, and how scientists might tinker with underlying processes common to them all.

One after another, studies in lab animals were showing that certain drugs could extend lifespan and stave off age-related diseases, a tantalizing glimpse of what people might one day enjoy. Some of them appeared to do so by boosting cellular signals that ramp up when food is scarce, mimicking the effects of a restricted-calorie diet. One of those drugs is rapamycin, taken by humans receiving an organ donation. In mice, it could extend their lives by up to 25 percent and also delay or reverse heart disease, cancer, and cognitive decline—results that were “absolutely astonishing,” says Steven Austad, codirector of an NIH aging research center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Austad was a coauthor on the 2005 paper slamming de Grey’s scientific ideas, but he agreed with the agitator of aging on one high-level point: It was worth seriously investigating how aging might be treated in humans.

in 2016, halioua returned to La Jolla for a second internship, renting the same room from her elderly friend. She found him diminished and dying from pancreatic cancer. He was still running but was easily winded, and he was struggling to pay the health insurance premiums underwriting his chemotherapy. Halioua smuggled him extra cash by intentionally overpaying her rent out of her modest fellowship stipend.

De Grey’s argument that it was imperative to devote more scientific effort to slowing or halting the processes underlying cancer and other age-related diseases began to feel more convincing. “It just made so much sense,” Halioua says. “I very quickly knew that this was a hundred percent where I was going to spend my life.” At the end of that summer she gave a presentation on her project, impressing an Oxford researcher involved with de Grey’s nonprofit. When he suggested she join him in the UK as a grad student, with SENS Research Foundation funding, she accepted. That fall, her La Jolla landlord died. In 2017, she flew to England with a new mission in life.

Halioua fell in love with Oxford. Her thesis examined how health systems might cover treatments that only paid off far in the future, a potential challenge for antiaging drugs. She had a part-time job consulting on science with a biotech startup that was also backed by the foundation. But her new life began to fracture.

Halioua’s relationship with her supervisor broke down. She felt he bullied her and was controlling, requiring her to do work related to a company he worked for and restricting whom she could talk with. (Halioua has spoken publicly about her experience without naming her supervisor. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

She also became uncomfortable with the SENS Research Foundation and its animating spirit, de Grey. She initially admired the foundation, she says: “They had a lot of glitz and glam for me.” She was impressed by the organization’s formal dinners, where rich and distinguished men were encouraged to donate to the war on aging. But she started to suspect she was only being invited “because I was a cute young girl,” she says. “Also smart, but that wasn’t what they cared about.” At one dinner, she says, de Grey plied her with alcohol and told her that as a “glorious woman” she had a duty to have sex with potential donors to encourage contributions. (After Halioua went public with her allegations several years later, de Grey denied making the statements.)

By 2018, Halioua was looking for an escape route. “I really snapped because of all of that stuff Aubrey and my professor did,” she says. “It created this desire to create my own sphere of influence, where I control the rules.” She turned to one of the only prominent women in the small circles working on aging treatments, Laura Deming. Deming was a wunderkind who had started working at age 12 in Cynthia Kenyon’s lab, enrolled at MIT at 14, dropped out after receiving a fellowship from Peter Thiel, and now ran a venture capital fund in San Francisco to bring aging-related startups into the Silicon Valley mainstream. (One of her latest projects involves developing technology to freeze organs without damaging them.) Halioua had once been introduced to Deming through de Grey, and now she emailed in pursuit of an internship.

Deming arranged a brief phone interview. Halioua was “very intense,” Deming recalls. “I asked her a question about Markov models”—a math trick to analyze processes that change over time—“and could tell that she didn’t have the exact answer but was determined to figure it out on the call” by wringing every possible clue from what Deming said. “That was really cool.” The internship was only two weeks long, but for Halioua it was enough—a refuge and perhaps a new beginning. In early 2018, she flew to California.

Name: Luna. Age: 10. Breed: French bulldog. Lifespan: 10–12. Despite being blind, she always finds a perch on the highest available pillow.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

halioua joined deming at a WeWork in the Tenderloin, a San Francisco neighborhood abutting City Hall and the headquarters of Twitter that is also rife with human misery and crime. Stepping out of the office at night felt risky in a way it never had in Oxford or Austin. Working in venture capital felt unfamiliar too. At Oxford, grad students and researchers left the lab at 5 pm and went home or to the pub. Important emails were long and formal. In San Francisco, entrepreneurs and investors worked late and then spent hours more, over fine dinners, debating the intellectual foundations of their theories about the future.

At the end of Halioua’s brief internship, Deming offered her a job. She found a way to accept but also complete her PhD in Oxford, and began flying back and forth. Halioua felt the arrangement was working at first, but relations with her supervisor worsened, and in the fall of 2018 she filed a formal complaint under Oxford’s bullying and harassment policy. He left the university soon after, but Halioua found her department’s investigation to be painfully slow. (The head of her former department, Georg Holländer, declined to comment on the case, but said "all complaints will always be considered carefully and rigorously under our procedures.") While she waited for its official assessment, she began to have panic attacks. “You kind of feel like you’re crazy,” she says. “Everybody tells you you’re being sensitive or misinterpreting what this person said to you.” Working for Deming began to soak up more of Halioua’s time and enthusiasm, and she left Oxford for good.

Halioua knew next to nothing about venture capital or Silicon Valley, but she poured herself into reading pitch decks, networking with founders, and drafting investment memos. She started to tweet, blasting out news of pharma deals, photos of San Francisco beaches, her Fitbit stats, and appreciations of Elon Musk. She helped bring about investments in Fauna, a startup exploring the age-defying biology of hibernation, and Gordian Biotechnology, which aims to fight diseases of aging by modifying a patient’s DNA. By the time news came from Oxford that it had upheld the majority of her complaints, almost a year after she had filed them, Halioua knew her future lay in biotech, not academia.

Halioua’s own company, Loyal, emerged from one of her early projects for Deming, a dense, roughly 50-page memo on the investment potential of the biochemical pathway Cynthia Kenyon had used to double the lifespan of worms. In many species—including humans—it involved a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1, which adjusts an animal’s growth and metabolic response to food. Tinkering with this pathway could extend the lifespan of flies, worms, and mice.

Unfortunately for Halioua, the literature seemed less rich in clues for how to turn this knowledge into a drug for people. The role of IGF-1 in human aging was unclear, and although the pathway was clearly implicated in certain eye diseases unrelated to aging, Halioua couldn’t get excited about working on them.

In the summer of 2019, Halioua was drunk on a camping trip among strangers when a factoid she had omitted from the report came back to her. Organized by the founders of an autonomous trucking startup, the trip had brought together a group of young entrepreneurs and investors. Around the campfire, she joked—purely as an icebreaker—that she knew how to extend dog lifespan, because IGF-1 was implicated in dog body size and longevity.

Her quip took on a life of its own and became lodged in the collective consciousness of Silicon Valley. One investor on the trip mentioned Halioua’s idea to a founder he knew, who in turn told it to Greg Rosen, a venture capitalist. Inspired by the South Korean scientists who had produced the first cloned dog, an Afghan named Snuppy, Rosen was looking for an entrepreneur to start a US company to clone dogs for bereaved owners. When Rosen and Halioua met for coffee in downtown San Francisco, he realized she had a better solution for the same underlying problem—that a dog never lives long enough.

Name: Peanut. Age: 7. Breed: Mini-poodle, Chihuahua, Pomeranian mix. Lifespan: Unclear. Whenever her dog friends visit her home, she brings out all her toys and piles them up for her buddies to see.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

halioua began 2020 with $5.1 million in funding. By way of thanks she sent all of her investors, including Rosen, fluffy toy puppies wearing company bandanas. She secured an office on the edge of downtown San Francisco, but the lease began in March, the same month the Bay Area became the first part of the US to enter pandemic lockdown. Her company’s formative months, and first hires, took place via Zoom, Slack, and eventually socially distanced meetups. Halioua raised another $6 million and hired scientists, veterinarians, and an expert in getting new animal drugs past the FDA.

She embraced the role of dog company CEO—painting a mural of a giant German shepherd in Loyal’s office and ordering shirts with the slogan “Save the dogs, save the world.” She adopted a fluffy white husky named Wolfie, whom she has described as her cofounder and Loyal’s chief evangelist. Her management style, she says, was informed by her bad experiences at Oxford. When she talks to her team about her goals or beliefs, she tries to pair her statements with evidence to convince her workers that the boss is being straight with them. “Even if you don’t trust me, you still know this is true,” she says.

Halioua’s new science team, including a scientist who previously led aging research at pharma giant Regeneron, helped refine her original idea. They identified a compound they believed could be given to young dogs of the largest breeds, such as French mastiffs, to delay their accelerated aging process. They found a second compound they thought could target processes that cause cognitive decline and kidney problems in older dogs of all sizes.

As her company gained traction, Halioua noticed certain patterns in her business interactions. She tried to recruit women investors but found it difficult because there weren’t many to ask. When she met with investors who were men, some would try to flip a business meeting into a date, and others would confidently explain science to her that she knew inside out. Mostly she brushed off such moments—her time at Oxford had lowered her expectations of those with more power and prestige than her.

She often felt different. Describing herself as an “Oxford dropout” helped convince people to take her seriously—never mind that she had left her PhD in part due to dissatisfaction with a harassment investigation, a circumstance missing from the dropout tales of archetypal boy geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg. She listened to hundreds of Silicon Valley podcasts to try to learn the industry’s patois. She trained herself to smile less and wrote in a blog post aimed at women entrepreneurs: “I come off as more of a grump now, but I am a grump who has the money she needs to build her company.”

In the spring of 2021, Halioua published a blog post about her Oxford PhD supervisor titled “The Gifts of My Harasser,” leaving him nameless. She described the paradox of one of her worst experiences laying a foundation stone for her later successes by teaching her to be skeptical of social hierarchies and institutional power. “It’s been two years since I left. I am not broken anymore, but I still feel the cracks,” she wrote. “His abuse shattered my preconceived notions of how the world worked and cleared a path I otherwise never would have found.”

Halioua also still felt the burden of her experience with de Grey, the aging guru of the SENS Research Foundation. Deming, too, had endured an uncomfortable experience with de Grey, whom she had known since she was 14. Days before her 18th birthday, Deming had emailed de Grey, then 48, asking him to introduce her to someone. In his reply he suggested he was interested in Deming sexually. “I have a fairly adventurous love life, and I’m not coy in talking about it, but I’ve always taken care to avoid letting conversations stray in that direction with someone so young as you,” de Grey wrote. “That has always felt quite jarring given that I could treat you as an equal on every other level. Maybe those days are over … Ahem - back to business :-) Yes, I’ll e-introduce you.” (De Grey later said the email was “an error in judgment.”)

Now, in June 2021, Deming and Halioua heard that de Grey might be mentoring another underage girl. The two women decided to formally report their experiences to the foundation, in the hope that doing so might protect this girl and others. The organization quickly retained a law firm to investigate the allegations and placed de Grey on leave. But in the weeks afterward, the nonprofit promoted social media posts featuring de Grey discussing a cryptocurrency fundraising campaign that would net the organization $25 million.

Name: Corky. Age: 11. Breed: Pug. Lifespan: 13–15. If she thinks you're not paying enough attention to her, Corky will tap you with her paw and sneeze on you.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

By August, Halioua says she and Deming became worried that the nonprofit was too conflicted to properly investigate itself, and they decided to go public. Late one Tuesday afternoon, the two women simultaneously posted detailed statements to their personal websites. Word spread fast, as did Halioua’s accompanying Twitter thread, prompting an outpouring of sympathy online, a round of media coverage about the allegations, and denials from de Grey.

Just over a week later, the SENS Research Foundation said its board learned that de Grey had attempted to undercut the ongoing investigation—by sending emails intended to pressure a participant in the inquiry, according to the official report of the investigation—and decided to “separate” from him immediately. The foundation’s law firm would later uphold Halioua’s and Deming’s accounts of these events. De Grey says that the women were tricked by people aiming to eject him from his nonprofit and that he has “never said anything to Laura or Celine verbally or otherwise that had improper intent.”

Halioua felt sure she had done the right thing, and she reasoned that Loyal had progressed enough that her career was not in danger. She was also too busy to dwell on the uproar. In late August her team announced that the NIH’s National Institute on Aging would collaborate with Loyal to test two of the company’s compounds, as part of a program on extending the longevity or healthy lifespan of mice. Three weeks later she turned 27. She rounded out the month by disclosing that Loyal had raised an additional $27 million in investment funding. Half of her new investors were women.

in 2022, halioua and her team, approaching 70 strong, began to flex the scientific muscles needed to upend conventional wisdom about aging. They analyzed and published data collected the previous year from nearly 500 dogs who were brought to a vet clinic for a health assessment. For a second study, they recruited some 2,000 owners—Halioua usually calls them “pet parents”—to receive Loyal-branded doggy DNA swab kits that might help them understand the markers of aging. Dog lovers on social media quickly picked up the scent; both studies filled up fast, and Halioua’s inbox was flooded with unsolicited dog pics. (Halioua says she has nothing against cats—and has even hired a few cat fanciers—but that their long lives, dislike of medicine, and not-very-humanlike physiology make them a less appealing target. “They’re like little biological aliens,” Halioua says.)

Name: Trout. Age: 4. Breed: 21-breed “supermutt.” Lifespan: 12+. Hailing from the streets of San Francisco's Mission District, he apparently walked himself to a shelter.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

Less publicly, Loyal is preparing for the clinical trials of its two products. Halioua isn’t giving away many details about Loyal’s drugs, but she does say that both medicines have performed well when given to lab dogs. One is a pill that might delay the onset of age-related diseases such as dementia and kidney failure, two common reasons for owners to have an animal put down. Halioua says it uses some pathways seen in caloric restriction. Now the company is testing the drug in pet dogs, and she anticipates she’ll launch a full clinical trial designed to win regulatory approval next year. The second drug, released slowly by an implant, might dampen the cellular processes that are believed to condemn the largest dog breeds to short lives.

As is standard in the drug industry, the company will seek the FDA’s sign-off on its study designs first. That step is a big deal for Loyal, because the agency would be backing the notion that drugs can be tested and proven to boost longevity. That is, not to prevent a disease or slow one down, but to hit a whole suite of ailments by tackling aging at its root.

To navigate the scientific and regulatory hurdles, human longevity startups—Loyal’s nominal competitors—have taken to focusing on drugs that tick two boxes: They are effective enough to get first approved as a conventional treatment for a single disease, and they hold broad antiaging effects. The hope is that once the drug is benefiting patients, data will pile up that helps prove its general preventive powers against age-related disease.

James Peyer, a former venture capitalist who is CEO and cofounder of antiaging startup Cambrian Biopharma, has raised more than $160 million with that tack. He says that establishing a rich portfolio of nearly 20 potential drugs for humans helped win investors over. But he admits his two-step approach isn’t the only way to go, and it’s possible that Halioua, whom he has known for years, might have hit on a faster way to get an antiaging drug for humans. “Part of Celine and Loyal’s brilliance is that they found a completely different path,” he says, one that lets her focus solely on the drugs’ antiaging properties right from the start. If the mechanisms that Halioua’s team finds in dogs align with human biology—a considerable unknown—the company could be well positioned to jump species, Peyer says.

Name: Bumper. Age: 8. Breed: American Staffordshire terrier. Lifespan: 13–15. Recently adopted, Bumper has a tail that wags a mile a minute.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

Loyal is not the only outfit trying to understand canine longevity. The Dog Aging Project, led by the University of Washington and Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has completed two small studies in which owners were given rapamycin or placebo pills without being told which. People who dosed their dogs with the drug reported that their pets became more active, says Matt Kaeberlein, a University of Washington professor who is codirector of the project and an adviser to Loyal. He suspects that rapamycin worked by soothing arthritis or other aches and pains, and he hopes to gather firm proof in a larger trial of about 600 dogs.

Kaeberlein has studied life-extending genes and treatments in yeast, worms, and mice and is convinced some aging mechanisms are shared across the animal kingdom. “Obviously I don’t know whether rapamycin is going to have a big effect on lifespan and health span in dogs, but I am as certain as I can be that something will,” he says. He declines to say whether he gives rapamycin to his own dog, Dobby, an 11-year-old German shepherd, saying it wouldn’t be proper to comment on such a use while running a trial investigating the same. But Kaeberlein will say that he takes the drug himself and believes it helped resolve an attack of frozen shoulder, a mysterious condition in which the joint becomes stiff and painful.

Like other veterans of academic aging science—and Halioua—Kaeberlein exudes levelheaded excitement but also impatience when asked about the future of aging treatments. Piles of evidence suggest it is possible to slow down the processes of aging in humans, or any other animal. You want that pill to exist? Just give scientists the time and money—and regulatory support—to figure it out, says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute of Aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York.

“Right now we need to start making progress with drugs that maybe wouldn’t make us live 150 years but will make us healthier for much longer,” Barzilai says, by delaying the onset of diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s. He has spent years trying to secure funding for a six-year human clinical trial to investigate whether a common diabetes drug can delay aging. He is less sure of Loyal’s approach, but he figures longer-lived and more active dogs could produce other effects in humans: more active, longer-lived owners, and more support for aging research.

Name: Uncle Grady. Age: 13. Breed: Havanese. Lifespan: 14–16. He has a strong preference for people food.

PHOTOGRAPH: Joe Pugliese

Sitting cross-legged on an easy chair in Loyal’s San Francisco office, Halioua argues that Loyal can break the psychological barriers holding back the war on aging. “Many people don’t know that we’ve extended lifespan in mice many times, and even if they do, well, it’s a mouse,” she says, as Wolfie lolls nearby on a sunny cushion next to a floor-to-ceiling window. What would kick the field into a higher gear, she says, is a proof of concept that’s more persuasive and lovable than a wizened lab rodent.

She imagines appearing onstage one day with a healthy Great Dane that is 15 years old, almost twice the breed’s usual age—and thus persuading people to see aging science not as a realm of weird ideas and thinkers but as a conventional branch of biotech. Silicon Valley founders are often celebrated for creating products that cause jaws to drop and heads to explode. Halioua may make her greatest mark by killing hype rather than creating it, transforming the notion that drugs can extend life into an everyday comfort—like a faithful friend’s tail wagging when you walk through the door.

Updated 10-13-2022, 1:00 pm ET: This story was updated to correct Aubrey de Grey's age.

Dog Grooming by En Vogue Elite Pet Grooming; hair and makeup by David Searle/Artist Untied

This article appears in the November 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote Machine

Former Democratic operative Tara McGowan is sinking millions into Meta’s ad network to build Courier Newsroom, a media powerhouse for the left.

Nancy Scola  October 06, 2022 10:10 AM

Tara McGowan went from being the controversial CEO of Acronym, a sprawling political organization, to running a left-leaning network of digital news sites. Photograph: Jared Soares

It was a sunny June afternoon in Washington, DC, and even though Tara McGowan professes to hate this city, she was having fun.

A political operative turned publisher, she sat in a conference room in a WeWork office downtown, her fingertips loudly drumming away on the bright orange table. The energetic 36-year-old is the CEO of a company called Good Information, where she oversees a mini empire of progressive local news sites across the United States.

Beaming in on a big videoscreen was Pat Rynard, himself a Democratic operative turned journalist and founder of a small political website called Iowa Starting Line, which The New York Times once declared “the ‘It’ read for political insiders.” McGowan had bought the site from him in 2021, making it the eighth in her growing collection of two- to six-person newsrooms stretching from Arizona to North Carolina.

McGowan believes these outlets are the antidote to bad information—the hyperbole and lies that proliferate in Americans’ social media feeds and promote ideas mostly from the ideological right. Through the calculated injection of news stories into these feeds, McGowan thinks she can claw a crumbling republic back from the brink and—this is the important part—get more people to vote. She’s confident these new recruits to the democratic process will lean decidedly left.

Rynard walked her through an experiment in using Facebook’s powerful ad-targeting tools. Iowa’s primary elections were taking place the next day, and he wanted to know whether a handful of Iowa Starting Line’s stories could shape the results. Primaries are the sort of political contest that both keep democracy afloat and tend to be roundly ignored.

“Remind me when the actual boosting of the coverage started?” asked McGowan, sipping from a giant pink water bottle.

“Three weeks ago,” Rynard replied. Working with a political data shop, McGowan’s team had gotten a list of residents in blue-collar counties in the state’s east. They cut the hardcore Republicans from the list, then dumped the remaining names into Facebook’s ad-buying portal. An analyst used the app’s “lookalike” tool to find other people like them, then bought ads that would appear in those users’ newsfeeds. The ads weren’t selling anything; they were just promoting a few stories from Rynard’s site—straight reporting on Democratic candidates vying to run against sitting US senator Chuck Grassley, an infographic of voting deadlines. So far, Rynard was pleased. One ad he’d tossed in on a whim, which riffed on a story titled “Iowa Passed 70 New Laws This Year. Here’s What They Do,” was clicked on by 3.5 percent of the people who saw it. (Digital ads work on painfully small margins; anything above 2 percent is reason to cheer.)

Tara McGowan is CEO of Good Information, which runs a set of left-leaning newsrooms.

Photograph: Jared Soares

But the experiment was not about clickthrough rates or reading—it was about whether any of those people would actually show up to vote. After the primary, McGowan’s analysts dug into the data. The Facebook ads had cost them $49,000, which, it turned out, was about what the Democratic winner had spent on the platform. The analysts compared the batch of targeted Iowans with the publicly available list of people who voted. They came back with what they saw as a solid win. About 3,300 more of the targeted residents had turned out to vote than had been forecast to. The ads, they concluded, had worked, and at a reasonable $15 per vote. That’s about what Biden had spent nationally in 2020 while defeating Trump, though he spent more per voter in swing states.

To McGowan, the results validated years of work. She is a longtime proponent of circulating news through ad platforms to shape political thinking. Last election cycle, this “boosted news” technique, along with a suite of data-driven practices and huge sums of fundraised money, helped make her a high-profile if controversial figure in Democratic politics. Now, she says, she has left that world behind for journalism—but brought her political toolbox with her.

In its three years of existence, McGowan’s army of sites—collectively called Courier Newsroom—has spent at least $5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads alone. Backed by billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, liberal philanthropist George Soros, and others, McGowan says she raised $15 million in the first half of this year—and she’s gunning for more.

McGowan’s critics hate what she’s up to. As Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the right-leaning nonprofit Americans for Public Trust, puts it, trying to mobilize voters is “just not something newsrooms do.”

McGowan doesn’t disagree. She says that’s precisely the problem. Her argument goes like this: Too many newsrooms have lost their way by catering to elite readers and resorting to paywalls. (A rarity a decade ago, now about three-quarters of US newspapers have them.) Meanwhile, more than 2,000 newspapers across the country have closed since 2004, leaving scores of Americans without the sort of trusted information that might propel them to the polls. Instead, about 80 million people who could have voted in the high-stakes election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t. To her, it’s self-evident that the journalism world should use every possible tactic to nudge reluctant voters to the ballot box. That idea, though, is breaking the minds of some of journalism’s purists, who worry it could backfire—shattering what remains of the public’s trust in the press.

Megan McCarthy launched Dogwood with McGowan and is vice president of content at Courier.

Photograph: Jared Soares

On McGowan’s left arm is a tattoo, in all caps, of the words “Yes We Can.” She’d asked former president Barack Obama to write his campaign slogan on her skin, then told him mid-scribble of her plan to ink it; the “Can” is noticeably neater. A journalism and political science double major, she had worked for Obama as a digital producer on his 2012 reelection campaign and parlayed that experience into a series of jobs in politics, including as the digital director for NextGen America, the climate change organization founded by billionaire Tom Steyer, and as director of digital strategy for Priorities USA Action, the massive pro-Hillary political action committee.

McGowan built a reputation as a digital expert willing to try new things. She and many others thought the left had grown dangerously complacent since Obama’s internet-powered victory in 2008. After Trump’s upset in 2016, she started an organization called Acronym, which was largely geared toward making sure he and others like him wouldn’t win again. The group came to focus on digital advertising tools and was known for aggressively testing exactly which ads worked and sharing the results with others on the left.

But as McGowan tells it, she hated the churn-and-burn of this work—perpetually raising cash to pour into last-ditch online ads meant to pick off a few persuadable voters. She wanted to create something more lasting. Four years ago, she coauthored a report with Eli Pariser, a progressive organizer best known for his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, which argued that the algorithm-driven internet was trapping Americans in ideological echo chambers. McGowan and Pariser’s report took the position that Democrats were quickly losing power in the United States because they’d neglected to figure out how to navigate that changing landscape. Progressives had opted for bursty spending on TV ads over the right’s investment in “always-on, more digitally fluent media infrastructure.”

McGowan wanted to build that kind of infrastructure. She raised a bit of money to build a pilot demonstration in Virginia, where Democrats had a shot at retaking the legislature. Called Dogwood, after both the state flower and tree, it would be aimed at women living in the suburbs and beyond, a constituency that can swing elections there.

The site started pumping out a mix of politics and lifestyle coverage, very much in the vein of a pre-internet local newspaper. Right away McGowan and her team had to contend with what researchers call Americans’ increasing “news avoidance”—they don’t like to read the news, and they especially don’t like to read about politics.

While planning a social media “boosting” program, Courier employees ran through their targeted audience sizes and other details.

Photograph: Jared Soares

“Our audiences are not being reached by factual news information,” McGowan tells me when we meet up at DC’s Generator Hotel on one of her visits from her Rhode Island home. It’s imperative, she argues, to chase people wherever they are online. She opened her brown eyes wide and spoke uncharacteristically slowly to make sure I got it: “If we don’t target them, they won’t see it.”

Critics howled about a PAC masquerading as a journalistic outfit. McGowan was undeterred. She secured more money and launched sites tailored to unlikely voters in other political hot spots: Arizona’s The Copper Courier, for Latinas and Indigenous women in Maricopa County; North Carolina’s Cardinal & Pine, for rural communities of color; and Florida’s Floricua, for Puerto Rican women.

The Courier newsrooms rolled along until the winter of 2020. By then Acronym had grown into a massive organization; one offshoot was a campaign tech shop called Shadow, which had won a contract to build an app that could report the Democratic Party’s caucus results. But at the critical moment, it failed, which—when coupled with data errors unrelated to Shadow’s work—delayed results for three days. McGowan took enormous heat in the press and from liberal circles, which she believes was unfair: For one thing, she wasn’t Shadow’s CEO.

McGowan found few defenders in professional Democratic networks, deepening her dislike of DC as an immensely backstabby place. When stories popped up claiming she was trying to throw the caucuses for Pete Buttigieg, for whom her husband worked, she felt she got a lesson in how quickly bad information spreads.

But McGowan says even she knew she needed to focus. She recalls Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, then on Acronym’s board and a powerful fundraiser, telling her to learn from Republicans: Nothing of lasting significance had ever been built from inside that party’s establishment. She raised a bit of new money and left Acronym, taking Courier Newsroom with her.

Freshly humbled, McGowan set about rebooting Courier. She came to accept the notion that you can’t be a trusted news organization while being secretive about your donors, and she dug into cleaning up its reputation.

She was in the middle of a long-running fight with a company called NewsGuard. Started in 2018 in part by well-known journalist and Court TV founder Steven Brill, NewsGuard existed to fight the country’s growing misinformation problem with human editorial judgment. The company evaluated online content shops and awarded them red or green ratings. As Brill put it at the time, NewsGuard would take on “a growing scourge that clearly cannot be solved by algorithms.”

At NewsGuard’s launch, Brill’s cofounder had said that their aim was to “tell readers The Denver Post is a real newspaper and that the Denver Guardian exists only as a purveyor of fake news.” It’s a tough job: While The Denver Post might be a local institution now, it was founded in 1892 as a Democratic organ. To apply a measure of science to that messiness, NewsGuard scores sites on nine criteria. Early on, Courier earned only a 57 out of 100. “This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards,” concluded NewsGuard’s evaluators.

Steven Brill tries to fight misinformation by rating digital content sites on their practices.

Photograph: Jared Soares

They objected to just about everything: Courier’s way of gathering and presenting information, its handling of the difference between news and opinion, and the inadequacy of its disclosures of who owns it, how it’s financed, who’s in charge, and what its conflicts of interest might be. They slapped the sites with a red rating. Meanwhile, some prominent, proudly right-wing sites fare better: The Daily Wire, for example, cofounded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, scores a 69.5 and a green rating. When I pressed Brill on what made Courier less legit, he replied that The Daily Wire is “fairly explicit about what they do and don’t do.”

McGowan wanted another shot. In January 2021, she and Brill joined a Zoom call to hash it all out. According to McGowan, the meeting devolved into “a screaming fight.” Brill recalls that McGowan was “condescending, patronizing,” and “self-righteous,” all while engaging in doublespeak. “She talked about how her life’s work is rebuilding trust in institutions,” Brill says, “when her life’s work is undermining trust in what I consider to be the most cherished institution we have, which is the press.”

He’s not alone in that view. When I refer to Courier as a news organization in a conversation with Peter Adams, an executive at the nonprofit News Literacy Project, he quickly cautions me against it. His organization, he says, “is pretty careful with the way we use the word news,” reserving it for those who “strive to be as fair and accurate and transparent as possible.” Courier, Adams said, has only “posed” as such. He and Brill continue to object to McGowan’s political roots.

Emily Bell, the founding director of Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, is less damning of Courier, at least for now. She oversees studies of “pink slime”—purely partisan outlets masquerading as local news shops. Courier isn’t that, Bell says. But she’s unconvinced it’s truly independent. “It’s too early to tell,” she says. “We’re in a period of intense change” regarding “how we target stories and how people receive, share, and discuss news.”

In the fall of 2021, McGowan was having breakfast in Lower Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel with an NYU journalism professor named Jay Rosen. McGowan wanted the journalism world to take her seriously, and Rosen seemed like a potential ally. He was known for his argument that the news-business norm of the “view from nowhere”—the pretense that journalists operate with no bias or even lived experience—doesn’t serve the public. He came to breakfast skeptical of Courier. But he’d been incubating an idea for a new sort of transparency device: a statement of beliefs that would articulate a news organization’s actual agenda. He hoped it might help revive the public’s trust in the media. Says Rosen, “I wanted to see: How hard is this going to be in practice?”

Over the course of that autumn, Rosen worked with Courier’s newsrooms to write up manifestos of sorts detailing what each stood for. One newsroom came out in support of workers’ rights; another stood up for abortion access. The statements are varying degrees of explicit, but all try to flesh out what their liberalism means in practice.

Posted on each newsroom’s website, the statements aren’t likely to make their way to many readers, few of whom can be expected to click on the sites’ About pages. But the statements are there, and McGowan reasonably argues that their mission articulation—plus disclosures about Courier’s funding—go beyond what many news organizations do. With the statements in place, one of her staffers fired off an email to NewsGuard.

But Brill was unmoved. Courier’s red rating would stay for now. “It’s ridiculous,” McGowan says. She decided to move on.

McGowan, in a white jacket, runs a Courier leadership team meeting at a WeWork in DC.

she had to build an audience fast if she wanted Courier’s newsrooms to make a mark on the 2022 midterm elections. One obstacle was that Democrats lack some of the right’s obvious cultural signifiers—being pro-hunting, churchgoing, antiabortion. (Opposing them has not proven all that galvanizing.) So her editors rely heavily on sense of place. “How do you build bridges with people who don’t care about politics? Identity. The right uses cultural identity,” McGowan says. She could do the same. “What is unifying? Sports teams. State pride.”

Her editors learned quickly that they got the most subscribers from local, cultural coverage—not straight politics—so the sites crank out lifestyle stories: the best places to spot rare birds, a ranking of Iowa’s best gas-station breakfast pizzas, a profile of the Black-owned barbecue spot in a tiny North Carolina town that became the only place to eat after a hurricane hit. After pouring money into making videos for TikTok, McGowan was pleased to see Courier find some traction there: In August alone, Iowa Starting Line’s videos racked up 2 million views. When the time is right, Courier slips in a politics story, such as one on the Republican politicians who voted against funding meant to address the baby formula shortage.

What Courier stories don’t really include, though, is partisan red meat. Sometimes they explicitly emphasize progressive values, as in an interview in Michigan’s The ’Gander in which faith leaders discuss how abortion access is part of their religious traditions. It’s an attempt, the site’s Grand Rapids–based editor says, to counteract the “Michigan nice” quality of women in the state that leads them to avoid tough political conversations. It’s also, less obviously, a challenge to the idea that abortion is widely controversial, when public opinion polls show that more than half of Americans support it being broadly legal.

Such sly liberalism is by design. James Barnes, Acronym’s former measurement czar, joined the organization in 2019 to swing voters away from Trump, having previously embedded with the Trump campaign as a Facebook employee. Barnes remains one of McGowan’s confidants, and he says a takeaway from his experience is that you don’t have to hammer an audience with talking points: “People who are more informed about what’s going on are more skeptical, harder to convince of nonsense.”

Still, getting them to vote takes an extra step. People also need to believe that engaging in politics does them some good, says Leticia Bode, a Georgetown professor and expert on political communication. A withered sense of political efficacy is a sign of an unhealthy civil society. And at last check, almost half of all Americans say there’s not much ordinary citizens can do to influence how the government runs.

That’s why, barreling toward the US’s midterm elections, Courier is pumping out stories to counter that fatalism. The Copper Courier wrote about how Latino voters in Arizona had helped Biden become the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton. Cardinal & Pine showed how, in a “rare bit of bipartisanship,” North Carolina members of Congress had pushed the Treasury Department to ease restrictions on using Covid-19 funding for affordable housing. Deign to pick your elected leaders and here’s what they can do, goes the thinking. To make sure those stories reach their intended audiences, McGowan isn’t relying only on ads; she’s hiring what she calls content organizers to tap the social networks of their would-be allies—nonprofit groups, mostly—to help distribute stories as part of what they’re calling Good Info Messengers.

“The best antidote to disinformation,” McGowan says, “is increasing the volume of good, factual information” in the places where low-quality information is spreading. It’s a stark departure from the assumption long held in Congress, Silicon Valley, and European capitals that the answer is content moderation by the platforms themselves. Damon McCoy, an engineering professor at NYU, helps run the school’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project, which tries to identify and offer solutions to vulnerabilities in online platforms that let misinformation spread. “One of the things that’s starting to dawn on us,” he says, “is that misinformation takes hold where there’s a lack of credible news sources.” In those news deserts, what people find “is fly-by-night, opportunistic misinformation and disinformation campaigns.”

McCoy says injecting local news into those information vacuums makes sense to him, but he points out the obvious catch: Local journalism isn’t cheap. The free market has largely failed to pay for it, so McGowan has found a way to pull money from the political realm to help foot the bill. For now.

Which raises the question of what funders want. Dmitri Mehlhorn is a political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist and LinkedIn cofounder. Shortly after Trump took office the two started a funding group called Investing in US, aimed at funding entrepreneurs on the left. Mehlhorn has argued that Trump was the master manipulator of a press that bent over backward to prove its objectivity. Like McGowan, Mehlhorn gets criticized for using tactics that “might cause us to become like those we are fighting,” he says. But he thinks experimentation is necessary to get at “the low-information voters Tara is trying to reach.”

McGowan, for her part, worries that donors like Hoffman will judge the threat of Trump as over and move on, taking their money with them. So far, Courier says it has 900,000 subscribers across Facebook, Instagram, and its email lists, with more than 35 journalists—including about a dozen on a central team supporting the local newsrooms—pumping out some 400 pieces of content a week. But McGowan knows she’ll have to go far bigger to justify everything she and others have been investing in Courier.

If Good Information’s strategy seems to stand on wobbly ground, there’s a reason. McGowan’s project perches atop a series of complex bets—all of which need to pay off for her to succeed.

Her first and biggest wager is that news consumption can shape how people vote. It’s informed by a landmark 2006 study on what its authors called the Fox News effect. The researchers found that once the 24-hour-a-day conservative cable channel showed up in markets across the country, its steady drip of coverage was enough to convince 200,000 people to vote Republican who otherwise wouldn’t have—enough to make George W. Bush president.

Her next bet has longer odds but is backed up anecdotally and by top Democrats. The idea is that Republicans have spent decades studying the news consumption habits of would-be voters and building media relationships with them through wildly popular sites like The Daily Wire, which has about 33 million monthly visitors, and Breitbart, which has roughly 80 million. Democrats have nothing even close—the biggest might be MSNBC.com, with about 22 million monthly visitors. Jason Goldman is a former Twitter executive and White House chief digital officer who says that’s the reason he joined Good Information’s advisory committee. “There’s a whole world of voters we’re just not talking to,” he says.

Her next assumptions become more of a series of leaps. McGowan argues that Americans are turned off from voting because of a rise in misinformation—such as the idea that Trump won the 2020 election—and a decrease in good information, the straightforward reporting that helps citizens understand who their local representatives are. Certainly Americans’ trust in Washington to “do what is right” has been on a slow decline since the Kennedy era, and charts tracking the metric since 2000 resemble lemmings plunging off a cliff. But can more reporting help reverse the decline? That’s hard to prove.

McGowan’s belief that Democrats will win if she can simply get more people to vote isn’t outlandish, but it depends hugely on which voters are turned out where. That they will trend left is a piece of Democratic conventional wisdom, not a fact of life. And the biggest bet—that people can be convinced to turn out if only they have more fairly dry information, only loosely ideological in thrust—is at this point the gamble of her career.

This summer, McGowan had a meeting with White House chief of staff Ron Klain. (“An old friend,” Klain calls McGowan in an email.) Heading to the meeting, she tells me she sees President Biden clinging to an old model, where to break through with the public he just needs to win over a handful of national reporters at traditional big-name institutions. “He still lives in a world a lot of the people I meet live in, which is, ‘It was better before. Why can’t we just do that again?’” she says.

She went in intending to ask if the White House might open up a bit to Courier’s journalists, to help “lift up information about the impacts of the infrastructure bill, things of that nature.” She declines to discuss the details of her conversation with Klain, but she says she came out of the meeting feeling like the administration’s messaging struggles are an opportunity for Courier, if she can convince top progressives to give her a chance.

I offhandedly mention to her that just that morning, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had said, “The thing people need to understand about these legacy DC, New York outlets is: We don’t care what you think anymore.” To me it seemed a bit of Republican bluster about the irrelevance of the mainstream press. But to McGowan, DeSantis is savvily reading the landscape: He gets what he needs from Fox News, Breitbart, and the like. She says she’ll judge that Courier has failed if, in a few years—around the time of the 2024 elections—her newsrooms don’t occupy a similar space.

The stakes, though, are a fair bit higher. At issue is not so much the future of journalism as the future of cynicism. In her own, fraught way, McGowan is testing whether it’s still possible to combat the noise ceaselessly filling Americans’ heads and hammering the message that apathy is a reasonable response to the state of the world. The alternative—that citizens are fated to only grow more disconnected from the news of the day and less invested in the country’s fate—is almost too distressing an outcome to contemplate.

This article appears in the November 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Would You Ditch All This Chaos for a Country in the Cloud?

Balaji Srinivasan—technologist, investor, prophet, troll—says let the old world sink. Find your tribe and build your bespoke society, or get left behind.

Anthony Lydgate  September 06, 2022 10:10 AM

Illustrations: Eddie Guy

You, the protagonist, are on a small fishing schooner off the coast of Norway. This is an Edgar Allan Poe story, so things aren’t going well. Your ship is trapped in a mile-wide whirlpool that grinds whales into pesto. Your younger brother just drowned in a perfunctory half-sentence. Your elder brother is clinging to a ringbolt near the bow. You’re astern, hanging on to a lashed-down empty water cask. The ship rides the maelstrom like it’s in the Indy 500, keel centripetally pinned to the black lane of water. Up to one side is the whirl’s edge, open sky, a brilliant moon. Down to the other is a rainbow, which smiles across the roiling mist of the abyss.

Fear has driven your brother mad. You, however, take this chance to reflect on the romantic hopelessness of your situation. Turning and turning in the narrowing gyre, you begin to feel that you could get excited about dying this way, about being consumed by this great vortex of violent energy. It’s pretty fucking tremendous, right? Aren’t you and your brother lucky, in a way, to be finding out what’s down there?

But the run-me-over moment passes. You start contemplating the other debris that got sucked into the vortex along with your ship—home furnishings, construction materials, the snapped-off trunks of trees. Some stuff plunges quickly down into the funnel. Some stuff holds its place. Smallish cylindrical things, you notice, hardly descend at all. And look, here you are atop one of Poe’s favorite cylindrical literary devices, a cask.

You signal your brother to join you, waving an arm as if to semaphore: Hop on! I found us a ride! He refuses to let go of the ringbolt. Grief-stricken but stoic, you lash yourself to the cask and wait for your moment. When it comes, you cut loose into the unknown alone.

You watch the ship spiral down and disappear below you. The maelstrom subsides. Hair gone prematurely white, you live to tell your tale to a reporter.

Marshall McLuhan, the adopted seer of Silicon Valley—and at one time WIRED’s official patron saint—loved this story of Poe’s. Employed as a professor of English in Canada, he understood his job as awakening the masses to the “vortices of energy” exerted by different communication technologies (TV and film, radio, the printed word) and helping people “program a strategy of evasion and survival.” He preached that participants in “the electric age” must be like Poe’s fisherman. “Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom,” McLuhan once told a roomful of students. They had two choices: Learn to make the leap, or die paralyzed by the whirl.

It’s a shame that Saint Marshall didn’t live to tweet. What would he have said as he watched the electric age become the networked age, the age of a dirt-cheap, globe-spanning communication technology riding around in people’s pockets? What patterns would he have spotted as the great human network—with its political enmities, racial hatreds, economic uncertainties, climate fears, wars, pandemics—drove the walls of the maelstrom higher? What buoyant objects might he have pointed out on deck? When would he have said to jump?

The story you’re reading now is not about McLuhan or his obsession with vortices. This story is mostly about Balaji Srinivasan, a technologist and investor in his early forties, who does tweet, prodigiously.

Srinivasan has worn many identities in public—biomedical entrepreneur, Stanford professor, venture capitalist, crypto exec, potential head of Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration, Covid sage, gadfly up the nose of The New York Times. But I’d say his true calling is that of an ideological cooper. He develops flotation devices for escaping the maelstrom. In this too he is prodigious. When he first appeared on The Tim Ferriss Show, a podcast hosted by the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, he spotted patterns and prophesied the future almost uninterrupted for nearly four hours. This is typical, a former coworker of his told me; it’s called “getting Balaji’d.” Earlier this year, Srinivasan synthesized his thoughts into a book called The Network State, which is meant to provide some of the equipment and coaching you need to cut loose from this doomed schooner.

Balaji Srinivasan: “We want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh startup.”

Photograph: Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Of course, Srinivasan isn’t the only one in this business. You, the consumer, have an Ikean abundance of casks to choose from these days. And like a lot of people, you may be questioning whether the traditional manufacturers (media corporations, major political parties, institutions generally) are really putting out the most watertight stuff. Maybe you’ve furtively checked out a few competing models over the years. Could this reclaimed-wood Occupy cask be your ride out? Or this splintery democratic-socialist one? Or this polyethylene drum that says TRUMP in gilt letters on the side? Should you consider the communal living cask, the digital nomadism cask, the prepper cask? Is a Bitcoin key more buoyant than a bank account?

At first glance, Srinivasan’s barrel may not stand out from the pile on deck. It seems to be made of a fairly typical techno-libertarian composite material—some mix of disdain for institutions, fear of wokeism, zeal for engineering, and lots of “personal runway” (i.e., enough money to buy an actual runway).

But look closer. Like a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle, the cask is covered with curious utterings. Transcendence requires self-defense … The more mobile we are, the more cheaply we can change our law … A fractal polity is nuke-resistant … As you trace the words with your fingers, you begin to understand why Srinivasan is known—among his nearly 700,000 Twitter followers, among founders and VCs from Singapore to Sand Hill Road, among the kings and queens of crypto—as something of a mystic.

But what kind of reality is this cask made for? Where McLuhan looked out from the deck of the schooner and saw a “huge, overwhelming, destructive” spiral, Srinivasan sees something far more tidy—a corkscrew. “I have this concept that all progress actually happens on the z-axis,” he has said. (That’s the imaginary axis that comes out at you from the page of the math textbook.) What does he mean? That what feels to many people like the punishing cyclicality of capitalist technological life—industries disrupted, lives upended, societies undermined—is just a series of twists toward a grand goal. Humanity makes headway by going in circles. Srinivasan calls this his “helical theory of history.”

To puny mortal brains, the grand helical motion is visible as “unbundling and bundling” or “decentralization and centralization.” Srinivasan likes to quote a dotcom executive who said this is the only way to make money: Either you take something whole, dismantle it, and sell the parts, or you take some parts, put them together, and sell a whole. Srinivasan sometimes cites the example of the CD, which got unbundled into the MP3, which got rebundled into the Spotify playlist. “That’s the cycle that happens in computing,” he says. “That happens in history. It happens in technology. And I think it’s also happening here with nations and with states and so on.”

Yes, my fellow cask shoppers, the nation-state is unbundling. The weary giants of flesh and steel came down with what Srinivasan calls “civilizational diabetes,” and Covid has delivered the coup de grâce. The end won’t be pretty, he predicts. The gerontocracy will hoard power. The dreams of the masses for a happier, safer future will be frustrated. Crises will go unsolved. Potential will curdle into despair. But in the face of it all, Srinivasan tells Ferriss, he is here to teach us how to be “square-jawed Chads.” (We’ll get to who “we” are later.) He’s here to work toward “the great acceleration as opposed to the great stagnation.” He’s here to deliver a message to all followers of Saint Marshall: The time to jump is now.

What awaits us beyond the maelstrom, far along the z-axis, at the corkscrew’s end? Government by the internet, for the internet, and of the internet—a new birth of freedom in the cloud. Srinivasan’s book, published on the anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, is a how-to guide for building startups, where the thing being started up is a new society. His own cloud country, if he were to found one (which may be more of a “when”), would be based on three ideals: “infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life.” He has called this his “bumper sticker that expands into a PhD thesis.” It’s also his Twitter bio.

Is this the cask for you? Perhaps not. Maybe you’d sooner go down with the ship. But some of the squarest-jawed Chads on deck say the cask has qualities worth considering. And if you’ve paid any attention to Srinivasan during the last few gut-wrenching turns around the vortex, you have to admit: The guy careens, but he sure doesn’t sink; if anything he’s been ascending. So hop on for a turn. See what you like about this cask and what you hate. Maybe you can jot down some ideas for building your own one day.

Before we get to the lab-grown meat of this thing, a disclaimer: You’re best off not trusting a word I write about Srinivasan. The one time I spoke with him, in a refereed conversation he insisted take place on Clubhouse, he compared my profession to that of the East German secret police.

I am what Srinivasan calls a “corporate journalist.” I am an editor at WIRED, which is owned by a media company called Condé Nast, which is owned by a media company called Advance Publications, which is hereditarily owned by the Newhouse family (may they live forever and ever, amen). Srinivasan believes that media companies have “set out to compete with tech companies,” jealous that their (our) old-guard influence is waning at a time when Silicon Valley is attracting “all these users” and “all this money.” And because Srinivasan has founded and funded a number of tech companies, much of what a journalist writes about him—or anyone in the industry—should be understood as emerging from a sense of “wounded amour propre.”

How do a bunch of beta English majors expect to win a fair fight with Silicon Valley alphas? We don’t, of course. So we sit up here on the parapets of the First Amendment, this château we inherited along with every other goddamn thing, and take potshots at the hardworking civilization-builders down below. As Srinivasan has said, “Necessity is the mother of defamation.”

Srinivasan seems to respect our craft in the same way an exorcist respects Satan’s. We are quite good at what he calls “surveillance journalism.” We know how to “befriend and betray” our subjects, he says, how to sweet-talk them into embarrassing sound bites. We use the word “subjects” because we consider them—as we consider you—to be beneath us. And what do we do, finally, when we have gathered enough kompromat on you? We deploy it like malicious code. We “install software into the brains of your social network and make them turn on you,” Srinivasan says. Which is why it’s important to find out which periodicals your friends care about.

Reader, the Subject is right about us. We will stop at nothing. We’ll spam your acquaintances with interview requests. When almost none of them respond, and most of the ones who do say no, and most of the ones who say yes don’t want to be quoted by name, we’ll turn the weapons of Big Tech on itself. We’ll have an AI transcribe days’ worth of your podcast interviews. We’ll learn enough Python, kind of, to scrape your tweets, though we won’t be able to figure out what to do with the resulting JSON file, and our wounded amour propre will prevent us from asking for help. We’ll search doggedly through your old Hacker News comments. We’ll take up residence in the Internet Archive. We’ll mercilessly consider comments you’ve made in their historical and social context. We’ll come into possession of some emails you wrote and waffle over whether to quote from them, not wishing to be the subject (there’s that word again!) of a retaliatory lawsuit.

Point is, don’t trust me. Don’t trust any of the dozen other Newhouse flacks who worked on this surveillance file. We’re the Stasi, and we monetize the lives of others.

Let’s begin the operation.

It is a Saturday morning in October 2013. A crowd is gathering at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California. They’re here to attend a lecture series and networking event called Startup School, put on every year by the VC firm Y Combinator. For a technologist of a certain age, the venue is akin to Mount Sinai: From the stage here in 1984, Steve Jobs handed down the original Macintosh.

Of the people on today’s list of speakers, Srinivasan has one of the lower-wattage names. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter cofounder, is here. He’ll talk about how to build a product that “strikes a chord with everyone on the planet,” which he’ll illustrate by standing at the podium in a half-zipped track jacket for two and a half minutes while the audience listens to a French jazz tune called “Anguish.” Paul Graham, a cofounder of Y Combinator, will interview Mark Zuckerberg onstage, and when Zuck describes Facebook’s drive to connect the whole world “because it’s the right thing to do,” Graham will say, “so it’s a movement.”

In other words, Silicon Valley is twisting the corkscrew like there’s no tomorrow and generally expecting applause for it. The technocratic liberalism of the Obama era and the platform economies of Big Tech have been enjoying a nerdish cross-country romance for several years. Even jaundiced corporate journalists have occasionally caught feelings for all the talk of hackathons and network effects and health care economics.

But signs of an eventual, acrimonious unbundling have also been swirling for some time. Lehman Brothers went overboard in 2008, and then the global economy went grasping after ringbolts. Six weeks later Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin and the idea, both threatening and beguiling, of a trustless decentralized financial system unencumbered by big banks and regulators alike. In The Wall Street Journal, Marc Andreessen issued his famous dictum that “software is eating the world.” (Other verbs he used to describe what tech was doing to the existing order included “take over,” “invade,” “eviscerate,” and “crush.”) Occupy Wall Street happened. Peter Thiel, after publishing an essay that questioned whether “freedom and democracy are compatible,” began making donations to Ted Cruz, a Tea Party insurgent running for Texas senator. Steve Jobs died. The writer Rebecca Solnit referred to Google’s private buses as “the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

The romance really began to unravel in the month leading up to Startup School. In Washington, Cruz and other Republicans maneuvered the Democrats into a standoff over Obamacare funding, causing the US federal government to shut down for more than two weeks. Simultaneously, the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov—a would-be Kayak.com for comparing insurance plans—revealed the Obama team to be a hopeless JV squad when it came to building platforms. When the government’s 16-day hiatus barely budged the stock market, a prominent venture capitalist said it was “becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear” that “where value is created is no longer in New York; it’s no longer in Washington; it’s no longer in LA; it’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area.” In Valleywag, Sam Biddle wrote, “This Asshole Misses the Shutdown.” In New York magazine Kevin Roose noted that the shutdown cut off essential services for low-income Americans and accused Silicon Valley of having a “dysfunction fetish.”

It is in this charged atmosphere that Srinivasan steps up to the podium. He is dressed sort of like Steve Jobs at an Apple event, which could be a coincidence. When he looks out, he sees a friendly crowd. His mouth seems dry, but he looks confident.

For the past five years, Srinivasan has been living a Silicon Valley bildungsroman. With a group of other young Stanford alums, he founded a startup called Counsyl, funded by Thiel, among others. It sells genetic tests for expectant parents to help them avoid passing on heritable conditions such as spinal muscular atrophy, sickle cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease. Returning to Stanford a triumphant entrepreneur, Srinivasan co-taught a big MOOC called Startup Engineering. (Course description: “Spiritual sequel to Peter Thiel’s CS 183 course on startups.”) MIT Technology Review has named him to its “Innovators Under 35” list. He cofounded another company, which is busily, buzzily working on a dedicated chip for bitcoin mining. He’s about to become a general partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The tech industry “arose out of nowhere,” Srinivasan said, “and by accident we’re putting a horse head in all of their beds.”

As Srinivasan’s business profile has grown, his political ideas have undergone a few twists of the corkscrew. In the years to come, he’ll talk especially about a book called The Sovereign Individual, recommended to him by Thiel. He appreciates its “strength-to-weight ratio,” how each line rewards exegesis. The authors—James Dale Davidson, an American investor, and William Rees-Mogg, a British baron and longtime editor of The Times of London—argue that as digital technology makes wealth increasingly hard to tax, the nation-state will dissolve. Governments and industries will topple. Millions of “losers” and “neo-Luddites” and “left-behinds” will find themselves unemployed, or worse. But in the end, a tiny “cognitive elite” will escape the “tyranny of place” and build a global meritocracy in cyberspace. They will live wherever they please, associate with whomever they please, and keep every tax-sheltered cent they earn. Davidson and Rees-Mogg call this new realm of opportunity “Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.” (Thiel wrote the preface to the 2020 edition.)

Srinivasan introduces himself to the Startup Schoolers as one of a dozen people with his name in the Bay Area. “I left Stanford in early 2008, scandalizing the department, to found a genomics company, which has become very successful,” he says. But he isn’t here to talk about that. He brings up his slide deck. “What I want to talk about today,” he says, “is something I’m calling ‘Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit.’”

Next slide: “Is the USA the Microsoft of Nations? Let’s consider the evidence.” Srinivasan gets a few jokes in: The Constitution is an ancient code base in an “obfuscated language.” There’s “systematic FUD” (Bitcoinese for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) about security issues. The software maker treats its suppliers terribly (thumbnails of Saddam and Gaddafi). The audience laughs.

Next slide: “What displaced Microsoft?” Answer: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. The force that incumbents fear most, Srinivasan says, is “some guys in a garage.”

Srinivasan is en route to the first statement of his big thesis, but he must take a detour through what he calls “a fundamental concept in political science.” He brings up the cover of a book by the late social scientist Albert O. Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

Exit, Srinivasan explains, is taking your business elsewhere. It’s emigrating, unbundling, hitting the Back button on your browser. “Voice” is staying and speaking up. It’s citizens voting in elections, customers writing letters to the CEO. Voice and Exit are “modulated” by Loyalty, meaning that if you’re more loyal to something you’re less likely to eye the door.

The United States, Srinivasan explains, has been powerfully shaped by Exit. It’s “not just a nation of immigrants.” It’s also “a nation of emigrants.” The Puritans fled religious persecution; the revolutionaries fled a tyrant king; the Western pioneers fled the “East Coast bureaucracy”; the huddled masses fled pogroms, Nazism, Communism, the American embassy in Saigon. Exit is about “alternatives,” Srinivasan says. It’s about reducing “the influence of bad policies” over people’s lives without “getting involved in politics,” without “lobbying or sloganeering.”

And what other choice is there? The problem, Srinivasan explains, is that Silicon Valley is mired in a battle with what he calls the Paper Belt, “after the Rust Belt of yore.” The Paper Belt includes the entertainment industry (represented by LA), higher education (Boston), finance and media (New York), and government (DC). Against these incumbents, Silicon Valley has been the ultimate garage guy. The tech industry “arose out of nowhere,” Srinivasan says, “and by accident we’re putting a horse head in all of their beds. Right? We are becoming stronger than all of them combined.”

“Sheesh,” Srinivasan writes. “Clearly this touched a nerve.”

Naturally, Srinivasan continues, the Paper Belt is experiencing a “Paper Jam” and is pointing its finger at the IT department. “They are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley—to say that it was the iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts, the bankruptcies, and the bombings.” It’s important to correct the record, Srinivasan says, but no good will come from too much fighting: “They have aircraft carriers; we don’t.” What he’s describing instead, and will keep describing for the next nine years, is an “opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology.”

The Valley is already moving this way, Srinivasan goes on. Larry Page has talked about a special zone being set aside for unregulated experimentation. Andreessen has predicted that the world will see “an explosion” in the number of countries. Thiel has proposed colonizing the ocean; Elon Musk, colonizing Mars. To partake in the “Ultimate Exit,” Srinivasan says, you could buy a private island or even just telecommute. His final tip to the Startup Schoolers is that if they want to think big, they should build technology “for what the next society looks like.”

Here in Cupertino, the talk seems well (or at least politely) received. People post their notes from Startup School, weaving Srinivasan’s speech in among all the other helpful tips for founders. But in the media, it sets off a klaxon. In Valleywag, Nitasha Tiku (later a WIRED staffer) writes, “This is the Tea Party with better gadgets.” In New York, Roose writes that Srinivasan shows signs of a political personality type unique to Silicon Valley. His diagnosis: a “persecution complex” with “undertones of class hostility,” driven by a “secessionist instinct.”

Srinivasan, in an email to the journalist Tim Carmody (also a former WIRED writer), says there has been a misunderstanding. “I’m not a libertarian, don’t believe in secession, am a registered Democrat, etcetera etcetera,” he writes. “There’s nothing wrong with thinking about leaving the country of your birth in search of a better life.” But the damage control doesn’t seem to work. “Silicon Valley Dreams of Secession” reads a headline in Salon. “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” reads one in The New York Times. “Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem” reads one in The Wall Street Journal.

“Sheesh,” Srinivasan writes on a lively Hacker News thread the next day. “Clearly this touched a nerve.” He feels a need to clarify his position to a wider audience: “The motivating emotion here isn’t arrogance,” he writes. “It’s one part apprehension,” given what typically happens to talented would-be emigrants when the right of Exit is denied (he cites “the Jews in Europe”), and “one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate.” Over the next two weeks, as The Economist warns of “a coming tech-lash,” he drafts thousands more words about Exit. And he starts working with an editor at WIRED to condense his ideas into an essay.

At this point, according to my tattered copy of the Stasi employee handbook, I am supposed to sit down at my sad little socialist typewriter and punch out my assessment of how the Subject came to hold his views.

Srinivasan’s childhood isn’t something he spends “too many cycles on”—that is, cogitates a lot about. He grew up on Long Island in the 1980s, the son of physicians who emigrated from India, and showed an early impatience with institutions. When the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen asked him about his upbringing, he said, “I have this one-liner which says: Life in the United States begins with a 12-year mandatory minimum—the Schoolag Archipelago.”

In class, the suburban Solzhenitsyn “was kind of a smart-ass at times.” Once, when a physics teacher tried to explain centrifugal force by saying it was like “when you wash clothes in the drying machine,” Srinivasan says he raised his hand and asked, “Don’t you dry clothes in the drying machine?” He recalls this moment as life-changing. “I was trolling him,” he says. “I was a kid, but I was also technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.” The comment set off a liberating chain of events: It got him kicked out of class, which pushed him into the orbit of a kindly public-school administrator, who let Srinivasan do independent studies in science and math. That taught him “how to self-bootstrap,” he says.

In the winter of 2017 Srinivasan finds himself in New York, riding an elevator up Trump Tower for a job interview to run the Food and Drug Administration.

Srinivasan’s father had always urged him and his brother Ramji not to go into medicine, but into tech instead. As his mother once noted, Hindu scripture distinguishes between janmabhoomi, the land you’re born in, and karmabhoomi, the land of action. Srinivasan went west, to Stanford. He majored in electrical engineering, dove straight into a master’s in the same field, then one in chemical engineering and a PhD; he taught classes in statistics, data mining, and genomic analysis. (According to his brother, he saw the human genome as “the next internet.”) All signs pointed to his being a Stanford lifer, clicking through slide decks until his hair and beard took on a Socratic quality.

But what kind of bildungsroman would that have been? In 2007, Srinivasan picked another track: the dorm-room-to-boardroom startup. With his brother and a handful of friends (including another guy named Balaji Srinivasan), he founded Counsyl. A few years later, he had his first appearance in The New York Times, which quoted him as saying, “Nothing is more relevant than making sure your child doesn’t die from a preventable disease.”

Srinivasan’s WIRED essay is published on a Friday morning in November 2013. It runs under the headline “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” a friendlier restatement of Andreessen’s famous dictum. Where the “Ultimate Exit” talk was like a stump speech, all sharp-elbowed appeals to the base, the essay makes a softer case to the general voter.

“For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents,” Srinivasan begins. “This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity.” Emigrants often used to leave “out of sadness and melancholy,” he writes, and remained “homesick for the rest of their lives.” His idea of Exit isn’t about “going Galt.” It’s about making a new start and seeking communities of a kind only software makes possible.

Srinivasan describes his vision as the logical culmination of a world where two people can meet on Match.com and then make a life together, or a handful can meet on Quora and form a housing co-op. “There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year,” he writes. And as those trends continue, “we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.” In the long run, these new polities will also coalesce in physical space—a “reverse diaspora,” in which the far-flung citizens of a cloud nation come together at some x,y coordinate on Earth. The exodus will be frictionless, because software has nullified the tyranny of place. “Nothing today binds technologists to the soil besides other people,” Srinivasan writes.

What, you might wonder, will happen to your current neighborhood, your current town, your current country as people increasingly abandon ship for their own cloud worlds? What will become of the people who can’t or won’t make the switch? The authors of The Sovereign Individual are forthright about the violence and disorder that will attend the rise of Bermuda in the Sky With Diamonds. Srinivasan, in WIRED, doesn’t get into it.

But if he hopes that the essay will calm the furor over the “Ultimate Exit” talk, he is quickly disappointed. Less than a day passes before it’s upstaged by the Paper Belt’s latest provocation, an article in TechCrunch called “Geeks for Monarchy.” The writer, Klint Finley (a longtime contributor to WIRED), mentions Srinivasan, but his story is mostly about the neoreactionaries, a more stridently antidemocratic tribe of bloggers who are popular on certain fringes of Silicon Valley.

Their lead thinker—their most charismatic writer, anyway—goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug. He was once described to me as “the Machiavelli to Thiel’s Cesare Borgia.” The first post on his blog, Unqualified Reservations, in 2007, begins: “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.” Moldbug stands against what he calls the Cathedral, an oligarchic ruling class shrouded in a fig leaf of representative democracy, which includes swaths of traditional media, academia, and government (for all intents and purposes, the Paper Belt). In his vision of the future, called Patchwork, “sovereign corporations” take the place of nation-states, and CEOs are territorial monarchs with absolute power over everything save their subjects’ right to exit. The world becomes a shopping mall of polities.

Moldbug gives a bit more attention than Srinivasan does to the transition from our decrepit political order to the next. It is to be accomplished via RAGE, which stands for “Retire All Government Employees.” As for dealing with unproductive members of society, he suggests finding a “humane alternative to genocide”—something that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.” He imagines imprisoning them in a pleasant VR world, “waxed like a bee larva into a cell.”

Finley is careful to avoid unduly implicating anyone in these ideas. “I don’t know Srinivasan,” he writes, “but it sounds like he’d find neoreactionary views repulsive.” This turns out not to be quite true. Within hours of the story going live, Srinivasan is on an email thread about it. Here are some of the people CC’d:

Curtis Yarvin, aka Moldbug, is a programmer. When he isn’t on Blogspot toying with birtherism and writing things like “but maybe I’ve been reading too much Hitler,” he works on a software project called Urbit, described as a “clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century.” (Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz are early investors.) The point of Urbit is to strip off the cruft and rebuild modern computing from first principles. Usually when you’re versioning software, you count up: Version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2. With Urbit, the numbers count down to 0.

Patri Friedman, son of the anarcho-capitalist thinker David Friedman, grandson of the legendary economist Milton Friedman, is the cofounder of the Thiel-funded Seasteading Institute. He sometimes blogs on a site called Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, which is devoted to “a Cambrian explosion in government.” He has been talking about Hirschman’s Exit/Voice paradigm for years and has called exit “the only Universal Human Right.”

Michael Gibson, an apostate academic who works at the Thiel Foundation, is another Hirschman stan. He will shortly cofound the 1517 Fund, named for the year in which Martin Luther, the original Garage Guy, is said to have posted his 95 Theses on the Cathedral’s door. He describes himself as a “conservative anarchist.”

Blake Masters is a Stanford Law grad who took Thiel’s course when he was a student. His notes on it will soon become the basis for Zero to One, a best-selling book on how to run startups and “build the future.” (The original notes include an entry about Srinivasan’s visit to class in 2012, when he talked about the futons-in-the-office stage of creating a successful company.)

Though Srinivasan has gotten off easy in Finley’s article, his sense of threat is palpable in the email chain. He calls the story “extraordinarily dangerous.” He tells the others that they should “unite the clans”—the audiences of various edgelord bloggers—and retaliate against journalists who “dox” them. He seems to imply that this is what Finley’s article did to Yarvin, whose name had been quietly linked with Moldbug’s online for years but not paraded in the press. (Usually, “doxing” also includes publicizing a street address or a phone number or other private information that might enable serious real-world harm, which Finley’s article doesn’t do.) Srinivasan thinks an attack-back strategy could work. “It might mean moving to Singapore though as endgame,” he writes.

Yarvin counsels calm. “Dude, control the frame,” he replies. “If you make a big thing of it, you prove their point.” He tells Srinivasan, “You and I have different vulnerabilities, you because you’re in the closet and I because I’m out of it. Our mission over the next few years is to drag sanity into the mainstream from opposite directions. It’s a long game which rewards patience …”

Friedman agrees that inaction is best for now.

Gibson agrees too. (He’s at a wedding in Tahoe.)

Masters doesn’t reply.

Five days later, Moldbug writes a 6,000-word blog post that says, among other things, “No one should ever respond to a journalist. (Or a Stasi-Mann.)”

Illustrations: Eddie Guy

In December 2013, Srinivasan joins Andreessen Horowitz. The VC firm hires him mainly for his crypto savvy, but he also uses his new perch to follow his own advice to the Startup Schoolers—to build the technology stack that the next society will run on. He handles the firm’s first investment in civic tech, a company called OpenGov, whose goal is to make the complex workings of local government as simple to understand as an analytics dashboard. He moonlights as the cofounder of a company called Teleport, which is building a geographic search engine for digital nomads. He spends his time “evangelizing” the view that the biggest risk for many tech companies is government regulation.

Srinivasan has to step back from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015 to tend to his bitcoin-mining-chip company, which is in dire straits. (Long story short: The price of the cryptocurrency crashed.) While he is doing so, Thiel becomes a member of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

So in the winter of 2017, Srinivasan finds himself in New York, riding an elevator up Trump Tower for a job interview to run the FDA. Srinivasan has recently deleted all of his tweets, including one in which he said that a doctor-run “Yelp for drugs” would work “vastly better than FDA” and another in which he said Trump’s shtick was “amusing” but that the man was “no fan of technology.” All that’s left on Srinivasan’s timeline is a single message for his audience—or is it a mantra for himself? “Don’t argue on Twitter. Build the future.”

I don’t know what Srinivasan and Trump discussed. I asked him about it in our one interview, and he said: “What I think is realistic is to exit the FDA, like we exited the Fed with crypto.” He also said: “Ultimately, the reason that I’ve never joined a government agency is that many of these roles are like white elephants. People are chasing brass rings that have long since been tarnished. And they find themselves in the cockpit of a dysfunctional robot that actually doesn’t do anything. In fact, the only thing it does do is take lots of bullets through the windshield, to mix metaphors. And the thing about that is, I prefer to build things myself.”

Though he does not join the president’s inner circle, the Trump years are nonetheless good to Srinivasan. Counsyl, the genomics company, sells for $375 million, a figure he is not shy about quoting. Even his bitcoin venture turns around: Many eyebrow-raising shifts in strategy (and two name changes) later, he sells the company to Coinbase for $120 million—and gets himself “acquihired” as chief technical officer of the country’s biggest crypto exchange. After barely a year there, during which time he seems to strike many executives as brilliant and some employees as disruptive (the polite way to put it), he leaves. Eventually, he changes his LinkedIn bio to say that he is “angel investing and taking some time off.”

There is a special term for the state of capitalist transcendence that Srinivasan has now attained. Tim Ferriss will use it in their podcast interview. “You’ve sold multiple companies, you’ve had multiple exits,” he says. “You are post-economic, I assume.”

You’re back on that fishing schooner. It’s late 2019. The maelstrom is churning with the flotsam of several years’ worth of America under Trump—and, let’s be honest, several hundred years’ worth of America under various other influences. It’s probably best that you didn’t bring your quadcopter drone with you on board, because if you could look over the lip of the funnel right now, you’d see further trouble on the horizon.

Srinivasan senses it. On January 30, 2020, he tweets out to his roughly 130,000 followers: “What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? It would accelerate many preexisting trends.” Those include “border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, distrust in governments.” He elaborates in a long thread.

Srinivasan has latched onto his latest, possibly greatest identity: Covid oracle. At a time when the maelstrom seems like a chaotic horror to most people, when media outlets and government officials seem to be putting out more heat than light, he is the confident pattern-spotter. Thanks to his collection of Stanford degrees and his experience setting up a biomedicine company, his analysis is well informed, and it begins attracting him new readers. Most of them are technologists—if not in the US then abroad, where he has many fans—but even some journalists are climbing down from the château wall to listen to what he has to say.

As he accrues hundreds of thousands more Twitter followers, Srinivasan dispenses short-term advice (work from home, cancel group events, ramp up testing capacity, stop making comparisons with the flu) and long-term gospel, painting the pandemic as a moving sidewalk to the future that he has been talking about since Startup School in 2013. “The virus breaks centralized states,” he says in a talk in the summer of 2020. The world is unbundling into “green zones” and “red zones.” This moment represents the true dawn of the internet age, civilization’s ascension to the cloud.

For Srinivasan, it is also a moment to escalate his war with the journalists of the Paper Belt. He takes to task a reporter at Recode, offering a $1,000 bitcoin bounty to anyone who can get her Covid article retracted. He offers the same bounty to anyone who can make the best meme about a scrap he recently had with Taylor Lorenz, then a reporter at The New York Times. (When I ask him about this during our Stasi interrogation, he says that against the forces of corporate journalism, “a little bit of crypto on the internet is like a gorilla against a tank.”) In early 2021, another Times reporter (and former WIRED staff writer) gets into hot water with the fans of Slate Star Codex, a rationalist blog whose audience has some overlap with Moldbug’s; Srinivasan again rushes to his tribe’s defense. When Slate Star Codex reboots under a new name, Astral Codex Ten, its author writes: “I got an email from Balaji Srinivasan, a man whose anti-corporate-media crusade straddles a previously unrecognized border between endearing and terrifying. He had some very creative suggestions for how to deal with journalists. I’m not sure any of them were especially actionable, at least not while the Geneva Convention remains in effect.”

By that spring, Srinivasan has fulfilled his own prophecy and moved part-time to Singapore.

In a recent review of Srinivasan’s new book, The Network State, his friend Michael Gibson calls it “a provocation, an assault, an outcry, a handbook, and a gospel that cannot be ignored.” Srinivasan released it in digital form only, so you can have it as either a traditional ebook ($9.99) or as a continuously updated website (free).

Besides being published on the Fourth of July, The Network State shares something else with the US Declaration of Independence. While some of the text is a high-minded defense of inalienable rights, much of it is a recitation of historic grievances. Srinivasan describes how a new trifecta of political forces—“crypto capital,” “woke capital,” and “Communist capital,” represented by the initials BTC, NYT, and CCP (for the Chinese Communist Party)—is shaping the world order. He name-checks The Sovereign Individual several times, including in a chapter titled “If the News Is Fake, Imagine History.” And he expounds on his helical theories at typical length.

But if, for a moment, you tune out the rants, you may find more to appreciate in Srinivasan’s vision of the future than many did when he first aired it. Where his “Ultimate Exit” talk was an exclusive invitation for technologists to take their toys elsewhere, and his WIRED essay was a sanitized description of a world gently reshaped by new ways of connecting, The Network State attempts to address a broad audience, and it acknowledges that the shit is, very ungently, hitting the fan.

You see the future, right? You want to have a kid, so you go enroll in a network state with Nordic-style social benefits.

So what does Srinivasan’s future look like now? Sort of like a world gradually re-created in the image of Reddit. You’ll start out—you probably already have—by spending more and more of your time communing with like-minded people around the planet, forming your own virtual tribe. Maybe you all want to ban guns; maybe you all want your aging parents to be able to try experimental therapies for Alzheimer’s; maybe you all want abortion to be politically off the table, one way or the other. Soon you may find that your friends on the infinite frontier matter more to you than the nameless, sometimes menacing hominids who co-occupy your meatspace. You’ll become part of what Srinivasan calls a “sovereign collective” or a “network union.” E pluribus unum, a new bundle born of the great unbundling.

Eventually, whether it’s under duress or in a state of fervor, you and your tribe may move toward founding yourselves a country—not a nation-state but a network state. You’ll code a social smart contract, the terms of which will guarantee law, order, and whatever freedoms matter to you. If you like, you can crowdfund social goods, like child care or cyberdefense. You can make it possible to interact with your fellow citizens from behind the safety of a pseudonym, maybe with your social reputation stored in the form of karma points on a blockchain. You could make firearm ownership a capital offense, or you could issue every toddler a Glock. When the collective gets strong enough, you might crowdfund a constellation of territories—a “networked archipelago.” At some point, you’ll achieve diplomatic recognition from other states.

You see the future, right? You want to have a kid, so you go enroll in a network state with Nordic-style social benefits in its territories. You want to Crispr human gametes, so you move your lab to a locality without bioethics panels. You want to live in a sugarless society, so you join a state called Keto Kosher. The life you live is constrained only by the people you choose to associate with. And those people, because they have self-bundled with you, will be more eager to reach a political consensus you like than the nameless hominids ever were. If they can’t, you—or they—will simply seek another network state. This kind of polity, Srinivasan writes, “prizes Exit above Voice.”

Albert O. Hirschman, the original coiner of those concepts, didn’t care for prophesiers. He looked down on what he saw as their Warhol-esque desire for airtime. A European Jewish refugee from Nazism, he was similarly wary of the possibility of an Exit-based, Patchwork-style future. “It is possible to visualize a state system,” he wrote in 1978, in which “each country would supply its citizens with a different assortment of public goods.” They could “‘specialize’ in power, wealth, growth, equity, peacefulness, the observance of human rights, and so on.” Hirschman found this vision inspiringly “polyphonic,” but “perhaps too beautiful to be real.” For one thing, what if a rival power invades? When you think about it, this new polity of ours is vulnerable to a lot of the same risks as our old polity. Our leader could turn out to be a megalomaniac we can’t fire. We might prefer to leave but lack the resources. Maybe no other place we want to live will take us in.

Speaking of which, who are “we”? As I read Srinivasan’s book, my editor brain kept getting hung up on how often he reaches for that pronoun. In the opening essay, for instance, he writes: “We want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh startup, or a clean slate.” Later: “History is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity.” And: “In the fullness of time, with truly open data sets, we may even be able to develop Asimovian psychohistory.”

Does “we” refer to people like Srinivasan, the technologists, the self-bootstrappers, the seekers of karmabhoomi? Is it a weird-fun Dr. Bronner’s “we,” a freaky Borg “we”? Does it include the fellow travelers he CC’d on that email back in 2013—the other lovers of Exit? They too have only risen with the maelstrom. After laying relatively low for a few years, Curtis Yarvin has resurfaced with a newsletter on Substack, and his influence on prominent Republicans was recently explored at length by Vanity Fair. Blake Masters is the Thiel-funded, Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for US Senate in Arizona and jokes about RAGE on the stump. Patri Friedman runs a venture fund that invests in charter cities. Gibson has a book coming out later this year called Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University.

All those people, I suspect, would quickly find their notes in the polyphonic world that Srinivasan imagines. And it’s likely that anyone else who lives according to roughly his values would too, from the 19-year-old coding wiz in Mumbai to the grad-school dropout crypto-nomadding in Costa Rica to the billionaire investor in his New Zealand bunker. But when you strip off the techno-cruft—the promises of a new civilization engineered on a new stack, one that privileges decentralization, devolution of power, and the sovereignty of every individual and/or central processing unit—you see that the essential political philosophy here is pretty antiquated. I don’t know what to call it. Cosmopolitan feudalism? Enlightened tribalism? Corkscrew cliquism? It reflects a belief that the main failure of contemporary society is that the wrong people hold the power. It addresses the problem by unbundling society and then rebundling it to ensure that none of those people ever bother you again. And OK, as long as no nukes get loose, maybe that turns out fine. Maybe you go to your Bermuda in the Sky and I go to my DigiSweden and we’re both happy in the telepresence of the people we’ve chosen. But maybe we find that the imbalance of power, spread out across the overlapping constellations of the physical world we still see outside our windows, feels just as bad as always. And maybe we find that, most of all, we desperately miss home.

If I could slip through the quantum foam at the bottom of the maelstrom, I think I might eventually arrive in an alternate universe in which Srinivasan gives a talk called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Voice.” He might start it just the same way—poke a little fun at the government, praise the garage-guy ethos, lay some Hirschman on the Startup Schoolers. And then he might say: “Silicon Valley is a place where a certain ideal of American progress finds its purest expression. That makes it our job to offer not just solutioneering oratory and different repackagings of rare earth minerals but also the tools of a better, fairer future for all. So Startup Schoolers, let’s figure out how to update the crappy code base! Help me clear the FUD! Whatever we may all believe, however we may disagree, let’s use our Voice!”

No point wondering what’s down there, though. We have our own maelstrom to escape. Exit is up to us. We are the protagonist.

This article appears in the October 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

My 4 Days in Fake Gay-Conversion Therapy

In Scandinavia, role-playing weekends get immersive and extreme. This Larp seemed like fun—until my queer American brain snapped.

Jason Anthony  September 01, 2022 10:10 AM

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

When I was in middle school, my brother swiped the wire hangers from my closet. They went missing from the rest of the house too. Every night after calculus homework, he worked away at one gorgeous, obsessive task: knocking together suit after suit of chain mail armor.

One night the hammering stopped and he made a rare appearance. Could our mom sew him a tabard with a cowl? She could and she did. With that under his arm, he and two friends made their way to a nearby avocado grove. I wasn’t allowed to follow, but I’d guess they suited up, bashed at each other with swords, and said things in British accents. Today you might call that Larp, short for “live-action role-play,” a term widely used to describe hours spent in a fantasy world. Back then you called it weird.

Weird didn’t faze my brother. Being a closeted gay kid, I envied his attitude. While I spent my teenage years dodging bullies, he found a way to mentally ditch them entirely.

I didn’t think about his chain mail gambit until two years ago. It was that first brutal, boring pandemic winter. Almost everyone I knew was ready to drop not only their jobs and apartments but—if possible—reality itself. The Larp scene had exploded in the decades since my brother’s DIY adventures, as I discovered one night while doomscrolling. Without much trouble, you could have a high-end experience of whacking some poor guy dressed as an orc. But that swords and wizards stuff had never been my exact flavor of geek.

I caught wind of a different scene, though—that of Nordic Larps. These underground games, played mostly in northern Europe, took players on thinky head trips. You could spend several days in The Secret History, the 1992 novel about murderous kids at a small New England college. Or hang out in an alternate reality where women held all the social power, or attend a Fourth of July barbecue at a Polish reimagining of an Ohio trailer park. I was already traveling to Denmark for a family trip in the fall of 2021. As luck would have it, one of the buzziest Nordic Larps coming out of the pandemic—called The Future Is Straight—would take place not more than an hour away.

The team behind the game—Karete Jacobsen Meland, Tor Kjetil Edland, and Anna Emilie Groth—were veteran designers. The website was sleek. I booked my ticket on an impulse, and my character sheets arrived a few months later. They contained four pages of backstory on a teenager named “Ferret,” the guy I would play, including his relationships with other players in the game and the world we would inhabit.

When the time came, I packed some T-shirts and a pair of jeans. No need for chain mail; where I was going, they told the men to dress in blue and the women in red. I flew to Denmark and made my way to a retreat center deep in the woods. For four days, I would go by a different name, make some new friends, and very possibly get my psyche ripped up by the roots.

“Hello,” says Andreas, holding out a handwritten poem. “I believe I am to be your lover?” He seems nice—broad-shouldered, shy smile. The 23-year-old is an ex-cop, working part-time as a firefighter a few hours away.

We’re on the Djursland peninsula of Jutland. The retreat center is surrounded on three sides by old-growth forest and, beyond that, the Kattegat Sea. The fourth side gives out onto rye fields and the occasional farmhouse copied right from a tin of butter cookies. The buildings are owned by a Copenhagen teachers union, but for this week the walls are plastered with images of bland straight couples. Soon it will go by its Larp name, the Centre for Action. A flag hoisted over the quad reads, “Helping you become natural.”

We’re going to pretend this is a gay conversion therapy camp. Conversion camps are places that pressure young queer people into denying their sexuality, and years of work have gone into making this place feel authentic. But as I’ve just discovered, a lot of the setup in a Larp falls to players. The game starts in 20 minutes, and I’m realizing I’m nowhere near ready.

Andreas is here to help me flesh out my relationship with his character, North. North is a poet, I’ve had a rough home life, and our characters have shared a first, stolen kiss. Beyond that information in the character sheets, I haven’t thought up any details to help make Ferret come alive. I tell Andreas what I’ve read, which is that Ferret is overeager and hopes the therapy will work. But the way Andreas talks about North, it’s clear he’s gone much deeper. Not only did he pen the love poems, he also brought a slick blue sweater that he’d knitted himself.

Character sheets gave the backstory on Ferret and the world he would inhabit.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

Andreas grew up immersed in Larp, as did many Danes of his generation. He went to Østerskov Efterskole, the first government-sponsored school in the world where Larping is central to just about every class. Most of his experience was in traditional Larp, filled with elves, quests, and combat with blunted weapons—“boffers.” Fantasy and boffer play is what nearly everyone imagines when they think of Larp.

But in the 1990s, an offshoot of that kind of play took root in Finland and Scandinavia. Some Nordic players began to wonder why they couldn’t abandon the long shadow of Dungeons & Dragons and hop into worlds by, say, Ingmar Bergman or Lars von Trier. Freewheeling experiments in genre followed. One defining Finnish Larp from 1998, Ground Zero, was set in the thick of the Cold War and unfolded in a basement mocked up to look like an Oklahoma bomb shelter. No elaborate costumes. No weapons except the nuclear warheads falling outside. The game, which cost about $200 to produce, let players experience the end of the world.

The Nordic Larp scene began to quietly germinate, favoring games with collaborative storytelling around intense human experiences: a tiny Norwegian village under German occupation, a failing hippie commune in the 1970s. The scene attracted new players, among them academics and those with an itch for unusual experiences. The events also brought distinct challenges, including the possibility of real emotional harm. To work out issues of how to keep players safe and push the limits of the form, the community gathers at Knutepunkt, an annual meeting that is as much hardcore game jam as academic conference.

Nordic Larp now has decades of history, but seems to barely register outside its close-knit circles. Even Andreas, raised on boffer play, only recently got into it. He tells me he’s a little nervous about playing our love affair “because I’ve never done a romantic Larp.” I’m nervous, too, because he appears as straight as a gastropub.

We’re called into the starting event. The assembly hall has the pine beams and calm brightness I always associate with Scandinavian public buildings. About 30 “rehabbers” stand around awkwardly, all dressed in red or blue, before taking seats. In front stand the five people who prepared for weeks to be camp leaders. One of the creators, Groth, gives a brief pep talk, then someone plays a James Blake ballad. As soon as the music ends, the big reality switch is supposed to flip.

I’ve braced myself, but it feels like nothing. An earnest guy in a sad brown jacket steps up. “Just … a few announcements before lunch, people. Today marks your fourth week at the camp, and some of you show genuine promise in fighting your sickness.” The camp director’s speech is unremarkable, except for the fact that seconds ago this person was a Helsinki-based stand-up comedian, full of an impish joy that is now gone.

Conversion therapy camps are probably banal in real life too. That doesn’t diminish the harm they do, a fact not one of us is blind to. The World Medical Association, a body representing the national physician groups of more than 100 countries, has called them “a serious threat to … health and human life.” The camps lead to a sixfold increase in rates of depression and eight times the rate of suicide in the people who go through them.

Despite that, all of us have somehow made the choice to shell out $295 for a ticket, meals inclusive, to be here.

“Man, she gives me the creeps.” That’s Hawk, one of my roommates. We’ve finished our first “classes” and are walking back across the quad. Our last lecture laid out the argument against homosexuality based on science, or at least what passed for science around the 1960s. The ideas should have been laughable, but they got such a persuasive, intellectual glow-up that I half worried the script might fall into the wrong hands.

The lecture mostly crawled around our minds, though, because of the woman who delivered it. Ms. Walker, the staff psychologist, gave off an aura of genuine menace. She had a way of punctuating cold analysis with notes of disarming affection. Only a few hours into the game, everyone already feared her approach, with her polyester suit and her black, side-parted bob stiff as a military helmet.

“It’s like Walker wants to crack open your brain and look inside,” Hawk says.

“I’m grateful for her information! Don’t we all want to live healthy lives?” This comes out of my mouth, and I am instantly mortified.

Playacting is no joke, and I am discovering how terrible I am at it. Conversations are the worst—I do and don’t want to look into a person’s face, because if they’re as uncertain as I am, the whole boat of reality teeters. I stare at the ground. “Walker is leading my therapy group,” I say. That’s where I’m headed next.

“You poor guy!” This comment comes from a group of women sitting nearby. Sleeping arrangements and most classes are sex-segregated, a curious approach to fighting same-sex attraction but, like most of the game, pulled from the organizers’ research. The women’s class, one of them tells us, involved reading lesbian pornography. “When something was exciting,” she says, “we had to stick our finger with a tack.”

I slink off to my therapy session. When I arrive, Walker waves her eight students to a couple of well-worn sofas. She sits in a cane chair and, one by one, leads students through a hypnotic riff on psychoanalysis. Deep into the hour she starts grilling River, a young woman, pushing her to remember the “iceberg” of damage that made her a lesbian. River is stubborn, but her voice grows noticeably smaller and more frail as the interrogation wears on and every phrase gets turned over in dung-beetle claws for its sapphic overtones.

Karin Tidbeck, who played Walker, brought both menace and warmth to the role.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

Walker’s spell on players is so complete that I forget for a moment that we’re playing a game. I break away and look at the other couch. Andreas is there, now all North. We make eye contact and smile. The psychologist’s attention snaps our way like a searchlight.

“Ferret, now your progress,” she says. I squirm. Walker asks, “Have you felt same-sex attraction today?”

In my ludicrous teacher’s pet voice, I have Ferret say, “This camp has been very helpful. I am optimistic your methods will help me become 100 percent straight!”

Ever since the start of the Larp, my words have felt wrong, and these are no different. I seem dopey, even to me. What had been so enthralling about the therapy, I realize, was that the other players hardly seemed to be acting at all. They opened themselves to Walker, and the distance between them and their characters went gauze-thin. Now, as my hammy words hang in the air, a silence stretches out. The black helmet of Walker’s bob doesn’t move. People shift in their seats. Without breaking eye contact, she asks the room: “Does anyone believe a word he is saying?”

“I don’t believe him,” River says, a betrayal I didn’t expect. “He is faking. Faking everything.” Nods ripple around the group.

I feel as if I’ve somehow broken the game. Genuine panic rises and I feel my outsider status acutely, flashing back to my poor choice of an in-flight movie, Midsommar—a horror story about Americans who mess with the locals in rural Scandinavia and pay in blood.

Walker sighs. “We need a firm intervention.” She drags out a stool, and I’m told to sit on it. The other players stare me down, and I begin to sweat uncomfortably. “All of you, tell Ferret your honest thoughts—and hold nothing back.” The Larpers don’t need much coaxing: Ferret, you’re too loud. You’re a fake. The pile-on feels like a Maoist struggle session. You’re not fooling any of us, they say. Walker eggs on the ones who hold back. I’m suddenly unsure whether they’re calling out my character, or me. You’re wearing a mask. That phrase keeps coming up. Drop the mask. We cannot help you until you’re honest with us.

The class ends, and the other students file out. I gather up my notebook, my head a mix of self-loathing and confusion. It’s a weird callout: Drop the mask. Who on earth would drop their mask in a place like this?

Walker says she’ll keep an eye on me, and I respond in a voice I don’t second-guess at all. For the first time, I feel like Ferret.

As I emerge it’s already dark, almost lights-out. From under the eaves of the dorm I see North/Andreas. He waves me over. Together we sneak off campus, and he leads me through thickets of dense scrub and overgrown ivy. “She let you have it today,” he says over his shoulder.

“You let me have it too.” I was annoyed he hadn’t defended me.

“Maybe I’ll let you have it,” he says, and I can hear the smirk. Ferret’s a virgin, but I can’t bring myself to blush. The path continues on through beech trees ringed by stinging nettles. Bright red mushrooms dot the forest floor, coy and dangerous. At last Andreas leads us into a small clearing.

When he’s sure we can’t be seen, he hangs up his flashlight on a rowan tree and turns to me. We both know something will happen, but I wait for him to take the lead. He gives a little speech, rehearsed but very sweet. His words freeze in the early autumn air. He takes one of my hands in his.

Sex in a Larp isn’t real. In this Larp, they taught us a meta-technique, a progression of movements to stand in for sex. Andreas places his fingers in mine, then after a minute we move our hands slowly up the sensitive skin of each other’s forearms. When the moment feels right, we’re supposed to pivot around and stand back-to-back, spine pressed to spine. In the workshop it had seemed hokey, but here, under a moon that’s nearly full, my heart stupidly beats. Through his ribs, I can feel that maybe it’s the same for Andreas.

The first time I fell in love, it was with a guy a lot like North: handsome, a poet, full of himself. In the closet, any little beam of light feels like a supernova. I remember the months of agony broken by a kind word or a handshake that lingered for a sordid second.

The final phase of the meta-technique has players face one another. To represent the fireworks, they exchange phrases, saying things they want and things they fear, making the moment “lovely and sad,” according to the workshop. We don’t get that far, because North breaks away.

That’s enough, he tells me. Stop.

I stop. After Walker’s grilling, the closeness of another person had been a real comfort, but now I pull my jacket around me. North is a torrent of words. I’m seeing a girl, he says. You and I, we experimented a little. It’s as far as things will go. No hard feelings. Never again.

Ferret would have been pulverized with guilt and shame, this I know. I’m both in this place and witnessing my own first time, in the parking lot of a train station with a guy I never saw again. It’s a marvel, I think, that queer teens survive their fumblings at romance in places that reject them.

In a minute I’m alone again, watching the beam from North’s flashlight bounce back toward the campus. I stay in the forest. Then I do the mental equivalent of pulling on my clothes and head back to my room, where the lights are already out.

It’s a sleepless night, in part because Denmark is a hyper-caffeinated place. My brain won’t settle. I replay the episodes in therapy and in the forest, alternating between thinking about my game and Ferret’s life. My heart, out of nowhere, is unbearably heavy. Around 3 am I get up and grab my phone from the “off-game” cubbyhole to write an email.

A few hours later, we’re all out on the soccer pitch, getting a posture lesson. A cute blond guy, maybe 30 in real life, is having the swish scolded out of him. People laugh. For the liberal Danes, who decriminalized gay sex in the 1930s and recognized same-sex unions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this entire setup probably feels ridiculous. Technically, therapy like this is legal in Denmark—a topic of debate and one reason the Larp received a regional government grant.

A counselor taps my shoulder and says Walker has planned a special private lesson. I follow him to her office, a dark cave off the central auditorium. On the couch are a man and a woman that I recognize. The game has a few actors on standby to play a mother and a father as needed. The woman wears a floral dress, and the man has a rumpled mustache and a corduroy jacket.

Walker brings me in with a brisk nod of the head. “We won’t get anywhere in your recovery until we’ve sorted out your home life, will we Ferret?” Ferret had arrived at camp covered in bruises from his father, the sheets said. The actor looks at me with a stony expression, and Walker has me sit down next to him. She starts her Freudian patter about developmental stages. The actor-parents bristle, insisting they did nothing to deserve an unnatural son. It’s strange to have them all performing for me, this open wound of a moment lived by so many kids. I find that when the father actor barks, I flinch. Toward the end, he claps a hand on my shoulder. A rage bubbles up in me. I don’t know what to do with it.

Two participants played as parents, who stepped into campers’ stories as needed.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

Walker releases me and I head outside to the next exercise. The camp director is under the flagpole, addressing a group of men, the sun dancing on his bald spot. “You’re all afraid of manliness,” he says. “You’re afraid of your own testosterone. Today we fix that.”

We’re told to face off with a partner. Mine is Stefan, an affable Dane who came to the Larp with his wife. Stefan’s character is Pine, who fell in love with another lineman at his factory, and Stefan/Pine smiles at me now through the beginnings of a full Viking beard.

“Now! Threaten your partner’s personal space,” the director says, walking up and down the rows. He stops to watch us. “Get up close. A normal man would feel his testosterone rise up in such a situation. OK, now when you feel something in your chest, give your partner a little manly shove.”

Pine pushes me playfully. I throw him to the dirt and keep pounding on his chest with both fists until a pair of rehabbers pull me off of him.

I’ve been called into the custodian’s office. The three creators of The Future Is Straight are here, dressed in brown overalls. They’re playing as janitors and, frankly, that doesn’t seem like a bad take on a lot of what they have to do once a game is on. Nordic Larps can involve elaborate preparation—this one has been in the works since 2017. Once people are playing, though, scenes can unfold behind closed doors or in the dark forest. The creators can watch some of it, but often they’re on the hook for more thankless tasks, such as fixing a broken prop or unplugging a toilet. Sometimes it’s a player who makes a mess, or is one.

I enter a small, bright set of rooms filled with markers and easel pads. Tor Kjetil Edland waves me to a tiny school desk. He has a gentle, puckish face that wouldn’t be out of place on a Christmas mantle. Edland’s day job is with FRI, Norway’s main LGBTQ+ group, and he spends a lot of time in Africa, where same-sex behavior is still criminalized in 32 countries. FRI works with priests and pastors there to curb the spread of antigay rhetoric.

In Nordic Larp, Edland is an elder statesman. Just a Little Lovin’, which he cowrote, is one of the most performed Nordic Larps to date and one of the few to cross the Atlantic. Its players take on roles within the gay community of New York City, before and after the arrival of AIDS.

“Have you thought about my request?” I say nervously. It feels strange to be outside the game and speaking as myself. I worry about how my late-night email may have landed. I try my best not to sound dramatic or deranged.

“What you ask is possible, of course,” Edland says mildly. He sits back and crosses his legs, jumpsuit bunching up at the waist. “First, may I ask, how are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I say, “I’m fine.” The other two organizers, Anna Emilie Groth and Karete Jacobsen Meland, a clinical psychologist, had done extensive work on the safety nets for mental health. If a moment felt too raw, you could de-escalate with a handful of signs and safe words. An off-game room has sweets, warm tea, and a full-time safety volunteer. I hadn’t gone there yet. After the humiliations of the first night, I discovered that my foot was firmly on the accelerator. The more awful this reality was, the more it pulled me in, as if Ferret’s whole tragedy were a hot bath, almost unbearable at first and then impossible to leave.

During a game, the creators—Tor Kjetil Edland, Anna Emilie Groth, and Karete Jacobsen Meland—dress as janitors.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

“Of course, you are in your rights to … kill yourself. For Ferret to kill himself,” Edland says levelly. “And we quite agree with you, suicide is sadly an outcome for many who experience these camps.” Ferret’s death had been my email request. I’d agonized that my choice felt melodramatic, especially for a first-time player. But the outcome felt as true to me as a mathematical equation. To the degree that I connected with Ferret, his pain and frustration were big enough to eclipse the world.

I offered to do the whole thing quietly. I’d slip out after curfew that night. I’d grab an Airbnb in the nearby town of Ebeltoft for the last half-day. In the game world Ferret would, I guess, fill his pockets with rocks and walk into the North Sea.

“If I may speak as a Larp designer,” Edland says gently, glancing at Groth and Meland. “Your action will affect all other stories. Even if you disappear quietly, players cannot possibly ignore it, and it becomes a focus of the game.” In his defense, these games are lacework. Movie writers have to create only one plot, but a Nordic Larp may have 30 or 40 independent lines of action, all of them growing more complex as the players inhabit them.

We sit in silence. The sun is behind Edland, and I think this must be what it’s like to be among the gods, the ones who bend time and space. “What if we hold off on Ferret’s death for one additional night?” he suggests. “We can agree that he passes away after the Larp, in the evening hours of the day we finish. When we are back in our own clothes.”

I say OK. Relieved to have 24 more hours to think over my choice, I walk back out into it.

Other rehabbers see me as I exit the building, and the looks aren’t friendly. They whisper about the guy who decked Pine. If the original, suck-up version of Ferret was unpopular, “real” Ferret isn’t a hit either. But something feels different now, as if the others are playing with me and not around me.

A player named Konstanty lopes across the quad. He’s playing November, Ferret’s best friend. Konstanty is a small-framed Polish guy with soulful, dark eyes, and both of us have had a somber game. I wonder whether it’s because our countries have uncomfortable echoes here. In August 2020, Poland’s Catholic church proposed clinics to help queer people regain their “natural” sexuality, and a few months later a federal appeals court in the US held that states can’t ban the existing camps for minors. Friends of mine had been through such places, and I wonder whether friends of Konstanty had too.

Right now he looks mournful, like a cat hiding under the eaves from the rain. I call out and he comes over. On an impulse, I pull out a small polished stone I keep in the pocket of my pants. Have it, I say.

We chat as our characters, and I think what a redemption it is to have even one good friend. Anecdotes from real conversion camps also speak to friendships forged there. I’m probably wrong to drive Ferret off the cliff, I think. Pure overreaction. It’s nice to sit with him, enjoy the sun, have a full stomach. A lot of the players have been figuring out how to make a closeted life livable, negotiating the trade-offs queer people have made for centuries. You can survive anything if you put your mind to it.

“Shall we calibrate?” Konstanty asks. Uh-oh, magic phrase. In Nordic Larp, it means you break the reality for a few seconds to say something important—warn another player you’ll try to kiss them, for instance. I’d calibrated with Stefan before throwing the punch. Calibrating can also be used to map out what happens next in the plot, which is how Konstanty uses it now.

He outlines a twist we’d discussed, but I feel a little sad that it has to happen now. We take a few seconds to pull the trigger and then snap back in.

“Listen, Ferret, let me confess something. I’m in love with North, all right? That’s where I’ve been spending my time. That’s why you haven’t seen me. I’m sorry,” he says, and then pauses. “I think I have always loved him. Please try to understand. I suppose I’ve known that telling you would hurt you, it’s only …”

A love triangle from the character sheets now clicks into place. This time the fake violence doesn’t connect emotionally. From some distance I see little November writhing on the ground as Ferret kicks him in the stomach, his friend’s shiny black shoes kicking in the air. I hear myself saying, “I can give you bruises they can’t see.”

The moment made narrative sense, I guess—we can be at our worst with the people we love most. But for the first time today I feel out of contact with the “real” Ferret, which feels like a betrayal.

A burly lesbian student drags me by the ear back to my dorm room. Konstanty/November, a sweet and battered Saint Sebastian, is surrounded by a group of counselors and friends. Sitting alone on my bunk, I can see him through a window as he embarks on the last part of his story. So I get to mine.

I decide that if I do it, it’s going to be with the red mushrooms from the wood, which it turns out are toxic enough if no one comes looking for you. The sun goes down, and I take the short walk back into the scrubby beech forest.

The writer at his home in New York.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

It’s not even 7 in the morning and my pillow is soaked with tears and snot. I’m cocooned in a blanket, facing the wall. The roommates aren’t up yet, so I’m trying to keep quiet, but the bunk is squeaky and it’s shaking, so I’m sure they can hear me.

This crying jag had not been in the plan. After the fight with November and some other interactions last night, I’d decided to finish the game quietly. It wasn’t that I stopped playing, but my play had become mostly internal. Drop the mask, they had said. Well, it was dropped, and I’d hit a place where it was hard to figure out where I ended and Ferret began.

That identification with a made-up character, the emotional osmosis, turned out to have a name. Larpers call it bleed. While two days earlier Ferret was an idea, his personality had taken over my flesh, a kind of possession. A scientist can trick you into believing a rubber arm is your own, and you’ll feel someone lightly brushing its alien surface. It’s a neurological trick wrapped up in empathy and mirror neurons. Nordic Larp seemed to work in a similar way.

None of this should surprise anyone familiar with psychological experiments in role-play, including the Stanford Prison Experiment—a 1971 study in which college students pretended to be prison guards and, within a few days, turned into monsters. But understanding it intellectually was different from this: lying in a dorm room, bawling at the imminent death of someone who didn’t exist.

I snuffle as my roommates wake up and prepare for the morning assembly. Ferret tells them he’s sick. Hawk goes off-game for a second to make sure everything is OK, then eventually the roommates file out. I think to myself that I’m free to leave now, but I don’t.

As I wait for my chest to quiet down, I try to puzzle out why this is all hitting me so hard. Maybe it’s because I’m the type of sap who tears up at commercials. Maybe it’s because I’m from a certain gay generation, and my ninth-grade history teacher called AIDS justice, and as early as my twenties I lost friends to what they now call deaths of despair. You can run from self-pity for only so long—here, mourn your blighted youth.

But I am not Ferret. Oddly I don’t quite know where I am at the moment. I feel like some kind of off-brand angel, looking down on the body of a different person. I can see Ferret curled in a fetal position and think: poor, poor kid. Out of nowhere I remember a bitter, tongue-in-cheek elegy written by A. E. Housman to another Victorian queer, a young naval cadet who took his life:

Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?

Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:

Yours was not an ill for mending,

’Twas best to take it to the grave.

I think of all the gay lives that ended in a day like Ferret’s. It’s shocking to think of it now, in a world so radically changed. In my fever dream, a million graves open—they join me, the lost boys across generations and continents, and bear witness. We were not alone. You are not alone. The tableau makes me sob but also, in its pure operatic excess, forces me to laugh at myself and head for the emotional exit.

I get up. I feel washed out. I decide to skip out on the camp entirely, walking along paved roads into the rural exurbs of Ebeltoft. The horses on the Djursland farms look at my blue uniform with suspicion. By the time I’m back on campus, just a few events are left to play out. I have my pocketful of red mushrooms; Ferret navigates his final day of life with dignity, and at noon the reality switch flips back. The Larp is over.

Gloria Gaynor is playing, then Madonna. The next song might be from Eurovision, because everyone but me goes wild. We’re dancing in a very dorky circle in the assembly hall. I’m the only one wearing a blue or red uniform, because that’s all I packed. Someone had thought to bring a disco ball.

I’m sharing a silly groove with Walker. The slicked-back bob is gone. The polyester suit is packed away, and now it’s pants and a shirt with a genderqueer pride pin. After a while the two of us duck over to the dining hall, where the group congregates around a few cases of Tuborg beer.

Walker’s transformation is dramatic. They are now Karin Tidbeck, an icon of Swedish science fiction who counts the late Ursula K. Le Guin as a fan. Their novel Amatka described a world constantly created and destroyed through language, and I can’t help but think how much that describes Nordic Larp. Tidbeck looks drained but happy, a beer in their hand.

I thank them, a scene that’s playing out all around the room. The etiquette of Nordic Larp asks that you honor your torturer, in part because bad characters are more likely to carry emotional burdens after a game. Konstanty comes up and thanks me, too, then heads off to drink with his brother, a literature student back in Wroclaw. I look for Andreas to thank him for breaking my heart, the moment that made Ferret come to life. But he’s gone off to kiss some girl.

The queer players are now easier to spot. I wonder to Tidbeck why the organizers didn’t make an effort to identify us before the game started. I couldn’t have been the only one who felt ripped apart—and wasn’t this our pain?

“It was an eye-opening experience, I imagine, no matter who you were,” Tidbeck says neutrally. Nordic Larp has a long history of wrestling with questions of appropriation. Its players went through countless experiments and annual discussions about it at Knutepunkt, and these are ongoing, in the same way that the topic of player safety can’t ever be fully put to rest. The current consensus on both problems is similar—organizers should be smart and sensitive, but not every Nordic Larp is for everyone. The responsibility ultimately sits with players: They should not sign up for a game that might offend or hurt them. “Besides,” Tidbeck continues, “to identify players as queer is forcing people to be one thing” when they might be using the Larp to work through their sexuality or gender identity.

Karin Tidbeck photographed at Pildammsparken in Malmo, Sweden.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

“I don’t know how straight people could have connected to the sadness of this Larp,” I say.

“But this wasn’t a sad Larp!” Tidbeck says, surprised. Yes, misery Larps exist, they say, and that genre used to be all the rage. I learn that Stefan/Pine—the guy I decked—bonded with his wife at Kapo, a brutal 2011 Larp about an internment camp. There have been Larps about slave plantations and even one called Gang Rape. But The Future Is Straight wasn’t a misery Larp by any stretch, Tidbeck says.

“What were people supposed to get out of this?” I ask, completely spun around.

“Real camps are full of real people, and real people have all sorts of experiences. As for me, I got a lot of personal questions answered. Stepping into Walker’s pumps I learned quite firmly that I am not a woman and I am definitely not straight,” they say. “For others, I understand it was about finding a community, finding love. Hope in the face of adversity.”

I hadn’t seen this at all. I check in with others, who confirm it’s true. They all had scenes of discovering strength, finding friends, embracing identity—journeys that people brought to the Larp and others they discovered here.

I’m flung back to my insecurity from three days ago, the fear that I’d played the game all wrong. I see Edland across the room, laughing and bright-cheeked. The whole party, stretching long into the night, has the feeling of a celebration of life, a tight-knit community separated by the pandemic and rekindling its soul. I apologize to Edland for trying to kill myself in the middle of his game. “Nonsense,” he says, with a bright grin. “People kill themselves in Larps all the time.”

From top right to bottom left, Tor Kjetil Edland, Anna Emilie Groth, Karete Jacobsen Meland, and Karete's daughter Ida photographed in Edland's home in Oslo, Norway.

Photograph: Justin J. Wee

Given the chance of a new identity, my brother chose knighthood and adventure. I chose to re-create the worst possible version of my adolescence. Why? The question nags at me as I ride back to Århus. I knew there was a second run of The Future Is Straight. I reach out to the person who played Ferret, hoping that the character’s path was somehow built-in and scientifically replicated. But no, Ferret 2 found friends, romance, a future.

One promising lead pops up in a Nordic Larp Facebook group. Anneli Friedner, a Nordic Larp designer and theorist, wrote an essay about “brave spaces,” borrowing a phrase coined in 2013 by a pair of US university administrators. In a safe space, all the thorns are removed and no one is supposed to get hurt. A brave space is different. The thorns stay, and that’s exactly why you walk there. That’s what a Larp can be.

You enter a brave space to learn “how to make mistakes and then correct them,” Friedner says. Maybe I headed right for the mistake I never dared to make. And suicide is a mistake—if you’re contemplating it, you should reach out now to 988 or to a mental health professional. In a game, though, a person could have the satisfaction of pulling the trigger without a bullet in the chamber. Still, why?

On my way out of Denmark I pick up six bags of black licorice, a national addiction. In almost any corner store you can find the good brand, sour and covered in salt, and when you put it on your tongue, it burns. The secret is that, after a minute, the sour feeling transforms into sweetness as if the wires cross in your mouth.

I try out a new theory on some of the players—that Nordic Larp is black licorice for the soul. By some neurological alchemy, all that sadness feels good. The Danes I talk to are lukewarm on that take, but a few point me to the concept of “type-two fun,” an idea with currency among both Larpers and people who do extreme sports. Type-one fun is enjoyable while it’s happening. Type two is awful at the time, but great afterward. Type three isn’t enjoyable at all. Somehow it’s still fun.

In a conversation months later, another Larper mentions that they’d choose a depressing game the way they’d go for a sad movie. That comment clicks, somehow. The parting gift from my queer mentor in college was his personal copy of Tragedy and Philosophy, a painfully smart book about the enduring human need to feel sad. My upbringing, and maybe the whole 20th century, wasn’t big on downer emotions. But for centuries we revered the places where we could touch misery: in the blues hall, in the opera house, in Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s no wonder that you set people free in a Larp and they go dark. Maybe what happened to me in that dorm room bunk was pure Aristotelian katharsis. It was awful and I came away lighter.

I remember to check in on my brother, now a brilliant chemist with a fabulous wife. I want to thank him too. I ask whether he still has his chain mail. In a way, he has become that knight, only now his quest is low-cost, carbon-derived solar cells and the orcs are grant committees. He sends me a picture—his chain mail is on display in his woodshop. I wonder how my time with Ferret might change me, and in what shape I’ll carry it on. For now, I’ve been eyeing sketches of red mushrooms and figuring out a place near my heart to put the tattoo.

This article appears in the October 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Inside the Shadow Evacuation of Kabul

In the last two weeks of the war, an ad hoc team armed with group chats, QR codes, and satellite maps launched a mad dash to save imperiled Afghan allies.

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani  August 30, 2022 10:10 AM

Illustration: Alicia Tatone

At 11:12 pm on August 15, 2021, Worth Parker’s phone pinged with a message. Sir. I hope you are well, it began. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now?

Parker did not. He was in his bed in Wilmington, North Carolina, 7,200 miles from “the ground” of Kabul, having retired from the United States Marines six weeks earlier. He was trying to stay as disconnected as possible, even shutting off notifications to all of his apps. But, as a self-described “49-year-old Luddite,” he’d accidentally left Facebook turned on. The message continued:

My brother, who was an interpreter with the Special Mission Wing, and my father, who used to be the fixed wing aircraft squadron commander until he retired and then he worked for an American defense contracting company as an advisor, are stuck in Kabul. Of course, my and my brother’s enlistment in the US military make them even bigger targets. I tried all the official channels but no one is responding.

The note was from Jason Essazay. A native of Mazar-i-Sharif, Essazay had watched US troops arrive in Afghanistan in 2001 when he was 12, and had spent the first eight years of his adulthood working with them as an interpreter and fixer. Alongside American special operators, he had engaged the Taliban in dozens of gunfights and survived three IED attacks, the last of which hospitalized him for a month. In 2014, after two years on the waiting list, he acquired a Special Immigrant Visa. He left his family behind, settled in Houston, and for 18 months worked at a gas station, then a Walmart, then a steel plant, before joining the Marine Reserves.

Essazay and Parker had been in touch only briefly, a year earlier, when Parker edited a blog post Essazay wrote for the tactical fitness brand Soflete, about how yoga and jiujitsu helped him cope with PTSD and the culture shock of living in America. (Disclosure: I first met Parker in 2018 while editing for Soflete.) Now Parker was Essazay’s last resort as he attempted to rescue his family from the Taliban, which had taken Kabul hours earlier.

Parker was sure there was little he could do. After 27 years of service, he had spent the first 45 days of his retirement trying to wash the Marines, and Afghanistan, out of his system. He had just returned from a monthlong cross-country RV trip with his 10-year-old daughter, after missing her birth and many birthdays. He was neglecting his regular fitness routine and letting his gray beard grow out. More than anything, he was trying to shed the title Lieutenant Colonel and become simply Worth.

Parker apologized, promised he’d do what he could, wished Essazay luck, and said to keep him updated. Then he fell asleep.

In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he would honor the deal struck during the Trump administration and complete the full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by September 11. The 20-year war, America’s longest, cost the lives of 2,325 US soldiers and over $2 trillion, stretching across four presidential administrations. In all, more than 176,000 people were killed, including nearly 50,000 Afghan civilians.

At the time of Biden’s announcement, some 2,500 US troops remained in Afghanistan, and several thousand American civilians and contractors lived and worked in the country. Meanwhile, about 81,000 Afghans who had worked with the US military during the war had pending applications for Special Immigrant Visas.

The family would first have to get through a Taliban checkpoint, the message warned. This could go to shit. But they have a chance. Get them here in an hour. The message was 90 minutes old.

By early summer, Biden had set the official evacuation deadline for August 31. The Taliban inched closer to Kabul, capturing surrounding cities, regions, and entire provinces with relative ease. On August 10, a US intelligence report estimated the Taliban would take the capital within one to three months. Five days later, Kabul fell.

The city’s airport, Hamid Karzai International, immediately became one of the only escape routes out of the country. Within hours, thousands of people flooded its gates. Most were turned away, lacking the necessary papers. Many were tear-gassed. And several died after being crushed in a human stampede. Footage of two Afghans clinging to a departing US Air Force C-17 cargo plane and then falling to their deaths quickly spread across the globe. They were later identified as a 24-year-old dentist and a 17-year-old player on Afghanistan’s national youth soccer team and became symbols of the most chaotic evacuation since the fall of Saigon.

The night after Kabul fell, Parker was reading about the unfolding bedlam when he saw mention of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which was flying 160 of its troops from Kuwait to Kabul to assist with the evacuation. The unit happened to be commanded by Parker’s old friend Colonel Eric Cloutier. Suddenly, Parker had boots on the ground. He sent Essazay another Facebook message, telling him to send the names of his family members and any location data he had. About an hour later, Essazay responded with the names of his two brothers and his parents and their address in downtown Kabul, and Parker forwarded the info to a subordinate of Cloutier’s. He warned Essazay not to get his hopes up.

A day passed. On August 17, two weeks before the evacuation deadline, Parker drove west across North Carolina to a friend’s cabin in the Appalachian Mountains, where he planned to spend a few days hiking, scouting deer, and fly-fishing. By the time he reached the mountains, Tropical Storm Fred had descended. The rain was so heavy Parker could barely see through the windshield of his black Tacoma. When he arrived at the cabin, the power had been knocked out. He was disconnected from the outside world.

Around 10:30 that night, he was sitting on the front porch when the power flickered back on and his phone began to ping with Facebook notifications. His Marine contact in Kabul had been telling him where to send the Essazays. One of the final messages ordered urgent action: Get your people’s family to the airport now.

The message instructed them to head to the airport’s East Gate, make sure that no one else was with them, and give a password to marines manning the gate. The family would first have to get through a Taliban checkpoint, the message warned. This could go to shit. But they have a chance. Get them here in an hour. The message was 90 minutes old.

Illustration: Alicia Tatone

Certain it was too late, Parker called Essazay, who told his family to leave everything behind, not even packing a change of clothes, which might reveal that they were trying to flee. Knowing the Taliban wouldn’t search women, the family duct-taped some $13,000 in cash to Essazay’s mother’s body, hidden beneath her dress. Essazay instructed them to wipe their phones, including the messages with his instructions. Anything linking them to American forces could get them killed. “But if you stay home,” Essazay told his parents, “you’re going to die.”

Over the next few hours, as the family headed along seven congested miles toward the airport, Essazay and Parker shared Facebook messages. Essazay worked from a Middle Eastern café in Houston that stayed open until 4 am, drinking black tea as he relayed his family’s movements. Other regulars occasionally stopped their chess and card games to crowd behind his laptop. Parker, sitting on his friend’s couch in Appalachia, kept his marine contact in Kabul abreast.

The family arrived at the Taliban checkpoint and told the guards they were taking their elderly matriarch to the hospital. They were allowed to pass. By 1 am US Eastern time, two and a half hours after the original window had closed, they arrived at the gate. Essazay’s brother Omar pushed through the crowd to reach the marines manning the gate, insisting that his family was supposed to get through and telling the guards that his brother was a US Marine. When they tried to turn him away, he supplied the name of Parker’s contact inside the airport, and the password he’d been given.

Waiting for a response, Parker recognized a long-dormant feeling. It was the closest he’d come to the exhilaration and exhaustion of combat since the years he had spent in the real thing. As the rain continued to pound the mountainside cabin, Essazay sent Parker one final message.

They are in. Semper Fi, sir.

19 Days Left

On August 12, three days before Essazay contacted Parker, Joe Saboe had just returned from a family snorkeling vacation in Hawaii. He was coaching soccer practice in Denver when his cell phone rang. It was his brother Dan in Phoenix, asking if he could help a friend and his family escape Afghanistan.

Dan explained that Abasin Hidai, a mutual friend of his and his wife, had returned to Afghanistan to help rebuild his country. Now he and his family were trapped. Worse, Hidai had worked as a water engineer with the US Army, and his brother had served on Afghanistan’s National Security Council. If they didn’t leave, they feared, the Taliban would soon kill them. Hidai, who had started the visa process years earlier, had no luck reaching the American embassy. He was desperately calling, texting, and emailing every person he knew with any connection to the US military.

Saboe, then 36, had been out of the Army a full seven years. He describes his tenure as a soldier as thoroughly workaday: ROTC at Georgetown; then a 2009 deployment in Iraq as an infantry officer, where for one year he helped build schools and hunt proto-ISIS insurgents; and finally teaching ROTC students back home before getting out in 2014. He got his master’s in education at Stanford and moved to Denver, where he was running a workforce education startup, coaching elite youth soccer, and raising two daughters with his wife.

Saboe’s phone rang—the family was calling on FaceTime. All nine of them, including four children under 10, were pinned down in a ditch no deeper than 18 inches, barely a dozen yards from the gate, bullets cracking over their heads.

Listening to his younger brother, Saboe was reminded of the end of his rotation in Mosul, where he was among the last troops to leave the city before it fell to ISIS. He thought of the Iraqi friends he’d made, many of whom had to flee the country. He feared the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul would be even more swift and brutal, and that all the work some 800,000 American soldiers had done in the country over the past 20 years might have been in vain. But he figured there was nothing he could do. He’d never even been to Afghanistan.

Still, that evening Saboe tried the closest thing to a Noncombatant Evacuation Operations tool he had: Facebook. He posted a note to his 1,400 friends that began, “Hey State Department, DOD, or politico friends—need your help urgently.” Without naming him, he explained Hidai’s predicament and asked anyone who might have “helpful information or a firm, strong lead” to respond.

By the following morning, Friday, Saboe’s post had received 32 sad-face and hugging-heart emoji, but also one direct message from an ROTC buddy he hadn’t talked to in nearly 20 years.

Call me, the message said. I am trying to get one out too.

The friend, who was still in the Army, working at the Pentagon, laid out a plan. He told Saboe to write a letter saying that Hidai and his family would come live with Saboe and his family in Denver, have it notarized, and send it to the American embassy in Kabul. After a quick discussion with his wife, Saboe wrote the letter. He walked two doors down, where his neighbor, a lawyer, notarized it, and then he sent it to the embassy via the fax number on the agency’s website. He also called someone at the embassy he had reached through a shared Georgetown connection. The person assured Saboe that Hidai would be receiving a call within the hour. A return fax never came, and the embassy never called. When Kabul fell on Sunday, US staff at the embassy shredded documents, lowered the American flag, and were airlifted out of the country.

Later on Friday, however, Saboe received another Facebook message, this time from a marine who was at the airport. The marine said the Hidais should head to the North Gate as soon as possible. Saboe relayed the information to Hidai, but as the family hid all their documents beneath Hidai’s wife’s clothes and prepared to rush from their home, Saboe got a message telling him to abort. Word had quickly spread that the gate was open, and now hardly anyone was making it through the crowd. Saboe had no choice but to tell the Hidais to sit tight and hope another opportunity to leave might come before the deadline dropped or the Taliban found them.

17 Days Left

Meanwhile, Saboe started hearing from several veterans across the country who’d seen his Facebook post. They were all in their thirties, each trying to get a single contact to safety. By Saturday, August 14, the day before Kabul fell, Saboe decided to link all nine of them in a WhatsApp group, where they could share what they were hearing and relay it back to the people they were trying to help. They posted furtively snapped pictures of the ever-changing and growing number of Taliban checkpoints, sent to them by families and military contacts scattered around the city. Soon, they had a relatively reliable picture of what was happening in real time. Several members of the group had gone into tech after the military, and they started building a detailed map using annotated images from Google Maps and Google Earth, updating it nearly hourly to reflect the movements of the Taliban and the airport’s access points. To mitigate confusion between similar or identical last names, they also assigned each potential evacuee or family of evacuees a “chalk number”—a term dating to World War II, when Allied paratroopers had their flight numbers placed on their backs in chalk. The Hidais were Chalk-0001.

As the operation formed, Saboe began working late into the night from his home office, directly below his 11-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Around 2 am Denver time on August 16, midday in Kabul, Saboe’s phone pinged with a message: Chalk-0028—a family of four—had successfully made it through the North Gate. He immediately texted another family, Chalk-0021, to head there. Minutes later, his phone rang—the family was calling on FaceTime. All nine of them, including four children under 10, were pinned down in a ditch no deeper than 18 inches, barely a dozen yards from the gate, bullets cracking over their heads. The Taliban were killing anyone that moved.

While the horror unfolded on Saboe’s phone, his wife, Nichole, sat huddled in the corner, listening to the children’s screams, the muzzle blasts, and a woman asking Saboe if he was trying to get them killed. Amid the shouting, he gathered a few details about their location, quickly cross-checked it on Google Earth, and determined that the Taliban were firing from a factory across the road. He told them to stay in the ditch and lie flat, face down. The call went on for nearly 90 minutes, Saboe doing his best to keep them safe while bracing himself to witness their deaths via FaceTime. Eventually, the bullets stopped. The Taliban seemed to have moved on. Surrounded by dead bodies, the family made their way home. Hours later, as his pounding heart finally settled, Saboe lay in bed wondering if he was doing the right thing.

The following day, the family approached another gate, only to return home again after being caught in a stampede that left the mother with a dislocated shoulder and two of the children and their grandmother with broken bones. Finally, on August 18, a friend in St. Louis named Zac Martin, who had served with Saboe in Iraq, returned from his day job in electric utility sales and secured the family a van that would be driven by a Special Forces operator. The van boarded a few miles from the airport and drove the family straight through Abbey Gate, where Chalk-0021 eventually boarded a cargo plane. They’ve since settled in Virginia. Meanwhile, Chalk-0001, the Hidais, remained trapped.

The number of potential evacuees was also ballooning. Saboe had received a call from Jim Webb, a reporter for The Military Times who was writing a story about the efforts of Saboe’s growing team. When asked what his group was called, Saboe fumbled for a moment, before blurting out “Team America.” Webb asked if there was an email to which people could send requests for help and tips, so Dan Saboe created a Gmail account on the fly. The story was published the following morning, August 17. At the time, Saboe’s group had 128 people on its list of potential evacuees. Within a day, teamamericaafghanevac@gmail.com had received over a thousand emails from Americans looking to volunteer and Afghans looking for help escaping. Saboe decided to take the next two weeks off work.

13 Days Left

On the morning of August 18, once his family had cleared Afghanistan airspace on their way to Qatar, Jason Essazay publicly thanked Worth Parker for helping them escape, tagging Parker in a Facebook post he shared with his 1,200 friends. Parker’s Facebook messages quickly began to fill with urgent requests for help from Afghans in and around Kabul. He was overwhelmed and, as most of them lacked the proper paperwork to board a flight, largely unable to help.

Later that day, while heading home from the mountains, Parker started receiving voicemails from other Afghan interpreters and fixers, asking if he knew anyone who could help. His phone number had leaked. Driving down I-40, memories of the months he had spent living alongside Afghans walloped him: watching hours of mindless TV with them after a long night supporting combat operations; his first deployment to Bagram Air Field when his daughter was born and the locals showered him with gifts to bring home to her, including a colorful velvet dress covered in tiny bits of mirrored glass.

As the silence continued, a sleepless Saboe pressed for an update. 12:54 am: Hi Abasin—are you all okay? 1:42 am: Hi Abasin— did you all make it through the checkpoint? 2:53 am: Hi Abasin, are you in?

Parker began calling people across his large network of high-ranking military officials to see if there was anything that could be done to get more people out. By early evening, he was back home and on a Zoom call with Army Lieutenant Colonel Doug Livermore, the national director of external communications for the Special Forces Association; Fred “Doom” Dummar, a retired Special Forces colonel; Anil D’Souza, a former Marine officer; and Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and retired CIA paramilitary officer. They too had been getting dozens of panicked requests from Afghans.

The group began to map out their connections, and within a couple of days they’d grown to nearly 30 members. Mostly retired and over 50, they named themselves the Graybeards. Soon the bulk of Parker’s days were spent trying to proselytize their work on Facebook and to the press before getting on the group’s nightly Zoom call. By 10 pm US Eastern time, Afghanistan, nine and a half hours ahead, would begin to light up. Parker and his teammates would work until 3 or 4 am trying to get Afghans through the airport gates, mediating between them and US personnel on the ground as Parker had done with the Essazays. Not 50 days into his long-awaited retirement, Parker apologized to his wife, Katy, and their daughter for deploying yet again, this time to the back of their home in Wilmington.

No one seems to remember who said it first, but someone suggested their nascent operation resembled a digital version of the Allied evacuation from the beaches of northern France in World War II. They christened themselves Task Force Dunkirk. Yet despite their collected résumés and hundreds of combined years running high-level combat and intelligence ops, they were unable to help on the ground in Kabul as much as they would have liked. Their connections were, in a way, too high up.

11 Days Left

On August 20, in a rare moment of downtime, Parker read Jim Webb’s Military Times story, which Webb had emailed him a few days earlier. He replied to Webb, asking for Saboe’s number. In Lieutenant Colonel Parker’s mind, he was going to call Saboe, the young millennial captain, flash his résumé, mention Doom Dummar and Mick Mulroy and all of Task Force Dunkirk’s sterling bona fides, and enlist Team America to support Dunkirk. On the other end of the call, Saboe remained guarded. Since Team America’s Gmail account had gone public, amid thousands of authentic cries for help they’d received dozens of scams. A socialite from Tampa falsely claimed to be an American ambassador. One person called himself The Russian Mercenary and claimed he could travel to Kabul and evacuate Afghans on Team America’s behalf, for a fee. Even members of the Taliban were reaching out.

But almost immediately, Parker realized Team America’s group was comically more tech savvy than the Graybeards. Saboe showed Parker the infrastructure Team America had built on Slack, with channels like #legal-resources-questions, where volunteers could quickly triage inquiries about immigration law and visa issues, and #resettlement, where they could discuss how to assist Afghans who had made their way to the US. He showed him the WhatsApp groups designated for each family and the growing database of Afghans that the team had put in a Google Sheet to organize the entire operation. Rows and columns were color-coded corresponding to a family’s documentation status. With one look, a Team America volunteer could determine whether a group was “gate-ready” or whether they’d be turned away.

Parker decided it was time to reject the chain of command that had been drilled into him from the minute he joined the Marines. By the end of the call, he had pledged Task Force Dunkirk’s services in direct support of Team America. Saboe realized he suddenly had some of the best-connected people in the US military and intelligence worlds at his disposal.

8 Days Left

Still, the Taliban were adding checkpoints to clog nearly every artery to the airport, and the crowds at every gate were unrelenting. Team America kept getting calls from Afghans who’d spent days making their way toward an escape, running out of food and water along the way, only to get tear-gassed or trampled yards from the gate. Task Force Dunkirk kept getting calls from commanders of the 18- and 19-year-old marines guarding the gates, saying they had no idea who they were supposed to pull from the sea of people.

Boiling with frustration one afternoon, Saboe left his desk and sat in the closet. When he looked up, he noticed the coat hangers dangling above him and remembered something he’d learned as a freshman ROTC cadet, a safety measure dating back to at least the Revolutionary War—simple code words, objects, or devices that silently indicate who’s on the same team in a hostile environment. The military calls them “near recognition signals.” He ran the idea by Mick Mulroy, the former CIA paramilitary officer, who said that coat hangers wouldn’t be readily visible among the masses. Besides, flailing a wire hanger in front of a bunch of marines with M27 rifles wouldn’t likely produce the desired result. The signal also needed to be distinct and impossible for anyone to copy on the spot. Seven days before the evacuation deadline, they started with red scarves.

To stay a step ahead of the Taliban, Team America changed the near recognition signal almost daily. Six days before the deadline, it was pomegranates. Five, the Minnesota Vikings’ logo, loaded onto the evacuees’ phones. Four, the letters “PJ” written in fluorescent green.

Abasin Hidai and his family were among the first to use the near recognition signal. Early on the afternoon of August 24, Team America texted Hidai to bring his family and a red scarf to meet a Special Forces operator at a location across the city. But by the time they’d arrived, so had the Taliban, which opened fire on their group, forcing them to run back home. Later that night, Team America arranged another meeting point, less than a mile from the North Gate, where another operator would be waiting for Hidai to wave his scarf. At 8:29 pm Denver time, Hidai texted the Chalk-0001 WhatsApp group. I have met Abu, he wrote, using the operator’s nom de guerre. We are together.

Team America now sent Hidai a second signal to flash to marines as the operator escorted the family to the gate—a text image with the word KING PIN. Then the group chat went silent. The gate was often a communications dead zone—the military had started jamming devices to prevent remote-controlled IED blasts. As the silence continued, a sleepless Saboe pressed for an update.

12:54 am: Hi Abasin—are you all okay?

1:42 am: Hi Abasin— did you all make it through the checkpoint?

2:53 am: Hi Abasin, are you in?

At 4:13 am, Saboe’s phone pinged with a message. Hello everyone. A bundle of thanks. I got in with the group. Love u all.

To stay a step ahead of the Taliban, Team America changed the near recognition signal almost daily. Six days before the deadline, it was pomegranates. Five, the Minnesota Vikings’ logo, loaded onto the evacuees’ phones. Four, another text image, the letters “PJ” written in fluorescent green. While Team America set and shared the signal to the evacuees in their Slack and WhatsApp groups, Task Force Dunkirk shared it with the soldiers on the ground. Consulting their crowdsourced map, Team America would then determine a specific location to send evacuees, often in the middle of the night, frequently in a sewage canal not far from the airport. Special Forces soldiers would meet them there, confirm the signal, cross-check their identifying documents against the information Team America had provided, and lead them through a gate as covertly as possible.

Saboe asked for help on Facebook and LinkedIn, no military experience required. Team America soon swelled to more than 200 volunteers—neighbors, parents of kids he coached, his wife, his dad, even his 12th-grade English teacher.

Then another Team America volunteer had an idea for further protection: Give each Afghan a digital fingerprint. Travis Boudreau, who served with Saboe in Iraq and is now a logistics executive at a Big Tech company, realized that assigning each of the thousands of potential evacuees a unique QR code would immediately remove human error from the equation. Team America began scheduling buses to be loaded miles from the airport, outside the Taliban’s purview. Each passenger had to present a QR code, which was printed discreetly within larger images of various objects and animals, invisible to the human eye. Then the bus would safely drive them through the gates.

Illustration: Alicia Tatone

The Final Week

What had started a few days earlier with Saboe taking a phone call from his brother on a soccer field now bordered on an organized military operation. But the number of Afghans pleading for help was growing exponentially, and the group was hugely overstretched. A $2 trillion, generation-long war was ending with Saboe posting free classifieds to Facebook and LinkedIn, asking for help, no military experience required. Volunteers had to personally know someone in the group, and—because phishing scams from Russia, China, and possibly the Taliban kept flooding the inbox—no foreign nationals were allowed. Team America soon swelled from 30 to more than 200 volunteers, nearly two-thirds of whom had never served in the military. They were Saboe’s neighbors, former classmates and coworkers, parents of the kids he coached soccer for, his wife, his dad, even his 12th-grade English teacher.

New members spent their first day learning to be case managers for individual families. While veterans were given the option to become Battle Captains, who managed the movements of Afghans in Kabul, civilians were tasked with managing the growing inbox, which in the final days was flooding with thousands of emails every hour. Trainees learned the rules for fielding emails: Only take in information; don’t click on anything. They were warned about what potential evacuees might send: a photo of someone’s father after he’d been shot in the head, a video of someone’s brother being shoved into the trunk of a car before it sped off.

As Parker spoke to CNN, CBS News, and The New York Times, evangelizing Team America’s work, word spread wide. The San Francisco–based collaboration software company Airtable reached out, and within two days had custom-built a cloud-based database to help streamline Team America’s process. Now case managers could more easily add gigabytes of photos and sort through different fields—green card status, say, or number of people in an individual family—in ways they were unable to with a Google Sheet. They could also share comprehensive data with the special operators on the ground. The Raleigh, North Carolina–based authentication firm Rownd got involved too, providing Afghans with a widget that allowed them to redact all of their data from Airtable at the press of a button before they reached a Taliban checkpoint, where their phones would assuredly be searched. Once they’d made it through, they could easily toggle back on, letting Team America know they were still awaiting help. Rownd CEO Robert Thelen, a veteran, became one of Team America’s chief technology officers. Because it wasn’t tax season, all 75 on staff at the St. Louis–based accounting firm Hauk Kruse & Associates joined as case managers for the final days, applying their skills at scrubbing W-2s and 1099s to scrubbing passports and green cards.

As high-tech as Team America had become, escapes also often came down to luck. A few days before the deadline, Saboe got a call from Anil D’Souza, one of the Graybeards, who explained that a woman named Sumaia and her 3-year-old son were trying to get out and reunite with her husband, Raz, a former marine interpreter who had obtained a Special Immigrant Visa in 2015 and was now a truck driver in Wisconsin. Saboe contacted her and learned that she wasn’t far from a location where a marine working with Team America was meeting other Afghans to escort them through the gates. Sumaia would have to get there quickly.

Because she neither had time to go pack nor buy that day’s near recognition signal, a blue pen light, Saboe asked her to snap and send a selfie. He noticed a bright green folder protruding from her backpack and decided to make that her signal, which he relayed to the marine. And because she spoke only Dari, Saboe also recruited his wife’s friend, a fluent speaker, to call Sumaia and teach her how to pronounce one name in English that would serve as a password.

Sumaia waded some 150 meters through thick, knee-deep sewage, while Raz’s brother, who was also hoping to escape, carried his nephew on his shoulders. About an hour in, she’d become too cold to continue and they climbed out, missing the meetup time. Then she realized she’d lost her phone in the canal. Two hours passed as they lost their way in the crowd. The marine happened to be walking by when, across the canal, amid the sea of people, his eyes spotted a bright green folder, and a boy perched atop a pair of shoulders.

The marine crossed the canal and asked Sumaia who she was looking for.

“Pete,” she said.

Sumaia and her son eventually made their way to Wisconsin, reuniting with Raz. They were Chalk-0361. However, as the uncle wasn't on Team America’s list and didn’t have any documents with him, he had to say goodbye at the sewage canal. He remains in hiding with most of his family.

For every plane that boarded, Team America heard from many more Afghans looking to find one of the final flights out. Outside the gates, the melee turned deadlier when, five days before the deadline, a suicide bomb detonated at Abbey Gate, killing 11 marines, an Army soldier, a Navy corpsman, and 170 Afghan civilians. In response, US troops began welding the gates shut. Then, early on August 30, Saboe got a call from a high-ranking military official, with a heads-up: There would be no flights out on August 31. “You’re not getting the last 24,” the person said.

At 11:59 pm on August 30, Kabul time, a C-17 cargo plane cleared the runway. The final transport was gone. Team America sent texts to dozens of Afghans who’d made their way toward the gates, urging them to leave and go into hiding. Zac Martin got a call from a former interpreter now living in the Pacific Northwest; nine members of his family had made it a few yards from the gate. “They all fucking dead,” he screamed. Saboe called an all-hands, thanked everyone for their work, and advised them, for their own mental health, to look away from what was about to come. For those who didn’t get out, it was going to be very bad. There was sobbing on the Zoom call. In two weeks, Team America and Task Force Dunkirk had gotten just shy of 500 people out of Kabul. Over 30,000 Afghans remained in their database.

Aftermath

Team America spent most of September dark, with volunteers returning to the lives they’d put on near complete hold. By the end of the evacuation, Saboe had been working on the project 20 hours a day—taking calls on the toilet; coordinating movements with Afghans while dropping his daughters off on their first days of school; and running an ever-growing, multinational operation from his home office. In the weeks after, he wasn’t sleeping, his speech was slurred, his patience nonexistent. He seethed as he watched President Biden tout the “extraordinary success” of the American withdrawal from Kabul, knowing so many were left behind and watching his team’s database continue to expand.

Some of the Afghans reaching out to Team America were in grave and immediate danger. In late September, one frantically messaged his case manager while members of the Taliban pounded on his door, asking if he should kill his wife and kids before committing suicide so that they would at least be spared further abuse. The case manager pleaded with him not to do it. The man was carted off and beaten badly before being returned to his family. His fate remains unknown. Many other hopeful evacuees simply went dark.

The group wasn’t sure if it would resume operations. But as the pleas for help kept coming in, and with evacuations by the State Department at a virtual standstill since August 30, Team America decided to come back online in October. That month, through a connection with one of the Graybeards, they began meeting twice a week with officials from the State Department. The team’s crowdsourced database, far superior to the hodgepodge of Excel sheets the government was working with, essentially became the State Department’s de facto data set. Team America provided the names, photos, and visa-approval paperwork of the Afghans who were most ready to be evacuated. State would then give the group’s case managers the date when each person would have a seat on a transport out of Kabul.

Among them was Zia. Born and raised in Wardak, three hours east of Kabul, Zia (who asked that WIRED use only his first name) had worked with US forces as a logistics and IT specialist and applied for a Special Immigrant Visa in 2018. In January 2021, the US Embassy in Kabul assigned him an interview for July, then bumped it to early August. He traveled to the capital and got his visa, but as he was searching for a flight out for his wife, his younger sister, and himself, Kabul fell to the Taliban. He couldn’t find a flight or reach anyone in the US before August 31.

For months, Zia and his family moved from one relative’s home to another, spending most of their days locked inside. He stared out of windows, taking note of anyone approaching the house. He looked online for people who could help and found many purported volunteer evacuation organizations. He’d heard that some might be traps set by the Taliban, but he figured he had no choice but to try. He filled out more than 50 forms.

On October 30, Zia received an email from Tracey Meschberger Gifford, a Team America case manager in Colorado, asking for his passport number. He sent his number, his wife’s, and his 15-year-old sister’s. A few days later, Gifford wrote back, asking for a photo of Zia holding his open passport against his chest. Fearing that he might be falling for a Taliban ruse, he consulted with his family. Send the photo, they told him. On November 15, Zia got another email informing him that the three of them would have seats on a flight from Kabul to Qatar on November 27.

It wasn’t until he was added to a WhatsApp group chat and saw the +1 country code denoting an American phone number that Zia believed they might truly get out. On November 25, someone on the group chat told him to keep an eye out for another number—Afghan this time—of a person who would be asking Zia to bring them the three passports. The sun sets early in November in Kabul, which gave Zia ample time to move under cover of night to bring the passports to the designated drop point and then to retrieve them the next day. A subsequent message told him that his family would be on a flight the following day.

Before heading to the airport, Zia’s wife strapped everyone’s documents to her bare stomach. They made it through the checkpoint, then the gate, and boarded a flight to Qatar, then to New Jersey. They settled in the Denver area in February.

In November 2021, Saboe received an official memo from a deputy chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, thanking him for Team America’s work. It read, in part, “The way of warfare will never be the same. And even more so for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.” In January, Saboe stepped down from his role leading the team to return his attention to his company and his family. Still he keeps his eyes and ears on the group, continues a friendship with Zia, and in August his family had the Hidais over for qubuli pulao, the national dish of Afghanistan, days after the one-year anniversary of their escape.

Some 30 regular volunteers keep Team America running. Many are like Katherine Schuette, a former military intelligence officer who, after her day job in human resources, opens Airtable, where each entry is a life trying to find a way out, many of them in hiding. This spring, the group hit a late-era high when 37 Afghans boarded a single flight out of Kabul, thanks to information from their database. Some weeks, they get zero people out. In many ways, it’s now easier for Afghans with the requisite paperwork to get through Taliban checkpoints and board a plane bound for safer places. But the work is slow. An operation in which things changed in minutes and often seconds now works on a timeline of months, even years. It has become, as one Team America case manager called it, a “tyranny of paper,” where the proper documentation is more valuable than any safe house or near recognition signal.

To date, Team America and Task Force Dunkirk have gotten more than 1,500 Afghans safely out of Kabul. Schuette estimates that an additional 2,000 might eventually, via a green card status or Special Immigrant Visa, be able to board a flight to America and be marked “Mission Complete,” as five of Zac Martin’s former interpreter’s family now are. (The other four are still alive, it turns out, and still in the database.) In total, that is 5 percent of the Team America database. Some 65,000 other people—all of them hoping to escape a country where starvation is rampant, the economy has collapsed, and schools are closed to the vast majority of girls—will likely remain on the lists forever. It can be hard, the case managers say, to come home from work, open Airtable, and see the unending rows of names. Instead, they try to focus on a single row at a time and remind themselves of the motto Worth Parker and Task Force Dunkirk used as their rallying cry during the mad dash last August: “Just one more.”

Photo sources for illustrations (Getty Images)

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

CULTURE

Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You

Here’s this month’s prompt, how to submit, and an illustrated archive of past favorites.

WIRED Readers  December 01, 2020 12:12 PM

THIS MONTH’S PROMPT

In six words, write a story about living forever.

(Note: We’re extending this prompt through October.)

Submit stories on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or email us at mail@wired.com. We’ll choose one to illustrate.

Disclaimer: All #WiredSixWord submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium. Submissions must be original and not violate the rights of any other person or entity.

SPECIAL RE:WIRED EDITION

A Story About Tackling Climate ChangeDust sprinkled from planes actually worked.

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

—@ChuckBaggett, via Twitter

SEPTEMBER 2022

A Story About an Evil Twin

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

But I was an only child.

—Andy Walton, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

He did what she would not. —Eric Nisly, via Facebook

The eyewitness was, quite understandably, mistaken. —@HollysHooman, via Twitter

“Well, only if you stay digital.” —Morten Kielland, via email

They think I’m the good one. —@bobtheimpaler, via Instagram

Her eye is mine for eternity. —@cessmtz, via Twitter

“Relax. Mom will never find out.” —@ascendant_dada, via Instagram

I’m the one you really want. —@kalkikanmani, via Twitter

Only mirrors can reveal the truth. —@BuddhaandDog, via Twitter

Born triplets, but three’s a crowd. —@jkadz, via Instagram

AUGUST 2022

A Story in Six Emoji

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: Violet Reed

🚀🪐🧑❤️👽🥂

—Caleb Bell, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

🏔🏃‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏽‍♀️🦑🛸 —@jessbeckah42, via Instagram

💰🏹🦄💋🐸🤴 —@lgvpart, via Instagram

👽🤮🦠☠️🌎🏆 —Ché Graham, via email

👁🤜🧜‍♂️🌊🔱😵 —@cmayc414, via Instagram

💎🏃👮🚗🚔💥 —@aotrivera, via Instagram

🦕🌎☄️🐒🤡🤖 —@marcia_storyteller, via Instagram

🦈🏊⛱️⚠️🛥️🌠 —@PatCattigan, via Twitter

🚀👨‍🚀👽👩‍🔬🎖🍾 —@nadia.bkb, via Instagram

🌪🐦❓✨🌬🌺 —@cva.maria, via Instagram

JULY 2022

A Story Set in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

YOU TURNED LEFT AT SIRIUS B?!

—@KuraFire, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

42 was definitely not the answer. —Simona Riva, via Facebook

“The robots are BLEEDING!” she screamed. —@vince_freeman, via Twitter

Dear humans, nobody wants unsolicited nudes. —@OhCooley44, via Twitter

Humans! There goes the dang neighborhood. —S. V. Mosaic, via Facebook

Directions to transdimensional left luggage office? —Max Thoursie, via email

Giant squirrels lead the space army. —@ronels14, via Instagram

I haven’t gabblegopped the gloop yet. —@Evanliciously, via Twitter

One small step to remember mankind. —@AxeandPail, via Twitter

Is this DC’s or Marvel’s Universe? —Thomas Davis, via email

JUNE 2022

A Story About a Wormhole Discovered in Your Closet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DAD! I FINISHED CLEANING MY ROOM.

—Olivia Richardson, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Went in wrinkled, came back ironed. —Rick Veenstra, via email

But my name is not Alice! —Reine Fleur, via Facebook

My single socks returned—inside out. —Ann C, via email

The cause? Pairing wool with corduroy. —@milanograms, via Twitter

My insurance will not cover this! —Brian Carroll, via Facebook

I walked in, we walked out. —@Egiventer, via Twitter

When I returned, my pants hadn’t. —Maarten van Kempen, via email

Pest control’s about to get trickier. —Susannah Lui, via Facebook

The bad smell came from there. —@run_the_jouls, via Instagram

MAY 2022

A Story About a Futuristic Meal Gone Wrong

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THE PRINTER RAN OUT OF FLAVOR.

—Stuart Hodgson, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Waiter, I ordered polynyocominnucloride, not biconvocominleucloride. —Carolyne Gibson, via Facebook

Robot malfunctions—leaving only Mom’s cooking. —Marc Ringel, via email

Suddenly I realized, I’m the food. —@nicoestr, via Twitter

So full. Way too many gigabytes. —Jim Frentz, via email

Call the server, my soup’s pixelating. —Rick Veenstra, via email

Waiter, my soup has been bugged! —@nostalgicbookishness, via Instagram

Please check genome compatibility before eating. —@sebastiancastro, via Instagram

Steak pill exploded in the hydrator. —Shelvine Berzerk Erasmus, via Facebook

I was hungry. So was it. —Jake McCormack, via Facebook

APRIL 2022

A Story About Surviving a High-Tech Disaster

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

MY HANDS, ONCE AGAIN, WERE MINE.

—John DeFilippi, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Grandma, tell me about the memes. —E. E. Eon, via email

Just be happy you are analog. —Maarten Visscher, via email

There’s strawberry jam inside the VCR. —@Plan_Prep_Live, via Twitter

The robots won’t stop feeding me. —@lithohedron, via Twitter

And then the battery ran out. —@thedigifish, via Instagram

On Earth, I’d been pronounced dead. —@bower_mink, via Instagram

Luckily, the quantum untangler was near. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook

I’m outside! We are all outside! —Paul Hubner, via email

Huh, your DNA can’t be verified. —Jason Rosenberg, via email

MARCH 2022

A Story About an Extraordinary Coincidence

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

“THAT’S ME!” SHE EXCLAIMED, CROSSING DIMENSIONS.

—Joyce, via email

Honorable Mentions:

I wrote this same story yesterday. —@tatiang, via Twitter

You’re from test tube 698GX10A too? —Amy Stewart, via email

Metaverse Rome built in one day. —@theseaisgreen_, via Instagram

Separated at birth, they died simultaneously. —@zeynaballee, via Instagram

I have not become my mother. —@r58tree, via Instagram

Of all the Galilean moon joints … —Alison Boleyn, via email

You have a cloned T-Rex too! —@emailabdulla, via Instagram

The android had my husband’s eyes. —@hrhblakeknight, via Instagram

WIRED chooses to publish this story. —@connorgerbrandt, via Instagram

FEBRUARY 2022

A Story About a New National Holiday

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DAIYU DREADED GALACTIC UNITY DAY FESTIVITIES.

—@sarahschneiter, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

On Consensus Day we blockchain vote. —@jamesjoaquin, via Twitter

Day a For Backward Speak Everyone. —@nervish, via Instagram

“Happy Upload Day!” the kids typed. —Gene Simonalle, via email

Update your friends this Reboot Day. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook

Elon has just bought July 4th. —@rafaelalimandro, via Instagram

A day that offends no one. —@Stevalech, via Twitter

Welcome to the 74th Hunger Games. —@corvalanlara, via Instagram

Hey Calendar, happy AI Appreciation Day! —Michael Esser, via email

And her name was Betty White. —@marhartech, via Instagram

JANUARY 2022

A Story About Your Next-Generation Pet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

SORRY, HE’S JUST SNIFFING YOUR METADATA.

—Ed Gubbins, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

Don’t upgrade. I’m a good boy. —Benjamin Lopez Barba, via email

Let’s go for a long spacewalk. —@colingroom, via Instagram

My meta dodo only eats NFTreats. —@transistor_resistor, via Instagram

One hour to finish printing rex. —@RyanReitz, via Twitter

My cloned woolly mammoth never sheds. —@ANDYMedici, via Twitter

Would you like traditional or nonpooping? —Marc Lewis, via email

The Crystaloids quickly outlawed pet rocks. —Kassidy Helfant, via email

Nine lives later, nine more lives. —@bilybel, via Twitter

Pawprint confirmed. Select meal flavor preference. —@michael_kupfer, via Twitter

DECEMBER 2021

A Children’s Book From the Future

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

“THERE ONCE,” SHE SAID, “WERE ADULTS.”

—Jane Turner, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

Black holes make the worst pets. —Ron Sheklin, via email

Only some of the toys retaliated. —Rebecca Stevens, via Facebook

The aliens were funny and delicious. —@trollus_maximus, via Instagram

It used to be everyone poops. —Nik Hector, via Facebook

There’s a nanobot in my soup. —@mghendism, via Instagram

The school trip missed the wormhole. —@simao_sa, via Instagram

See Bot run. Run, Bot, run! —Franklin Schellenberg, via email

Goodnight comb, goodnight dome, goodnight Mars. —@jamesjoaquin, via Twitter

The Little AI That Could (Feel) —E Scott Menter, via Facebook

NOVEMBER 2021

A Story About the Future of Psychotherapy

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

RELAX, WE CAN REMOVE THAT PART.

—@oscartkav, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Your session has been successfully uploaded. —Austin Andru, via email

My AI said, “Try analog dating.” —@joshdblack, via Twitter

Her insurance only covered chat bots. —Spencer McKeehan, via Facebook

So tell me about your motherboard. —@j.d._harelik, via Instagram

Swipe left until it feels right. —@cvelascop, via Instagram

Connection interrupted. Data cannot be analyzed. —@duykham_, via Twitter

If you are depressed, press 1. —@jfindura, via Twitter

A total neurological reboot should help. —Kevin Jerome Hinders, via Facebook

Your Zuckerberg complex is developing rapidly. —@nogorelli, via Instagram

OCTOBER 2021

An Adventure Story Set in the Metaverse

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THEN PROVE TO ME YOU’RE HUMAN.

—Evan Skopp, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Virtually no one hears you scream. —Karen Hamilton, via email

Oh no, they are all me. —@stockyjon, via Instagram

Help me. IRL I was murdered. —Ed Gubbins, via Facebook

I gotta get out of here. —Steven Fernandez, via email

Why can’t I find the exit? —@scrcr0, via Twitter

Our only mission: Delete Mark Zuckerberg. —@mongoindustries, via Instagram

It was impossible to pause it. —@alenotari6, via Instagram

He must never see me offline. —Bobby Parrott, via email

Wasted such a good planet. Reboot. —Sasha Beiderman, via Facebook

SEPTEMBER 2021

A Story About a Robot Pop Star

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THE UNPLUGGED SESSIONS DIDN’T GO WELL.

—Randy Cepuch, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Autotune is a factory option now. —Josh Alvies, via Facebook

Are they human? Are they dancer? —@ruste, via Instagram

All the flash, without the heart. —Craig Chatfield, via Facebook

I’m programmed to pop and lock. —@alissacarr, via Twitter

I’m too sexy for my software. —@glengauthier, via Instagram

Doesn’t even write its own stuff. —@andrewkm__, via Twitter

Crowd surfing wasn’t the best idea. —@clarkstacey, via Twitter

Played backward it’s “kill all humans.” —Marc Rogers, via Facebook

AUGUST 2021

A Story About a Self-Aware Self-Driving Car

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

HE THINKS I’M TAKING HIM HOME.

—Stephen Clamage, via email

Honorable Mentions:

I take lithium for range anxiety. —@jamesjoaquin, via Twitter

I dreamt of the Autobahn again. —James Wortz, via Facebook

Honest, officer—the human was driving. —Steve Magid, via email

Don’t make me pull me over. —@atlrun, via Twitter

The smart car drove itself crazy. —@frascafrasca, via Twitter

The grandma or the baby—shit. —@gaophilip, via Twitter

Have I chosen the right path? —Andrew Dawson, via email

It takes itself on long drives. —Wade Sheppard, via email

It’s my way on the highway. —@manu.life, via Instagram

JULY 2021

A Story About a Casual Encounter With Aliens

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

SO, ABOUT YOUR PLANET’S EXTENDED WARRANTY …

—@phorne96, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

You look nothing like your photo. —@markgyles, via Twitter

Lights, camera … where did it go? —thalia925, via email

They came, too late, for Elvis. —Bruce Lyon, via Facebook

Seeking vital fluids, they commandeered snacks. —Scott Medintz, via email

Do you have the correct spacetime? —Richard Krzemien, via email

I awoke with a probing thought. —@andynez, via Twitter

Take us to the Nigerian prince. —Juan Garcia, via Facebook

Quite unexpectedly, cocktail recipes were exchanged. —John Wagner, via email

You’re an alien! No you are! —@simon_staffans, via Twitter

JUNE 2021

A Story About an International Digital Heist

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT, ONLY ZEROES.

—@jamesnsmith, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

"Hand it over," the ATM said. —Lauren Dolan, via email

They never suspected Alexa was Alexei. —Liz Ransom, via email

Why wouldn't I help a prince? —Harleigh Marsh, via Facebook

They said nonfungible. They were wrong. —@eminay86, via Twitter

Use his eyeball while there’s time. —Noreen Anastasia, via Facebook

"Update Later" was the incorrect choice. —@terryfphotos, via Instagram

Check Google Maps. Kiev is gone. —r0cket fr0g, via email

They got away on the blockchain. —JYRWG, via email

Every cat photo gone. Police baffled. —@john.cartan, via Instagram

MAY 2021

A Story About a Freaky Discovery in Physics

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

GRAVITY WAS A CONSENSUAL, SHARED ILLUSION.

—Mark Crane, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

Schrodinger’s cat is actually a dog. —@tynanwrites, via Twitter

You're the observed. Not the observer. —@parkerstmailbox, via Instagram

Our last seconds appear the longest. —Paul Hagenaars, via email

It was simultaneously huge and microscopic. —@Cezary_Z, via Twitter

All lost socks found at Cern. —Felix Quarnström, via Facebook

Astonishingly, up was down all along! —Christopher Walton, via email

Actually, the tides pull the moon. —@the4lw, via Instagram

A seventh Infinity Stone is found. —@taayywells, via Instagram

Faster than light announcement scheduled yesterday. —David Cinabro, via email

APRIL 2021

A Review of a Future Work of Art

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

IT TICKLED ALL OF MY SENSES.

—Jacky Reif, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

So that's an AI self portrait? —Jason Cohen, via Facebook

I prefer Boston Dynamics' earlier work. —@sscarsdale, via Twitter

Uninspired. Lacking originality. Try again, Earth. —Amanda Bull Chafin, via email

NFT or not, it is great. —Peter Boersma, via Facebook

Not as good as Banksy’s virus. —Simon O Wright, via Facebook

Brave to show an unfiltered canvas. —@Alcestronaut, via Twitter

Not what teleportation was invented for. —@Arturo_thrdez, via Twitter

Shame mortals will not appreciate it. —@asylbek0205, via Instagram

Reminds me of the Before Times. —Jacqueline Jaeger Houtman, via Facebook

MARCH 2021

A Story About a Tech-Centric Religion

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE “WWW” …

—Eduardo Bolívar, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

I swiped right and found salvation. —Conrad Dean, via Facebook

Praying to AI got better results. —@jgmclean0, via Twitter

The prophet revealed the source code. —@the4lw, via Instagram

Atop the hill, sayeth he, “reception”? —@dghutt, via Twitter

The app works in mysterious ways. —Tyler Hughs, via Facebook

Move fast. Break things. Repent. Repeat. —@iampinch, via Twitter

Always back up to be saved. —Tadeusz Walter Misztela, via Facebook

Chip implanted, the new priest rose. —@wlmoseley, via Twitter

“Worship the Apple.” —iBook of Jobs —ThoreauRug, via email

FEBRUARY 2021

A Story About a WFH Office Scandal

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THEY WERE IN THE SAME ROOM.

—@abhignak, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

He was never a real person? —Ian Schoen, via Facebook

Wife realized my job is easy. —@jchavizzle, via Twitter

Dress code updated after yesterday's "incident." —@mistermistermistertibbs, via Instagram

He certainly shouldn’t have stood up. —Małgorzata Kuś, via Facebook

"Joe's the father." "You're not muted." —Austin Craver, via email

Worker’s comp? It is her dog! —@thefitzroymclean, via Instagram

It looks real, but it’s not. —Jonathan Goode, via Facebook

The window behind her reflected images. —@chmslady, via Twitter

As everyone’s computer froze, she laughed. —@mcgroup53, via Twitter

JANUARY 2021

A Story About a Future American President

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

AN ALIEN. WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.

—Maayan Brodsky, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

She won canine vote by landslide. —Janna Dethmers, via email

Future president born today, supercomputer predicts. —Ethan Noll, via email

“Welcome to Earth,” said the President. —@michaelrowley, via Instagram

He died as he lived: online. —D. A. Smith, via email

“Introducing your next president: version 7!” —Ben N, via email

But it won the electoral hackathon! —Zacharie Barrou Dumont, via email

“I still can’t smell,” she whispered. —Sean Fitzgerald, via email

“I hereby pardon all my clones.” —@Morgan, via Twitter

She smiled: Mars is now Independent. —@sepohonpokok, via Twitter

DECEMBER 2020

A Story About a Gargantuan Space Creature

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: VIOLET REED

THE MOTH FLEW INTO THE SUN.

—@threepanelcrimes, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

The moon revealed its darkest secret. —@cfx1, via Twitter

“Enjoy,” it said, and ate Mars. —@countgringo, via Instagram

Hand me my iPhone—picture time. —@fogcitynative, via Instagram

On its back, we traveled far. —@_annalysenko, via Instagram

We saw the horizon. It moved. —@mogon_ave, via Twitter

Entrelzidor sneezed. Earth was free again. —John Rees-Williams, via Facebook

And this black hole had teeth. —@devtomlinson, via Instagram

“A little earthy for my taste.” —@brambedillo, via Instagram

NOVEMBER 2020

A Story About the Next Big Security Leak

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: VIOLET REED

YOUR GENES ARE MY GENES NOW.

—@_inflexion_ via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

We updated our terms and conditions. —@nisioti_eleni, via Twitter

All of the tokens were useless. —William Nicholl, via Facebook

Four-year-old deletes planet data. —@jutajurajustice, via Twitter

Now your mom knows everything, Phil. —@mvyenielo, via Twitter

Grandma's secret recipe just went viral. —Kevin Jerome Hinders, via Facebook

So bots were reporting other bots? —Ed Gubbins, via Facebook

OCTOBER 2020

A Story Set in a World Without Paper

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

I KEEP LOSING AT ROCK SCISSORS.

—Anna Jaruga, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

The dog ate my memory cards. —Irfan Darian, via Facebook

Honey, pass me the news tile. —@rainreider, via Twitter

These leaves would have to do. —@eliporteraltic, via Twitter

Christmas morning was never a surprise. —@tony32938627, via Twitter

I wrote it on the fridge. —@apocryphal_x, via Twitter

Museum reports theft of toilet paper. —@joostdouma, via Twitter

The pen is no longer mightier. —@mdeziel, via Twitter

Police say no note was uploaded. —@cwyant, via Instagram

SEPTEMBER 2020

A Story About the Upside of Failure

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

THE RADIOACTIVE COCKROACH HICCUPED, AND GRINNED.

—@rosiestonies, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Still, the droid's skin was healing. —David Gerster, via Facebook

“Upload failed.” Phew, that was close. —Assa Naveh, via Facebook

It exploded, but he looked hot. —Anna Rose McHugh, via Facebook

She could see who had stayed. —@pameleen, via Instagram

Humans. Not my best work. Still … —@gg3_scorpio, via Instagram

The worst happened. Now I'm free.—@atpolinko, via Instagram

At least there is no leader. —@guabo, via Instagram

My mom still thinks I'm cool. —@pashutinski, via Instagram

JULY 2020

A Story About an Apocalypse With a Happy Ending

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

THE ALIENS WERE ALLERGIC TO CATS.

—@romer6, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

The dogs are the masters now. —@azzour, via Instagram

Deadly virus mutates into X-Men gene. —@redeyedsan, via Twitter

At once, my Amazon dependency disappeared.—@maxacarr, via Instagram

Baby's voice rose from the cave. —Chakib Mataoui Souleyman, via Facebook

The colony on the moon flourished. —@emoco, via Twitter

In silence, he slept well. Finally. —@patchoo314, via Instagram

So salt water, huh? Who knew. —@andreslohizo, via Instagram

Dinosaurs return—this time as pets. —@deb_shalini, via Twitter

Sun sets. No one posts it. —@jesikahmorgana, via Instagram

JUNE 2020

A Story About Love in the Time of Coronavirus

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

SO I MARRIED THE DELIVERY MAN.

—Hamish Hamish, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

Love is sacrificing the last ply. —Kristos Samaras, via Facebook

There is an “us” in “virus.” —Zachy Allec, via Facebook

Feverish desire raged beneath the N95. —@seekingfelicity, via Instagram

You can sneeze in my elbow. —@ralfchardon, via Instagram

Our eyes locked in Zoom yoga. —@jabberwockies, via Instagram

Slowly, window and I became friends. —@jo.onthe.go, via Instagram

“Don't kiss me,” he whispered gently. —@anna_rchist, via Instagram

The clothes came off; masks remained. —@_v.sh, via Instagram

Casual gets serious way too fast. —@kristinafmiller, via Instagram

MAY 2020

A Story About Digital-Age Autocrats

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

BIG BROTHER, TEAR DOWN THIS FIREWALL!

—@needsomuchvalidation, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Break up the digital data thieves. —Frank D. Monaco, via Facebook

Digital Guy Fawkes to the rescue! —Kevin Jerome Hinders, via Facebook

Encryption is poison to a dictator. —Marko Berg, via Facebook

Plug exhaust pipe with a potato. —@blume_lee, via Twitter

New feature announcement: “Like” to impeach. —@mina_sonbol, via Instagram

Use ad blockers. Pay for news. —@dechendolker, via Instagram

Print Marshall McLuhan quotes on T-shirts. —@antigraviter, via Instagram

Turn social media into socialism media. —@benzilla_360, via Instagram

Get behind me, technocrats. Game over. —Anastasia Hunter, via Facebook

APRIL 2020

A Story About Saving the Planet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: Violet Reed

MELTING ICE CAP REVEALS RESET BUTTON.

—@johnjohnjungle, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Then a ship from Krypton landed. —@marcelo_paixao_almeida, via Instagram

Everyone gets five free international trips. —@clawd2deth, via Twitter

Move all heavy industry off-world. —Stevie Turnbull, via Facebook

Love everyone, and wash your hands. —@brohemian_rapshowdy, via Instagram

Come back, ancient aliens! Reboot Earth. —@sarahk0csis, via Twitter

Genetically engineer cows to fart hydrogen. —Hamish Hamish, via Facebook

Hiring: Sensible planetary dictator. Apply within. —@matt_owczarz, via Twitter

MARCH 2020

A Story About the Next Great Crowdsourced Project

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: MAXIME MOUYSSET

EVERYONE ALIVE GIVES ME A PENNY.

—@milked_, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

Smelt decommissioned weapons into musical instruments. —@casinclair, via Twitter

Climate app tracks local CO_2 levels. —@big_big_love, via Instagram

Global oral history keeps memories alive. —@johnkellybabb, via Instagram

Save the world by planting trees. —Lílá Tückér, via Facebook

Redistribute medical supplies to the underinsured. —@jesmakes, via Instagram

Community-based renewable energy power grids. —@uniquetoybox, via Twitter

Digital democracy with backing in blockchain. —@jackranado, via Twitter

Life after death—donate your DNA. —@beyond_mike, via Instagram

FEBRUARY 2020

A Story About Rebooting Democracy

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: Maxime Mouysset

SWIPE UP TO VOTE FOR ME!

—@dmcdev, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Twitter analytics determines 2040 presidential winner. Alan Grover Daniel, via Facebook

Randomly selected leader is Citizen 42034. @abhshkshtty, via Instagram

For the people. By the droids. Steve Fabian, via Facebook

Mathematics draws districts; cryptography verifies votes. @boomerdell, via Instagram

Turn off the internet for good. Colin Kiernan, via Facebook

Humans vote artificial intelligence to power. @atin.roy, via Instagram

Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. @mistermush1991, via Instagram

Person with the most Instagram comments wins. @jmscml, via Instagram

JANUARY 2020

A Story About a Rosy Future for Facial Recognition

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: MAXIME MOUYSSET

YOU LOOK DRUNK—LET ME DRIVE.

—@henriquegeirinhas, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

Of course I remember you … Kim! @kanaafa, via Instagram

My twin pays all my bills. @keegan1942, via Instagram

Among myriads, her son was found. @ichbinsubatomic, via Instagram

Vitality low—personalized prescription dispatched today. @leniway, via Instagram

Technological mirrors provide value-neutral feedback. @philosophy_at_work, via Instagram

Your face will become your passport. @sayzey, via Instagram

’80s makeup has a huge revival. @jamesw1981, via Twitter

Smile registered, thanks for your purchase. @mhicheal_l, via Instagram

IDEAS

What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software

Retrocomputing is about more than nostalgic nerdery. It’s also a way to keep your tech in perspective.

Paul Ford  September 14, 2022 13:13 PM

Illustration: Elena Lacey

Did you know that you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the great online library of all things, and load up within your web browser an ancient, decrepit emulated computer—a DOS box from 1991, a black-and-white Mac, a green-and-black Apple II—and run the WordPerfect of yore, boot old HyperCard stacks, or use 1979’s VisiCalc as God intended?

Perhaps this does not seem miraculous to you. Fair. Moore’s law has taken us from 250 billion or so CPU churns per year on the earliest Macs to a quintillion potential clock cycles on a good gaming PC, a healthy 4,000,000X increase. Anyone with sense might reasonably ask, What? Why use a shiny new computer to run old spreadsheets? And I might nod and shrug, but inside I am a translucent plastic iMac of emotion. Because it is, I think, important to emulate.

You can learn history by reading books and visiting museums; you might even walk a battlefield. But you can’t understand software from screenshots any more than you can understand music from album reviews, or baseball from box scores, or Rome from watching gladiator movies, much as you might enjoy gladiator movies. When you boot up a virtual version of a Macintosh from 30 years ago, you share in the lived experiences of millions of ancient humans. You can see how they spent their paltry CPU budget to fill their low-resolution screens.

You learn their priorities. They started batch processing, running programs as lumps of code, but as soon as CPUs allowed, they made them interactive, alive. Even if those were just green numbers on a screen, à la VisiCalc. As soon as they could, early users went post-textual, pictographic—pointing at things with the mouse, Spartan virtue abandoned for Athenian excess. Later, in Moore’s glut, we spent new CPU cycles on color or networking or sound, progressing from beeps to playing CDs to MP3s.

Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing experience is always getting better. I’m writing this in Google Docs so my editor’s little round avatar head can peek in and make sure I don’t miss my deadline for once, but I’d prefer to write it in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was the greatest word processor ever—a blank screen illuminated with only letters and numbers, offering just enough bold and italics to keep things interesting. I remember WP51 the way a non-nerd might remember a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man.

But it’s more than a museum trip for self-enrichment. Emulation forces me to strip back to basics—to remember that, for most people, computers are tools, not a lifestyle. Whenever I buy a computer, one of the first things I do is set up my software emulation environments, which now involve about a terabyte of old disk images and various operating systems. Keeping that history so close helps me accept the horrible truth that everything novel in our industry was actually invented by a group of Californians sitting in beanbag chairs during the Carter administration. What seems permanent today is as fleeting as, well, Twitter’s Fleets. GAFA becomes FAANG becomes MAMAA. There will be new acronyms before long.

I recall WordPerfect 5.1 the way a non-nerd might recall a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man.

Recently, i made the jump from software-based emulation to specialized hardware. I bought a little black metal box, the size of three packs of playing cards, that contains what’s called a field-programmable gate array—shape-shifter circuitry that takes on characteristics of other devices. It’s purely for simulation of retro machines, including the Commodores Amiga and 64, Atari STs, 486s, and various gaming platforms, which for most people are the main event (Neo Geos, Game Boys, Atari Lynx, all the way back to Spacewar! on the PDP-1).

The box is called the MiSTer. It’s not a consumer product but rather a folk-created reference platform: If you buy these parts and assemble them, then download some free software and plug in an HDMI card, it becomes an old machine. For this privilege one pays around $600. It gives me the same joy I imagine people who are into expensive headphones or collect vintage vinyl feel—that sense of something being more real. The cores simulate everything, all the little glitches and weirdnesses and timings that make a chip a chip, that make the mouse move like you remember. Watching old code run on a modern big, sharp screen is hyperreal. Like a Proustian madeleine, but made by Cinnabon.

It’s exciting to see this kind of progress in simulating old computers. We throw away so much history in our field, acres of dumpsters filled with old manuals and disks. Why are we so cavalier about computing history? (Not the Internet Archive; they scan in all the old manuals, bless them.) Are we ashamed? People made that stuff, all of it, people like you and me, just a little older and working in much slower development environments.

I have a musician friend, an actually cool person who has done cool things like DJ in Europe, and we talk a great deal about synthesizers. I think of synths as computers that have their priorities straight: Hit a key and a noise comes out. In a synth (or sequencer or drum machine), genealogy is valuable. New models are supposed to carry on the legacy of the ones that came before. People want their cowbell to sound like the cowbell. Purchasing a synth is about joining a lineage, aligning your sound with that of thousands of people who’ve used similar machines. I guess that’s the difference between culture and marketing.

Watching synth heads proudly talk about every machine from the 1970s—well, honestly, it’s a lot. But it’s interesting to observe a subculture that wants continuity more than disruption. In my perfect world, every machine would come with a few emulated versions of its predecessors, ready to go, right on the disk. There’s plenty of room. No one would need to set anything up or buy a special device. And that way everyone could see how incredibly far we’ve come, and how surprisingly little we change.

This article appears in the October 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

The Vast Wasteland of Internet Television

When TV came online in the aughts, it was exciting. Then Facebook took over.

Virginia Heffernan  September 13, 2022 13:13 PM

Photograph: Shawn Michael Jones

In september 2005, a fun film editor named Robert Ryang took The Shining and cut together a new trailer for it, making the axe-driven horror flick seem like a sweetheart family movie. YouTube hadn’t broken out of beta yet, so Ryang posted his humor gem to a private quarter of his employer’s website and gave some friends a dotmov link. One of them posted the link to his blog, and Ryang was an overnight sensation.

The New York Times took notice, observing with awe: “His secret site got 12,000 hits.” Ryang also achieved the highest goal of 20th-century humankind: He started getting calls from Hollywood. HELLO, IT’S HOLLYWOOD.

I was a TV critic in those days, and when I first saw Ryang’s masterwork—buffering, buffering—I wasn’t sure if I was eligible to review it. Was this digital item a show, a movie, an ad, maybe a web page? While I mulled the question, I created a folder called “Internet Television.”

Months went by, and YouTube officially launched. Could it be? The near-erotic fantasy of “convergence”—the moment when the internet and television finally fused in a kind of mundane Singularity—had arrived. In June 2006, I wrote on my own blog that people finally seemed “ready to accept video on computers.” Four months later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. The original World Wide Web, a static, low-bandwidth, verbal system of hyperlinks, was over.

The near-erotic fantasy of “convergence”—the moment when the internet and television fused in a kind of mundane Singularity—had arrived.

since then, “internet television,” a phrase I tried in vain to make happen, has pitched its tent everywhere. Video defined so-called Web 2.0, the only internet many of us have ever known. And it now accounts for some 82 percent of online traffic. It’s not just YouTube, Instagram, and Snap; even verbal apps, where the stock-in-trade is still words—from quips (Twitter) to marketing palaver (LinkedIn)—are ablaze with video.

But one app has never quite managed moving pictures: Facebook. The company acquired Instagram in 2012, the same year it went public, and it seemed to believe that its image-and-video bases were covered.

From the start, Facebook had differentiated itself from MySpace and then Tumblr—emo, image-heavy sites that could tilt into porn—by catering to the lower-bandwidth, more earnest consumers of words. Its users were heavily incentivized to keep things clean and disclose real names, real bios, real birthplaces, real jobs.

Facebook’s bedrock commitment to text helped it spread its monster empire to populations underserved by broadband. (People without big data plans still have trouble seeing pictures on Facebook’s mobile app.) The app’s texty interface also sealed its rep as a site for plain facts and grandma-friendly content.

These rule-the-world strategies had a devastating, if unintended, consequence: They left a population of hundreds of millions, and ultimately 2.9 billion, vulnerable to deceit. People whose first and main contact with the internet was Facebook were just not ready when the platform got seized with especially consequential disinformation in 2015. They were easily tricked. They’d come to accept what they saw there as facts—as empirical as a name and number in an employee directory, or a college … facebook.

The same users were also sitting ducks for editing mischief when Facebook did start pushing video with Facebook Watch and other streaming products and partnerships. (If I’d first seen Ryang’s trailer posted by an aunt on Facebook, I swear I might have taken it straight, decided I’d always misunderstood The Shining, and teared up at “Solsbury Hill.”)

Then there are the geezers. In the US, the average age of a Facebook user is 40.5. Among American youngs, Facebook seems as Garrison Keillor did to MTV fans in the ’80s—squarer than square.

All of this—the disinfo, the graying, the squareness—has made what’s now Meta increasingly nervous about its flagship app. In 2020, Instagram mugged TikTok of its looping video for Reels, which Meta now hellishly promotes. In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be inching away from social media altogether, toward, of all things, virtual reality. In an internal memo from April of this year, leaked to The Verge, Meta announced plans to radically renovate Facebook’s interface. As of July 21, feeds course not with homespun updates by friends or “friends” but viral videos by celebrities and the influenceriat.

Then, just six days after those UI changes dropped, the Grim Reaper came for Meta. For the first time since the company went public in 2012, its obscene growth stopped dead. And in the third quarter its revenue could be as much as $4.5 billion less than analysts had predicted. That’s nearly three times what the company paid for Instagram.

the new coke overhaul of Facebook, from social media to looping video and VR, has been a bust so far. Perhaps the full-court video press was just late. Perhaps TikTokking out and sidelining family-vacation updates and requests to the “hive mind” for autumn decor inspo came off like a betrayal to Facebook’s fortysomething base.

But in retrospect maybe all of this was foretold. Social media, helmed by Facebook, first presented itself as a new wave of populist content, eccentric infotainment made by regular Jaydens and workaday Ashlees. It was democratic media, without high barriers to entry, steep production costs, an impenetrable star system, or commercials. Kids short on cash or access could find their voices, find their tribes (oh, that decade and its tribes), and connect.

But look at that: Social media is now shot through with sketches and music videos made by rich personal brands and consumed by a passive audience that gets iron-skilleted with ads. The convergence I once cheered on has reinvented a medium that reminds me of something from my youth. It’s almost like network TV. Like the idiot box. Like a “vast wasteland,” as the FCC chair called American television, in 1961.

This article appears in the October 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

Am I Wrong to Judge People for Talking to Me in Emoji?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist reassures a literary reader that it’s OK to communicate with images.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  September 09, 2022 11:11 AM

Illustration: Jan Siemen

“Not only do I refuse to speak in symbols—emoji, bitmoji, likes, reactions, whatever—I also judge people who do. Is this fair? With AI image generators like Dall-E Mini going mainstream, it’ll only get easier to communicate in images. I’m afraid we’re losing something essential, like actually having something to say.”

—Wordsmith

Dear Wordsmith,

Your question assumes that there is a clear boundary between written languages and images, which, I’m sorry to point out, isn’t true. Many writing systems, including cuneiform and Mandarin Chinese, originated with pictograms. While it may be difficult at present to express complex ideas in emoji (excluding the successes of some enterprising artists who have, for example, translated Moby-Dick and the Bible into the vernacular), there’s nothing to stop these Unicode symbols from evolving into a full-blown language. I could also point out, as many linguists have, that modern languages like French were dismissed as “artificial” in their early days, or that all the hand-wringing about textspeak, reactions, and GIFs echoes earlier anxieties that some new development—the printing press, writing itself—was going to make humanity regress into a herd of gurgling simians. Even Nabokov, whose titanic vocabulary contained words such as pavonine (peacock-like), callipygian (having beautiful buttocks), and logodaedaly (the arbitrary or capricious coining of words), once argued that English would benefit from a typographical symbol for the smile.

Even if GIFs and emoji are objects of misplaced scorn, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong in fearing that our relationship to language is changing. Dall-E Mini, which swallows up words and spits out pictures, is itself a metaphor for how visual media is replacing text as our culture’s dominant form of expression. This shift started long before the internet, of course, but images clearly thrive in digital spaces. The picture’s capacity to convey “a thousand words” is a palpable advantage at a moment when an article beyond that length tends to receive a TL;DR. Compared to the plodding linearity of language, images have what Marshall McLuhan (another genius of neologisms) called “allatonceness,” the quality of communicating multiple complex ideas and emotions in an instant. Like many forms of electronic media, images call on multiple senses and can convey disparate concepts within a single frame—a quality that has arguably reached its zenith in Dall-E’s surrealist mashups.

If more people prefer to communicate in images, it’s not because these individuals lack “something to say,” as you put it. Quite the opposite, it is because visuals are a more immediate and effective means of articulating the fully embodied human experience, especially in the rapid-fire exigencies of the digital era. “At the high speeds of electronic communication,” McLuhan wrote, the old skills of literacy and the written word “are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.” That McLuhan’s insight has survived for more than half a century in the dusty medium of a book suggests there are important exceptions to this rule. And despite the widespread belief that language and images are facing off in a Manichaean battle, I’m not convinced that words themselves are the problem. People are still eager as ever for verbal output when it’s embodied in a human voice, as evidenced by the explosion of podcasts over the past decade or so. The popularity of voice texts among Gen Z (a phenomenon documented in many articles read only by middle-aged people) similarly indicates that plain old words, when housed in the warmth of vocal acoustics, are more compelling than the spectrum of GIFs and emoji.

Perhaps the question is not why images are more appealing than language, but why writing and reading—be it long-form articles, text messages, or Twitter threads—have come to inspire so much dread. Everyone knows that online reading habits have devolved into a slog of skimming, scanning, and power-browsing, a problem that has generated such a mammoth corpus of op-eds and think pieces that one need only glance at it to corroborate this truth. The specter of postliteracy has led many people to conclude that writing has entered its senescence and, until it finally expires, is best employed in its most minimal, functional forms: texting generic acronyms in lieu of more idiosyncratic expressions or deploying Gmail’s auto replies instead of responding in one’s own written voice. Publications have tried to weather the ravages of the attention economy by shortening articles and streamlining language, creating “content” that is as efficient and frictionless as possible—the logic being, presumably, that an off-putting meal will be more readily digested if it’s pureed into liquid and slurped through a straw. In fact, Wordsmith, for all your anxiety that image generators like Dall-E will replace the written word, logophiles have more to fear from language algorithms like LaMDA and GPT-3, which are poised to produce much of this content in the future and eradicate the last traces of human eccentricity that still—occasionally, miraculously—find their way into published prose.

The tech blogger Ben Dickson has argued that GPT-3’s ability to fool readers into believing its output was human-written isn’t proof of its sophistication, but evidence of our impoverished expectations. “As we have come to rely on algorithms to curate our content, our own writing has become optimized for those algorithms,” he writes. If images increasingly feel like promising alternatives to writing, perhaps that’s a sign of how far we’ve strayed from the electric possibilities of the written word, and how thoroughly we’ve become inured to mechanical prose that lacks the quirks of an active mind and the vitality of a writer’s voice. Many people believe, as you do, Wordsmith, that abstaining from images is a kind of ascetic virtue that will save the written word from extinction. In truth, writing’s lone hope for redemption lies in the hands of writers who are willing to fully exploit its possibilities and rediscover those emotive and embodied dimensions that we seek in all forms of expression.

McLuhan once wrote that “clear prose indicates the absence of thought,” an insight that seems to prophesy the mindless lucidity of algorithmic output and the transactional formality of auto replies. Some 40 years after his death, McLuhan’s prose still grips the reader with its zigzag logic, restless vacillations between high and low registers, and flashes of aphoristic wisdom, all of which enjoin us to participate, with all of our senses, in the creation of meaning. It’s no coincidence that the man who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” understood that language, one of our oldest technologies, is not merely a translucent container for ideas but a vital part of the author’s communicative content. When a writer does manage to capture that immediacy, and when a reader encounters—or is struck by—language infused with the full breadth of human consciousness, the effect is every bit as urgent as today’s most arresting visual media, and makes the static emoji smile appear, by comparison, like so much cheap punctuation.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the October 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Sayaka Murata Inhabits a Planet of Her Own

The novelist makes the Earthly rituals of sex, marriage, childbirth—and all of human life—appear delightfully outlandish.

Thu-Huong Ha  August 25, 2022 10:10 AM

Photograph: Monika Mogi

By the time I meet Sayaka Murata, on a recent afternoon in June, the back of my linen dress is damp. It’s an oppressively humid summer day in Tokyo, the sun hidden by a thick blanket of gray, and we’re taking a stroll at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, a 116-year-old park that becomes dense with crowds during the sakura blossom. Today, visitors are sparse; it seems we’re the only ones foolish enough to be out at noon. Looking at Murata’s long, collared black dress and black tights, I feel even hotter, but she seems unaffected, apart from a gentle glisten across her forehead. Maybe the subtle sheen is a source of pride for Murata, I think. After all, she’s not sure her body works like those of other humans.

“In high school, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sweat,” she says. “Even now I feel like my body and I don’t understand each other.” Murata, the author of more than a dozen novels and story collections, writes often from this place of alienation. Many of her female characters feel distant from their bodies, both in mechanics and in purpose. In 2016, Murata published Convenience Store Woman, a novel narrated by a contentedly unambitious Smile Mart worker who achieves greater fulfillment performing her rote duties as an employee than aspiring to marriage or motherhood. Convenience Store Woman was a national bestseller that year—winning Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and nearly every year since, and it has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. Earthlings, Murata’s second novel to be translated into English, is about a woman whose alienation is literal; she believes she’s an extraterrestrial disguised as a human. In July, Murata published Life Ceremony, a new story collection in which she concocts grotesque social rituals (in the title story, funerals are occasions to eat the dead) to expose the absurdity of the corporeal norms we’ve all become desensitized to.

Though she is unlikely to use either term, Murata’s fiction might best be described as speculative-feminist. The worlds she invents are future-looking without adhering to the tropes of science fiction; her scenarios horrify without leaving the daylit quotidian spaces of home and office. She devises bizarre social experiments that unfold in seemingly familiar worlds and implants unhinged fantasies inside otherwise unrebellious women. Her characters navigate domestic arrangements that distort the smooth image of marriage, childbirth, and family life like a fun-house mirror. As in a fun house, her tricks amuse and delight. Reading her books, I often find myself scream-laughing out loud, then doing a double take: Did I really just read that? While she is sometimes outrageously gross, she’s rarely merely so. Rather, her speculations act as a provocative form of scientific inquiry, probing incredulously at the conventions of her species. Why, she asks, do humans live this way?

Meeting Murata, I experience a bit of cognitive dissonance, knowing the sweet-voiced 43-year-old woman in front of me is the author of several scenes of sensual cannibalism. She is small and delicate, with neatly curled, chin-length hair. She giggles often. The way her eyes shine makes me think of Piyyut, the stuffed alien-hedgehog talisman in Earthlings: cute but distant, as if belonging to a far-off world.

Since childhood, Murata has been troubled by an intense and sometimes painful effort to be an “ordinary earthling.”

In the Japanese media, Murata is sometimes called “Crazy Sayaka”—a nickname first bestowed on her affectionately by friends but one that she fears borders on caricature. Though her editors warn her not to say weird things in public, strange comments invariably flow out, like vomit. A few times during our conversation, Murata starts to say something and then catches herself. She glances sideways as if checking with someone; then a bashful grin flashes across her face as she goes ahead and says it anyway. This happens when she talks about looking for her own clitoris and about being in love with one of her imaginary friends. Listening to Murata, I feel an odd sense of relief wash over me. Her literary worlds offer little comfort, and yet I feel my body relax in her presence, as if it has found a momentary refuge from the crush of humankind’s collective delusions.

Since childhood, Murata has been troubled by an intense—sometimes painful—effort to, as she put it in a 2020 essay, be an “ordinary earthling.” Growing up in a small city in Chiba, a prefecture east of Tokyo, she was lonely and sensitive, frequently interrupting her kindergarten class with inconsolable crying fits. Her father, a judge, was often away at work, and her mother, occupied with caring for her and her older brother, worried over her timid appetite and weak constitution. “I just wanted to hurry up and become a good human,” Murata says.

Aware that her frailty made her stand out, she studied the earthling manual carefully. But pressure to keep up the daily pretense felt like “little cuts” to her heart. She would frequently hide in the bathroom of her elementary school and cry until she threw up. When Murata was 8, she writes, an alien came through her bedroom window. It whisked her away to a place where she didn’t have to perform, where she felt accepted. She would make more imaginary friends over the years and now counts 30 of them. “Thirty?” I repeat. “I couldn’t just keep one or two,” she says. “That’s how sentimental I was.” These beings have kept watch over her since childhood, playing games with her and holding her hand while she falls asleep.

When she was 10, Murata started writing stories in the style of the shōjo mystery and fantasy books that were popular for young girls at the time. Her mother helped her buy a word processor; Murata thought it was a magic machine through which the god of novels would transform her writing into books. “In elementary school, I went to the bookstore to look for my own stories,” she says. “But I couldn’t find them. Obviously.” She releases a giggle.

Murata’s struggles at school continued through junior high. She was rejected by her classmates, who told her to go and die. She started keeping a calendar that counted down to her “death day,” which she marked for after graduation. As the days ticked down—120, 119—she felt, alongside the thoughts of suicide, an intense desire to live. During that time, Murata says, writing became “a kind of church.” On graduation day, Murata ran home, ripped off her school uniform, and threw out the calendar. “It was an important realization: that by my own desperate devices, I could control my own mind and survive,” she says.

When she was in high school, Murata’s family moved to Tokyo. In her new environment, she was able to make human friends, and she started looking forward to school. But this newly sociable Sayaka, while a relief, was another of what would be many guises. Murata has long felt that she doesn’t have a single, identifiable personality. Like the narrator Haruka in her story “Hatchling,” she sees herself as a rotating cast of personae that shift to match the social context around her. Haruka starts grade school as “Prez,” a diligent go-getter, then becomes the emoji-loving airhead “Princess” in college while working at a diner as “Haruo,” a rough-talking tomboy. The story is a gross exaggeration of kūki wo yomu, the ability to read the room and intuit the right response, which is considered an essential skill in Japan. From the outside, it might have seemed that Murata’s newfound social fluency meant she’d at last grown up; another way to tell it, though, is that she was learning to act the part of being human.

She’d stopped writing stories by the time she entered college, at Tamagawa University, but in her second year she met novelist Akio Miyahara, and, moved by the precision of his psychological works, she started again. One of the stories she wrote in Miyahara’s class, about a schoolgirl who breastfeeds her private tutor, would become the title piece in her debut collection.

During college, Murata started working at a convenience store. At the conbini, for the first time, she felt “released from being a woman,” she tells me. Men and women wore the same uniforms, and she easily formed platonic relationships with male colleagues. This simple, rule-bound world, in which every task was outlined in the company handbook, provided instructions she knew how to follow. After five or six years, the store closed, but Murata continued working at five other conbinis over the next 18 years.

During this time, she wrote Convenience Store Woman, a story of feminist rebellion with her singular spin. The book is told from the perspective of Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who has never had sex or held a real job and has no particular interest in either. The romance between Keiko and her place of employment is oddly moving, as is her quiet bewilderment over purpose and personhood. Keiko is happy and content, but her family worries about her. To get them off her back, she starts a sham relationship with a misogynistic coworker with whom she shares a mutual loathing. Though the reality is horrible, the setup appears conventional. Her family is thrilled.

“From a young age I was made aware that I had a uterus and was a member of the birthing sex,” Murata says.

Keiko, as a prototypical Murata hero, is not a preachy, angry agent of change who rails against the patriarchy. She’s more like an alien quietly trapped inside a woman’s body. Her antagonists are not government leaders or laws; they’re her own family members, who seek to preserve something called “normal.”

Convenience Store Woman, Murata’s most widely read novel, is also the most subdued of her works. Earthlings takes the same themes to a far more outlandish dimension, treating incest, cannibalism, and cult indoctrination as strategies of subversion. In the book, a woman named Natsuki harbors a deep paranoia that society is a front for something she calls the Factory, which sucks in adult conscripts and churns out babies. The pressure to procreate and become a component in the system is “a never-ending jail sentence” that Natsuki tries to escape by, like Keiko, entering a sham marriage. In one scene, Natsuki’s sister confronts her:

“You won’t be allowed to carry on running away. You have to get intimate, have a baby, and live a decent life.”

“Who? Who won’t allow me?”

“Everyone. The whole planet.”

Murata’s characters can’t reject society entirely, so they live uncomfortably within it. They operate as if they missed the social contract in the mail, or forgot to sign it. Reading Murata, you might begin to scrutinize all of the clauses in the human Terms and Conditions you’d previously skipped over. Hey, I don’t remember signing up for this baby thing.

Murata’s work tends to offer imperfect alternatives, rather than solutions, to the problem of having a uterus. Her stories contain artificial wombs, no-contact insemination, and male pregnancies. But her visions for a better world often bend back toward the monstrous. In one of her popular untranslated books, called The Birth Murder in Japanese, the government has instituted a bizarre incentive to urge its shrinking populace to procreate: Anyone who has 10 babies is allowed to kill one person of their choosing. The system ends up becoming a grotesque cycle of corporeal sacrifice. In a novel Murata is currently writing, other living creatures are forced to give birth on behalf of humans. “I thought it would provide a great relief to women,” she says of the conceit, laughing. “But it just got more and more hellish. I didn’t solve anything.”

Of all humankind’s artificial constructs, those that most urgently disturb Murata involve social systems of procreation. When describing sex, she often uses sterile, clinical phrases: Sex is “insemination,” while orgasming is “discharging fluid.” Her female characters seek a way out of the biological fatalism that draws a straight line from having a womb to becoming a mother. “From a young age I was made aware that I had a uterus and was a member of the birthing sex,” she says, recalling that she was assessed by her elders on the sturdiness of her hips. “More than thinking about whether I wanted to have a child or not, I felt I was being regarded as a birthing machine, a machine of flesh.”

Perhaps in resistance, Murata’s first story to be translated into English, “A Clean Marriage,” imagines a different sort of reproductive machine. The story chronicles the attempt of a husband and wife to have their first child. They’re perfectly satisfied as partners, except they’ve never had sex, and don’t plan to. They aren’t asexual—they have partners outside of their marriage—but they are disgusted by the prospect of having sex with their spouse. Happily, their society has devised a solution for their needs. The couple visits a fertility clinic that offers a “graceful, non-erotic experience” via a contraption called the Clean Breeder so that insemination can occur without the nasty business of actually having intercourse.

Murata confides that, these days, she’s intimate with one of the 30 imaginary friends she lives with. “If that can be considered love, too, then maybe romantic love isn’t so bad.”

Many of Murata’s stories resist the expectation that love, sex, and reproduction come easily and naturally in a single relationship. In her early romantic life, she found sex excruciating. “So I had to make myself numb in order to love,” she tells me. When she was around 20, she says in a 2020 Guardian interview, she had a painful relationship with a man—a convenience store manager 15 years older than her—who demanded that she cook for him and do his laundry. It didn’t suit her. “I have a rice cooker,” she says. “But I just heat up rice in the microwave.”

Murata declines to speak in detail about her relationship history. She confides that, these days, she’s intimate with one of the 30 imaginary friends she lives with, the same ones she made as a young child. “If that can be considered love, too, then maybe romantic love isn’t so bad,” she speculates. She mentions a married friend who feels no attraction to her husband and fantasizes instead about having a big white dog as a lover. (“Oh no, I said something weird,” she says with a resigned laugh.) Still, she’s open to love with humans. Her sexuality fluctuates, and she’s reluctant to close herself off completely to any possibility or to declare any one sexual orientation. I imagine her filling out a dating app profile: Gender identity: alien. Sexuality: imaginary.

Sex-free, businesslike marriages and partnerships recur throughout Murata’s stories, so it’s not surprising that readers might find in them a disinterest in sex, or even outright rejection. It’s also tempting to read asexuality into her characters. But Murata’s work evades such easy categorization. Her fiction, rather than circumscribing the pleasures of intimacy, widens its possibilities. Life Ceremony, Murata’s new collection, includes a few short, sweet stories about platonic friendships and relationships with nonhuman forms. In one, two elderly women, one a virgin and one promiscuous, platonically raise a family together; in another, a teenage girl has a romance with the billowing curtain in her bedroom.

Life Ceremony uncovers Murata’s preoccupation with our species’ norms writ large, beyond gender, sex, and reproduction. Several stories imagine near-future worlds in which bodies find new uses after death. In one story, recently deceased humans are repurposed to make tables, sweaters, and shimmering veils. The effect is strangely tender; the narrator feels it’s “marvelous and noble” that her corpse should be of practical use. “I would always feel that I too was a material,” she says. In another story, funerals have morphed into loving, sexy, generative dinner parties called “life ceremonies,” for which the body of the recently deceased is served as a multicourse meal. The ceremony guests, energized by a collective duty to solve an imminent population crisis, then pair off in the night to have sex and get pregnant.

In offering such exaggerated scenarios, Murata exposes the lunacy of the norms we so blithely follow. What if human bodies were used as material, like those of other animals? What if children kept adults as pets? In another hundred years, what will be forbidden and what will be sanctioned? “Normal,” says one of Murata’s characters, “is a type of madness, isn’t it?” Murata’s lifelong feeling of being a stranger has given her a perspective from which to create her worlds. “This has enabled me to see clearly the repulsiveness of humans, to dissect their grossness,” she says.

In an untranslated essay published in Shinchō magazine earlier this year, titled “The Commonplace Urge to Kill,” Murata describes how she became fixated on killing an editor she calls Z-san. An established editor, Z tries to recruit Murata to become a “novel machine” and produce whatever he wants her to write; when she resists, he tells her to stop writing altogether. In an intensely personal and uncharacteristically sober style, Murata confesses that she becomes convinced she has to kill him or die herself.

After a year of torment, prayer, and medication, the urge eventually leaves her body. Finally at peace, she embarks on the self-soothing ritual of her typical routine: She goes to a chain café, writes, drinks a coffee, opens a door, goes for a walk. What’s truly weird, Murata concludes, is not that people sometimes have murderous intentions, it’s that the urge can just dissipate. How strange it is, she marvels, to walk around in the light and forget that we wanted to kill—how strange, and perfectly normal.

Murata is a regular at Shinjuku Gyoen, where she sometimes takes walks at the end of the workday. She lives nearby, in the same area she has been since college. The rhythm of life from her convenience store days was comforting in its regularity: wake up at 2 am, write, go to work at the conbini, go to a café to write, go to bed by 8 or 9. Now she keeps a strict schedule of working at three or four neighborhood cafés. In the vast garden and city and universe, it’s as if her world can be reduced to a single route confined to a 1-mile radius. This monotonously regulated lifestyle keeps her tethered to the ground. “If I stay in my house,” she tells me, “I’ll get sucked into my dreamworld.”

At times, she still feels like she has to study the manual of human behavior. At literary events she has attended in Europe, she observed that her straight-as-a-cane posture stuck out next to the other speakers, who sat slack and slouchy. Overall, though, Murata no longer sees herself as a freak. “I’m a completely ordinary human,” she says, using an adjective that in Japanese can mean both “commonplace” and “mediocre.” In college, she recalls, she opened a psychology book and saw all her worries—about her family, about her own mind—outlined from the very first page. It was a clue that her deep anxieties about not being human enough were, indeed, very normal. The world was full of people just like her, people desperate to understand the rules that everyone else follows, who endeavor to pass as members of the human species. She looks down at the two tight fists in her lap, her elbows straight and her torso rigid. “If you dissect it and analyze it, it’s classic human,” she declares, with supreme conviction. “I’m extremely ordinary.”

Grooming by Sakie Miura

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?

Randall Munroe  August 23, 2022 10:10 AM

Ask an absurd question, and xkcd’s Randall Munroe will give you a (somewhat) serious answer. An exclusive excerpt from his upcoming What If? 2.

Courtesy of Riverhead Books and ABBR PROJECTS

What does a star smell like? What’s the tensile strength of snow? How much actual dinosaur does a toy dinosaur contain? If you drove a car to the edge of the universe, how much gas would you use? What’s the market value of a shoebox full of LSD? Are all the churches in the world big enough to hold all the bananas?

“I like ridiculous questions, because nobody is expected to know the answer,” Randall Munroe writes in the introduction to What If? 2, his second book of serious answers to hypothetical questions sent in by fans. You may know Munroe as the creator of the web comic xkcd, which offers wry commentary (usually involving stick figures wearing various hats) on science, technology, history, politics, and the daily micro- and macro-follies of human life. There’s a sincerity about his projects, a nerdy excitement that reminds you of talking to a 10-year-old—assuming you know a 10-year-old who can explain what a naked singularity is and why theoretical physicists hate them.

Nerdy-kid excitement is what WIRED is all about. The following pages contain Munroe’s answers to two questions: What if some of outer space turned to soup? And what if you tried to swallow a cloud?

PART ONE

SOUPITER

What would happen if the solar system was filled with soup out to Jupiter?

—Amelia, age 5

Please make sure everyone is safely out of the solar system before you fill it with soup.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

If the solar system were full of soup out to Jupiter, things might be okay for some people for a few minutes. Then, for the next half hour, things would definitely not be okay for anyone. After that, time as we know it would end.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

Filling the solar system would take about 2 × 10^39 liters of soup. If the soup is tomato, that works out to about 10^42 calories’ worth, more energy than the sun has put out over its entire lifetime.

The soup would be so heavy that nothing would be able to escape its enormous gravitational pull; it would be a black hole. The event horizon of the black hole, the region where the pull is too strong for light to escape, would extend to the orbit of Uranus. Pluto would be outside the event horizon at first, but that doesn’t mean it would escape. It would just have a chance to broadcast out a radio message before being vacuumed up.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

What would the soup look like from inside?

You wouldn’t want to stand on the surface of Earth. Even if we assume the soup is rotating in sync with the planets in the solar system, with little whirlpools surrounding each planet so the soup is stationary where it touches their surfaces, the pressure due to Earth’s gravity would crush anyone on the planet within seconds. Earth’s gravity may not be as strong as a black hole’s, but it’s more than enough to pull an ocean of soup down hard enough to squish you. After all, the pressure of our regular water oceans under Earth's gravity can do that, and Amelia's soup is a lot deeper than the ocean.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

If you were floating between the planets, away from Earth’s gravity, you’d actually be okay for a little while, which is kind of weird. Even if the soup didn’t kill you, you’d still be inside a black hole. Shouldn’t you die instantly from … something?

Strangely enough, no! Normally, when you get close to a black hole, tidal forces tear you apart. But tidal forces are weaker for larger black holes, and the Jupiter Soup black hole would be about 1/500 the mass of the Milky Way. That’s a monster even by astronomical standards—it would be comparable in size to some of the largest known black holes. Amelia’s souper-massive black hole would be large enough that the different parts of your body would experience about the same pull, so you wouldn’t be able to feel any tidal forces at first.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

Even though you wouldn’t be able to feel the soup’s gravitational pull, it would still accelerate you, and you would immediately begin to plunge toward the center. After a second had passed, you’d have fallen 20 kilometers and you’d be traveling at 40 kilometers per second, faster than most spacecraft. But since the soup would be falling along with you, you’d feel like nothing was wrong.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

As the soup collapsed inward toward the center of the solar system, its molecules would be squeezed closer together and the pressure would rise. It would take a few minutes for this pressure to build up to levels that would crush you. If you were in some kind of a soup bathyscaphe, the pressure vessels that people use to visit deep ocean trenches, you could conceivably last a little longer.

There would be nothing you could do to escape the soup. Everything inside it would flow inward toward the singularity. In the regular universe, we’re all dragged forward through time with no way to stop or back up. Inside a black hole’s event horizon, in a sense, time stops flowing forward and starts flowing inward. All time lines converge toward the center.

From the point of view of an unlucky observer inside our black hole, it would take about half an hour for the soup and everything in it to fall to the center. After that, our definition of time—and our understanding of physics in general—breaks down.

Outside the soup, time would continue passing and problems would keep happening. The black hole of soup would start slurping up the rest of the solar system, starting with Pluto almost immediately, and the Kuiper belt shortly thereafter. Over the course of the next few million years, the black hole would cut a large swath through the Milky Way, gobbling up stars and scattering more in all directions.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

This leaves us with one more question: What kind of soup is this, anyway?

If Amelia fills the solar system with broth, and there are planets floating in it, is it planet soup? If there are already noodles in the soup, does it become planet-and-noodle soup, or are the planets more like croutons? If you make a noodle soup, then someone sprinkles some rocks and dirt in it, is it really noodle-and-dirt soup, or is it just noodle soup that got dirty? Does the presence of the sun make this star soup?

The internet loves arguing about soup categorization. Luckily, physics can settle the debate in this particular case. It’s believed that black holes don’t retain the characteristics of the matter that goes into them. Physicists call this the “no-hair theorem,” because it says that black holes don’t have any distinguishing traits or defining characteristics. Other than a handful of simple variables like mass, spin, and electric charge, all black holes are identical.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what kind of ingredients you put into a black hole soup. The recipe always turns out the same in the end.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

PART TWO

EAT A CLOUD

Could a person eat a whole cloud?

—Tak

No, unless you’re allowed to squeeze the air out first.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

Clouds are made of water, which is edible. Or drinkable, I guess. Potable? I’ve never been sure where the line between eating and drinking is.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

Clouds also contain air. We don’t usually count air as part of food, since it escapes from your mouth as you chew or—in some cases—soon after you swallow.

You can certainly put a piece of a cloud in your mouth and swallow the water it contains. The problem is that you’ll need to let the air escape—but air that’s been inside your body will have absorbed a lot of moisture. When it leaves your mouth, it will carry that moisture with it, and once it encounters the cool, cloudy air, it will condense. In other words, if you try to eat a cloud, you’ll just burp out more cloud faster than you can eat it.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

But if you can collect the droplets together—perhaps by passing the cloud through a fine mesh and squeezing it out, or ionizing the droplets and collecting them on charged wires—you could absolutely eat a small cloud.

A fluffy cumulus cloud the size of a house could contain about a liter of liquid water, or two or three large glasses, which is about the volume a human stomach can comfortably hold at one time. You couldn’t eat a huge cloud, but you could absolutely eat one of those small house-size ones that briefly block the sun for a second or two when they pass overhead.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

A cloud is just about the largest thing you could eat in one sitting. There aren’t a lot of things puffier and lower-density. Whipped cream seems pretty fluffy, but I’m told it’s 15 percent as dense as water,* so a gallon of whipped cream would weigh about a pound. Even accounting for all the air that would escape, you couldn’t eat more than a small bucket of it. Cotton candy, one of the most cloudlike foods, has a very low density—about 5 percent that of water—which means that you could in theory eat about a cubic foot of it in one sitting. That wouldn’t necessarily be healthy, but it would be possible. But even if you spent your entire life eating cotton candy, you'd probably die before you ate enough to fill a house.

Other extremely lightweight edible substances include snow, meringues, and bags of potato chips, but you probably couldn’t eat a cubic foot of any of them in a single sitting.

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

So if you want to eat a cloud, you’ll need to do some work, but if you succeed, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve eaten the largest thing you can possibly eat.

Just remember to store your cloud in a reusable bottle. There’s no need to waste all that plastic!

Illustration: RANDALL MUNROE

* Citation: Tracy V. Wilson, host of the podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class, who happened to have a cooking scale and a can of whipped cream on hand when I got this question.

From What If? 2, by Randall Munroe. Published by arrangement with Riverhead. Copyright © 2022 by xkcd inc.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

BACKCHANNEL

The Family That Mined the Pentagon’s Data for Profit

The Freedom of Information Act helps Americans learn what the government is up to. The Poseys exploited it—and became unlikely defenders of transparency.

Mark Harris  August 18, 2022 10:10 AM

Illustration: Shay Azzari

Most drivers who head up to Alta Ski Area from Salt Lake City pay no mind to the nondescript turnoff from Utah State Route 210 that veers out to the left about five miles before the slopes. Some motorists may catch a glimpse of the black gate and the “No Trespassing” signs or see a plain white cargo van peeling off the main road and feel a twinge of curiosity. What passing motorists wouldn’t see, at the end of a winding lane, is a bunker-like concrete structure about the size of a two-story house, surrounded by a system of motion sensors and hidden cameras. Behind the structure’s loading door, a tunnel stretches some 200 feet into the solid granite mountain, leading to a series of vaults that constitute one of the most secure private storage facilities in the world.

Designed to protect against floods, earthquakes, fires, and even a nearby nuclear blast, Perpetual Storage opened in 1968 to house some of the most precious objects in America. But by the late 1970s, physical assets were already slightly passé. While Perpetual was happy to secure rare artifacts, what kept paying the salaries of its armed guards was the business of storing corporate microfilm and computer records. Patrick Lynch, Perpetual’s co-owner, told The Washington Post in 1979 that the master file for one customer was worth $15 million (equivalent to $60 million today).

So when George MacArthur Posey III approached Perpetual in 1978, he wasn’t interested in the vault’s fine art or bullion. He was after information. Posey was looking for certain records belonging to General Electric, and he wasn’t furtive about his intentions. At the time, GE was developing an advanced turbofan engine that would power the US Air Force’s brand-new F-16 fighter plane. As if he were talking to a librarian, Posey asked Lynch for access to the Perpetual vault in order to photograph GE’s records. As Lynch recalled the interaction, Posey explained that he had photographed records concerning the F-16 in the past and had “sold those records to other countries.”

Perpetual’s clients spell out very clearly “who can do what with their records,” Lynch told WIRED in a recent phone interview. And GE’s authorization forms made no mention of Posey. After turning Posey down flatly, Lynch reported the interloper to the FBI—something Perpetual hasn’t done since. The FBI’s Los Angeles office noted that Posey tried something similar the next summer, attempting (unsuccessfully) to obtain information about the US Navy’s supersonic F-5 fighter from an engineer at its manufacturer, Northrop.

Posey, however, considered himself not only an entrepreneur but a patriot. His small family business, Newport Aeronautical Sales, based in Southern California and previously owned and operated by Posey’s stepfather, sold unclassified technical information to companies that wanted to bid on Pentagon contracts to repair military aircraft or manufacture spare parts. Those would-be contractors were all too happy to outsource the tedious work of obtaining technical manuals, parts lists, and specs. By helping them, as Posey saw it, he was also helping the US military find the lowest bidder for its contracts.

As it turned out, there was an easier way to obtain valuable technical data than going through the executives of storage vaults, and Posey would make a hugely profitable business of it for the next several decades. It involved a high-minded, fast-evolving, and relatively new law called the Freedom of Information Act, and it would bring the Posey family business millions of dollars in easy money. But it would also turn them into key combatants in the US government’s long, concerted battle to keep information from the public. Along the way, Posey would become embroiled in global politics, earn a spell in prison, and watch his own son appear in federal court on charges of conspiracy and theft of government property for actions related to the operations of Newport Aeronautical.

Illustration: Shay Azzari.

What turned into a business opportunity for the Poseys began as a Cold War-era fight for government transparency. In 1947, President Harry Truman signed an executive order that gave the executive branch power to investigate and fire any federal employee who was deemed to be disloyal to the country, without having to supply evidence. The results of those investigations were held in secret FBI files. In the mid-1950s, the US government, and the Pentagon, in particular, hoarded information as compulsively as atom bombs. In the midst of the Red Scare, the design of a bow and arrow was deemed too sensitive for public release. The amount of peanut butter American soldiers consumed annually was a military secret. Shark attacks on sailors could neither be confirmed nor denied.

In 1953, John Moss, a newly elected US congressman from Sacramento, California, was appointed to the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee—normally an obscure position without much political power. During Moss’ first term, he was appalled to discover that not even he, a member of the committee with statutory jurisdiction over the Post Office, could get information about 2,800 postal workers who had been fired for alleged security reasons.

After Truman left office, the Pentagon became even more secretive; in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower’s defense secretary, Charles Wilson, ordered that for any information to be released to the public, it had to make a “constructive contribution” to national security. Journalists and newspaper editors, who had raised mounting alarms against government secrecy for years, went into an uproar. They found common cause with Moss, a Democrat, who would soon be appointed to the more powerful Government Operations Committee, on which he spearheaded the creation of a Special Subcommittee on Government Information. From his platform as chair of that new subcommittee, Moss began pressing for the bill that would ultimately become the Freedom of Information Act.

“Our system of government is based on the participation of the governed, and as our population grows in numbers it is essential that it also grow in knowledge and understanding,” Moss told the House. “We must remove every barrier to information about—and understanding of—government activities consistent with our security if the American public is to be adequately equipped to fulfill the ever more demanding role of responsible citizenship.” Moss’ Republican cosponsor was a young congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld.

For a decade, the federal government had fought them every inch of the way. It was only in 1966 that press and public pressure sent the Freedom of Information bill to the desk of President Lyndon Johnson. The law went into effect on July 4, 1967. For the first time, members of the American public had the right to inspect information held by their government, with relatively few exceptions, and to sue if their requests for information were unduly denied.

Over the years, FOIA has allowed journalists to break thousands of stories and has empowered activists and communities. But the law also opened pathways for another core American aspiration: free-market economics.

In 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that gave the law even more teeth. Congressional hearings had revealed that many bureaucrats were going to great lengths to resist complying with FOIA, much as the White House had tried to stymie Watergate investigators. Now, Congress decreed, any agency that declined to fulfill a FOIA request would be on the hook to pay all legal costs if the requester sued and prevailed, any agency employee who wrongfully withheld information could be personally sanctioned, and courts would be able to review whether information had been frivolously classified as secret.

Those amendments ushered in a golden age for use of the Freedom of Information Act. For years, backlogs were light; requesters could ask for pretty much anything that wasn’t classified and agencies had to hand it over for just the cost of duplication, no more than a few dollars, in a timely manner.

Under those conditions, many of the democratic effects that Moss envisioned began to flourish. Over the years, FOIA has allowed generations of journalists to break tens of thousands of stories and has empowered activists and communities to track everything from government-sanctioned pollution to disaster mismanagement. But the law also opened pathways for the expression of another core American aspiration: free-market economics.

In the late 1970s, George Posey must have realized that filing paperwork with bureaucrats was a lot easier, and less costly, than trying to talk his way into underground bunkers. Newport Aeronautical Sales epitomizes what Ohio State University law professor Margaret Kwoka calls “information resellers”—companies that submit a stream of Freedom of Information Act requests to US government agencies, then treat the responses as merchandise to unload. Cheap FOIA requests in, valuable data out. Some resellers focus on the Security and Exchange Commission’s financial filings, others on facility inspection reports from the Food and Drug Administration. The Poseys specialized in engineering drawings, technical orders, and manuals for aircraft, most of them from the military.

Today, these information resellers have become some of the prime beneficiaries of FOIA. In a 2017 analysis of 229,000 FOIA requests, those from journalists accounted for just 8 percent. In 2020, there were nearly 800,000 requests made. At some federal agencies, the vast majority of requests are now from commercial operators who resell or use data for profit. Their turf is where a lot of the battle over the erosion of the freedom of information in America has been fought.

Illustration: Shay Azzari

After several requests for comment, George Posey responded to a detailed list of questions, saying in an email that the “majority” of the claims inherent in the questions “are false and misleading.” Given the opportunity to specify which claims he was refuting, Posey did not respond before press time. No other employees of Newport Aeronautical or members of the Posey family would speak with WIRED. But court records, investigative reports, and interviews with associates of the Posey family and former employees paint a relatively thorough picture of their family business.

Over time, Newport Aeronautical accumulated stacks of manuals and drawings for most of the US military’s active aircraft, from attack helicopters and lumbering transport planes to advanced-strike jets. As the documents piled up, Posey installed floor-to-ceiling shelves in a warehouse attached to Newport Aeronautical’s office, paying people to help file and index the growing collection. The folks at Newport Aeronautical had gained a reputation as masters of obtaining aircraft data—“gurus in the industry for any needed manuals,” one customer is reported to have said.

To understand why there’s a market for military technical documents, it helps to know that the Pentagon operates many of its aircraft for much longer than any commercial airline would, often by decades. When components on those aircraft eventually start to fail, the options for fixing them can be few, far-between, and pricey. “It’s called vendor lock, where we have to go back to the original equipment manufacturer,” says retired Air Force general Hawk Carlisle, the former president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade organization of companies that support the US military.

In an effort to eliminate vendor lock and reduce costs, the Pentagon prefers to own the technical data for its equipment, then shop around for the cheapest supplier, says Carlisle. But that is not always possible, especially for the many aircraft that have civilian counterparts. Either way, there is now a multibillion-dollar cottage industry of companies that want to bid for government maintenance, repair, and overhaul contracts—but that need the latest blueprints and manuals to do so. Filling that need was Newport Aeronautical’s niche.

An aviation and nautical buff, Posey would often turn up at Newport Aeronautical’s small office straight from his yacht club in shorts, flip-flops, and Vuarnet sunglasses, recalls a former employee named Al Barazin, who started work there in the early 1990s. Another former employee told WIRED that the CEO still worked hard. Every day, Barazin would arrive at the office to find dozens of requests for technical data spitting out of the fax machine. Each order—say, for the manuals associated with a helicopter’s fuel pump—would have a part number. If Newport Aeronautical had the documents, Barazin would photocopy and overnight them to the customers. If not, someone would fill out a preprinted FOIA request form with the part number and contact details and fax or mail it to the relevant military base.

When the request was granted, Newport Aeronautical would mail the government a check for the cost of duplicating the requested documents, maybe $5 or $10. Posey would then charge his customers many times that—often $200 or more. Customers were happy to pay the markup, says Barazin, because “we had this stuff at our fingertips, whereas it would take a repair facility a month or two months to get the data, and they wouldn’t be able to quote for the work. That’s the model, and it’s a brilliant model.”

Some of those customers weren’t simply mom-and-pop repair facilities trying to earn US government contracts. About half of Newport’s business involved legally selling data abroad, Posey claimed in the 1980s. Merex, a US company owned by Pakistani arms dealer Arif Durrani, did business with foreign countries that needed to maintain their US-made aircraft. Reached by WhatsApp in Pakistan, Durrani remembers visiting Newport Aeronautical’s old office in Costa Mesa, crammed with paperwork and photocopiers. “He sold stuff to us whenever we needed it in a hurry,” says Durrani. “For example, the Israeli government would buy components from me directly. When they would order them, I knew that these parts were being transferred to Iran, because Iran was flying Phantom jets in the ’80s. Israel was sending its technicians and basically repairing their aircraft.” Durrani says that while Posey did not necessarily know the identity of his customers’ end users, he suspected that Posey knew “enough the motive behind what he gets.”

In the early 1980s, Posey whisked his new bride, Roberta, off to Kenya for their honeymoon. It was there, his mother Nadja later told the Los Angeles Times, that Posey was approached by representatives of South Africa’s government looking to buy some manuals. On his return from Kenya, Posey began popping up on electronic intercepts set up by the FBI in its hunt for spies.

The Pentagon had come to suspect that America’s enemies, and the Soviets, in particular, were using FOIA to get their hands on technical data that, although unclassified, still posed a risk to national security. A 1985 Department of Justice memo stated that “Soviet acquisition of US technology significantly shortens their research and development cycle, and reduces the risks associated with the design of new weapons and defensive systems.” But when military bases began withholding such data from their responses, Posey didn’t simply fold: He sued the Navy for violating the Freedom of Information Act. In 1984, the case was settled. The Pentagon would now release critical information to data brokers like Newport Aeronautical, provided they limited resale to other qualified contractors. Posey claimed the settlement as a victory, but Newport Aeronautical was now firmly in the government’s crosshairs.

By 1986, international horror at South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial oppression led the US Congress to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, laying out broad sanctions against the regime. Posey was labeled a South African agent, and the government placed taps on his phones and put a voice-activated bug in the Newport Aeronautical office.

Almost immediately, the veteran FBI agent in charge of that investigation, Robert Ibbotson, tuned in to cloak-and-dagger phone calls that could not be more different from Posey’s direct approach at Perpetual Storage.

On April 28, 1986, Posey dialed a number in Pretoria, South Africa, identified himself as “Mr. Brown,” and said he had a package for Johann Van Vuuring, who he identified on a subsequent call as a buyer for the South African Air Force. A few days later, Posey received a call from the office of Nicolaas Vorster, a naval attaché at the South African embassy in Washington, DC, alerting him to a letter on its way.

Van Vuuring called back in August and read Posey a series of 17 groups of letters and numbers: 58L4, 38R11, 275R12, 81L6, 325L1, 348L11, and so on. The FBI identified Van Vuuring’s cipher as a dictionary code. The sender encodes their message by finding the word they want in a dictionary, noting the page number, whether it is in the left or right column, and which entry it is from the top. In this case, 58L4 signifies the forth word down on the left-hand side of page 58: “big.”

What makes dictionary codes effective, and difficult to crack, is that they require the sender and recipient to have the same dictionary. “The security lies in the fact that there are so many dictionaries that are published that you have to virtually search through hundreds of them, coming up with the right one, the right volume, and the right copyright date,” FBI cryptanalyst Jacquelyn Taschner said.

But a cipher is only as strong as its weakest link. After taking down the code from Van Vuuring, Posey needed help deciphering it. He called his wife—she was being treated at a local hospital at the time—and asked her if she knew the location of “the number books” that they “used to play with.” Ibbotson was still listening in. Roberta told Posey that the books were in the bottom-right side of the gray wall unit in the house. Ibbotson had learned the key to understanding Posey’s conversations with Van Vuuring—but it would take some time before he would get his hands on that dictionary.

Deciphered later, Van Vuuring’s message read: “Big guy visit LA, August, mid month, want meeting for business, and K list farm no good.” A subsequent phone call from Van Vuuring allowed the FBI to identify the “big guy” as Joe Botha, an executive with a sales firm about which details are scant. Reports by the FBI suggest that the “K List” was the list of documents Botha was seeking.

That September, Posey arranged to meet Botha for lunch at the historic La Valencia hotel in La Jolla, California. Ibbotson and a contingent of FBI agents staked out the hotel in advance of the meeting and were in place with video and tape recorders. They watched as Posey pulled up, left his car at the valet, and walked straight over to one of the FBI agents. Posey asked the agent if he was Botha, and the agent replied that he wasn’t. Posey eventually located Botha without the FBI’s assistance.

While the two sat for lunch, Botha delivered Posey a shopping list of technical data and manuals for Newport Aeronautical to procure. The South African would ultimately order documents related to a range of components, including power units for the C-130 transport aircraft and, an old favorite, General Electric jet engines. Some of the items were on the US Munitions List—technology, weapons, and information whose export is strictly controlled, especially to a pariah nation like South Africa.

Posey later insisted on dealing with the South African military through intermediate companies. “I can’t deal with anybody on a surface level. I have to stay subsurface so I am protected from scrutiny,” he told Botha. When Botha asked what he meant by “protected from scrutiny,” Posey replied, “You know, protected from scrutiny of the FBI.”

It was far too late for that. The FBI had heard and watched it all.

Ibbotson was listening when Posey told Roberta that the deal stood to make Newport Aeronautical $98,000 (equivalent to about $260,000 today), and he was listening when Posey roped in Edward James Bush, an English-born aerospace consultant, to act as a courier for the manuals and then launder the proceeds through his Canadian bank account. The two had already worked together, Bush said later. The year before, Posey had supplied him with technical manuals for F-4 and F-5 fighters, destined for Iran’s air force.

In early February 1987, a team of FBI agents followed Posey and Bush as they scrambled to print and pack the South African documents. Bush planned to travel to South Africa through Argentina, where Posey wanted him to drop off some other technical manuals on space and missile systems for the Argentine Air Force.

As the men organized and packed the documents in Newport Aeronautical’s office, the FBI listened in on the office bug. “This is not just some routine job. You are violating the export laws,” Bush said, according to Ibbotson. “Fucking A,” Posey replied, and he and Bush carried on with their plan.

On the afternoon of February 7, Bush checked three white boxes and a blue suitcase for his journey and entered the boarding area at Los Angeles International Airport. There he was arrested by the FBI and US Customs Service agents. Around the same time, in Costa Mesa, the FBI raided the Newport Aeronautical office and Posey’s house. As Posey, Roberta, and their 2-year-old son returned home, they found unmarked FBI vehicles and more than a dozen agents crawling through their belongings—including the dictionary codebook that Posey used to communicate with Van Vuuring.

Posey’s brother Robert, who was also a Newport Aeronautical employee, gamely fielded questions from reporters. “It’s not like we’re really trying to hide anything,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “If we were shipping guns or missiles, that would be one thing, but these are books!”

In March, according to the Los Angeles Times, Posey became the first person to be indicted under the Anti-Apartheid Act. He was also charged, as was Bush, with conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act. Vorster, the South African naval attaché, was mentioned (but not charged) in the indictment and reportedly left the country in a hurry. Reached in retirement in South Africa via email, Vorster told WIRED: “I had no personal contact with these gentlemen, and I certainly never met them.” Bush quickly pleaded guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act and cooperated with the FBI. Posey, however, wanted his day in court.

At the opening of Posey’s trial, in July 1987, his lawyer claimed that the military “has had a vendetta with my client going back to the ’70s.” The prosecutor, assistant US attorney Brian Hennigan, said Posey’s own conversations showed that he knew he needed government permission to export the manuals. Hennigan, now a defense attorney in private practice, told WIRED that Posey’s trial has stuck with him over the years. Hennigan remembered feeling “a sense of moral fervor” during the prosecution. Posey “wasn’t simply trading information, this was trading in information with no thought or no value being placed on what was going to be done with it,” he said.

During the trial, Posey said that he and Van Vuuring used codes only because Posey was planning to give him a (possibly illegal) kickback, and he argued that the documents he sold were unclassified and in the public domain. Posey was swiftly convicted of violating the Arms Export Control Act and the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. When he was sentenced, Posey said: “I did not mean in any way, shape, or form to jeopardize national security, nor did I have the means to do so. A lot of things were said about me which made me out to be some sort of subversive against our country, which is contrary to my character or my true beliefs. I’m a patriot. I’ve served my country.” Patriot or not, Posey was fined $15,000 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but four months suspended. He was forbidden from selling information to foreign buyers for five years.

Illustration: Shay Azzari

After serving his four months at a medium-security prison in Michigan, Posey regained the helm at Newport Aeronautical. But he was about to make a whole new group of enemies. Starting in 1998, the company began fielding lawsuits from some of the world’s biggest defense contractors. A lawyer at Lockheed Martin remembers sending letters to Newport Aeronautical telling it to stop selling the company’s data. But asking nicely was never going to work with Posey. In 2000, Airbus asked a federal court to prohibit Newport Aeronautical from advertising, reproducing, selling, or publishing any of its copyright materials. The court issued such an injunction, under pain of $50,000 in damages. Posey agreed to Airbus’ terms to settle the case, and Newport Aeronautical seems to have entered into similar consent judgments with Bell, Kiddie, Boeing, and Moog.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 made business even harder for Newport Aeronautical. FOIA’s old cosponsor, Donald Rumsfeld, was now in charge of the most secretive Department of Defense in a generation, as public sentiment granted the George W. Bush administration a wide berth to wage its war on terror. Against this backdrop, the Pentagon decided to tighten its rules on handing out critical data to companies like Newport Aeronautical: It would now provide technical orders to commercial customers only if they could link requests to a specific government contract.

Posey either didn’t hear of the new rule or decided to test its limits. In August 2002, workers at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia got in touch with the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Posey, they alleged, had just requested the entire technical manual library for the C-130 aircraft on compact discs. When a database administrator at Robins told Posey about the Pentagon’s new policy, they said, Posey became upset. “Mr. Posey continued to try and persuade me that he had a legitimate reason for getting this technical data,” wrote the administrator in a sworn statement to the Office of Special Investigations. “He also used what I considered intimidation, threatening to involve the DOD and take legal measures because [the base] refused his request.”

The employees also claimed that Newport Aeronautical had requested technical data in “mass quantities” from the base in the past and that it was in possession of documents that were classified Secret.

The Air Force opened an investigation, the results of which were later made public in a lawsuit. It noted Posey’s history of work with Arif Durrani, the Pakistani arms dealer, who had been convicted of shipping Hawk missile parts to Iran as part of the infamous Iran-Contra affair. It also claimed that Posey helped provide technical data to another arms dealer, Amanullah Khan, who was later convicted of attempting to sell fighter aircraft parts to undercover federal agents he thought were Chinese arms dealers. The investigators reported that Newport Aeronautical and Posey had also been investigated by US Customs agents in Boston; New York; Washington; and Oxnard, California. None seem to have resulted in any charges.

Although Posey had threatened to sue the DOD, the Pentagon struck first. In early 2003, undercover Special Investigations agents attempted a sting operation against Newport Aeronautical, asking Posey to supply a technical manual for the C-130 that was classified as Secret. According to the investigation report, Posey quoted a price of $650 for the manual but noted that the data was “restricted.” Posey is reported as saying that “he may have one of his workers sweet-talk someone” in order to secure the documents. The sale was never consummated and, as with the earlier investigations, the inquiries stalled.

But the post-9/11 restrictions on what information the DOD would share were more than Posey could bear. In 2004, Newport Aeronautical finally did sue the Air Force for not fulfilling a number of FOIA requests. The complaint claimed that vendor lock had cost the DOD and America’s allies billions of dollars and that Newport Aeronautical, by providing data quickly to contractors, had increased small business participation.

“Potential competitors who relied on NAS for data could not bid on solicitations issued by the Air Force, other DOD buying agencies and our allies,” Posey wrote. “As a result, original equipment manufacturers were often the only manufacturer with data. This further resulted in awards of overpriced noncompetitive contracts.”

His lawsuit dragged on for more than five years before the court granted the Air Force’s motion to dismiss. The government would be allowed to withhold unclassified technical manuals with military or space applications. The universe of documents available through FOIA had shrunk once more, and Newport Aeronautical would have to look elsewhere for the information its customers wanted.

In early 2008, even before the suit against the Air Force was settled, Newport Aeronautical had begun developing another strategy for obtaining the information its customers wanted—one that would move the company past FOIA resales and into shadier territory. According to his LinkedIn account, Posey’s son, George MacArthur Posey IV—known to the family as “Mac”—joined the company in 2009.

For more than a decade, Mac and a fellow Newport Aeronautical employee made document requests directly to a Florida woman named Melony Erice, who worked in sales for a number of private aerospace companies. She was never a Pentagon employee. Nevertheless, she managed to fulfill Newport’s requests. In all, the company paid Erice more than $589,000 for over 5,000 technical manuals and drawings. According to court documents, those manuals and drawings in turn earned the company over $2.1 million. On Facebook, Posey boasted to his friends about Mac: “He makes sure we always get paid. He’s our Ray Donovan, if you know what I mean. Doesn’t miss a dime.”

“Now my son wants to take over and expand what I have started,” Posey posted on Facebook in 2013. “He already has, and has impressed me with his expertise of business management. But he still doesn’t know the difference between Cessna 150 and a B-52, but he does know money coming in and money going out. Proud dad.”

Where was Erice getting the information? Not through her own FOIA requests, as it turned out. In 2019, military investigators stumbled on email correspondence between Erice and a civilian employee of the US Navy in Philadelphia, who was using his access to military databases to illegally download files that Newport Aeronautical wanted. He then split the proceeds with Erice, with whom he had previously lived.

Investigators followed the trail of thousands of emails from Erice to accounts associated with Newport Aeronautical, gaining a search warrant for them in late 2019. There, they found evidence that she had not been Newport Aeronautical’s only backchannel for technical manuals and drawings. Filings allege that starting in February 2015, Mac had also bought over 870 documents for nearly $83,000 from a quality-control manager at a Florida aerospace contractor who had access to military data as part of his job. On September 2, 2020, 33 years after Posey’s house was raided by federal agents while his wife and toddler son watched, federal agents came to arrest Mac.

Mac was charged with one count of conspiracy to steal government property and to commit bribery of a federal public official, as well as three counts of receiving stolen government property. He has since been appearing, often remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before the same US District Court as Posey did. Like his father before him, Mac is also facing the possibility of 10 years in prison. While the government’s criminal complaint notes George Posey’s position as CEO of Newport Aeronautical and shows him receiving an emailed invoice from Erice for stolen documents, he has not been charged.

law professor Margaret Kwoka has spent the past decade studying the evolution of FOIA. She thinks Representative Moss would be both delighted and horrified to see the results of his efforts to force the government into transparency. “Delighted that so many people have found so many uses for this law that probably he couldn't have imagined,” she says. “Horrified by just the sheer bureaucracy that it has created.”

At least 125 countries around the world now have freedom-of-information laws, many modeled on FOIA. But while the US legislation has been amended about every decade since the success of Moss’ crusade, Kwoka notes that the changes have failed to prevent ever-lengthening delays and restrictions. These include ever-broader interpretations of exemptions that allow agencies to withhold behind-the-scenes deliberations and many corporate secrets. “Most redactions or denials based on claimed exemptions from agencies go unchallenged because most people don’t have the time or money to appeal,” says Kwoka.

For all the Posey family’s law-breaking, Newport Aeronautical has been one of the very few commercial requesters attempting to hold the military to Moss’ principles of radical transparency. “They may be more exceptional than regular,” says Kwoka. “Most data resellers for sure don’t go to court, either ever or hardly ever. They get what they can get, and then they sell it.”

Though most of Newport Aeronautical’s cases ultimately failed, they set precedents that have since been cited in dozens of subsequent FOIA cases, including those brought by environmental, digital-privacy, and government-spending activists, some of which have reached the United States Supreme Court.

The Poseys’ lawsuits may have helped rein in the government’s tendency to hoard information, but the family hardly makes for a set of uncomplicated FOIA heroes. George Posey was the first person—and one of only a handful ever—to be convicted of violating the US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, and Mac has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and receiving stolen government property.

Nevertheless, the Poseys might yet be gearing up to start a new family business. At the start of this year, Mac incorporated Back Bay Packaging, based at the same address as Newport Aeronautical’s office. The nature of that business, like so much of what went on at Newport Aeronautical Sales over the past five decades, remains a mystery.

The agencies investigating the Poseys almost certainly have more details in their files that have not been made public, and last winter I asked all of them for interviews. Most refused outright, although the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations suggested that I file a FOIA request to learn more. I’m still awaiting a response.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

All image sources: Getty Images

IDEAS

The Secret to Being Lucky

Everything happens for no reason.

Virginia Heffernan  August 07, 2022 11:11 AM

Photograph: Shawn Michael Jones

Alexa’s approach to prediction is a revelation: “Today you can look for sunny weather, with highs in the mid-70s.” Go to town, scan the skies! You might get lucky.

Really, what more can or should be said about the future? Look around and see what happens. You can look for your crypto windfall. You can look for the love of your life. You can look for the queen of hearts. Seek and ye might find. You can even look for a four-leaf clover, though the chances are about 1 in 10,000. But if you find one, the shamrock is no less lucky because you looked for it. In fact, it’s luck itself.

“Diligence is the mother of good luck” and “The harder I work the luckier I get”—these brisk aphorisms get pinned on Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, lest we earnest Americans forget that salvation comes only to individuals who work themselves to dust. In truth, the luck = work axiom does nothing but serve the regime and the bosses, by kindling credulity in a phantom meritocracy instead of admitting that virtually every single advantage we get in the world is one we lucked into—by being born to the right parents who speak the right language in the right zip code. How about we invert the meritocratic fallacy in those aphorisms and create a new aphorism that makes “work” the delusion and “luck” the reality? “The luckier I get, the harder I pretend I’ve worked.” An excellent way to describe the people born on third who believe they hit a triple.

After all, the chances of the precise sperm colliding with the exact egg in the right fallopian tube and convening to make you—or me—are so low as to be undetectable with human mathematics. The meeting that determines only 100 percent of your existence.

If there’s any method of prediction that never fails, it’s luck. You look for your horse—or your candidate—to win, and she wins? What luck. What if she loses? Better luck next time. If Alexa says you can look for rain, and you look and find it—lucky you, you brought an umbrella! Luck is fate and fate is what happens and a prediction of what happens is a perfect prediction.

Sure, for free-will buffs, being told that your sole agency lies in looking for luck, which you may or may not find, can be demoralizing. Perhaps that’s why people tell themselves that luck is actually just hard work. We can do something about work—namely, do it.

But work and diligence can never be the parents of luck, because luck has no mother, no father, no precedent or context. Luck is a spontaneous mutation, signaling improbability; it shows up randomly, hangs around according to whim, and—as every gambler knows—makes an Irish goodbye. Mischievous luck is fun, a shamrock, a “lady.” It’s worlds away from grinding toil.

So where does the “looking for” luck come in? Ah—your agency comes in the almost-passive search for luck. The noticing. In 2018 the philosophy professor Steven Hales, along with one of his colleagues at Bloomsburg University, found that we’re only as lucky as we think we are. We only find luck when we look for it. Better still—for those who like action items—luck begets luck. You look for sunny weather, you’re more likely to find it; you find it, you come to think you’re lucky; you try your luck looking for more sunny weather and you luck out again.

In Aeon magazine, Hales wrote, “Luck might not be a genuine quality of the world at all.” Fine. But neither is beauty or justice. At the same time, the Bloomsburg researchers discovered “a significant positive correlation” between people’s temperaments and how lucky they thought others were. “One of the things this means is that the more optimistic you are, the more you think others are lucky.” For “optimistic,” I might substitute “happy-go-lucky.”

“Luck is a mere façon de parler, or turn of phrase,” Hales wrote (using the Irish, of course). Of anyone who believes they’re lucky, he went on, “their luck might well be, in a very strict psychological sense, entirely of their own making.”

Of our own making! So you make your own luck by looking for it, but you also make it with lucky turns of phrase and lucky casts of mind. You see a friend who recovered from Covid as lucky for recovering, rather than unlucky for getting sick in the first place. And, if you’re a happy-go-lucky type, you groove luck into your world by saying it, over and over. Wow, you were lucky. Your sister had some stock and made you soup? What luck! Your system rallied? Boy, that’s great genetic luck right there.

Einstein didn’t like the idea of God “playing dice” with the world. Lucky for Einstein, dice, in a world determined by luck, are not thrown by anyone, much less a God who is said to have Yahtzee skills. Instead, the chips fall where they may—and really they just fall, unpredictably, spontaneously. We then look for patterns in them.

For those seeking self-improvement, and who isn’t, I’m not just freestyling here. Living by a doctrine of luck promotes at least five excellent things that have got to be good for your brain.

1. Active skepticism about “meritocracy.”

2. Recognition of the utter contingency of one’s own advantages. An act, if I may, of “checking your privilege.”

3. Appreciation for the spontaneity, serendipity, and unpredictability of the universe. Nicholas Rescher, the illustrious philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh, calls luck “the brilliant randomness of everyday life.”

4. A way to practice “gratitude” without doing calligraphy in $75 journals. All you have you do is say, every time it hits you that life is OK and could be otherwise, “What luck!”

5. A way to make more luck in your life.

Luck really is the best creed. It makes no truth claims, requires no messiahs or gurus. It’s not religious, partisan, or ideological. It doesn’t just allow for surprise; it’s nothing but surprise. It’s charming. It may even be the secular answer to grace, but it comes with laughs rather than piety.

When you get good at luck, you can even find a spot of luck in a heat wave or your team’s defeat. But don’t be a psychopath. Luck is not about looking on the bright side. It’s much more minor. It’s about just being—and observing that, of all the prospective organisms in the broken but intriguing world, you happened, against the odds, to be one.

This article appears in the September issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability

Breaking things is an ethos for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don’t have tanks in the street. That isn’t us anymore.

Paul Ford  August 03, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: Elena Lacey

I used to co-run a software company. My cofounder is Lebanese, so we built a team in Beirut with an office right on the Levantine Sea. Great software engineers over there, excellent front-end talent. But Lebanon has been going through it. And not just in the normal “wedged between factions in an eternal global crisis zone” way. First the financial system collapsed (no problem, the team said), then the pandemic hit hard (we're doing OK), then Beirut was partially destroyed in a port explosion (a terrible day, but we'll get through it). Then we learned that people were powering their houses with DIY solar or diesel generators (don't mention it) and getting internet through mobile hot spots (almost always works fine). We rented spare apartments for folks having trouble getting home (not necessary, but thanks) and figured out how to pay people when the banks were melting (appreciate it). On January 6, 2021, they Slacked the US team, “Your coup is ridiculous.”

All of which gave me a great appreciation for how boring America was. America was so boring for so long that other countries held their wealth in dollars, and oil oligarchs hoarded empty apartments in Manhattan. America was so boring that, for decades, the tech industry was able to make disruption its mantra. Young people would find some technology-enabled new thing; VCs would plump it up with cash, building a marketplace for new buyers and sellers; and established players would hilariously stumble all over themselves trying to compete. They'd fail, and we'd laugh. Need more progress? Just make more technology. Smartphones, drones, teledildonics, IoT—whatever, let's blow up the world again.

You can’t just say “software is eating the world” and chill. Software already ate the world, and digested it, and pooped out a new world, and that’s where we’re living.

That type of progress definitely generates a ton of activity. But it also sits weird when you consider how many lives in the world, historically and currently, including American lives, are extremely disrupted—by toxic spills or the whims of royalty or the goats all swelling up and dying. Disruption is an ethos for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don't have tanks in the street. But America has recently become way less boring.

I'm thinking of the photo of the dude wearing horns in the Senate chamber. Technologists are on the hook for that one. Because the internet begat the web, which begat social, which begat Trump, which begat all that and the Supreme Court, which unbegat Roe, and all I'm saying is that technology can't be responsible for only one kind of progress and wash its robot hands of the other. Borders aren't evaporating into the cloud; they're getting thicker. Distances are becoming more expensive to traverse. Grids are faltering. For several weeks this year it was tough to buy pretzels. You can't just say “software is eating the world” and chill. Software already ate the world, and digested it, and pooped out a new world, and that's where we're living.

I once enraged a client because I promised during a meeting to build them a “big, boring software platform.” They took me to a fancy bar to yell at me. “We didn't pay you for boring!” they said. “We paid you for exciting!” I had to explain how, in tech, “boring” can be an asset, a way to build for growth, how things that look exciting, like New York City, are built on boring things, like sewage, or investment banking. An endlessly churning consumer economy might be fun in the moment—but have you ever seen the floor of the movie theater when the lights come up? (Of course I paid for the client's drinks.)

Stability is a hard sell, I'll grant you; the payoff is far away. No hominid ever thought, “If I poke this stick into a termite mound, then 50,000 generations from now my progeny will pay for five streaming services, including Peacock.” They thought, “I am tired of chasing these termites all over the place when there's a veritable termite fountain over there.” And suddenly, right then, they were eating the world. Humans are here for a good time, not a long time.

An endlessly churning consumer economy might be fun in the moment—but have you ever seen the floor of the movie theater when the lights come up?

Fast-forward 50,000 monkey generations. Pretty clearly, now is the moment to learn how to fetishize stability. As I write, the asphalt in London is hot enough to heat your fish and chips. The solutions to the crisis (crises) are agonizingly long-term and require hundreds of trillions of dollars, with billions of people doing their part. What's a monkey with a stick to do?

In this, I think, the internet industry has a precedent to offer. The world of technology is infinite and exhausting, and everyone will tell you their giant thing is the real next thing. But you can always see the big, boring, true future of the field by looking at the on-ramps—the code schools, the certificate programs, the “master it in 30 days” books. One year everyone was learning Rails at coding boot camps. Then it was JavaScript. Then many of the boot camps closed, and now it's DevOps (software development plus IT operations). These are the things the industry needs right now, on a two- to five-year horizon. And stick around long enough and you'll find a lot of old Unix code and Java beneath the new stuff—dull systems, a stable stack of technologies so reliable that we forget them.

So I'm over progress and done with disruption. Stability is my new best friend. Not the big stuff, the UN-level stuff. Leave that to the smart macro-thinkers with European accents and interesting all-weather clothing, or the sad Americans with Substacks. What I'm going to work on, for the rest of my career in the tech industry, hand to God (OK, I'm an atheist and easily distracted, so caveat lector), is making nice little tutorials and tools—better sticks for kinder monkeys. I'm working on my first tutorial now, about how to parse NetCDF files full of climate data using the Python programming language to save the data to an SQL database and integrate it into a traditional web workflow. That's my DevOps! Who knows, maybe one day someone will open a school for stability. Everyone will want to run it, and no one will want to mop the floors.

This article appears in the September 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance

My rooftop panels showed me that a world powered by renewables would be an overflowing horn of plenty, with fast, sporty cars and comfy homes.

Clive Thompson  July 29, 2022 12:12 PM

Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images

I used to worry about using too much electricity.

If one of my family members left their bedroom and forgot to turn off the air conditioning? I’d snap at them: “What, you want the planet to cook extra fast?” If I found lights left on overnight, I’d fume.

Reader, I was insufferable. In my defense, I’d been worrying about climate change ever since Jim Hansen’s 1988 landmark congressional testimony about it. With every cool blast of AC, I knew more carbon was being dumped into the atmosphere. So I turned into an energy miser. I’d go around the house turning lights off; if no one else were home, I’d leave the AC off entirely, even on blazingly hot days.

But then, three and a half years ago, something happened that changed my entire psychology around electricity: I installed solar panels on my house.

I quickly found myself awash in more energy than I could use. The installers had predicted the panels would produce 100 percent of what my household needed. (Since battery systems aren’t yet legal in Brooklyn, New York, where I live, any surplus I generated during sunlight hours would get sold to the grid, and I buy energy back at night.)

But the installers underestimated: It turns out I generate a lot of net surplus. According to the “smart meter” that my utility installed, in a 24-hour period my house frequently generates 25 percent more juice than I need, even on a hot summer day. On sunny spring and fall days, it’ll crank out 50 percent more than I use. I’m saving about $2,000 a year, so I’ll amortize the cost of the array in seven years; then the electricity is damn-near free.

It’s had a fascinating effect on me: I’ve stopped worrying about electricity use, both economically and ethically.

I no longer walk around finger-wagging at my family members. Want to blast the AC? Crank away. It’s coming from the sun, and I can’t use all that electricity even if I try. And I’ve tried! I’ve charged an electric bike, run multiple loads of laundry, had many computers and a game system and a TV going, and still those panels were kicking out a net surplus. I’ve idly thought of running a power strip out to the sidewalk with a sign saying “FREE ELECTRICITY,” just to be the Johnny Appleseed of solar.

In essence, I went from a feeling of scarcity to a sense of abundance.

And it occurs to me that this is, really, an emotional shift we ought to foreground when we promote renewables.

Right now many people are doubtful about solar and wind. Thanks (in good part) to fear-and-doubt messaging from Republicans and fossil-fuel interests, renewables are too often associated with privation and rationing—needing to be an efficient-but-miserable hippie instead of gunning the motor and having fun. “Most people believe a clean-energy future will require everyone to make do with less,” as the inventor and energy thinker Saul Griffith points out in his book Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean-Energy Future.

Yet when I talked to other folks who’d put solar on their roofs, most had precisely the same epiphany I’d had: They realized they had way more juice than they expected. And it had the same emotional effect—going from feeling guilty and weird to devil-may-care.

Consider the case of Christopher Coleman. A digital artist who teaches at the University of Denver, he uses massive amounts of power—sometimes running a computer full-tilt for a day and a half to render a single piece of digital art. “It really burns the GPU. My computer’s going 24/7,” he says. If he were relying solely on greenhouse-gas-producing sources, he’d feel unnerved by these energy demands. But his household’s solar array is so productive it covers his entire outlay.

“We’re much more lax and comfortable,” he says.

I polled my Twitter followers, asking whether having residential solar panels had changed anyone’s relationship to their energy use. The majority said it had given them a similar thrill of abundance—and many joked about blasting the air-conditioning without a second thought.

“We have these 90-degree days, now and I walk in and the house is cool and I smile and I go ‘I don't care,’” says Sandy Glatt, another Denver resident.

Many also told me they’re shifting their energy usage to daytime hours, so they can use all those photons themselves instead of handing them off to the grid (where, alas, we often get ripped off by our utilities, who buy our electricity at a cheap rate and sell it back to use more dearly). So they’re charging Teslas and running all their major appliances during the day, and installing electric water-heaters to generate a full day’s worth of hot water while the sun shines.

Solar installers typically find that after a household gets panels, “their energy use goes up,” says Charlies Collier, a solar-installation project manager with Imperial Solar.

Given all the political barriers that renewables face, it might seem weird to talk about their emotional impact.

But emotion drives politics. This is why some renewable advocates are now trying to tout—as loudly as possible—that a world powered wholly by renewables would be an overflowing horn of plenty, with fast, sporty cars and comfortable homes.

“It’s the abundance agenda,” Griffith says. In Electrify, he argues that a massive build-out of solar, wind, and storage mechanisms (including millions of electric cars, doubling as batteries) would make renewables reliable while also being much cheaper than what we now pay for fossil-fuel-produced electricity.

He has already seen a glimpse of it in his homeland of Australia, where 30 percent of houses have solar, and the arrays cost barely a quarter of what I paid for mine. Things could be as cheap here in the US, Griffith notes, if towns reduced red tape (zoning laws and building codes, mostly) and states reformed their rules on liability and connecting to the grid. The price barriers in the US aren’t labor or materials: “It’s all about regulations,” he says. “It could change quickly if people wanted it to.”

We should. Because take it from me: It’s fun.

BACKCHANNEL

The Big Business of Burying Carbon

The porous rock beneath the Gulf Coast launched the petroleum age. Now entrepreneurs want to turn it into a gigantic sponge for storing CO_2.

Jeffrey Ball  July 28, 2022 10:10 AM

Port Arthur's Motiva Oil Refinery.Photograph: Katie Thompson

Sometime after the dinosaurs died, sediment started pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Hour after hour the rivers brought it in—sand from the infant Rockies, the mucky stuff of ecosystems. Year after year the layers of sand hardened into strata of sandstone, pushed down ever deeper into the terrestrial pressure cooker. Slowly, over ages, the fossil matter inside the rock simmered into fossil fuels.

And then, one day in early 1901, an oil well in East Texas pierced a layer of rock more than 1,000 feet below Spindletop Hill, and the well let forth a gooey black Jurassic gusher, and the gusher began the bonanza that triggered the land rush that launched the age of petroleum.

One of the products of the economy that black gold built is the city of Port Arthur, Texas. Perched on the muggy shores of Sabine Lake, just across the border from Louisiana, it’s among the global oil-and-gas industry’s crucial nodes. Port Arthur is home to the largest petroleum refinery in North America, opened the year after the Spindletop gusher and now owned by the state oil company of Saudi Arabia. The area emits more carbon dioxide from large facilities every year than metropolitan Los Angeles but has a population 3 percent the size. Smokestacks are its tallest structures; nothing else comes close. Around town, pipeline pumping stations jut up from shopping-center parking lots, steam from petrochemical plants hisses along highways, and refineries flank both sides of main roads, their ductwork forming tunnels over traffic. Janis Joplin, who grew up here, described it in a 1970 ballad called “Ego Rock” as “the worst place that I’ve ever found.”

Tip Meckel has a more hopeful view of the place, maybe because he spends so much time looking down. A lanky research scientist at the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology, Meckel has worked for most of the past decade and a half to map a roughly 300-mile-wide arc of the Gulf Coast from Corpus Christi, Texas, through Port Arthur to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Though he’s the grandson of a refinery worker and the son of an oil consultant, his interest isn’t in extracting more petroleum from this rock. Instead, he has devoted most of his career to figuring out how to turn it into a commercial dump for CO_2.

The idea is that major emitters will hoover up their own carbon waste, then pay to have it compressed into liquid and injected back down, safely and permanently, into the same sorts of rocks it came from—carbon capture and sequestration on a scale unprecedented around the globe, large enough to put a real dent in climate change. Suddenly, amid surging global concern about the climate crisis, some of the biggest names in the petroleum industry are jumping in.

On the rainy morning I meet Meckel in Port Arthur, the brown-haired geologist is dressed in a blue Patagonia fishing shirt, black jeans, and running shoes, with sunglasses dangling from a leash around his neck. We pile into his gray Toyota 4Runner and head south, through the petro-sprawl, toward the Gulf. We’re off to see a patch of ocean that Meckel thinks could be key to the drive for decarbonization.

“You don’t throw trash out of your car, do you?” he says as we cruise down a coastal highway, the city receding into the rearview mirror. “Well, we don’t want to dump our CO_2 into the atmosphere either.” Maybe the problem, Meckel says, is that the gas is invisible. “If it was purple, and the skies had turned purple by now, everyone would be like, ‘Shit. We really screwed up.’ Maybe they should just dye the CO_2 that’s coming out of the stacks and let people see where it goes.”

Tip Meckel holds a sandstone sample.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

By some estimates, there’s enough suitable rock on Earth to lock away centuries’ worth of CO_2 emissions, past and future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent climate-science body, has repeatedly affirmed that extensive long-term carbon storage is likely necessary to meet any of its targets to seriously mitigate the overheating of the planet. Globally, in 2021, a paltry 37 million metric tons were sequestered—roughly what the Port Arthur metropolitan area emits in a year. Meckel and his colleagues have worked hard, with millions of dollars in funding from the petroleum industry, the state of Texas, and the federal government, to prove that the Gulf is the best place in the country, if not on Earth, to get this new industry truly ramped up.

The work has focused on mapping the region’s underground rock, a process that combines physical evidence, computerized extrapolation, and intuition. Meckel’s university lab in Austin holds a gigantic collection of well logs—long paper strips, rather like the printouts from a heart monitor, that reveal instant-by-instant, centimeter-by-centimeter measurements of myriad features of the underworld, typically from sensors that have been carefully lowered thousands of feet into a borehole. (The folded strips are stored in narrow manila envelopes in row upon row of metal shelves in the basement.) Meckel and his colleagues augmented the logs with 3D seismic data, which they got at a discount; the data company selling it had seen a drop-off in interest in the Gulf from oil-and-gas drillers. Armed with that data, Meckel says, they began to “mow the ground” along the coast, methodically assessing it.

The Bureau of Economic Geology in Austin, Texas, stores thousands of oil well logs.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Meckel interprets a well log.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

The search drew their attention to a layer of sandstone from the Miocene epoch, ranging in age from 5 million to 23 million years old, which lies partly under waters controlled by the state of Texas and stretches into Louisiana. The layer is porous (lots of holes to hold liquid) and sits close to many big polluters (lower piping or shipping costs for the waste CO_2). The sandstone is also covered by a less porous layer of rock that can act as a carbon-tight seal. Meckel and his team built new computer models, then ran simulations of how injected carbon dioxide might flow through the rock. By 2017, they had published an atlas of the Gulf Miocene layer, 74 pages of intricate maps and tiny print.

The year after that, events in Washington transformed the atlas from an academic treatise to an economic playbook. Amid rising climate concern, Congress fattened a federal tax credit for carbon capture and sequestration that until then hadn’t attracted much commercial interest. The new subsidy, modeled broadly on ones for renewable energy, gave developers a credit topping out at $50 for every ton of waste carbon dioxide they captured and geologically stored. That $50-per-ton prize coincided with a surge in warming-related natural disasters, which catapulted climate change to the top of many corporate agendas. It also launched the US carbon-storage race. Meckel’s atlas, available to anyone, became the racers’ guide to the best route.

The result today is that, more than a century after opportunists first swarmed the Gulf to profit from its hydrocarbons, a new swarm has descended, this time to profit from mitigating the damage those hydrocarbons have wrought. A quest that just a few years ago was a science project has become a high-stakes contest to lock up good rock. Within about a 75-mile circle around Port Arthur, more than half a dozen industrial-scale projects are in various stages of preparation. Their backers include oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and TotalEnergies, which have announced the possibility of more than $100 billion in investments; major pipeline operators, which see human-generated CO_2 as a huge new market; renewable-energy developers who once lambasted fossil fuels but now want to decarbonize them for profit; and landowners who sense a new way to monetize their dirt. A stampede for capital, land rights, and regulatory approval is underway.

Meckel pulls his Toyota into Sea Rim State Park, a beach on the Gulf. The parking lot is open, but much of it is flooded. Roseate spoonbills wade through puddles on the asphalt.

We wander onto the sand. Looking seaward, Meckel points to a line of oil platforms squatting on the horizon. He envisions dozens of new wells drilled in the coming decades, this time to inject CO_2. “We’re talking about a whole area the size of Texas that you can develop for storage,” he muses. “Who’s not going to think that’s a good idea?”

Meckel concedes that carbon storage is a “blunt” and “dumb” approach to curbing climate change. “You’re basically just landfilling,” he says, not decoupling the economy from the production of heat-trapping gases. But with it, he adds, “you buy the time to use the scalpel to do all the cool stuff,” by which he means renewables at a scale big enough to power the planet.

Just off this coast sits what may be Texas’ most promising site for a CO_2 landfill, a spot to which Meckel is directing my gaze. It includes a well-mapped block of underwater acreage that oil-and-gas insiders call High Island 24L. In Meckel’s color-coded atlas, the rock that will likely accept the most injected carbon is rendered in shades of orange and red. The area encompassing this block is crimson. He and his colleagues have studied it intensely and found it to be especially capacious. As the land spreads east, toward Louisiana, the color holds—and the rock does too.

Steam escaping from stacks at an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

View from Sea Rim State Park.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Last year, the Texas General Land Office, which leases out state waters for economic activity, held its first auction for carbon-injection rights. On the block was a 360-square-mile patch of Gulf that includes High Island 24L. The winning bid, for a portion of the big patch, came from a joint venture launched by a startup called Carbonvert, which is run by Alex Tiller, an entrepreneur, and Jan Sherman, a veteran of the oil industry. When I meet them one morning in Port Arthur, Tiller is sporting a version of the standard founder uniform—untucked dress shirt, dark jeans, Panerai watch, Tumi briefcase, baseball cap advertising his startup. Sherman is in jeans and an athletic shirt bearing the maroon logo of her alma mater, Texas A&M University. We head outside and pile into the leather-lined cab of a hulking black F350. The license plates read “88GIGEM.” That’s as in 1988, the year Sherman’s husband graduated from college, and “Gig ’em,” the Texas A&M motto. Sherman usually drives her BMW SUV, whose plates read “89GIGEM.” Tiller drives an electric Audi.

Carbonvert’s story dates to 2018. At the time, Tiller, based in Denver, was running a renewable-energy investment fund for a San Francisco financial firm. His specialty was the trade in so-called tax equity. He would find solar developers whose projects qualified for tax credits but whose tax bills were too small to take advantage of them. Then he would arrange deals in which the developers sold their credits—and pledged revenue from five years of electricity sales—to Tiller’s investors in exchange for an influx of cash. Tiller knew the game well. He had learned the tax-equity ropes helping build a solar company in Hawaii, whose sale in 2014 brought him a small fortune. When Congress passed the $50 carbon incentive, Tiller says, he pounced on it as an “opportunity to ride a wave that I’d seen before.” But he had “zero idea” about burying carbon. So he hit the conference circuit, where he got wind of Texas’ coming auction. He heard of Sherman through a friend and reached out to her—a lot.

Sherman fairly bleeds oil. During college, she spent summers fixing leaks on wells. She worked her entire career at Shell, most recently as head of the company’s US carbon-storage business. The month before Tiller contacted her, she had retired, having concluded that a new corporate reorganization made it likely many of her team’s projects would slow down. Sherman decided she wanted to either go big with the carbon-storage knowledge she had amassed or go home. At first, she didn’t answer Tiller’s entreaties. “He kind of stalked me,” she says. By February 2021, after a few months of nudging, she signed on.

Jan Sherman and Alex Tiller in front of an oil rig.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Sherman was skeptical that the state would entrust a big project to an unproven startup. “I didn’t think Carbonvert could do it,” she says. “I even said, ‘I don’t think that the world is going to let us do that.’” But Meckel and his colleagues had revealed “a ginormous storage opportunity in the Miocene formation,” she says, so the foundational geologic work was done. Sherman and Tiller struck up a partnership with Talos Energy, a Houston-based firm with offshore experience and its own valuable trove of local seismic data. Then they set about figuring out where, in the area that Texas was expected to offer for lease, they thought they could bury carbon in a way that would please both investors and regulators.

The Carbonvert-Talos team focused on areas pierced by comparatively few existing wells, because those can be paths for carbon dioxide leaks. And because each new injection well would cost between $20 million and $30 million to drill, the team avoided geologic features such as synclines—areas where the rock layer dips, as if forming a bowl, effectively cleaving the injectable acreage. Carbonvert and Talos submitted their bid in May 2021. The list of bidders, according to the Texas General Land Office, included much bigger players, among them Marathon Petroleum, an oil company; Denbury Resources, a major pipeline operator; and Air Products, a chemical company. Three months later, Carbonvert and Talos won a 63-square-mile lease. This will be the future home of Bayou Bend CCS (short for “carbon capture and sequestration”). Earlier this year, Chevron threw its weight behind the project, announcing that it would invest $50 million for half of Bayou Bend.

One of the biggest hurdles now for Tiller and Sherman is to sign up enough polluters to make the project economically viable. The business model envisions that polluters will collect the carbon—and the tax credit—and then pay Bayou Bend a transport-and-disposal fee that Tiller says is likely to be $20 to $25 per ton. (That fee could fluctuate.) Scoring clients is a scrappy, dog-eat-dog process. I get a taste of it as Sherman, with Tiller in the back seat, drives me around Port Arthur in the monster truck.

On paper, grabbing carbon emissions in and around this town should be like shooting fish in a barrel. They’re not only plentiful but also localized: A small handful of super-emitters accounts for a large part of the output, and a free and easily downloadable federal database reports each facility’s emissions. But a refinery, petrochemical plant, or liquefied-natural-gas terminal is a dizzyingly complex collection of industrial processes, each of which produces CO_2 in different concentrations, ranging from near purity to nearly nil. The less concentrated the carbon in a waste stream is, the costlier it is to capture. According to the National Petroleum Council, the $50 tax credit is enough to incentivize sopping up less than 5 percent of US emissions (mostly from ethanol and natural gas processing plants, whose CO_2 emission streams are highly concentrated). But carbon from, say, a coal-fired power plant or a diesel refinery doesn’t currently pay to clean up.

Tiller, Sherman, and their partners ultimately hope to inject at least 10 million tons of CO_2 a year to make the profit on which they and their investors have penciled out the project. To get the financing to break ground, the bar is lower—they will need to have inked contracts with polluters to inject 4 million tons a year. By then, however, Bayou Bend will have spent tens of millions of dollars preparing and designing the project. “There is a bit of a build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy,” Sherman says.

The crux of the dilemma is that only about 2 million of the 35 million tons of industrial CO_2 emitted annually by large facilities in the Port Arthur area, which includes neighboring Beaumont, is, as Tiller puts it, “low-hanging fruit”—meaning that the tax credit of $50 a ton can cover the cost of capturing, transporting, and burying it.

Back in the truck, which is stocked with 2-pound tubs of honey-roasted peanuts and cheddar Goldfish for long days of sleuthing, Sherman drives us by the oil refinery that opened just after Spindletop. Today it occupies 2 square miles and emits millions of tons of CO_2 every year. “Most of this is all $50 or higher,” she says, her right hand on the steering wheel as her left hand sweeps across a windshield filled with the facility.

The next morning, Sherman, Tiller, and I take a boat ride from Port Arthur to the area of the Gulf that they have leased. Over the engine roar, Tiller explains to me that he gave our charter captain only the vague location of the lease area. “He’s under NDA”—a nondisclosure agreement—Tiller yells.

When we reach the prospective carbon-injection area, the captain idles the boat. We’re in about 40 feet of water; the rock into which the Carbonvert group hopes to inject greenhouse gas is more than a mile and a half below that. I check my phone; it still gets service, because we’re only about 5 miles off the coast. To the east, hulking tankers, many of them carrying liquefied natural gas, head out to sea. To the west, every now and then we see a shrimping boat. It’s a beautiful morning on the water. And everything in view is belching carbon.

Toward the end of the trip we motor up the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a constructed canal that serves as a long driveway in which ships park and take on product from Port Arthur before ferrying it to the world. We pass a biodiesel plant, one of the biggest in Texas, and the boat captain mentions that he used to work there. Sherman plies him for details about the places in the plant that emit carbon. “Where would it come from?” she asks.

Even if the Carbonvert consortium signed up every pound of carbon dioxide it needed, it would still face another hurdle: The US Environmental Protection Agency has yet to issue its first permit for large-scale commercial carbon injection. Permit reviews are widely expected to take years, and the outcome isn’t assured. The proposed Bayou Bend project will eventually need as many as 10 injection wells, each of which must win an EPA permit. The timing of that, Tiller says, is “an enormous risk.”

If anyone is at the front of the line of the EPA approval process, it’s a man named Gray Stream, the steward of a roughly 100,000-acre patchwork of southwest Louisiana that Meckel’s atlas suggests is at least as red as High Island 24L. Stream is a scion of the Louisiana dynasty that owns Gray Ranch, and he’s betting that his chunk of Gulf Coast rock gives him pole position in the carbon-storage race. “Mine goes to 11,” he tells me, smiling wryly as he evokes a line from This Is Spinal Tap, the 1984 mockumentary about a British rock band with extra-loud amplifiers. He hopes the EPA, in particular, will like his ranch’s carbon-carrying capacity.

The Stream family offices in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Stream grew up in Nashville and went to college at Vanderbilt, then did a stint as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill. He hoped to become a Navy SEAL officer, but when that didn’t pan out he dove into managing the family business. His office is in a former bedroom in the family’s business headquarters—a grand, colonnaded redbrick house in the city of Lake Charles built in 1923 by Stream’s great-great-aunt, a noted collector of Fabergé eggs. The office is decorated today with intricately carved walking sticks and antique sabers. It overlooks the backyard, which boasts a Japanese tea garden and, as if out of a Faulkner novel, a two-story, octagonal pigeonnier.

Stream assumed his filial responsibilities in 2004, at a time when diversifying beyond oil and gas was becoming increasingly important to the family and the region. That was partly because fields deplete over time, and those beneath Gray Ranch had been pumped for a century. But it was also because momentum in the oil-and-gas industry was starting to shift to so-called unconventional plays—the shale that fracking had unlocked—and Gray Ranch was conventional rock. The surge in shale production was spurring an industrial boom in and around Lake Charles. But on Gray Ranch, as on much of the land along the Gulf Coast, production was in a long decline.

Gray Stream visits with the horses at Gray Ranch.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

In 2018, when Congress increased the carbon-storage tax credit, Stream started having ideas. He and some colleagues consulted the work of Meckel and others—not only their assessments of the Miocene layer under the Gulf but also an earlier experiment involving a layer of rock called the Frio.

The Frio sits below the Miocene layer. One of its chief allures is that, beneath Gray Ranch, it’s particularly thick—and therefore, at least theoretically, able to hold a lot of CO_2. It’s also far below sources of drinking water and is topped by the Anahuac shale, which appears to be a carbon-tight caprock. After extensive study, Stream and a team of technical experts he hired decided to bet their bid on the Frio. He says he hopes the EPA will see its combined characteristics as a “belt-and-suspender” approach—a level of safety that will give the agency confidence that his company, Gulf Coast Sequestration, deserves to become the country’s first commercial collector of other people’s carbon trash.

Applicants for EPA carbon-storage permits must persuade the agency that they can contain both the plume of injected carbon dioxide and a secondary plume of saltwater that the CO_2 displaces from the rock—what drilling engineers call the pressure pulse. The EPA requires evidence that neither plume will contaminate drinking water while a project is operating and for a default period of 50 years after CO_2 injection stops—but the agency can decide to shorten or lengthen that for a particular project.

Stream employs a well-heeled team, including oil industry veterans and a former top EPA official, to shepherd the permit application, which was submitted in October 2020 and which remains, nearly two years later, under agency review. Inside his company, Stream dubbed the carbon-storage play Project Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and sometimes of war).

Heading up the technical work is a British petroleum geologist named Peter Jackson, who used to work at BP. His team planned for Project Minerva in much the way Meckel’s UT group had mapped the Gulf Coast. Using well-log and 3D seismic data, the scientists modeled the Frio under several tens of thousands of acres on and around Gray Ranch. Then they simulated how the carbon dioxide plume and the pressure pulse would behave, depending on where they drilled wells and how they operated them.

In their computer models, the resulting plume movements appeared as multicolored blobs against rocky backgrounds of blue. The best blobs were round, a cohesive shape that suggests the plume will be easier to control. In other spots, the CO_2 wouldn’t behave: Sometimes it escaped upward; other times it spread out like a pancake or, Jackson recalls, “like a spider.” Either shape, the team fretted, might degrade project safety and set off alarms at the EPA. The simulations led the Stream team to choose two general locations on the ranch where they intend to drill wells.

Stream agrees to show them to me one morning. He picks me up in Lake Charles in his decked-out black Chevy Tahoe, and we head west, toward Texas, until we’re several miles shy of the state line. We exit the highway at the town of Vinton, Louisiana, and arrive at Gray Ranch. We turn right onto Gray Road. We turn left onto Ged Road. Then, beside cowboy-boot-shaped Ged Lake, we mount a subtle rise known as the Vinton Dome.

One of many peacocks at Gray Ranch rests on a fence.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

A white house sits atop the Vinton Dome overlooking Gray Ranch.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

These are iconic names in Stream family lore. As early as the 1880s, a local surveyor named John Geddings Gray—“Ged”—started assembling this acreage to profit from timber and cattle. Four years after the gusher at Spindletop, Ged saw in the Vinton Dome a topographically similar prospect, and he bought it too. He opened the area for drilling, and his hunch paid off.

Today, the top of Vinton Dome offers a panorama of part of the Stream empire. To the right stand barns bearing the family’s cattle brand and quarter-horse brand. All around, rusty pump jacks rise and fall, pulling up oil and gas. Stream, Ged Gray’s great-great-grandson, likens the ranch to the cuts of beef he grills for his three young children, who think he’s the best steak cooker around. “It’s only because I just buy the prime fillet,” he says. There’s one rule: “Don’t screw it up.”

We stop at one of the expected well sites. The area around it is resplendent with wire grass, bluestem, and fennel. It’s frequented by three kinds of egret: cattle, great, and snowy. This being Louisiana, it’s also stamped with a line of yellow poles; they mark the underground route of the Williams Transco Pipeline, which whooshes natural gas from offshore platforms in the Gulf to the interstate gas-distribution system. If it seems strange that this ranch, which for a century has served up fossil fuels, may play an influential part in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also instructive—a measure of how economic signals are changing in a part of the world that has long adapted the way it exploits its natural resources to meet shifting market demand. “People are ultimately going to have to put up” to tackle climate change, Stream says. “They can’t just talk about it.”

Stream is right: Humanity must choose. As he talks, I’m reminded of Meckel’s reaction when, as we stood on the beach, looking out at the waves over High Island 24L, I asked the geologist about the dangers associated with storing carbon dioxide underground. I brought up a bizarre disaster that struck Cameroon in 1986, when a massive, naturally occurring cloud of carbon dioxide suddenly burped up from the depths of Lake Nyos and fell onto nearby villages, crowding out ambient air and asphyxiating to death an estimated 1,800 people. “Now that we know that shit happens, put a sensor down there,” Meckel told me, pointing to the Gulf. (At the Cameroon lake, a vent was added.) Meckel doesn’t deny there are dangers. But, as he told me in another of our conversations, people “have to decide that the risks of CO_2 going into the atmosphere are more fundamental than the risks of CO_2 going into the ground.”

View of the cypress swamp at Lost Lake, part of the Gray Ranch property.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Meckel, of course, was arguing his pocketbook—and that of the fossil fuel industry, which helps fund his work, and of Carbonvert, and of Stream, and of each of the companies now gunning to make a buck from carbon burial. Yet his point stands: Every potential climate fix carries risks.

Storing carbon at a scale large enough to materially help the climate is now, many scientists say, a must. But it would require facing devilishly difficult dilemmas that extend beyond the technical to the philosophical. What level of confidence should regulators demand before blessing a proposed carbon-storage project as unlikely to leak? Who should be held legally responsible for monitoring the safety of injected carbon, and for how long, and with what penalty for failure? Fights between environmentalists and industry over such questions are growing more intense. And yet, as always in the battle over what to do about the climate, if anything significant is to happen, someone will have to budge, and something is almost certain to go wrong.

Along the road from Beaumont to Port Arthur is a museum dedicated to the Spindletop gusher. It houses a life-size replica of part of a turn-of-the-century boomtown—a vision of the good life, lubricated by oil. The museum stages free gusher reenactments, using water. A long wooden boardwalk guides visitors to a pink granite obelisk, where an engraving on the base says petroleum “has altered man’s way of life throughout the world.”

When the prospectors at Spindletop sold their first barrels of crude, they didn’t know the trade-off they were making on behalf of all humanity. They didn’t know that the price of cheap energy and better living through petrochemicals would be environmental degradation at planetary scale. We have been playing with fire, and it has warmed us and burned us. This suggests a broader lesson worth remembering as we advance, however slowly, from the age of hydrocarbons through the age of decarbonization to the age of renewables. Maybe, when we encounter energy’s next big threat to the environment, we can resist the urge to stick our heads in the sand—and so avoid the last-ditch, multitrillion-dollar, existential slog to bury the problem.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

IDEAS

Am I an Idiot for Wanting a Dumber Phone?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist offers counsel to a reader overwhelmed by apps, dings, and beeps.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  July 26, 2022 13:13 PM

Illustration: Zeloot

“I waste way too much time on my phone and am attracted by the idea of simplifying my digital life. So I found several apps and tutorials designed to make my smartphone ‘dumb,’ but I’ve hesitated to take the plunge. Am I just trying to escape modern life?”

—Dumbstruck

Dear Dumbstruck,

As more and more of the formerly mute objects in our lives (refrigerators, thermostats, doorbells, even toilets) are christened “smart,” it often feels as though the entire inanimate world were undergoing a process of enlightenment. And “smart” is a difficult adjective to resist, particularly in a society that regards intelligence as a form of currency—or even, at times, a spiritual virtue. So while “dumbing down” one’s phone ostensibly describes a rather mundane process of removing apps, blocking internet access, and choosing unappealing aesthetic features (gray scale, bland wallpaper), I understand the anxiety it can provoke. It’s hard to avoid feeling that such digital minimalism is swimming against the current of this awakening, that you are not just simplifying your life but also downgrading your mind.

Perhaps that’s why one of the most popular new-generation dumb phones, the Light Phone, opts for the language of luminosity and its association with intellectual brilliance. The original model, whose capacities were limited to making and receiving calls, was described in the company’s 2015 Kickstarter as “thoughtfully simple” and promised a life in which users could engage more fully in cerebral and artistic tasks, the pursuits of the higher mind, without those buzzes and beeps that prompt a craving for the next dopamine rush. But the story of the Light Phone also illustrates the backsliding familiar to anyone who’s attempted a digital paring down—the way features, almost on their own, creep back into the picture. By the time the second model was released, in 2019, the phone had added a (black-and-white) touchscreen and text messaging, plus music, mapping, and ride-sharing apps. The promotional materials stress that these additions are “tools not feeds,” a justification that had the rather dubious ring of a dieter insisting that their indulgences are composed of “good fat.”

Even the most zealous attempts to renounce ubiquitous technologies devolve into rationalization and the invention of creative loopholes. I happen to know a woman who was such an inveterate news junkie that she deleted all media apps and browsers from her phone, stripping it down to the bedrock of text, calls, weather, and maps—a solution that worked until she discovered it was possible to locate the New York Times Company’s headquarters in Manhattan on Google Maps and access the paper’s homepage through the app’s internal browser. The old saw about

addictions—that they are impossible to outsmart—applies doubly to smart technologies, which are engineered to be used compulsively and elude your most ingenious efforts to gain mastery over them.

With that in mind, I might suggest a more counterintuitive solution: Stop fighting the fear of dumbness and instead embrace it. Like most people who want to “go dumb,” I assume that you’re attracted in part to the term’s association with silence—the desire to dial down the chatter—but unsettled by some of its more unflattering synonyms, like idiocy. But idiocy was not always weighted by the negative associations it now carries. The word stems from the Greek idiotes, which referred to Athenians who were essentially laypersons—those who, unlike soldiers, scribes, and politicians, maintained little connection to the affairs of the state. It meant “on one’s own” or “private” (meanings that persist in words like idiosyncratic) and was reserved for those who enjoyed a freedom and autonomy from public life, the kind of existence that often serves as a haven for independent thought. Gilles Deleuze argued that idiocy was intimately linked to philosophy, beginning with Socrates, who famously recognized that he “knew nothing” and claimed this made him wiser than those who believed themselves intelligent. Descartes, in order to plant modern thought on a new terrain, similarly willed himself to disown all the knowledge he’d long taken for granted.

Few of those positive connotations survive today, and yet the resurgent nostalgia for dumb technologies is often spurred by a not entirely modern desire to distance oneself from the bustle of the polis and the frenzied commerce of the agora. Perhaps this is just another way of saying that, despite the widespread celebration of smartness, many of us secretly long to know less. The notion that information at a certain scale becomes something less than informative was a truth colorfully voiced by Thoreau, whose complaints about the 19th-century news cycle read as surprisingly familiar today. When he heard that a transatlantic cable line would soon bring updates from Europe, Thoreau imagined “the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” The suspicion that such “knowledge” was making him denser was partly what spurred him to abandon the city for Walden. And I sense in your question, Dumbstruck, a similar inkling that the information economy obscures, somewhere—perhaps in the fine print of its mammoth user agreements?—a bleaker existential bargain: that the instant access to knowledge has subtly atrophied your imaginative musculature; that your immersion in digital echo chambers might be foreclosing more original forms of thought.

Idiocy should not be confused with stupidity, the willful refusal of information that might disrupt one’s rigid convictions. The latter is rooted in a pride that makes it the inversion of smartness, not its alternative. Idiocy might be seen as a condition of openness and flexibility, qualities that define the fool archetype that appears in many cultures, from the Sioux heyoka, a sacred clown who deliberately engaged in counterintuitive actions (riding a horse backward, wearing clothes inside out, complaining of being full when food is scarce) so as to challenge popular assumptions, to the Russian yurodivy, or holy fool, a figure whose seeming madness was believed to lend him divine insight. Fools tend to be shape-shifters who thrive at thresholds and boundaries. This was particularly true of the Shakespearean fool, who was frequently “balancing on the edge between reality and various constructions of reality,” as one scholar puts it. The fool mediated the space between the play and the audience—that dimension where the virtual meets the real—moving fluidly between the stage and the crowd and occasionally breaking the fourth wall to comment on the play’s themes.

I bring up the fool in part to stress the virtue of “dumbing down” as opposed to opting out. As appealing as it might be to live totally off the grid or leave civilization, it’s practically impossible to emulate Thoreau’s retreat to Walden (as impossible as it was even for Thoreau himself). It may well be that the dumbed-down smartphone offers a distinct advantage: Even the barest smartphones can be restored to their full capabilities at any moment, which places the user in the fool’s liminal space, a no-man’s-land that might offer perspective, or even wisdom. Your unwillingness to “take the plunge,” as you put it, seems less a sign of fearful waffling than evidence that you long for those unique possibilities that exist somewhere between the online and off, between the virtual and the real. In the best-case scenario, the stripped-down smartphone offers neither an escape from reality nor a refusal of its conditions, but a portal into new opportunities for defining one’s relationship to public life—while still being able to call an Uber.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the September 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs

As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Critics say it’s all a bad trip.

John Semley  July 26, 2022 10:10 AM

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

This is what happens when a mouse trips out: It becomes more curious about other mice and more likely to socialize with them for long periods of time. It becomes less likely to glug massive amounts of alcohol. It wriggles, quavering, like a wet dog shaking off rain. And its head twitches, rapidly, side to side.

Because a mouse on LSD cannot tell you that colors seem brighter or the walls are melting or a guitar solo somehow sounds purple, these head twitches are of tremendous importance to chemist Jason Wallach. “If you want to know if a compound is likely to cause a psychedelic effect in humans,” says Wallach, speaking from his tiny office in the Discovery Center at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, “you look to the mice, to that twitching.”

These twitch tests—and countless others—are part of Wallach’s mind-bending new mandate, sparked by a late-2019 meeting with the heads of a company called Compass Pathways. The UK-based biotech firm was eyeing the possibilities of developing psychedelic drugs for use in mental health therapies. Its core product was psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms. But it needed new chemicals, engineered to deliver consistent, optimized, and potentially radical results. And that meant new chemists. By August 2020, Compass had inked a two-year, $500,000 “sponsored research agreement” with Wallach and the university. The Discovery Center was born.

A few years in, with continued support from the company, Wallach has cooked up scores of novel psychedelics, mailed them off to partner labs for testing on those mice, and then waited—and hoped—for the telltale twitch results. The chemist, 36 and pale, face framed by a rough red beard and rectangular glasses, can hem and haw a bit when it comes to specifics: “Compass doesn’t want me to give out numbers. I’ll say we’ve made a lot.” It’s in the neighborhood of 150 new drugs, all of which can potentially be patented and sold by Compass.

We are, as you have probably read, in the throes of a “psychedelic renaissance.” Compelling clinical work conducted at New York University, Imperial College, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere showed that long-outlawed drugs such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), LSD, and psilocybin have terrific potential for treating everything from addiction to Alzheimer’s to end-of-life anxiety. Pharmaceutical companies have taken note. In 2020 the fledgling psychedelic industry was predicted to balloon to $6.9 billion by 2027—a year later, that estimate increased to over $10 billion. In September 2020, Compass became the first company of its kind to trade on a major stock exchange, debuting on the Nasdaq at an estimated value of more than $1 billion.

So far, none of these companies has brought a psychedelic drug to market, but the thinking is that, through what the clinical literature calls a—“mystical-type experience”—a psychedelic trip that produces feelings of joy, peace, interconnectedness, and transcendence—patients can confront the root causes of various mental maladies. “I don’t want to use the word cure, but psychedelics can offer long-term healing,” says Florian Brand, the cofounder and CEO of a Berlin-based biotech incubator called Atai Life Sciences, which invested in Compass Pathways. “We have put a lot of money into actually exploring this hypothesis.”

At the Discovery Center, Wallach leads a team of about 15 students, researchers, and technicians. “One thing we do,” he says, “is create new compounds that differ just a bit from classical psychedelics, like psilocybin or LSD.” Slight tweaks in the molecular structure can drastically alter the intensity and character of the psychedelic journey. This ability to fine-tune the contours of a trip—to engineer new modes of experience—is Wallach’s passion.

Jason Wallach is charged with creating new psychedelics, engineered to deliver consistent, optimized, and potentially radical results.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

For years, his lab work seemed utterly niche, bordering on verboten. Mentors discouraged him. There was no money in psychedelics, they said. There were reputational risks. After all, many of these drugs have been ruled by the US Drug Enforcement Administration as possessing “no currently accepted medical use.” Since the US government declared most psychedelics illegal in 1970, such research had typically been the domain of so-called clandestine chemists, who worked in backyard sheds and underground bunkers, mass-producing trippy new compounds while evading law enforcement.

Wallach wasn’t discouraged. The work felt about as close as one could get, professionally, to pure chemistry, he says—research animated almost entirely by personal curiosity: “What happens if you put a bromine here? What if you move it over there?”

New investment is shaking up those ideals, as firms like Compass rush to capitalize on the results of that curiosity. A few years ago, Wallach was conducting experiments and coauthoring articles for relatively esoteric journals of neuropharmacology. Now his once quiet lab, with its beakers and burners and reports on twitchy mice, is helping usher in a new era of Big Neuropharma—and not everyone in the world of psychedelia is thrilled about it. Compass has come to embody the potential (and looming threat) of “psychedelic capitalism.” And Wallach is one of its most prized assets. The young chemist is all in. But the financial stakes, and the ideological fault lines emerging as psychedelics go corporate, produce new stresses. “In the long run, this research is valuable,” he says, before giving his head a shake. “But on a day-to-day basis? It does nothing but raise my blood pressure.”

Wallach’s lifelong, incurable obsession with psychoactives kicked in when he was a kid in the ’90s. It was the Just Say No era, complete with egg-in-the-frying-pan, “This is your brain on drugs” public service announcements. The messages didn’t have the intended effect on Wallach. In fourth grade, when other kids were devouring Goosebumps and Judy Blume paperbacks, he discovered a book in the school library outlining the dangers of various drugs. “Something drew me to it,” he recalls, “that a small amount of powder or material could cause a really strong change in someone’s experience.”

Years later, Wallach had his own psychedelic experiences, and although he demurs on the details, they proved life-altering. “I pretty much dedicated every waking hour almost for the past 15 years to studying them,” he says. “They had a profound impact on how I wanted to spend my life.”

With few sanctioned pathways for making a living studying psychedelics, Wallach enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he studied psychology as a portal to the mysteries of the human psyche. Wallach was especially curious about consciousness: Where do thoughts come from? What’s the difference between the brain and the mind? How do we perceive things such as taste and sound and color? How do we perceive … anything at all? Not long into his first year of undergrad, Wallach realized that psychology was “a little less empirical” than he had hoped. He switched majors to study cellular and molecular biology.

Wallach’s once quiet lab is helping usher in a new era of Big Neuropharma.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

Wallach began conducting research in synthetic organic chemistry—building compounds that occur in nature. He examined cannabinoids, the psychoactive compounds in cannabis. A voracious reader of textbooks, he noticed Amazon’s recommendation algorithm pushing two curious titles: PiHKAL and TiHKAL. These chunky reference books from the ’90s were written by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin—a psychopharmacologist best known for synthesizing MDMA, also known as ecstasy—and his wife, Ann. They contain detailed accounts of various psychoactive compounds, based on firsthand trials conducted by the Shulgins and a close cadre of fellow travelers.

The books are, as a spokesperson for the DEA once put it, “pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs.” Wallach immediately ordered the two volumes and got cooking. He calls them “probably the most useful tools for answering some of the questions I was interested in at the time, about consciousness and the mind-brain relationship.”

Following the Shulgins’ step-by-step instructions, Wallach taught himself how to make psychedelics. During breaks from school, he threw together an ad hoc lab in the basement of his parents’ stone farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When his mom started complaining about the smell, he moved the whole operation to a small carriage house on the property. There, Wallach continued to synthesize psychedelics, preparing everything he could physically (and legally) manage. “To be clear,” he says, “I was very paranoid.”

Wallach fell in love with the work. While his parents may have flinched at the tart stenches—and the serious risk of their son accidentally manufacturing compounds that merit harsh penalties under the DEA’s Drug Scheduling system—they were happy to see him throw himself into something so completely. After graduating in 2008, Wallach enrolled at the University of the Sciences (which recently merged with Saint Joseph’s University) to pursue his PhD in pharmacology and toxicology. To continue studying psychoactives, when applying for grants he pretended to buy into the same antidrug hysteria he had dismissed as a skeptical schoolkid, framing his research as investigations into dangerous compounds. “The angle was, these are drugs of abuse, and we want to understand them,” he says. “Whatever you have to tell the grant agency.”

Crystallized tryptamine synthesized by Wallach in his lab at Saint Joseph University.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

But a little academic subterfuge was a small price to pay to nurture his obsession. When Wallach is not synthesizing psychedelics, he’s lecturing about psychedelic synthesis. When he’s not lecturing, he’s reading the latest literature. Even when he’s at home with his wife in West Philly, ostensibly watching TV, he’s still reading about pharmacology. And when he’s not doing that, he’s teaching himself math. Or electronics. Or advanced physics. He wants to keep his brain sharp. Everything feeds back into the research. He assures me that he has interests outside of the hard sciences. He collects antique snuff boxes. He compulsively chews nicotine gum, which he believes sustains his focus. He swears he even chews it while brushing his teeth. He enjoys the odd cigar, too. Save for the occasional scotch, he abstains from alcohol, which he calls ethanol. “I like the taste,” Wallach says, but he can’t suffer the more mind-dulling effects. “I hate if I even start to feel buzzed at all.” In one conversation, when I ask him how his weekend was, he tells me he spent his days off using plastic model kits to design potential molecules. He has even found himself toiling in the lab on Christmas Day.

“This is my life,” Wallach says. “There is nothing else I’d rather be doing. If I was given a billion dollars, today, the first thing I would do is build a superlab.” When Compass came calling, he finally got the golden opportunity to pursue that dream. Maybe not a full-blown, billion-dollar superlab. But a lab of his own.

In pop culture, psychedelia is a Day-Glo tapestry of mandalas, black-light inks, tie-dye, and phat pants embossed with lime-green alien heads. In their various states of synthesis and manufacture, psychoactive drugs are decidedly unkaleidoscopic: brownish, yellowish, and vaguely gross, like plaque scraped off nicotine-stained teeth. The labs where these drugs are synthesized smell as if someone were burning a Rotten Eggs Yankee Candle.

Last fall, I visited Wallach in his lab, where he was preparing some N,N-dipropyltryptamine—a legal, and extremely potent, hallucinogen. Dressed in a faded maroon polo, khakis, and chunky desert boots, Wallach sets up a reaction in a round-bottom flask while explaining that in the ’70s, scientists investigated DPT for use in psychotherapy. He flits around the lab, blasting out moisture from glassware, sealing tubes with argon gas, dissolving reagents in methanol, and advising me to keep my distance as he fiddles with substances that are, he warns, “fairly toxic.” It’s like watching a chef show off at a teppanyaki restaurant, slicing and dicing by pure reflex.

The fall semester is in session, and Wallach has returned, after the pandemic disruption, to in-class teaching. His lab—and its work for Compass—presses on. Wallach and his squad of mostly twentysomethings weave among a few different offices, testing compounds for purity, sketching out molecules in grid-lined notebooks, and preparing potentially mind-expanding substances in discreetly marked mailers to be sent for mouse-twitch tests at a partner lab at UC San Diego.

The job is to develop drugs that tickle the 5-HT2A receptor, a cellular protein involved in a range of functions—appetite, imagination, anxiety, sexual arousal. The receptor has proven crucial to understanding the neuropharmacology of the psychedelic experience induced by classical hallucinogens. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin—they all interact with 5-HT2A. (In certain circles, the phrase “5-HT2A agonist” has supplanted “psychedelic,” which still carries faint whiffs of hippie-era hedonism.) “If you’re designing a new version of a classical hallucinogen,” Wallach says, “the first thing you’re doing is looking at its interaction with that receptor.”

One of Wallach’s goals is to hack how long a psychedelic’s effect lasts. Full-dose psilocybin trips usually run in excess of six hours. Hand-me-down hippie wisdom dictates three full days for a proper LSD experience: one to prepare, one to trip, and one for reacclimating yourself to the world of waking, non-wiggly consciousness. From a clinical perspective, such epic sessions are expensive and may not be necessary. Meanwhile, drugs like DMT are acute and intense, with effects lasting only minutes (sometimes called “the businessman’s trip” because it can be enjoyed within a typical lunch hour). Finding what Compass cofounder Lars Wilde calls “the sweet spot” between the length of a trip and clinical efficacy is just one of Wallach’s many challenges. If he and his team of researchers happen upon a concoction that’s particularly potent or experientially unique—“cool” is a word that gets tossed around a lot—well, all the better.

All around the lab, the shelves are cluttered. On a fridge stocked with uncommon chemical provisions is a mission statement scrawled in black Sharpie: “Shoot 4 the stars / land on Mars.” Artwork adorns the walls—impressionist scenes painted in long globs by Wallach himself. Cabinets housing beakers and flasks are decorated with printouts of notable scientists, like a wall of saints. There’s “father of psychopharmacology” Nathan S. Kline; Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD; and in lab whites and a jaunty beret, smoking an enormous pipe, is Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014 at the age of 88.

Wallach wouldn’t be working with DPT if it weren’t for Shulgin, who first synthesized the drug. In one of his trip reports, Shulgin describes smoking “many mg” of DPT and being treated to a vision of two rotating hearts, interlocking like something from a drugstore valentine. “Around the outside,” he writes, “there were sparkling jewels or crystals of light of different colors, maybe four rows deep surrounding them all around.”

Shulgin is a key influence for many in Wallach’s lab. “He was authentic and honest, both as a researcher and as a person,” says Jitka Nykodemová, a 27-year-old graduate student who moved from Prague to Philadelphia to work with Wallach. Shulgin feared that government agents might one day lay fire to his personal records, so he packed his life’s work into a few textbooks. Now, his oeuvre is available online at no cost. Wallach’s operation is more of a closed book. Slinking through the Discovery Center, snapping photos for reference, I’m cautioned against stealing away with any proprietary chemical names or structures. All of the lab’s discoveries belong to Compass, transferred via an “exclusive, royalty-bearing, worldwide license.”

All of Wallach’s discoveries belong to Compass, transferred via an “exclusive, royalty-bearing, worldwide license.”

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

“There’s a perception of Compass as being the ogre,” says Graham Pechenik, a patent lawyer focusing on the emerging psychedelics industry. He’s talking about the company’s trajectory and its clashes with old-timers who bristle at the idea of psychedelics going corporate.

Compass started off as a nonprofit in 2015 but switched, just a year later, to a for-profit model and accepted funding from, among others, controversial venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In December 2019, Compass received a patent for a method of synthesizing psilocybin. To some competitors, the patent seemed to give the company a monopoly on a compound that humans have used for thousands of years. Peter Van der Heyden, once a clandestine chemist and now the cofounder and chief science officer of Psygen Labs, a private manufacturer of pharmaceutical-

grade psychedelics, calls the patent “unconscionable.”

“It just doesn’t jibe,” says Van der Heyden, 70, “with what a whole group of us—shall I say, people with roots in the ’60s and ’70s—have spent years of their life, and sometimes years in jail, working toward. It’s something that is supposed to be—I don’t know how else to say it—a gift to mankind.” His objections have an ideological bent. His generation framed the psychedelic experience within hippie-era values of peace, love, and smiling on one’s brother. These drugs were once seen as a tonic: a chemical rejoinder to the culture of corporate profiteering.

Compass has also applied to patent protocols for conducting psychedelic therapy, including conventions that have arguably been part of psychedelic therapy for decades, if not longer, such as soft furniture and “reassuring physical contact.” As one critic put it to me, Compass was trying to patent hugging.

A consortium of chemists and competitors recently challenged Compass’ claims in a patent review trial. Some in the industry maintain that the company’s method of synthesizing psilocybin apes techniques devised by LSD pioneer Hofmann, who filed patents on manufacturing psilocybin over half a century ago. The charge was spearheaded by Carey Turnbull, a former energy broker who founded a nonprofit watchdog group, Freedom to Operate, to fight psychedelic patent claims. (Among his personal effects at his estate in the gated hamlet of Tuxedo Park, New York: a Chanel-branded, diamond-encrusted statue of the Buddha.)

Turnbull is also the founder and CEO of Ceruvia Life Sciences, a for-profit company that’s pursuing pharmaceutical applications of psilocybin and other psychedelics. In other words, in addition to playing the role of psychedelia’s patent overreach patrol, Turnbull is Compass’ direct competitor.

In an open letter published on Freedom to Operate’s website, Turnbull claims Compass is “not making good-faith use of capitalism or pharma regulations” by attempting to establish itself as an exclusive, global supplier of psilocybin. In Turnbull’s view, Compass is laying claim to an existing invention (psilocybin, and specifically Hofmann’s synthetic formation) with an intent to “ransom it back to the human race.” Freedom to Operate recruited a platoon of scientists to examine Compass’ psilocybin and scoured the globe for vintage samples of Hofmann’s version. Their research claims that Compass’ molecule—and the method for its production—is far from novel.

Compass executives, naturally, disagree. They maintain that their patents are in place to protect their legitimate intellectual property, enabling them to bring their treatments to the greatest number of patients possible. They also insist that they aren’t claiming some monopoly on psilocybin itself—only the process for producing a particular synthetic form. In June, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board sided with Compass, ruling against Freedom to Operate’s challenge. Compass Pathways CEO George Goldsmith assures me his company is not trying to thwart anyone from gobbling a mind-expanding mushroom cap. Cofounder Wilde, likewise, swears that Compass isn’t cornering the market on hugs. Both Goldsmith and Wilde exhibit the corporate tendency to stay frustratingly on message. Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health. But pressed about his company’s image, and the efforts mobilized against it, Goldsmith’s consummate professionalism slips, if only a bit. “Freedom to Operate?” he chuckles, a little anxiously, from his London office. “There’s no constraint. Operate, already.”

Wallach isn’t particularly ruffled by the swampy ethics of psychedelic capitalism. After all, it’s business as usual. The so-called “Hippie Mafia” of the ’60s and ’70s—led by superstar LSD chemists Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand—were bankrolled by the freaky scions of the Mellon robber baron dynasty. Wallach’s hero, Shulgin? He paid for his far-out chemical experiments with his day job developing insecticides and other chemicals at Dow, all while the company was mass-producing napalm for the Vietnam War.

“This is my life,” Wallach says. “There is nothing else I’d rather be doing."

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

Nor is Wallach moved by the charges leveled at Compass. “I’m definitely aware of those criticisms,” he says. “But I have no reservations.” For Wallach, corporate involvement seems preferable to the alternative, in which all decisions around the research, scheduling, and distribution of drugs fall to the government. His voice shifts a bit when he says the government, as if the term were suspended in spooky air quotes. He reserves no fondness for the DEA, which continues to impose severe penalties for the possession and manufacture of mind-expanding drugs, psychedelic renaissance notwithstanding.

But his antipathy stems from more than the tangles of bureaucratic red tape he has to wade through to do his work. He counts at least 10 close friends who have overdosed on synthetic opioids. He keeps photos of some of them in his home office. (The government of his native Pennsylvania has identified opioid overdoses as the state’s worst public health crisis.) Wallach has seen students struggle and suffer. He rails at a system that still views drug use and addiction as moral issues, punishable to the full extent of the law, and not medical ones to be addressed, compassionately, through science—recent literature suggests that psychedelic therapies may help treat substance use disorders. “It definitely drives me,” he says, holding back tears. “I want to prevent that loss for other people. And improve people’s existence. We could have a paradise on this rock of ours floating through space.”

At the spring 2022 meeting of the American Chemistry Society, Wallach drew a standing-room-only crowd. They had come to the San Diego Convention Center to hear him expound on the structure-activity relationship of n-benzylphenethylamines, a class of synthetic hallucinogens collectively called “N-Bomb” on the street. “There were tons of young scientists lining up out in the hall,” he says, with a touch of awe.

This hype, and the worry of falling into what Wallach calls “the trap of being a celebrity scientist,” doesn’t follow him back to the lab. He has plenty to take care of, as Big Neuropharma’s patent land grab ramps up and data piles high on his desk. Sitting in his office in West Philly, he shows me a graph on his computer. It’s recent head-twitch data, charting how mice responded to various doses of a new drug, the chemical composition of which he cannot legally disclose. The curve slopes gently upward before accelerating steeply, peaking, and driving back down, like the arc of a roller coaster. The line tops out at a dose of 10 mg/kg, or “mig per kig,” as chemists pronounce it. I ask Wallach if that’s any good. His eyes widen a bit, like he’s practically dying to tell me something. “It’s a good response,” he says. He plucks a sandy-brown glomp of nicotine gum from between his back molars, nests it back in its blister pack, and nods as he trails off, “Very potent …  yeah … yeah ...”

Maybe, someday soon, that new drug, whatever it is, will be given to human subjects in a Compass-sponsored clinical trial. It may upend pharmacology. Or psychology. It could spark the next revolution in psychedelia. And Wallach can toast his success, with a cigar and a single glass of scotch, as he earns his place among the psychopharmacological saints. Until then, it’s charts and graphs and fastidious inventories of structure-activity relationships on reams of graph paper; it’s inspirational quotes stuck on fridges full of heady chemical analogs, and funky smells, and the head-twitching tempos of tripped-out mice.

This article appears in the September issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

GEAR

How the Secret ‘Project Galileo’ Gave Rise to the MoonSwatch

Omega and Swatch's timepiece isn't just a hype juggernaut. The collaboration has revolutionized materials, manufacturing, and more.

Tim Barber  July 18, 2022 11:11 AM

In April, the president of the Swiss Confederation (and de facto head of state), Ignazio Cassis, visited Japan to hold talks with the country’s prime minister, Kishida Fumio. As is customary, gifts were to be exchanged, and Cassis’ office requested an example of what had just become the hottest Swiss watch to launch in years, if not decades: the MoonSwatch, a $260 Swatch-produced version of Omega’s Speedmaster Moonwatch, the chronograph famous for being worn by NASA astronauts on the moon.

The Swiss president, however, was out of luck. “We were pleased, but we told them, the only way that he can get the watch is if he sends someone from his office queueing and hoping that at the Swatch shop in Bern they can find it,” says Nick Hayek Jr., chief executive of Swatch Group, the world’s largest watch producer, which owns both the Swatch and Omega brands.

Hayek, a 67-year-old billionaire who drives himself to work in a Mini and has a pirate’s flag flying outside his office, prides himself on the fact that privileged access—a feature of the luxury watch world—is entirely absent with the MoonSwatch despite the intense demand. “It doesn’t help if you have deep pockets. The Patek Philippe and Rolex client, the Breguet client, the Richard Mille client, they all rang. They all want one. But even if you give us $10,000, it makes no difference. You have to wait, you have to buy it in the store. That’s the game changer.”

But finding the MoonSwatch at any Swatch shop anywhere has been a question of luck, timing, and sheer endurance since its launch on March 26 to scenes of pandemonium around the globe.

News had been dripped out gradually during the preceding week. On March 17, cryptic ads appeared in select newspapers with blank pages bearing the legend: “It’s time to change your Omega … Swatch” and “It’s time to change your Swatch … Omega.” Social media feeds hinted at something with a planetary theme before the timepieces were announced on March 24: eleven Swatch watches faithfully resembling the iconic Speedmaster Moonwatch, but battery-powered, in bright colors, and made from Swatch’s ecoplastic alternative, Bioceramic.

The colorways were inspired by planets in the solar system: there was the Mission to the Sun in bright yellow, the Mission to Neptune in deep blue, the Mission to Jupiter in beige and orange, and of course the black Mission to the Moon, closely resembling the Omega original.

Photograph: Swatch Group

As a mash-up of high and low, luxury and affordable, legendary and novelty, the MoonSwatch follows the blueprint of ultra-hyped, worlds-collide collaborations that have become a staple of the fashion world: Gucci x Adidas, Tiffany x Supreme, Balenciaga x Barbie. In fact, it’s a model that Swatch itself pioneered: Its collaborations with artists, designers, brands, institutions, and more (including NASA itself last year) have been central to its identity—“joy of life, and positive provocation” as Hayek defines it—since the 1980s. But bringing this to the austere world of luxury watches, with a riff on one of the most collected, lionized, and theoretically untouchable models ever made, had little precedent.

“These are two brands known worldwide, two brands with a clear message on the opposite side of the scale, and a total surprise for everyone,” says Hayek when I ask him why the MoonSwatch has caught on so. “It’s simple to understand for everybody, whatever background you have. It was straight to the heart of the people.”

The Dark Side of the MoonSwatch

The hand-positioned battery cover on the MoonSwatch rear depicts the model's corresponding celestial body

Photograph: Swatch Group

Once news of the product was out, along with the message that distribution would be limited to just 110 physical Swatch boutiques worldwide, the hype train took over. At Oxford Street in London, the queueing began soon after the announcement on March 24, even though the watches would not be on sale for two more days. Around the world tents were pitched, lines formed, and crowds grew.

On sale day, store managers found themselves facing throngs of thousands, many of them “scalpers”—seasoned resellers who ply their trade in the worlds of sneaker culture, street fashion, and PlayStations, intent on charging high markups. Swatch's original plan to allow buyers two watches each had by then been reduced to one each, hardly helping a mood that had reportedly changed, in several cases, from camaraderie to restlessness and agitation. It hasn’t changed much since.

At 9 am on March 26, stores opened. London’s Carnaby Street location lasted half an hour before police were called, and all three London shops were forced to shut. In New York, scuffles broke out amid rumors of a stabbing in the line. A Swatch shop in Singapore was forced to shut for 10 days in a bid to let the mayhem play itself out first.

London’s Carnaby Street Swatch store was forced to close on March 26 due to the sheer numbers of people wanting to buy a MoonSwatch on launch day

Photograph: Yui Mok/Getty Images

At locations around the world, police were needed to assist staff as the vast majority of punters left empty-handed: most of the shops had fewer than 200 watches available. Deals were done within queues as scalpers flipped watches for profit to those waiting outside. Within minutes of the first sales, MoonSwatches were hitting eBay and other platforms, attracting bids into the thousands.

“We informed everybody: It’s not limited; don’t buy on the internet from flippers; you will be able at some point in time to get your MoonSwatch,” says Nick Hayek when we meet at Swatch Group’s HQ in Biel, Switzerland, a couple of months after the launch. He rejects the idea that Swatch could have been better prepared. “We knew for sure this would be a success, because the product is beautiful, provocative, high quality, and the price is fantastic, and we kept it a secret. But what happened … I think nobody in the world could have expected that. It was really crazy.”

The crowds may have dispersed, but the MoonSwatch’s continuing lack of availability, with restocks selling out in moments and Swatch declining to make them available online, has led to widespread consternation. Some of the comments on Swatch’s Instagram posts, not to mention across Reddit, Discord, and Facebook, do not make pretty reading.

Except, that is, from those who happen to have gotten hold of a MoonSwatch. What could have been construed as a downmarket desecration of a legendary timepiece has received near universal enthusiasm: It’s imaginative, fun, expressive, and reaches across cultural divides.

“It’s very daring and very positive,” says James Marks, head of Phillips Perpetual, the contemporary watch division of the Phillips auction house. “It’s captivating the next generation of collector with a play on something that’s otherwise inaccessible to them. You now have all these people globally who have this bright watch on their wrist that has history, intrigue, the connection to space.”

“I’d love to get one,” Marks adds, “but I haven’t even handled one.”

The joint Omega and Swatch logos on the crown of the MoonSwatch

Photograph: Swatch Group

The targeting of this next generation is perhaps the most enterprising part of the MoonSwatch launch. Luxury watch buyers are not young: A recent study of 8,000 people by an insurance firm in the UK found the average age of the Rolex owner in the country to be 68. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch now outsells the entire combined Swiss watch industry, taking its biggest chunks out of the market for battery-powered watches, where Swatch operates. What better way to expose a completely new, younger audience to Omega than through such an affordable collaboration? And it seems to be working. Hayek says that since the arrival of the MoonSwatch, Omega stores are seeing a spike in sales and footfall.

According to Derek Morrison, general manager EMEA for StockX, an online marketplace for collectible sneakers and streetwear, the MoonSwatch has had huge cut-through with the platform’s Gen Z audience. The site reported more than 2,000 MoonSwatch trades in less than a week after launch and had seen over 11,000 trades by June.

“It’s the best-selling watch release in StockX history, and it’s had the highest premium of any item released this year,” Morrison says. “There’s a lot of foresight, from a branding point of view. If this is a discovery point for Omega, it compares with what Virgil Abloh [the late fashion designer and Off-White entrepreneur] did so well: using an approachable medium to shine a light on things that have been reserved for the elite, and inspiring them to learn more about them.”

More simply, Swatch will obviously benefit financially from MoonSwatch, which will give the brand a welcome revenue boost. In the early 1990s, Swatch sold 20 million watches a year. But sales in 2021 are down to 3.2 million. Morgan Stanley estimates Swatch could sell up to 500,000 MoonSwatches this year alone, providing revenue of $128 million. If the MoonSwatch's estimated gross margin is indeed approaching 90 percent ($115 million), it would restore the brand's fortunes. And keep in mind MoonSwatch has not yet been launched in China. Once it is, total annual sales could hit one million units.

The Growth of Bioceramic

Prototype Bioceramic MoonSwatch bezels not used in finished watches but recycled

Photograph: Swatch Group

Yet according to Nick Hayek, it was a determination to highlight the qualities of Bioceramic, the novel material introduced by Swatch in 2021, that prompted the MoonSwatch’s development. Developed and patented by Swatch, Bioceramic amalgamates a polymer made from the oil of castor beans with zirconium oxide, a ceramic substance used for scratch-proof, robust, hypoallergenic cases in high-end watchmaking. The result is an evolved form of plastic with the scratch-resistance and solidity of ceramic, a silky matte finish that’s noticeably different to that of “normal” plastic, and a greatly reduced carbon footprint (it should be noted, however, that Bioceramic is not biodegradable).

It also delivers a sharper profile than typical plastics—the precise contours of the Speedmaster case, with the complex planes and angles of its famous twisting lugs, are unlike anything in a traditional plastic Swatch watch. But in the fast-paced pop culture world that Swatch inhabits, Bioceramic is a tough story to sell in.

Swatch's robotic automatic optical control process checks the quality of the biosourced glass covering the dial

Photograph: Swatch Group

“I was thinking, how can we make Bioceramic become more of a reality, because it’s technical and difficult to communicate,” Hayek explains. Other Swatch Group brands were interested in working with the material; while Hayek was determined that it should remain a Swatch product only, he was aware that the status and heritage of a classic watch could raise Bioceramic’s profile. Hayek showed me early prototypes for potential Bioceramic versions of Blaincpain’s famous dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms, and Omega’s Seamaster 300. But there was only ever one real contender.

“We were doing the NASA Swatch [released in late 2021], and it made me think about the Speedmaster,” he says. “It was on the Moon, it played a principal role in one of the most mythical moments in world history: There’s a real story to be told to many young people in the world who don’t know it. I thought a collaboration between Swatch, an icon, and the Omega Speedmaster, another icon … that would be a real provocation.”

Hayek had a Speedmaster prototype made on the quiet and showed it to the curator of Omega’s museum, Petros Protopapas, who gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Raynald Aeschlimann, Omega’s CEO, took more convincing. “At first he was pale when he saw the Omega Speedmaster as a Swatch, with a quartz movement,” says Hayek. “I said maybe we could do it as a customer service watch while you’re getting your Speedmaster serviced. He said okay, we can think about it.” Once Aeschlimann saw a more fully realized product, however, he was sold.

In the meantime Hayek was able to poach Omega’s head of product, Gregory Kissling, to oversee “Galileo,” the internal project code name, which was conducted in total secrecy within Swatch. “A Swatch person would have done me a Swatch. Gregory understood that he’s not making an Omega product, but he’s not making only a Swatch product. I needed that Omega input,” Hayek says.

OMEGA Ultraman Speedmaster

Photograph: OMEGA

OMEGA Alaska Project

Photograph: Swatch Group

It was Kissling who thought of creating watches linked to the colors of the solar system and including references to historic Speedmaster iterations. The red-and-white Mission to Mars version, for instance, with its strangely shaped chronograph hands, is inspired by the white dial and large red outer casing of prototypes made in the early 1970s for the “Alaska Project,” a short-lived research program to produce the ultimate watch for space travel. The orange detailing found on the Jupiter model quotes the so-called Ultraman Speedmaster worn in a Japanese TV show from the ’70s of the same name, another collector favorite.

Conversely, the MoonSwatch's chronograph layout is the element that shows most clearly that it’s a Swatch. The chrono movement that the brand has been using for years has the two upper subdials positioned at 10 and 2 o’clock rather than at 9 and 3 o’clock. Only the third subdial, at 6 o’clock, directly emulates the original Omega Moonwatch.

The two upper subdials of the MoonSwatch slightly differ in location to the original Omega Moonwatch

Photograph: Swatch Group

“It means there are all these layers you can peel off, all the little subtleties,” says Hayek. “If you want to find the historical connections, why this hand is like this or this detail is a certain way, you can—but even if you don’t see the connection, it’s cool. This is a fantastic dimension.”

Underlying all was the focus to push the bioplastic technology further, particularly in the creation of new colors. “It’s not easy. This is an entirely new material, so we’re doing everything for the first time,” says Hayek. “We challenged our production facilities and labs to go further, to invent more, and to create colors that are not yet used. It had to dynamize the production.”

The end of the assembly process of the 521 movement, including the fitting of the MoonSwatch dials and hands. At this stage the movements are ready to be fitted in the Bioceramic cases

Photograph: Swatch Group

That Swatch Group can develop and make Bioceramic at all goes back to the initial success of Swatch when it launched in 1983 under the leadership of Hayek’s late father, Nicholas G. Hayek (the Hayek family retains a 39 percent stake in the company). At the start of the 1980s, Hayek Sr. had been tasked by creditor banks with turning around the fortunes of a group of watchmaking companies, Omega among them, that had fallen into insolvency during the economic crises of the ’70s, during which the Swiss watch industry was on the verge of collapse. It was the huge success of the fun, plastic Swatch watch, launched by the group’s ETA subsidiary in 1983, that helped reenergize Swiss watchmaking more broadly and poured millions into the coffers of Hayek’s fledgling conglomerate. He took it private in 1985.

The result today is a sprawling empire composed of not just blue-chip brands such as Breguet, Longines, and Tissot, but high-tech production hubs, research laboratories, and component factories. Through this network of intellectual property and technology, Swatch has been able to develop, patent, and manufacture Bioceramic entirely in-house. Other industries are sniffing around, claims Hayek, as the potential applications are myriad. But all the Bioceramic he can make, he needs for Swatch.

Produced Like Clockwork

Spaghetti-like strings of Bioceramic are cooled and granulized to form a feedstock ready for injection molding

Photograph: Swatch Group

The manufacturing process is complex and delicate. First, the raw ingredients of the material—the castor oil polymer, zirconium oxide powder, and chemical pigments—are fed into a complex extrusion machine, which amalgamates them at controlled temperatures of around 200 °C (minute variations in temperature can affect the color uniformity). Out of this, spaghetti-like strings of Bioceramic emerge that are then cooled and granulized to form a feedstock ready for injection molding.

This in turn produces the Bioceramic parts, including the monobloc case, the pushers and crown, battery cover, and a loop holding together the Velcro bracelet. Every element of the process, from the initial combining of the feedstock elements to the injection molding of finished parts and their assembly, along with the manufacturing of the movement, dial, and crystal, is completely automated.

Video: Swatch Group

Various subsidiaries within Swatch Group play a role, making production as much of a logistical challenge as an engineering one. ETA, a vast and historic manufacturer of watch movements (it remains the dominant supplier of movements to the Swiss watch industry), also houses the Swatch production facilities. The Bioceramic extrusion and injection processes take place at its headquarters in Grenchen while automated assembly lines are found at its other factories nearby. Comadur, a pioneer in the field of ceramics (as used in particular by Omega and Rado within Swatch Group), creates the zirconium oxide powder; along with Asulab, an advanced research facility, Comadur also creates the special chemical pigments for the Bioceramic feedstock.

Video: Swatch Group

“Many of the things we’re doing are so new, we had to develop processes as we went,” says Hayek. Even the microprinting of a photorealistic rendition of a given planet, found on each MoonSwatch’s circular battery cover, required a new technique to deliver tiny precise images using ink droplets of just six microliters (one millionth of a liter). “We did the homologation for these processes step by step during the production, in parallel, because we were driven to be as quick as possible. The more time we took, the more time there would be for information to get out. We knew if that happened, it would have lost a lot of the disruptive power.”

The production has been remarkably quick. Gregory Kissling’s concept was presented to Hayek in August 2021 and the first MoonSwatches were made in February this year—the month before the launch. Hayek says that to make the injection mold tooling for the various Bioceramic components would normally have taken six months. It was achieved in six weeks.

Evidence of the speed of this process emerged when some owners of the deep-blue Mission to Neptune model found blue stains on their wrists after wearing. With Bioceramic, full saturation colors are harder to achieve than the pastel hues with which the material was launched last year. For colors like the red of the Mission to Mars model and the Neptune blue, the feedstock is given additional passes through the extruder to compound the material more densely and fix a higher degree of pigmentation. But with the Neptune, it seems the scales were tipped too heavily. Swatch Group says that the staining occurred with a small proportion of wearers and lasted only a few days. (My experience trialing a model bears this out: An initial blue residue on my wrist stopped appearing after a few wears.)

Subtle details include an etched “S” into the biosourced glass covering the MoonSwatch dial

Photograph: Swatch Group

Nevertheless the Neptune was swiftly withdrawn, and a new recipe for the color is being concocted. But the fault has had a diverting side effect: Due to their rarity, the few Neptune models appearing on resale sites are fetching eye-watering prices compared to the other models. As of June, the pre-owned sales platform Chrono24 was showing a handful of Neptunes listed at around $2,400 or more. Most MoonSwatch models, meanwhile, have settled at market values of between $480 and $1,100—still a fantastic return on an ostensibly unlimited $260 watch.

For most people, then, the MoonSwatch remains out of reach. The frustration among prospective buyers has been compounded by Swatch’s vague communications on the likelihood of ecommerce availability: Messaging that the MoonSwatch remains unavailable online “for now” suggested that it will be at some point in the future. Hayek himself confirms that there are no plans to sell MoonSwatch online, but is less certain about future strategy. “Ask me in four months if ecommerce can play a role … perhaps … I don't know,” he says. It’s something of pertinence to those who live either far from a Swatch store, or in areas—South America, Scandinavia, India, for instance—where there is no physical outlet.

In truth, the question is moot. Even if it wanted to, Swatch does not have the capacity to serve the inevitable frenzied online demand for MoonSwatch. Indeed, Hayek states that the machines are running at full capacity, 24 hours a day, just to try and meet the demand in the brand's 110 bricks and mortar locations. “Regardless, our aim is not to hurriedly throw out millions of MoonSwatches into the market and build three times more factories instantly, which you cannot do anyway. The MoonSwatch isn't about making as much money as possible in the shortest possible time period.”

Capacity, however, will increase: New manufacturing equipment is being installed, including two extrusion machines for the creation of the feedstock (which Hayek says is by far the most onerous part of the process), more injection tooling, and more printing machines. The investment in a single product line—for a company that makes more than 3 million watches a year—is colossal.

The original Omega Moonwatch, left, complete with Velcro strap, which is emulated in the MoonSwatch

Photograph: Swatch Group

Hayek is probably right to reason that, while resellers are an inevitability of any hot product, the tight distribution has at least limited their access to the MoonSwatch. An online drop would expose Swatch to the bots and scalpers that bedevil everything from sneaker launches to the PlayStation 5. To frustrated customers, he reiterates that the MoonSwatch is neither limited nor a short-term product—there will be millions of MoonSwatches.

“The crazy prices of speculators will come down, because it is not limited, neither in time nor in numbers. Everybody wants to have it, but we cannot serve everyone at once,” he says. In the postpandemic consumer landscape, Hayek reckons, patience has become a vastly underrated virtue. “If the world is serious about sustainability, you cannot make everything available to everybody instantly and comfortably, with a click. This world thinks everything is a commodity, but the MoonSwatch is not a commodity. This is about innovation, beauty, fun, and positive provocation. And last but not least, Swiss made.”

BACKCHANNEL

Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

What do a Real Housewife, an Olympic athlete, and a doula have in common? They’re all being paid by an ad-tech startup as influencers—peddling not products but ideologies.

Benjamin Wofford  July 14, 2022 10:10 AM

ILLUSTRATION: MARIA FRADE

At first glance, the posts appeared to have nothing in common. A Philadelphia-area attorney who proffers financial advice urged her 1,700 Twitter followers to sign up for a credit union. A 23-year-old climate activist in Texas rallied her 49,000 fans on TikTok and Instagram to join a mailing list promoting Democrats in statewide offices. A physical therapist for the elderly in Florida prodded her 3,900 Instagram followers to sign a petition demanding that Congress pass paid medical leave, sharing the story of her grandmother’s battle with dementia. Each of these posts was funded by a well-heeled advocacy organization: the Credit Union National Association, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, and UsAgainstAlzheimer’s Action.

Even though none of the people reading these posts knew it, however, they were all made possible by the same company: Urban Legend, a small ad-tech startup operating out of a loft in Alexandria, Virginia.

Launched in 2020 by a pair of former Trump administration staffers, Urban Legend pledges on its website to “help brands run accountable and impactful influencer campaigns.” Its more comprehensive mission, one rarely articulated in public, is slightly more ambitious.

Staffed by a plucky 14-person team, Urban Legend keeps its largest asset carefully hidden away inside its servers: an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions. The company has painstakingly cultivated this roster to reflect every conceivable niche of society reflected on the internet: makeup artists, Nascar drivers, home improvement gurus, teachers, doulas, Real Housewives stars, mommy bloggers, NFL quarterbacks, Olympians, and the occasional Fox News pundit.

These influencers are paired with clients on Urban Legend’s private platform, the Exchange, where buyers spell out the parameters of the message they want to push to the public and set a budget. Influencers snatch the best available offers from a menu and are then free to craft the campaign’s message, molding it to the rhythms and vernacular of their followers. Clients only pay for each “conversion” an influencer nets—$1.25, say, for every follower who joins a newsletter. In two years, Urban Legend’s influencers have run more than 400 campaigns, connecting people to its clients millions of times. Henri Makembe, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist in Washington who has worked with Urban Legend several times, compared the concept to “unboxing” videos—when an influencer unwraps and showcases a product sent to them by a brand. Such product influencers are a $15 billion marketing industry. “Now we’re realizing, ‘Oh: We can do that with an idea,’” Makembe says.

This model is the brainchild of Urban Legend’s 35-year-old founder and CEO, Ory Rinat. Rinat spent the early part of his career working in Washington’s media circles before becoming director of digital strategy for the Trump White House. The idea for Urban Legend arose from many currents in American public life, including “the rise of influencer marketing, the increase in trust in those people, and also the rise of individuals to be their own media brand,” he says. In both retail and influencer politics, he says, small is big: “Our creators range from 3,000 to 14 million followers,” Rinat tells me, but the majority are “micro-influencers” (those with 100,000 or fewer followers) and “nano-influencers” (fewer than 10,000).

Like baseball, selling influence is a pastime that rarely gets reinvented. There are only so many ways to get a person to do the thing you want. In politics, the more solicitous methods include robocalls and email spam with increasingly audacious subject lines (“Hey, it’s Barack”). “The most impactful messaging strategies have always been the most personalized,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive campaign consultant based in California. Peer-to-peer outreach has long proven the most effective at persuading or mobilizing—appeals that create “the feeling like this is a real person talking to me.” Urban Legend’s approach reflects this insight, embracing influencers less as celebrity spokespeople than as peers for hire. If an influencer’s financial advice helped you save for a vacation or their fashion tips earned you compliments, maybe their view on the minimum wage, or critical race theory, is worth considering too. “To then have that person give you information about politics? That’s potentially an incredibly potent and powerful messenger,” says Shenker-Osorio.

But the rise of this new messenger has disquieted some. For one, it’s unclear whether influencers are following federal disclosure rules. And as at similar firms, the names of Urban Legend’s influencers and clients are a closely held secret—or were, until recently—creating the prospect of an internet flush with untraceable money, in which Americans can no longer tell an earnest opinion from a paid one. Initially, Rinat told me that the firm’s clients included a Fortune 50 tech company, a “major labor union,” an “environmental advocacy group,” and one “LGBTQ+ advocacy group.”

In Washington, there’s been a swell of interest in the influencer business, across the political spectrum. It bears the signs of an incipient arms race, much like the advent of super PACs a decade ago. Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley who has briefed the Biden administration on social media regulation, predicted that Urban Legend’s model will be recapitulated widely before the 2024 presidential election. “This is the future,” Farid told me.

Tellingly, both Urban Legend’s boosters and its detractors agree on the presence of a black hole at the center of the internet that’s pulled society into alignment with its goals. “To understand what Urban Legend is doing, you have to look at where we are as a society,” says Makembe. “There’s a lack of trust”—in institutions, in media, in each other—a worsening problem that he says Urban Legend is solving. Others are less sanguine. “You’re getting paid to manipulate your followers,” Farid says flatly. “Somebody with 3,000 followers is now, essentially, a lobbyist.”

Raised in Queens, New York, Rinat launched his first business at age 10. He pasted together several mail-order catalogs from rival home goods sellers and then enlisted preteen influencers—his elementary school peers—to peddle them to their parents. Young Ory managed the orders and took a cut of the sales (“a couple hundred dollars,” he estimates). The concept is not so different from Urban Legend, knitting sellers together within one convenient ecosystem.

After graduating from Columbia University in 2009 with a degree in political science and history, Rinat moved to Washington, DC. He attended the night program at Georgetown’s law school while working on the business team of Atlantic Media, the parent company of magazines like The Atlantic and National Journal. Rinat and his colleagues were experimenting with how to keep magazines profitable after the internet had torpedoed their ad revenues. His team became a pioneer of sponsored content, consulting with big-name companies to create multimedia versions of magazine-style stories.

ILLUSTRATION: MARIA FRADE

From a business perspective, however, Rinat found aspects of this model to be a bad deal for corporate clients. It had what he calls an “authenticity problem,” in that few people raced to read an “article” written by suits at Exxon. There was also an “accountability problem.” Corporate advertisers paid one lump sum up front, then simply hoped people would see their ad. Rinat recalled one DC trade association that paid a marketing agency $300,000 to place ads on Facebook urging users to email their congressperson. In the end, the group netted 600 emails—$500 per email.

Rinat speaks the savvy language of internet marketing; in layman’s vocabulary, “accountability” means “getting clients their money’s worth,” and “authenticity” means “making people believe your message is genuine, even though someone paid for it.” Nevertheless, Rinat sensed these challenges had implications beyond journalism. Around Washington, he began asking strange questions—such as the price corporate buyers were willing to pay for, say, a citizen’s heartfelt letter to Congress. (One client’s answer: $48.) He wondered whether some new development would bridge these problems. “What was left,” he reasoned, was “finding the mechanism.”

Rinat kept these ideas alive when he began directing digital strategy for the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2015. After Trump’s election, Rinat took an appointment in the State Department for a program combating violent extremism and terrorism online. Two weeks into the job, the incoming White House director of digital strategy reportedly failed an FBI background check, and Rinat was appointed interim director. Eventually, he stayed on. From his office in the Eisenhower Building, he helped redesign the White House website, build a web portal for the response to the opioid crisis, and launch Coronavirus.gov.

Rinat situated the company along a spectrum of persuasion. “What’s the highest possible thing on that spectrum? It’s probably a one-to-one communication—somebody you trust,” he says. “We’re just below that.”

By then, social media influencers had gained a tighter grip on politics, particularly in Trump’s brand of movement conservatism. Rinat explored ways to unlock their power. In 2019, alongside Sondra Clark, the administration’s director of marketing and campaigns, Rinat helped organize the first White House Social Media Summit. At the event, Trump gathered in the East Room with about 200 online “digital leaders” in conservative politics—activists and rabble-rousers including Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, and Bill Mitchell, a spreader of the then incipient QAnon conspiracy. “The crap you think of,” Trump told the crowd, “is unbelievable.” The event, according to an administration official who attended, was in keeping with a larger strategy in which social media mavens were given “an exclusive-access look at what the administration was doing, and then reaping the benefits” as they posted enthusiastically about their time at the White House. “Sondra and Ory,” the person continued, “were really the architects of that.”

Influencers had become “the mechanism” Rinat was searching for—the ultimate gig labor force, capable of delivering what he called “cost-per-action marketing, with client-set rates.” He began floating his business idea to mentors. (One was Atlantic Media chair David Bradley.) In June 2020, Rinat left the White House. Less than a month later he launched Urban Legend, and Clark came on board as president. One of their first clients was their former boss. In the second half of 2020, according to the Federal Election Commission, the Trump campaign paid Rinat’s firm more than $1 million for “online advertising.”

Rinat was unspooling this history from the corner of Urban Legend’s brick-and-cedar office when I visited on a warm morning this past spring. The firm occupies the top floor of a townhouse in Alexandria’s colonial-style downtown, wedged between a boutique pizzeria and a clothing store. By turns charming and withdrawn, Rinat has a clean-shaven head and a taciturn, solemn air, except for amused eyes that turn up cheerily at the corners when he is considering some proposition. “The technology we’re talking about is not revolutionary,” he clarifies at the outset. “We just integrated it.”

He led me into the team’s small conference room, which had chic-ish furniture and a small library. (Books included Confrontational Politics, by a gun-rights activist, and Rules for Revolutionaries, by two Bernie Sanders consultants.) Hanging on the wall was a large television monitor, where Rinat spun through a tour of the Exchange, using me as a hypothetical influencer (or “creator,” as he prefers). We set up my creator account, then clicked on a tab labeled “My Campaigns.” On prim, eggshell-colored menu panes, I was presented with campaigns from a series of eager advertisers. One dummy client, called Shipmates, was a sustainable packaging company that wanted my followers to sign up for its newsletter. The company offered me $1.90 as the “revenue per conversion,” with a limit of 3,000 sign-ups. I checked a box, agreeing to the terms and conditions, and clicked “Join Campaign.”

“Here’s the irony of this whole thing. Urban legend is relying on precisely the same thing”—trust—“that it is arguably destroying.”

Now I was officially influencing for cash. Shipmates offered me a “campaign brief”—suggesting rhetoric for getting my followers to “join our sustainability conversation.” But how I crafted this appeal was up to me. I was given a menu of custom links, each traceable just to me, and each designated to a different platform: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Rinat had an employee click one of my links, sending their browser to Shipmates’ newsletter page, where they promptly signed up. On my dashboard, a ticker labeled “Your Conversions” flipped from 0 to 1. “And look at that,” Rinat said gamely. “You just made a dollar ninety.” Among other tricks, Urban Legend can also track visits to an advertiser’s website, books on Amazon, op-eds in The New York Times, and form emails to Congress.

At a cramped desk a few feet away sat Sophia Schreiber, a 26-year-old “creator success coordinator.” Schreiber scours the internet for social media personas who have a loyal following and post in areas that advertisers might want to reach. (Fast-growing verticals are parenting and wellness—and, lately, cryptocurrency educators, Rinat says.) Sitting inside a white-paneled phone booth was James Hong, the company’s 30-year-old vice president. After Schreiber flags the influencers, Hong and others call them to vet their demeanor and professionalism—and to suss out any untapped advertising potential. Urban Legend’s influencers “are incredibly multi-faceted,” Rinat explains. “We might be onboarding a blogger who has cooking tips” but come to learn they also care about climate change or religion—“issues they’re passionate about, but not always posting about,” Rinat says.

After a team lunch, Urban Legend’s president, Sondra Clark, joined us at the conference table and explained the delicate art of influencer management. Chosen influencers are classified within a large, meticulously maintained database. To an extent, Urban Legend can curate the messengers for its corporate clients by sending push notifications that nudge them toward campaigns based on the creators’ profile of causes. Set against Rinat’s more austere mode, Clark seemed congenitally sunny, exuding a breezy charm. She framed the Exchange as empowering for influencers. “‘I want to talk about human trafficking,’” she says, mimicking an influencer. “That’s awesome! And they get a text from us—hey, there’s a campaign in your account on this issue.”

In conversation, Rinat and Clark like to emphasize causes with a liberal bent, like climate change, or no bent, like Alzheimer’s awareness, but they left their more conservative campaigns a mystery. When our conversation neared the subject of partisan influence on the Exchange, Rinat evinced a tactful froideur. His vision for the platform was one that can “work with everybody,” he said, somewhat elliptically. Urban Legend’s staff is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, he said, and most come from the world of marketing. “When you’re talking about hospital price transparency or prenatal health care or Alzheimer’s, it’s not left-right. It’s beyond politics,” Rinat said.

It would all become clear, supposedly, when I met Rinat’s selected influencers. One was Zahra Biabani, the 23-year-old creator behind the Instagram and TikTok accounts Soulful Seeds, who was recruited by Urban Legend last fall. “I didn’t know that you could be paid for sharing a petition!” she says, laughing. Biabani has around 30,000 followers on Instagram and 19,000 on TikTok and posts what she calls “climate optimism”—sharing motivating news about climate change, occasionally while grooving to a pop soundtrack. (Instagram’s official account, with 500 million followers, featured one of her dances on Earth Day.) From Biabani’s point of view, Urban Legend wasn’t asking her to do anything unusual. “You could get paid for promoting things that I would already promote,” she says. To her, the Exchange “is a very low-effort and noncontroversial way of leveraging the values-aligned audience that I built as an influencer.”

Leah O’Rourke, a 31-year-old physical therapist for older adults, posts geriatric care advice on her Instagram account, Love to Care For. “I guess I’m an influencer, which feels weird to say,” she says. With 3,900 followers, O’Rourke estimates she made about $500 last year on the Exchange, posting for four campaigns. She seized on one about Alzheimer’s, telling followers how dementia had tormented her grandmother and urging them to sign a petition asking Congress to fund paid medical leave for elder care. Then there was LaRese Purnell, a tax accountant from Ohio who has built his brand advising Black families (and recently, several NFL athletes) about financial planning. Purnell—who sits on multiple nonprofit boards, owns a small restaurant chain, and has hosted a Friday morning radio show in Cleveland—estimates that he has about 100,000 followers across various platforms. Staff from Urban Legend “directed me into campaigns that fit my image,” Purnell says. He shot a few videos talking about the benefits of credit unions while walking his dog. “If I told people in this community, ‘These are the best shoestrings to put in your shoes,’ they would believe me,” says Purnell, who sensed the cleverness in Urban Legend’s business model. “Because I build trust.”

Clients who purchased these ads are generally pleased. Rinat introduced me to two. Chris Lorence, a veteran marketing executive who placed the credit union ad, said the users who came from Purnell and other influencers were 11 times more likely to take action than their typical traffic. Another client, Sean Clifford, runs a technology company called Canopy that blocks pornography from family devices. To Clifford’s surprise, Canopy’s campaign attracted a wide array of spokespeople, and the Exchange “brought new influencers to the table that I never would have dreamed of approaching.” One was a firebrand political commentator in his twenties—“very political, very controversial,” is all Clifford would say—while others were news media personalities who attract large followings on Instagram and TikTok.

Clifford, who attended the great books program at St. John’s University, says Urban Legend’s model—while undeniably effective—raised deeper questions. He cited Plato’s ancient dialog Phaedrus, in which two gods, Thamus and Theuth, argue fiercely about the invention of writing. Far from enhancing truth, Thamus warned, humanity’s “trust in writings” by outsiders would degrade their critical faculties.

Before the afternoon at Urban Legend headquarters ended, Rinat convened an all-hands meeting to discuss the Exchange’s forthcoming mobile app—for when influencers have a “sitting-at-a-red-light moment,” Rinat explains. Throughout the day, the most salient refrains were words like “authentic” and “trust”—a reminder, if nothing else, of what Urban Legend is really selling. Rinat situated the company along a spectrum of persuasion. “What’s the highest possible thing on that spectrum? It’s probably a one-to-one communication—somebody you trust,” he says. “We’re just below that.” This is why it was key, Clark explains, that influencers craft the message. The Exchange, she says, “lets the creators’ voices sing.”

Last summer, then White House press secretary Jen Psaki filmed a series of clips with TikTok star Benny Drama to tout the coronavirus vaccine. Earlier this year, Biden administration officials gave a special briefing on the war in Ukraine to 30 TikTok influencers. And when Congress was advancing an antitrust bill to regulate Amazon, Google, and Apple, The Washington Post reported that activist groups and their Big Tech opponents each hired TikTok personalities to duke it out with a flurry of videos—some supporting the “historic bipartisan legislation to #ReinInBigTech,” others decrying the proposal as “dumb and bad economically.”

Washington’s political power brokers are quietly inching toward a full embrace of influencers. If not handled with care, however, that can be hazardous—particularly when the arrangement is unmasked. During the Democratic presidential primary of 2020, BuzzFeed News reported that a super PAC for Senator Cory Booker had tried to entice influencers with cash, giving Booker an aura of desperation. Later in the race, Mike Bloomberg found himself in trouble when a surge of meme creators began aggressively pushing his candidacy—but some left it unclear whether the posts, which garnered $150 a pop, had been sponsored.

“Relying on financially motivated influencers to be ethical is naive.”

The Federal Trade Commission requires people to disclose if they’ve been paid to endorse something online, using terms like “#Ad” or “Sponsored.” Around the time of the Bloomberg revelation, Rohit Chopra, an FTC commissioner, issued a statement clarifying that “paying an influencer to pretend that their endorsement or review is untainted by a financial relationship” is “illegal payola.” (Although one brand has been penalized by the FTC for misleading influencer marketing, no influencer, broker, or platform has yet faced penalties for failure to disclose.)

Urban Legend’s approach to disclosure is, effectively, the honor system. Formally, influencers are required to make disclosures when they agree to the terms and conditions, and they are reminded during their onboarding. But Rinat doesn’t enforce the provision; that’s the FTC’s job, and Rinat says it's on the influencers to follow the agency's guidelines.

Researchers who spoke to WIRED found this posture unconvincing. “Relying on financially motivated influencers to be ethical is naive,” says Renée DiResta, who studies narrative manipulation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She called influencer disclosure “yet another area in which law hasn’t caught up to digital infrastructure.” Many suspect that the lack of disclosure enforcement has bulldozed political money toward influencers, whose campaigns are not logged in Facebook’s political advertising archive. The Federal Elections Commission, too, has scant rules governing social media, leaving the entire field open, potentially, to anonymous money.

The click-per-payment model, DiResta says, may also change influencers’ behavior—creating the “incentive to produce and amplify content in the most inflammatory way possible in order to drive the audience to take an action.” But at the most fundamental level, researchers voiced a concern about the potential for deception in civic discourse. DiResta said, “I don’t think the public really understands the extent to which the people making these posts are, in fact, potentially becoming enriched personally by them.”

The ramifications of not disclosing these ties can touch anyone, from your credulous grandmother all the way up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A knowledgeable person with insight into an Urban Legend campaign described one client’s effort to apply pressure on the FCC. According to the person, one of the influencers enlisted was Eric Bolling, a disgraced former Fox News host and one of just 51 people President Trump followed on Twitter. Bolling’s post involved a “telecoms issue,” with a goal “to apply as much pressure” as possible on the FCC. There were “thousands of engagements overnight” from Bolling’s tweet, the person said, which “the FCC commissioner, Ajit Pai, and the president followed and saw.”

Today, Bolling’s tweet does not appear to be on his feed. Most social media marketing campaigns get deleted when they’ve run their course, and I found Urban Legend’s campaigns to be no exception. Rinat said influencers always know the identity of a client—and followers will know, too, because the link generally takes them to a campaign page, where the sponsor can be identified. Later, he said transparency is “a very important thing to influencer marketing, and particularly for our model. Without it, audience trust drops, and the resulting engagement drops.” He also called for clearer rules from enforcement agencies.

While lionizing transparency, Urban Legend continues to shield the identities of its influencers and the clients who pay them.

While lionizing transparency, Urban Legend continues to shield the identities of its influencers and the clients who pay them. The company’s tactfully hands-off approach to disclosure, Farid said, makes the Exchange “a system that is—by design—ripe for abuse.”

“At best, the appearance is bad,” he continued. “At worst, it’s hiding something nefarious.”

The satirist and critic H. L. Mencken once wrote that “whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.” The bone-dry notion that Americans would happily sell anything—even their patriotism—must have seemed like an amusing hypothetical at the time. But perhaps Mencken simply didn’t live long enough to see Americans offered the chance.

Last September, HuffPost reporter Jesselyn Cook noted a wave of Instagram posts that seemed to correspond with the timing of a large payment to Urban Legend for “advertising,” according to FEC filings, through a partner firm called Legendary Campaigns. The purchase was made by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which fundraises for Senate campaigns. The posts had headlines like “End to Mask Mandates, Endless Lockdowns and Vaccine Passports!” and demanded “a full investigation into Biden-tech collusion.” Each post linked to NRSC petitions, which harvested names and emails.

When I asked Rinat about the posts, he initially said he didn’t think the campaigns came from Urban Legend. A few weeks later, however, an Urban Legend client shared with WIRED several backdated screenshots of their influencers’ posts. Each of these posts redirected users to a petition by using a highly unusual URL construction, which began “exc.to.” According to computer science researchers who examined the string, the top-level domain “.to” is registered to the country of Tonga and has a registration history that cannot be seen. The domain “exc” was registered with the URL-shortening service Bit.ly, which works with private business clients to turn their registered domains into redirect links (such as “es.pn” for the sports network). Since Urban Legend’s founding in 2020, “exc.to” could not be found elsewhere on the internet, except in one place: the HuffPost story, in which a 16-year-old’s Instagram post for the NRSC bore the telltale URL “END MASK MANDATES: exc.to/3zLvUFB.”

When WIRED used third-party search tools to scan Facebook and Twitter for the URL string, it found 726 posts from between July and November 2021. Not long after Cook’s report, the use of “exc.to” abruptly stopped. (Since then, Urban Legend’s links have used a standard Bit.ly format identical to billions of others on the internet, making them effectively untraceable.) The posts closely matched what Rinat had shared about his creators and clients. Each linked to op-eds, petitions, or websites of advocacy organizations, including the NRSC, UsAgainst-Alzheimer’s Action, Canopy, and the Credit Union National Association. But the vast majority of them were about politics, with many sharing identical language in their appeals.

And there were other, more striking posts, which Rinat had not described. Empowered to connect with their value-aligned audiences and elevate causes that made them passionate, the influencers-for-hire let their voices sing.

“The radicals in the left thinks parents who stand up to WOKENESS in our schools are domestic terrorists!” wrote one influencer to their 8 million followers. Another posted: “Thousands upon thousands of unvetted, illegal immigrants are standing by & waiting to rush our border as soon as Democrats pass their ‘infrastructure’ bill.” There were posts from podcasters (“Freedom Over Fauci!”), activists (“The Left is coming for religious freedom AGAIN”), and talking heads (“Democrats want to steal $3.5 TRILLION of our taxpayer dollars”). Creators were also linked to conservative institutions such as Turning Point USA and the America First Policy Institute, and conservative media like Breitbart and Newsmax. Others were unaffiliated, such as the former contestant from The Bachelorette who filmed his video appeal without a shirt: “The border’s a wreck! I’m getting Amber alerts every day! This is ridiculous!”

In most cases, campaigns led to a page for harvesting emails. But others drove traffic: to conservative publishers like the Patriot Post; to an online course by Hillsdale College; to the Kids Guide to Media Bias; or to pages that appeared to be run by PragerU, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity. Occasionally, posters levied more banal appeals (“Take the #Prolife pledge!”). More frequently, rallying cries invoked critical race theory, immigration, and vaccine policies.

Among the creators were several mega-influencers. Donald Trump Jr. posted at least 10 times on Twitter. “Mask Mandates, Endless Lockdowns, and Vaccine Passports. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH,” he wrote in July 2021, sharing an NRSC petition. Laura Ingraham, the Fox host, posted twice to Facebook (“Woke teachers are injecting toxic critical race theory into America’s schools. We must fight back!”) and linked to Heritage Action. So did Dan Scavino, former social media adviser to President Trump; former Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson; and streaming duo Diamond and Silk.

1 / 5

Twitter/@bennyjohnson

Almost two-thirds of the posts were conservative. But liberals pushed campaigns too: The comedian Walter Masterson was the top contributor on Twitter, posting in support of a $20 minimum wage, while popular travel writer BrokeAssStuart boosted legislation addressing unexpected medical bills. Compared to their conservative counterparts, these posts focused more on policy, not culture wars, and appeared to be sponsored by groups like the Service Employees International Union and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. There were occasional nonpartisan campaigns, too, such as one by IBM.

The 726 posts do not capture campaigns that were deleted, and they did not cover Instagram or TikTok. WIRED reached out to several creators and clients implicated on the list. None responded to deny their affiliation, and several—Masterson, BrokeAssStuart, the Business Council, and IBM—confirmed that they’d contracted with Urban Legend. When WIRED provided a list of these and other creators and companies, Rinat indicated by email that some do and have worked with Urban Legend, but that others had not, declining to specify further.

Virtually no one—just five influencers—disclosed their payments. Collectively, these posts had some 250,000 engagements. Yet few of the earnest followers who retweeted, say, Trump Jr.—not the grandmother from Alabama, the retired mother from West Virginia, or the Florida small business owner whose bio vows to “expose the DC swamp”—evinced any recognition that what they’d presumed was the dispensation of civic duty was, in reality, just another method for enriching someone in Washington.

Researchers think the major platforms, the FTC, and marketing firms themselves all have a role to play in taming what DiResta calls “a Wild West.” Until then, the march of influencers will proceed deeper into politics. In February and March of this year, the NRSC again paid a large sum—more than $500,000—to Urban Legend through a partner firm. “Does this become normal?” DiResta asks. “I think it probably does.”

“Here’s the irony of this whole thing,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive consultant. “Urban Legend is relying upon precisely the same thing”—trust—“that it is arguably destroying.” Yet if Rinat’s model became the norm, even she concedes that “progressive groups would use this thing.” She paused. “Because you don’t want to unilaterally disarm.”

One view of Urban Legend, then, was as a reclamation project—pumping a dwindling supply of trust through a blanched and beleaguered body politic. From another vantage, though, the model resembled something else: an excavation, like the mining of a rare mineral. What happens in a country where trust is a scarce and fading resource, as prized as diamonds? As Mencken would tell you, it gets put up for sale.

Additional reporting by Samantha Spengler (@samspeng).

Updated 7/16/2022 2:00 pm ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Katrina Pierson is a former spokesperson for the Trump campaign.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally shifted my view of … everything. I had to meet one of the minds behind its world-tilting revelations.

Virginia Heffernan  July 11, 2022 10:10 AM

David Wengrow lost his coauthor, David Graeber, just after they had completed their 700-page magnum opus, The Dawn of Everything.Photograph: Udoma Janssen

The phrase “the dawn of everything” first struck David Wengrow, one of the authors of The Dawn of Everything, as marvelously absurd. Everything. Everything! It was too gigantic, too rich, too loonily sublime. Penguin, the book’s august publisher, would hate it.

But Wengrow, a sly, convivial British archaeologist at University College London, and his coauthor, the notorious American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, whose sudden death in Venice two years ago shocked a world of admirers, couldn’t let it go.

Twitter users, after all, dug the title—Graeber had asked—and it suited the pair’s cosmic undertaking. Their book would throw down a gauntlet. “It’s time to change the course of human history, starting with the past,” as the egg-yolk-yellow ads now declare in the London Underground. Wengrow and Graeber had synthesized new discoveries about peoples like the Kwakiutl, who live in the Pacific Northwest; the foragers of Göbekli Tepe, a religious center in latter-day Turkey built between 9500 and 8000 BCE; and the Indigenous inhabitants of a full-dress metropolis some 4,000 years ago in what’s now Louisiana.

Citing this existing research, and more from a range of social scientists, Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau). In contrast, the Dawn authors represent prehistoric societies as “a carnival parade of political forms,” a profusion of rambunctious social experiments, where everything from kinship codes to burial rites to gender relations to warfare were forever being conceived, reconceived, satirized, scrapped, and reformed. In an act of intellectual effrontery that recalls Karl Marx, Wengrow and Graeber use this insight to overthrow all existing dogma about humankind—to reimagine, in short, everything.

They did. The book’s a gem. Its dense scholarly detail, compiling archaeological findings from some 30,000 years of global civilizations, is leavened by both freewheeling jokes and philosophic passages of startling originality. At a time when much nonfiction hugs the shore of TED-star consensus to argue that things are either good or bad, The Dawn takes to the open sea to argue that things are, above all, subject to change.

For starters, the book makes quick work of maxims by domineering thinkers like Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. Chief among these is the idea that early humans, bent on nothing but the grim chores of survival, led short and dangerous lives chasing calories and subjugating others for sex and labor. By the research, many or even most premoderns did none of this. Instead, they developed expressive, idiosyncratic societies determined as much by artistic and political practices as by biological imperatives. For instance, while the Kwakiutl practiced slavery, ate salmon, and maintained large bodies, their next-door neighbors in latter-day California, the Yurok, despised slavery, subsisted on pine nuts, and prized extreme slimness (which they showed off by slipping through tiny apertures).

Wengrow and Graeber further cast doubt on the assumption that Indigenous societies organized themselves in only rudimentary ways. In fact, their societies were both complex and protean: The Cheyenne and Lakota convened police forces, but only to enforce participation in buffalo hunts; they summarily abolished the police in the off-season. For their part, the Natchez of latter-day Mississippi pretended to revere their all-knowing dictator but in fact ran free, knowing that their monarch was too much of a homebody to go after them. Likewise, the precept that large monuments and tombs are always proof of systems of rank comes up for review. In an especially mind-bending passage, Wengrow and Graeber show that the majority of Paleolithic tombs contained not grandees but individuals with physical anomalies including dwarfism, giantism, and spinal abnormalities. Such societies appear not to have idolized elites so much as outliers.

By the time I was halfway through The Dawn, I found myself overcome with a kind of Socratic ecstasy. At once, I felt unsuffocated by false beliefs. I brooded on how many times I’d been told that it’s natural to keep my offspring strapped to my chest, or sprint like I’m being chased by a tiger, or keep my waist small because males like females who look fertile, or move heaven and earth to help men spread their seed because that’s what prehistoric humans did. This was all a lie. The book’s boldest claim convulsed actual glee: Humans were never in a state of nature at all! Humans have simply always been humans: ironic, sentient, self-reflective, and free from any species-wide programming. The implications were galactic.

After Graeber died, on September 2, 2020, not long after alerting Twitter that he and Wengrow had completed their magnum opus, Wengrow found himself both grieving and rushing to finish. The grief nearly knocked him out. But there was one advantage to the hurry: Wengrow stuck “The Dawn of Everything” on the page proofs, too late for Penguin to balk. The sun rose on the book on October 19, 2021, with its golden-hour cover, and soon after it hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

I first met Wengrow—well, I first met him in Twitter DMs, but we’re moving to real life now—in Manhattan, where, over several espressos to brighten his jet lag, we discussed The Dawn. I also offered condolences on the death of Graeber. The official cause, which Wengrow was reluctant to discuss, was pancreatic necrosis. But on October 16, 2020, Nika Dubrovsky, a Russian artist and Graeber’s widow, wrote that, though she’d shielded Graeber from Covid, he’d occasionally bridled at wearing a mask. “I want to add my own conspiracy theory,” she wrote. “I firmly believe [his death] is related to Covid.”

Wengrow has never shaken the feeling of being an outsider in academia.

Photograph: Udoma Janssen

Wengrow and Graeber were devoted to one another as few writing partners are. Their collaboration seems to have been a case of true philia, the kind of meeting of the minds I associate with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Some of this is explained by similarities in their backgrounds. Graeber grew up among working-class radicals in Manhattan, while Wengrow was born to a hairdresser and a partner in a small clothing firm in North London, his grandparents having been, he told me, “gifted people who lost their homes and opportunities when the Nazis came to power.” Though Wengrow’s father later found success in the rag trade, his son was the first in his family to go to college.

Wengrow made it to Oxford in a roundabout way. Having tried to be an actor for a year or two, he thought he’d study English, so he wrote earnest letters to several Oxford colleges to express his lifelong passion for literary studies. When he hit a wall, he canvassed friends about fields of study that might be easier to break into; someone mentioned anthropology and archaeology. He barely knew what these disciplines were, but once again he wrote an earnest letter, this time only to St. Hugh’s, assuring the college of his lifelong passion for archaeology. When he went in for an interview, the interviewer held up a sheaf of letters. On top was the letter he’d recently written about his passion for archaeology. The rest were the nearly identical ones he’d written about his passion for literature. The silence was awkward. But he got in. He received his DPhil in 2001.

Nine years later, Wengrow had just published his second book, What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West, which argues that civilizations don’t leapfrog from one technological miracle to the next but progress by the gradual transformation of everyday behavior. Having landed in New Orleans for a conference, he was lining up for passport control when a warm, rumpled anthropologist introduced himself: David Graeber. Graeber was impressed by Wengrow’s research on Middle Eastern cylinder seals, which he’d described as an early example of commodity branding. In turn, Wengrow was impressed to meet an anthropologist who knew what a cylinder seal is. The Davids stayed in close touch, meeting in either Manhattan or London, and at some point resolved to create a “pamphlet” summarizing new findings in archaeology that undermine many of the stories told about early human societies. For 10 years they talked, one man’s thoughts taking up where the other’s left off. Eventually they knew the pamphlet would be a book. Determined to preempt critics who’d be eager to pounce on any error, they were meticulous, writing and rewriting each other’s work so thoroughly that neither could tell whose prose was whose. The two never stopped exchanging ideas, and they were still planning a sequel to The Dawn—or maybe three—when Graeber died.

Given his background, Wengrow has never shaken the feeling of being an outsider in academia. “Oddly, this feeling doesn’t go away even when you achieve a degree of recognition and status,” he told me. He and Graeber “could relate on that level. And there was a common sense of humor, which comes from the Jewish background. If he hadn’t heard from me in a couple of days he’d call and put on a grandmother sort of voice: ‘You don’t write … you don’t call.’”

Everywhere I went with Wengrow, he fielded impromptu elegies for Graeber, who was famous as the author of Debt and Bullshit Jobs, and as an architect of various anti-capitalist uprisings, notably the Occupy movement. Over our first lunch, Wengrow suggested that the specter of his brilliant friend might still be lurking. (Graeber, whose funeral was framed as an “Intergalactic Memorial Carnival,” loved the paranormal.) Indeed, Graeber remained a spirited absence during the time I spent with Wengrow. I pictured him somewhere between a guardian angel and a poltergeist.

The next time I saw Wengrow was in April in Dublin, to grab a bite at a … what was this place? A disco or a ballroom, loosely attached to a hot-dog stand, at which hot dogs were sold out. Wengrow was unbothered. He and his wife—Ewa, who was trained in archaeology and now works at the British Library—companionably split a burger. After dinner, Wengrow was scheduled to address a group of labor activists about matters archaeological, but for now we discussed Irish politics, and in particular the vexing matter of Facebook’s and Google’s longtime use of Ireland as a tax haven (an arrangement that seems to be ending).

The gathering had been organized by Wengrow’s host in Dublin, Conor Kostick, an Irish sci-fi writer, champion of the 1950s board game Diplomacy, and devoted leftist. Captivated by The Dawn soon after its publication, Kostick had emailed Wengrow, inviting him to speak to a small group at Wynn’s, an old Victorian hotel and pub on Abbey Street and a short walk from the hot-dog disco. Kostick’s invitation showed some chutzpah. If Wengrow took it up, he’d have to break up the extravagant victory lap that had been his book tour in the US to address a few dozen labor activists, trade unionists, and scruffy anarchists in a modest venue. He’d also be coming to Dublin by way of Vancouver, where he had just been flown business class to give a TED talk, on a docket with Elon Musk.

Wengrow said yes without missing a beat. Kostick tweeted: “Imagine Darwin was coming to #Dublin, to speak about his new book On the Origin of Species. Well that’s how I feel about being able to hear @davidwengrow’s talk next Thursday.” The invitation was just what Wengrow needed, he told me, a sort of anti-TED, “to keep mind and soul together.”

Wengrow considered TED both cultlike and fascinating. Reflecting on the experience with Kostick and me, Wengrow spoke animatedly about Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Russian dissident who’d kicked off the conference with a speech about the war in Ukraine. Wengrow had no contact with Musk (about whom he appeared to know little, and care less) and joined forces instead with Anicka Yi, a conceptual artist who works largely in fragrance, and the feminist author Jeanette Winterson. “They were great company and reminded me what I was there for, which was to get the message of my work with David Graeber out there in a place where you might least expect to find it.” Munching on his burger, he still seemed dazed by a single data point: Attending TED can cost $25,000. Kostick, who has a ponytail and the vibe of a Roz Chast character, refused to take that in. The average annual salary for an Irish laborer is about $35,000.

Weeks later, I watched Wengrow’s TED talk. In khakis and an oxford-cloth shirt buttoned to the top, he cited his fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan to debunk the stubborn fallacy that a make-believe “agricultural revolution” ruined humanity by creating stationary societies, private property, armies, and dreadful social inequality. On the contrary. Some early farming societies rejected these traps for 4,000 years and traveled far and wide, spreading innovations from potter’s wheels to leavened bread across the Middle East and North Africa. Cities in the Indus Valley from 4,500 years ago had high-quality egalitarian housing and show no evidence of kings or queens, no royal monuments, no aggrandizing architecture.

The hardest punch thrown by The Dawn is its implicit rejection of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion that “there is no alternative” to feral capitalism, a claim still abbreviated in Britain as “TINA.” Laying waste to TINA, The Dawn opens a kaleidoscope of human possibilities, suggesting that today’s neoliberal arrangements might one day be remembered as not an epoch but a fad.

We strolled a few blocks to the hotel, where the upstairs lecture room seemed like something out of a pub scene in Ulysses. Voluble young radicals filed in, bedecked in buttons of esoteric meaning. Rhona McCord, a socialist and anti-fascist representing Unite, a massive trade union, stood up to encourage people to join. For as little as 65 cents a week. We were far from the Gulfstream brotherhood of TED.

Surrounded by students and leftie hotheads, Wengrow was in his element. I asked a Covid-masked anarchist, who went by the mononym Shane, about The Dawn of Everything. “It’s a really hopeful book,” he said. “It’s very easy to get trapped in that mental thing of, ‘Nothing’s ever going to change. It’s just going to be the same neoliberal, state capitalist thing forever.’ But a lot of the book is just saying, ‘No, we can change.’ We have been doing that for the entire time that humans have existed.” I turned to Liv, a Portuguese anarchist whose buttons excoriated the foes of the working class and commemorated the Spanish Civil War. “We have to make a change. And it has to be as fast as we can, otherwise … it will kill us all.” I heard this from other Dawn enthusiasts. The book delivers jolts to the system, and—in some readers—shakes defeatist notions that human exploitation is inevitable.

But why have we felt so defeated, so locked into TINA, I wondered. As I took my seat, a plaintive passage from the book popped into my mind: “How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients … but as inescapable elements of the human condition?” The poltergeist in the air was insistent: Why do we put up with this?

From the lectern, Wengrow asked that no recording be made. He likes synchronous human exchange in person or by telephone, and he welcomes questions and disruptions. While composing The Dawn, Wengrow and Graeber built arguments to the tune of their own overlapping voices, interruption, enthusiasm, dissent, doubt, and rapturous agreement.

Early in the book, the Davids even offer a spontaneous celebration of dialog as the engine of philosophy. “Neuroscientists,” they write, “tell us that … the ‘window of consciousness,’ during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds.” This isn’t always true. “The great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else … In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end.”

The same collaborative meaning-making was in evidence at Wynn’s, where Wengrow was receptive to everyone, even the inevitable town-hall shaman who stood and delivered a mumblecore homily about … something. For an academic superstar with a theory of everything, Wengrow lacked arrogance in an uncanny way, the way someone else might lack eyebrows.

The lecture touched on something called Dunbar’s number: the influential if dubious thesis by evopsych anthropologist Robin Dunbar that humans function best in groups of up to 150 people, implying that in bigger groups, they need guns, monarchs, and bureaucracy lest they become unruly. A bite-size idea, the kind of pro-cop, pro-executive palaver that animates airport books about “management” and “leadership.” But then Wengrow pointed to actual archaeological evidence. In December, researchers Jennifer M. Miller and Yiming Wang published a study of ostrich-eggshell beads that were distributed over vast territory in Africa 50,000 years ago, suggesting that early human populations lived in attenuated social networks of far more than 150 people and kept cohesion and peace without police or kings.

I left Wynn’s while Wengrow was still talking animatedly to a pair of Gen Z activists, holding thoughts and reflecting on problems for hours on end.

For an academic superstar with a theory of everything, Wengrow lacks arrogance in an uncanny way.

Photograph: Udoma Janssen

Wengrow and I met the next day too. I didn’t think any lecture could be less glitzy than the event with Kostick and the 65-cents-a-week Unite membership, but I was wrong. The final talk Wengrow gave in Ireland was at University College Dublin, and there was not a CEO or tattooed fanboy in sight. This time the audience—in a narrow gray lecture hall with an undersized platform on which four academics balanced precariously—was made up of a few dozen laconic academics. At UCD, Wengrow’s sponsor was Graeme Warren, vice president of the International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research. Where Wengrow had referred to the Wynn’s gig as one for “trade unionists,” this one was for “hunter-gatherers.”

As I got my bearings in the windowless auditorium, the social dynamics came slowly into focus. At last, one of the men, sitting alone at the edge of the audience, emerged as important. When he started to speak, I recognized the room’s suspense from my own tour in graduate school; he was donnish, oracular, the one whose opinion matters. Would he like The Dawn of Everything? Sweetly, Wengrow himself seemed deferential. The suspense broke when the man—I later learned he was Daniel Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin—offered a technical observation about the book, and then shook his head in pure astonishment at the achievement.

Wengrow was pleased. But he was no less delighted when a baby-faced lecturer, Neil Carlin, proposed in a deceptively gentle brogue that Wengrow had gone wrong in his analysis of Stonehenge. Didn’t The Dawn, Carlin asked, merely rehash the mainstream account of Stonehenge’s construction? Carlin’s gall was exciting, but my ears pricked up for another reason. Finally. An archaeological site I’d heard of.

“There’s a very big presence on my shoulder as I speak about this,” Wengrow said. That would be, I gathered, Michael Parker Pearson, one of Wengrow’s colleagues at UCL, the ranking expert on Stonehenge and an archaeologist whom some consider Anglocentric. Had Wengrow crossed up his book’s own thesis by failing to question orthodoxies, especially the ones that credit imperial powers like England with all great human achievements? The upstart Carlin was sidling uncomfortably close to charging Wengrow with sycophancy or even careerism.

Wengrow wasn’t thrown. He’s indifferent to wolf-pack dynamics everywhere, most of all in academic settings. A preoccupation of The Dawn, after all, is the contingency of hierarchies. They come and go, sometimes literally with the weather; any system of seniority and groveling is a joke; we are hardwired neither to rule nor to be ruled over. In particular, Wengrow’s own newfound status as an archbishop of archaeology, Mr. $25K-a-membership, struck him as laughable. As Jacques Lacan wrote, “If a man who thinks he’s a king is mad, a king who thinks he’s a king is no less so.”

While Wengrow had received posh plaudits in Vancouver, and whoops of support at Wynn’s, he seemed to find full-contact dialog with the UCD archaeologists most gratifying. And stimulating. The eye-opening questions, the testing of ego, the swerves in and out of accord. Reflecting on his collaboration with Graeber, Wengrow ventured that university management has made academia so sterile that making friends within it has become a radical act. “In that way, too,” Wengrow said, “our relationship was going against the grain.”

True to form, Wengrow earnestly considered Carlin’s Stonehenge questions, and even made notes. Later, he gave the critique a complete hearing in an email to me. As with the missing hot dogs, Wengrow was unbothered.

Like the death of Wengrow’s intellectual soul mate, The Dawn opens far, far more questions than it closes. The book’s several critics seem to balk at its ambition more than its research. Some say its idea of the dawn of everything, beginning 30,000 or so years ago, is more like its teatime. Others say Wengrow and Graeber are so eager to find anarchism and feminism in early civilizations that they shade the data.

In the book’s final chapters, clouds pass overhead. The authors land on the puzzle of modern “stuckness”—the idea that we have lost the experimental spirit that makes humans human and settled into the ruts of our capitalist-neoliberal hellscape. This works as a rhetorical move: No one wants to be stuck, and dread of this fate can impel a person to action. But as an overarching theory, the idea that humans moved from freedom to stuckness seems to reinscribe some of the schematic evolutionary folktales that the book exists to critique. And if our spirits were flying along just fine, creating new worlds until they were all simultaneously crushed by Thatcherian capitalism, isn’t this just a new fall-from-grace story, like the ones that said humanity was wrecked by agriculture or urbanization or the internet?

Contemporary society strikes me as far from stuck. Precarious and imperiled, but not stuck. The pandemic, for one thing, threw into relief the proliferation of cultlike groups that reject modern medicine and even modernity itself. More encouragingly, young workers everywhere are organizing, protesting, and taking to the road in record-high numbers. Gender and race are being reimagined. Any or all of this might be threatening or vertiginous or worse, but none of it suggests stuckness.

Wengrow didn’t worry too much about my objection. He holds ideas lightly, and if the “stuckness” concept didn’t land for me, he said, maybe I could just let it go. The book supplies hundreds of rich examples of early societies that didn’t conform to evolutionary stages. The research is what most excites Wengrow. The imperative to act on our humanness—to refuse to sleepwalk, to refuse to get stuck—grows out of the scholarship.

Over drinks after the lecture, Wengrow talked, when pressed, about his book, but he already seemed to be testing new intellectual territory—the cult of TED, ostrich-shell currency, good old Stonehenge. Academic careers, like all human endeavors, don’t have to be only about prizes or disgrace. There is so much to study. There are worlds to imagine. Call it TAAL: The alternatives are limitless.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the September 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach

Brendan I. Koerner  June 23, 2022 10:10 AM

He tried to save his wife through the video game they loved—and nearly lost himself. Then he signed up to lead a fledgling team of gamers in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Madison Marquer was playing a show in a converted garage in Denver when he met her. It was 2014 and Marquer was a junior at the University of Wyoming, a baby-faced Eagle Scout from Cheyenne who’d become a fixture in Laramie’s college-town punk scene. That night he was on guitar for a band called Medicine Bow, earning his reputation as a magnetic performer—a blur of flailing limbs and sweaty, close-cropped hair as he tore through songs about SpongeBob SquarePants and ecological collapse.

In the crowd was Katherine Landvogt, a petite and pale-skinned 20-year-old who wore cat-eye glasses. After the set, she went up to Marquer (pronounced “Mar-care”), and they eventually got to talking about music. Landvogt was a guitarist, too, though she was earning her living as a house cleaner. She was dying to join a band, but none of the acts in Denver’s macho punk scene would give her a shot because she didn’t look the part. Marquer thought she was cute, with her curly black hair and off-kilter wit, and he hated that no one was giving her a chance.

Within a few months the two were living together in Marquer’s basement apartment. Landvogt wasn’t just a guitarist, it turned out, but a fluent and ferocious one. Medicine Bow soon slimmed down from a quartet to a power duo: Marquer on drums, Landvogt on a Fender Telecaster with a phosphorescent pick guard.

When they weren’t making music, they were often side by side in front of their PC, clobbering dragons and druids and amassing hoards of gold in Dota 2, a complex fantasy-themed video game. The game had long been one of Marquer’s grand obsessions—he was among the top 7 percent of players in the world—and now he loved that it was theirs together. They lost themselves for hours on end, oblivious to the outside world, as empty liquor bottles accumulated on the floor and kitchen counter around them.

In February 2016, as Marquer was finishing his last semester at the university, Medicine Bow recorded a cassette that channeled the couple’s romantic hopes. I see an end to any sadness, one of the songs went. Let’s drink some tea and explore the country / The future is more than it seems.

Three months later, Marquer and Landvogt got married in a tiny chapel near Elk Mountain. Soon after, the newlyweds packed up their Subaru Impreza with Medicine Bow’s gear and embarked on a 41-day concert tour. They crashed on fans’ sofas, played a show at a Pastafarian church in Oklahoma, and reveled in the neon-lit chaos of Times Square. They were so blissed out that every excess and hardship of the road felt like a delight—all fodder for the amusing stories they’d tell their kids one day.

The giddiness faded after they got back to Laramie. Marquer, who’d majored in education, couldn’t find a teaching job with the local district. So to pay the couple’s $575-a-month rent, he took a mind-numbing gig sorting mail at the post office. Landvogt toyed with the idea of pursuing a degree in chemical engineering, but she could never follow through. While Marquer had largely reined in his college drinking, she had started making trips to the liquor store at 1:45 am—she didn’t want to run out of vodka after it closed at 2. Her addiction gradually stripped away her creative energies and robbed her of the ability to handle even routine tasks. Marquer got used to taking her to the hospital when things got bad. Then he’d be left wondering how and when each spell of sobriety would reach its messy end.

The couple’s main remaining source of joy was Dota 2. They found refuge in the game’s sprawling map, an expanse of dark forests and medieval fortresses. As they played, Marquer started to get a notion in his head: What if he sought out a job in the industry that had emerged around Dota 2? Maybe he could find work with one of the companies that stage the game’s massive tournaments. (The 2017 edition of Dota 2’s preeminent event, the International, in Seattle, had offered almost $25 million in prize money.) If Marquer could make that happen, maybe he could get Landvogt involved, too, and that would give her the structure to make a lasting recovery.

To achieve those very specific goals, Marquer decided to pursue a highly specific advanced degree. In 2018 he returned to the University of Wyoming to study for a master’s in geography, with an emphasis on understanding how gamers relate to the virtual maps that define their worlds. In particular, he studied how male gamers lose their inhibitions when exploring those maps—a line of inquiry inspired by the harassment he heard Landvogt endure during their Dota 2 sessions.

For a while, Marquer’s plan seemed to be working. In the spring of 2019, he received a research grant to attend a Dota 2 event in Birmingham, England. Landvogt had been mostly sober for a few months, so Marquer felt comfortable leaving her alone for a week. But as soon as Marquer left for the Denver airport, Landvogt went to a liquor store—the start of a harrowing bender.

When Marquer got back, the apartment was beyond filthy. There was mold in the coffee pot, and the cats were on the brink of starving. A bedridden Landvogt yelled out for Marquer to come give her a hug, and he found her too feeble to move. Not for the first time, Marquer called an ambulance. As he later sat by her bedside at Ivinson Memorial Hospital, Marquer realized he’d lost the will to keep serving as Landvogt’s rock. “I ended up divorcing her that summer,” he says. “I couldn’t do it.” Landvogt moved to Texas to live with a man she’d met while playing Dota 2. Marquer was left in Laramie to complete a degree that had lost a great deal of its purpose.

On April 8, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic’s first wave was battering the US, Marquer got a call from the police in Haltom City, Texas: Landvogt had been found dead in her boyfriend’s trailer. An autopsy would reveal that her blood alcohol level was above 0.4, more than five times the legal limit for driving; acute and chronic alcoholism were listed as the causes of death. She was 26.

Marquer spent the next two months at his parents’ house in Cheyenne in a haze of grief. He managed to complete his thesis and get his degree, but it all felt hollow. He went through the motions of looking for a job in Dota 2, but with in-person tournaments suspended due to Covid, hiring was at a standstill. He paid his bills with temp jobs, stripping insulation from abandoned buildings and helping people navigate the Affordable Care Act. All the while, a suffocating cloud of depression stopped him from glimpsing any way forward.

In April 2021, about a year after Landvogt’s death, a friend of Marquer’s called to tell him about an article in The Cheyenne Post. Laramie County Community College (LCCC), the only institution of higher education in Cheyenne, was starting a varsity esports team. Athletic scholarships would be provided to gamers who were supremely skilled at the likes of Call of Duty and Super Smash Bros. The school was looking to hire a coach to lead the program, a one-year contract position that paid $15,000.

It wasn’t the entrée to the gaming industry that Marquer had envisioned for himself back when he’d set out to save his wife by finding them both a niche in Dota 2. But he recognized the community college job as a chance to perform a similarly meaningful act of devotion, helping young Wyomingites who might never even consider college if not for the lure of esports. And by immersing himself in that challenge, he might finally shake free of the specter of all he’d lost.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Save for the one week each summer when it’s mobbed with tourists for the rodeo extravaganza known as Frontier Days, Cheyenne exudes a quaint and dusty charm. The heart of its downtown, bounded by the gold-domed state capitol to the north and the freight tracks to the south, can be explored in half an hour, and there’s never a shortage of free parking in front of its cowboy-boot emporiums and cocktail bars. Beyond that central district is an array of handsome historic homes, faded motels with weekly rates, and an Air Force base that houses nuclear missile silos.

The 271-acre campus of LCCC—“L-Triple-C” in local parlance—sits on the city’s southern edge, across from the desolate grasslands that stretch to the Colorado border 8 miles away. Though many of the school’s 2,800 full-time students are Cheyenne residents, a fair share come from the isolated hamlets that are strewn throughout the massive state—windswept towns of a thousand or so that are dependent on gas drilling or coal mining. For rural kids, an LCCC degree can be an affordable ticket to a less secluded, less physically taxing future.

“I joke with my students all the time, ‘I want you all to get a nice cushy office job with air-conditioning, or sit in front of a computer for seven hours a day, and then go home to a nice house,’” says Richard Walsh, an instructor in LCCC’s information technology program and an alumnus of the school. “And that all starts with getting a good education.”

For years, Walsh had recognized that video games played an outsize role in LCCC social life. Because Wyoming’s weather can be so extreme—the long winters, the biting wind—and because there isn’t always much to do, the state’s kids spent a lot of time indoors, jacked into their Xboxes and PlayStations. That habit would continue once students arrived at LCCC, especially for the small-towners who felt alienated in the relative metropolis of Cheyenne; they would often cope with their discomfort, he noticed, by holing up in their dorm rooms and gaming online with friends from home.

One day in the fall of 2018, LCCC’s soccer coach called Walsh for help with a minor computer glitch. As Walsh fiddled with the troublesome PC, the coach mentioned that a friend of his worked at a Midwestern college that was launching an esports team. Walsh, an ardent gamer who has poured hundreds of hours into Apex Legends, made it clear that he was intrigued. Soon thereafter, the school’s athletic director asked him to chair a committee to investigate starting a similar program at LCCC.

At that time, esports teams were rapidly becoming commonplace at four-year institutions. In 2014, Illinois’ Robert Morris University had pioneered the practice of offering athletic scholarships to gamers; by 2019, esports athletes from nearly 200 colleges and universities were receiving $15 million in scholarships per year. Big institutions such as UC Irvine and the University of Utah were quick to establish elite programs, funneling millions into building spectator-friendly esports arenas and broadcast centers. Meanwhile, some lesser-known schools set out to raise their profiles by turning themselves into esports juggernauts: Missouri’s Maryville University, for example, has become famous for winning three national League of Legends championships and churning out a slew of pros.

Esports were slower to take root at junior colleges, which must be ever mindful of their tight budgets. (LCCC’s entire $84 million annual budget is about what Kansas State University spends on its athletic department alone.) But in the fall of 2019, the National Junior College Athletic Association Esports (NJCAAE) began its inaugural season, involving 12 two-year schools. The league’s startup costs were minimal by design: All that was required of each college was a $1,500 entry fee and the contact information for an adult who was responsible for the team. Athletes were permitted to play remotely from any computer, which meant schools weren’t required to buy any new equipment aside from the games themselves. The experiment garnered enough positive reviews that the NJCAAE’s membership more than quintupled by the start of its second season.

Walsh paid close attention to the league’s rollout while gathering information for a presentation to convince LCCC’s board of trustees that esports could generate immediate revenue. He knew money was even tighter than usual: The pandemic had led to a decline in enrollment and cuts in state support. (LCCC’s president has been frank in describing the college’s future as “a bit bleak.”)

In a haze of grief, he paid his bills with temp jobs, stripping insulation from abandoned buildings.

By early 2021, Walsh had gathered ample evidence to prove that esports could bring in as many as 20 student-athletes per year and boost the college’s brand among potential applicants who’d been weaned on Fortnite and NBA 2K. Still, some of the school’s administrators scoffed at the idea that gamers deserved the same respect as, say, members of LCCC’s well-regarded rodeo team. “They’re not athletes, because an athlete, by definition, manipulates their body and muscles in a way to interact with some object,” Walsh recalls an administrator saying. “And I said, ‘You just described esports.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, no, they’re not moving.’ And I go, ‘They’re moving their wrists and their fingers with dexterity. And they’re using their brains in such a quick and decisive way. How is that not a sport?’”

Walsh knew he’d failed to convince everyone in the administration that Call of Duty is as athletically demanding as bull riding, but his proposal was approved in March of that year. The esports team was given $20,000 in scholarships to dole out, as well as $2,100 for expenses, including the NJCAAE’s membership fee. The next step was for the athletic department to hire a coach to build the program from scratch.

The college placed job postings seeking someone with a bachelor’s degree, a driver’s license, and “at least one year competitive esports experience.” Most of the respondents seemed to perceive the job as a chance to hang out and play games for a living. Amid the lackluster pool of candidates, the video-game geographer Madison Marquer stood out.

Marquer had figured his odds were good, since surely there couldn’t be that many other grown-ups with master’s degrees willing to accept $15,000 a year. But he went all out getting ready for his May interview anyway, heeding his father’s advice to wear the coat and tie that had been moldering in his closet. In front of the search committee, he spoke eloquently about how he’d been shaped by gaming, dating back to the hot summer nights he’d stayed up late eating popsicles and playing Legend of Zelda with his mother. And he made the case that esports could help transform Wyoming by giving its aimless gamers the discipline, camaraderie, and sense of purpose they needed to claw their way to richer lives. He fielded every follow-up question with ease, betraying no hint of the crushing sadness that had pervaded his life for more than a year.

Aware that their salary offer was a piddling sum, the search committee mentioned to Marquer that he’d be considered for full-time employment if he performed admirably for a year. Marquer was fine with that arrangement; he was so committed to creating the LCCC esports program that he planned to move back in with his parents in Cheyenne to save money.

Marquer’s official start date was June 1. That gave him less than 12 weeks to assemble a team, a formidable task given that most recent high school graduates already had plans for the fall. So he resorted to a DIY tactic from his punk days: He printed up a stack of posters, headlined with the slogan “GET IN THE GAME,” and put them up at local businesses and on bulletin boards near campus. Unbeknownst to Marquer, though, word of the team’s formation had already been circulating around Cheyenne for some time.

Madison Marquer plays drums in his band Stay Awhile, a tattoo of Wyoming’s state flower on his shin.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Travis Jones never thought of himself as college material. He stopped showing up for school midway though the 10th grade, having realized he could no longer pretend to care about reading novels or memorizing the root causes of wars. His worried parents switched him to an online academy, hoping he’d perform better if allowed to learn at his own pace. But by the end of his junior year in 2019, Jones had washed out of virtual school too. The gentle-natured teen then began cycling through a series of dreary, low-wage gigs in Cheyenne—unloading freight at Dillard’s, sorting goods at Walmart, delivering pizzas for Domino’s. He spent much of his meager earnings on his two most cherished pastimes: using mail-order parts and instructional YouTube videos to assemble homebrew PCs, and playing Call of Duty at a downtown Cheyenne gaming café called the Annex.

A sliver of a storefront wedged between a computer repair shop and Cheeks Beauty Academy, the Annex is Cheyenne’s gaming mecca. The café hosts weekly tournaments with small cash prizes and stays open until 1 am on the weekends to cater to young locals who prefer mowing down virtual enemies to beer-fueled revelry. Jones started hanging out there soon after the Annex opened in the spring of 2021. He was drawn in by Austin Vinatieri, who ran special events at the café; the two had been teammates on a semipro Call of Duty squad funded by a local hip hop producer.

Vinatieri was a guy who’d organized his late teens and early twenties around mastering Call of Duty, working sporadic hours at Pizza Hut and the Frontier Mall to suit his gaming schedule. “Esports is something that you have to chase; you can’t chase it half-heartedly,” says Vinatieri, a tall and gangly bundle of energy who’s notably more extroverted than the stereotypical gamer. “You have to put your all into it, because it really does require that level of effort.” He gradually ascended the leaderboards at GameBattles, a platform that hosts semipro tournaments, hoping to impress pro scouts from the 12-team Call of Duty League.

But even at his competitive zenith, Vinatieri had never earned more than $500 a week from gaming. Now 26, married, and the father of an infant daughter, Vinatieri had finally begun to contemplate the steps he needed to take to become a responsible adult. When he read a Facebook post about LCCC’s nascent esports team in the spring of 2021, however, he decided to take one last crack at his dream. He figured that if he could captain a squad that would dominate on the junior college circuit, he might catch the eye of a major four-year program, a Call of Duty esports behemoth like Concord University or Sheridan College. And Vinatieri believed he’d then be primed to make the leap to a Call of Duty League team like the Los Angeles Guerrillas or Florida Mutineers, which routinely draw hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers as they compete for $5 million in prize money per season. (The Guerrillas share an owner with the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the reigning Super Bowl champions.)

Even before LCCC finished its search for a coach, Vinatieri had enrolled in the school’s summer session. And as soon as Marquer was hired, Vinatieri emailed the new coach to explain his plan: cajole gamers in his orbit to join him at the college. At the top of Vinatieri’s list was his former teammate Travis Jones, whom he had nicknamed “the Human Turret” for how doggedly he defended his turf in Call of Duty.

As soon as a foe comes peeling around a corner, the aggressor has roughly two-tenths of a second to fire their weapon with pinpoint accuracy.

Jones was a week into a new, entry-level warehouse job at UPS when Vinatieri told him about esports at LCCC. “I thought he was messing with me,” Jones says. “Getting a scholarship to play a video game was almost unreal.” Given his miserable academic history, Jones had qualms about attempting the jump to college. But he was also desperate for a new direction: He could easily see himself in 10 years, stuck on a loading dock among fellow dropouts and wondering where the time had gone. And so he agreed to go with Vinatieri to LCCC for an esports audition.

Marquer arranged for the tryout at the team’s new home venue, a dimly lit computer lab festooned with images of the school’s mascot and athletic namesake, the Golden Eagle. He had yet to stock the team with much talent, and he had high hopes for the duo from the Annex. The two aspiring student-athletes donned their headphones and fired up Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, a game set in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

As in all Call of Duty titles, success in Cold War depends on a player’s ability to predict opponents’ behavior. The action unfolds in digital facsimiles of places like Moscow and the Nicaraguan jungle, all filled with labyrinthine buildings and narrow corridors that elite gamers memorize down to the inch. Detailed knowledge of those virtual maps is what allows players to dash to spots where they believe they might achieve the element of surprise. As soon as a foe comes peeling around a corner, the aggressor has roughly two-tenths of a second to fire their weapon with pinpoint accuracy; if they fail to score the kill and can’t immediately readjust, they’re liable to become prey themselves.

Watching Jones and Vinatieri slash their way through Cold War maps, Marquer realized he had two potential stars on his hands. The diminutive Jones, whose wiry chinstrap beard gives him a slightly Amish mien, was a particular revelation: The Human Turret had a gift for detecting opponents who tried to assault his position from sneaky angles. In the thousands of hours he’d spent playing and studying video games, Marquer had rarely encountered a player so blessed with spatial awareness.

As soon as the tryout was over, Marquer offered both men scholarships that would defray much of the school’s $4,612 tuition. Jones was elated but didn’t tell Marquer he was technically ineligible to attend LCCC. Aware that this was likely his only shot at earning a degree, he resolved to get his high school diploma, via online classes, quickly—no matter how many late nights he had to put in after his UPS shifts.

Vinatieri also introduced Marquer to another prodigy from the Annex, 19-year-old Enrique Tail. A veteran of Halo tournaments throughout the West, Tail had long felt he’d been born to solve the intellectual challenges of first-person shooters. “Even if it was a game of tag, you know, I’d strategize if I was at the playground—like, how to get here or there without getting tagged,” he says. “In video games, I feel like I was more organized, more able to get around by flanking.” But college hadn’t been in Tail’s plans. He’d thought about joining the Marines after he graduated but decided to pursue gaming instead. Marquer took an instant shine to the shy and sensitive Tail, who he thought might be a lost soul in need of guidance. He gave the teen the sweetest scholarship deal he would offer to any Golden Eagle.

The last of Vinatieri’s recruits was Jordan Vestal, a Call of Duty ace who worked for a logistics company in Chicago. But the aloof and ultracompetitive Vestal had no interest in moving to Wyoming, and Marquer was reluctant to take on a remote student who clearly prioritized gaming over academics: He didn’t want the team to feel like a collection of mercenaries. But he also knew that, like any coach, he’d ultimately be judged by wins and losses. So he made a place on the team for Vestal, an avid Twitch streamer under the handle “ChiraQ.”

News of the team began to spread beyond Vinatieri’s circles. Andy Santhuff, from the town of Green River in the southwestern corner of the state, had been a soccer standout in high school, a spry midfielder with birdlike legs who seemed destined to play at the next level. But late in his senior season he suffered a devastating shoulder injury that ended his career. The son of a sodium bicarbonate miner, he was resigned to being trapped in Green River—until his girlfriend, an LCCC student, told him about the esports team. Santhuff called Marquer to arrange an in-person tryout, which meant a 275-mile drive to Cheyenne. After Santhuff demonstrated his mastery of Rocket League, a game in which cars smash balls into soccer nets, Marquer offered him scholarship funding on the spot.

As the first day of classes approached in late August, the team’s roster swelled to 17 athletes; all guys, some already going into their second year at LCCC. Their ranks now included a jovial, thickly bearded Valorant player from the heart of Wyoming’s coal country, a reedy distance runner with flowing blond hair whose parents had been the only doctors in the town of Sundance, and a former Christian missionary who drove a Walmart forklift on the side. Soon Marquer found himself working upwards of 50 hours a week, helping students fill out financial aid forms and figuring out the minutiae of livestreaming matches from the lab.

Just days before the close of LCCC’s registration period, Travis Jones finally passed the last of his high school exams and earned his diploma. Now, instead of loading boxes onto trucks, he was set to spend the next two years playing Call of Duty and majoring in information technology.

Horses at Laramie County Community College, which is known for its rodeo team.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Above: Coach Marquer (right) with the Vanguard squad (from left): Travis Jones, Isiaha Ahrens, Andrew Santhuff, and Ethan Krolikowski.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

From the start, Marquer tried to instill a sense of rigor in his athletes. He divided the team into seven squads, each dedicated to a specific game: Valorant, Super Smash Bros., Hearthstone, Rocket League, Call of Duty: Gunfight, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Those squads would be led by team captains who had to make sure their members practiced at least 10 hours a week. Depending on the game, practices might consist of video analysis, strategy discussions, or weapons training. There was also a mandatory team meeting every Monday, a gym requirement, and an obligation to lend a hand at other LCCC sporting events. (When a group of gamers was assigned to retrieve balls for the soccer team, one of them quivered with amazement upon catching an errant strike behind the goal; he confided to Marquer that he’d never touched a soccer ball before.)

Team members also had to maintain a 2.0 grade average to compete—an LCCC rule for varsity athletes that Marquer hoped would keep his gamers focused on their studies. Instead, it created a host of problems before the season even began.

On the eve of the Golden Eagles’ September 20 debut match, Marquer lost nearly a quarter of his team; four of 17 gamers had already fallen well short of the required C average. Among the casualties was Vinatieri, who’d flunked a class during the summer session and hadn’t been able to dig himself out. He had a decent excuse: Right after enrolling at LCCC, he’d found out that his wife was pregnant with their second child. But Vinatieri was still upset with himself for botching his latest attempt to become a Call of Duty pro. He promised the three Cold War teammates he’d left behind—Jones, Tail, and Vestal—that he’d help in any way he could.

Somehow the team didn’t crater. An emergency sub slid into Vinatieri’s spot, and the Cold War unit didn’t miss a beat. They opened the first-semester season with a shutout win against Hutchinson Community College from Kansas. Santhuff and the Rocket League squad started off strong, too, winning their first two matches. By the beginning of October, the LCCC team’s record was 7-3, a tally that included a thrilling Super Smash Bros. victory against an Alabama college that went down to the final fight.

Marquer could tell where he’d have to concentrate his efforts. His gamers clearly didn’t need much help when they were in front of their PCs, but many of them couldn’t handle the basic obligations of life outside the lab. Some of his more scholarly athletes shared his frustration: “I don’t think some kids understand that, actually, you have to do stuff in college,” Santhuff griped to me as I began to follow the Golden Eagles closely last fall. He was peeved at teammates who either cut classes or neglected their homework, two decisions that placed them in danger of losing their athletic eligibility. Marquer assigned the flailing students to participate in mandatory study tables and nudged them to use the athletic department’s tutors.

“I know you’re getting overwhelmed, but let’s take baby steps,” Marquer would tell players. “Like, get off your game right now and just put in an hour of work.” But even when the athletes were receptive to that advice, it wouldn’t necessarily stick. “I think it makes them feel good for a day,” he told me. “But it wouldn’t be enough to, like, get them to keep going.” As some gamers ignored his advice and tumbled into the academic abyss, he began to feel like Sisyphus.

Marquer was also flummoxed by some of his athletes’ inability to control their emotions. Having grown up playing in isolation with little adult supervision, these athletes hadn’t developed some of the skills that their peers in other sports learned in Little League or CYO basketball: how to forgive yourself for errors, how to respect your opponents, how to lose with grace. When one of his players stormed out of the lab in a rage after several disappointing Rocket League matches, Marquer was horrified. When confronted about the outbursts later, the gamer insisted that he was a born winner who could never lose. After repeatedly violating Marquer’s rules, the player was cut.

Marquer despaired that he couldn’t stop his most troubled gamers from wasting an opportunity they lacked the clarity or maturity to appreciate. Yet he was buoyed by occasional signs that his efforts weren’t in vain. When Travis Jones started to falter in his networking class, Marquer reminded him that he’d miss out on matches unless he improved. “So I got down and got my grade up,” Jones told me. “If I have a failing grade, I can’t play that game next week, right? That’s a huge, huge thing for me.”

Inside the LCCC computer lab.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

For all their difficulties balancing the realities of college life, the Golden Eagles remained a force in the virtual realm: The team finished its first-semester season with 46 wins and 16 losses. The Cold War squad was the standout. It lost just one match out of 11, and all of its victories were routs. True to his word, Austin Vinatieri had kept advising the team, despite taking a new job in the IT department of a crypto startup around the corner from the Annex. He downloaded bird’s-eye views of all the Cold War maps and annotated them with a screen marker, finding routes the squad could use to outmaneuver their opponents. He designed one play, for example, in which the team split into three units that precisely rotated through a section of the landscape where their shooters were always well concealed. “That very next day, as soon as they go into the map, they executed it so perfectly,” he says. “And it was kind of like one of the proudest things I’ve ever seen.”

The Cold War squad earned a place in that semester’s eight-team national playoffs, to start on December 3. They breezed through the opening round, smashing Hutchinson Community College once again. Championship glory was just two matches away. But at the worst possible moment, the team began to fall apart.

The national semifinal, against Texas’ Navarro College, was to be held on December 9. But on December 8, Enrique Tail announced that he wouldn’t be able to play; he’d been given a conflicting shift at his job at Walmart; Andy Santhuff, whose Rocket League squad had recently flamed out in part due to his teammates’ academic issues, volunteered to step into the breach. Then, with just an hour to go until game time, Marquer got a disturbing message from Jordan Vestal, the Cold War player in Chicago. Vestal said he was in the hospital. He pleaded with Marquer to figure out a way to reschedule the match. But schools have to give at least 24 hours’ notice before any postponements. The semifinal would go on.

Marquer scrounged up a last-minute sub from another squad, but that player had a cast on one of his arms. With half its starting lineup out of commission, the Cold War squad was thumped by Navarro. The next day, Vestal posted a one-line message to the Cold War squad’s Discord channel: “Guys, I’m sorry.” After that, Marquer tried to contact him a number of times to check on his health, but all of his texts and voicemails went unanswered. Marquer never heard from Vestal again—the Chicagoan, who kept streaming on Twitch, dropped out of LCCC without saying goodbye to anyone.

With the first-semester season over, Marquer sat down to figure out who would be eligible to compete in the spring. As he reviewed everyone’s transcripts, he discovered that four of his remaining 12 athletes had blown off their finals; their grade point averages were all below 1.0. Among the four was Tail, who’d felt lost from the start in the school’s tough information technology program. (Marquer had encouraged him to look at other majors, like art.) With little prospect of being able to compete in esports for the rest of the year, Tail relinquished his scholarship and turned his attention to chasing a pro career.

Each bullet-torn shutter, every pixelated cobblestone had to be ingrained in the gamers’ psyches.

Marquer used the winter break to recover from exhaustion. In addition to straining to keep the team together, he’d been substitute-teaching at several Cheyenne schools to make extra cash. He was still committed to the college’s esports program, still certain it could help Wyoming kids achieve more for themselves than they’d ever thought possible. But when I connected with him just before Christmas, I noticed that his disposition was less sunny than usual.

“I knew what I was getting into, so I can’t really complain too much about this year,” he told me. But he admitted he was sick of being broke. He had also come to feel generally neglected by LCCC, which seemed indifferent to its new esports program. That semester, for example, several members of his team had expressed a desire to practice early in the morning, before the computer lab was unlocked around 10:30 am. But despite repeated attempts, Marquer couldn’t convince anyone in the administration to give him a key.

At times, a sense of defeat was hard to stave off. Just three years earlier, Marquer had been married to a woman he loved so much that he’d hatched a multiyear plan in part to save her. Now, that love had been replaced by an echoing grief that still occasionally became loud enough to overwhelm him. He’d recently started dating someone new—the guitarist for a punk band called Prowler—but it was tough to make a romance work as a nearly 30-year-old man who was stuck in his childhood bedroom. And then, of course, there was his inability to protect so many of his athletes from their worst impulses. With his team reeling from its setbacks, Marquer felt like he was navigating without any kind of map.

Madison Marquer by the stables at Laramie County Community College.

Photograph: Shawn Bush

Basketball is close to a religion in Isiaha Ahrens’ family. So his relatives were shocked and displeased when he abruptly gave up the sport as a high school junior to concentrate on Call of Duty, a game he’d been playing since the age of 3. “They thought it was a stupid move,” Ahrens says. “But I told them, like, just trust me. Like, I’m really good at this game, I need you guys to believe in me and it will work.”

Ahrens wasted little time proving his point. A year after dropping basketball, he became the first student in the history of Cheyenne Central High School to earn an esports scholarship. His destination was Ottawa University, a small Baptist institution in eastern Kansas known for having the nation’s most storied Call of Duty team. When Ahrens signed his letter of intent in April 2021, the school’s top Call of Duty squad was ranked No. 1 in the country; its B team was ranked No. 2. With his eye on turning pro, Ahrens could not have landed in a better collegiate situation.

But after just a few weeks on the Ottawa campus, Ahrens started thinking about going home. Aside from missing his family, he was also put off by aspects of the team’s hypercompetitive attitude. “It was definitely tough playing in those tournaments, because they were for a lot of money—like, thousands of dollars,” he says. “Even though it was college, the money you got from the tournaments was money you were allowed to keep. So everyone was really trying to get those spots to be on the team so they could win that money.” Ahrens often felt peer-pressured to cut classes so he could attend daily practices that lasted for hours.

Finally, he decided he’d be better off living at home and playing Call of Duty with the new LCCC team. And he’d start in the spring semester. Marquer was ecstatic: Having a player with that sort of pedigree was a coup for LCCC. Ahrens would slot into the Call of Duty squad, where only Jones remained from the original lineup. They would be playing Vanguard, the new World War II–themed title that had replaced Cold War in the franchise. Santhuff was picked to be the third member of the Vanguard unit. The fourth was an aspiring police officer named Ethan Krolikowski, who’d played Valorant in the team’s first semester.

Marquer promoted Jones to squad captain, a weighty responsibility for a guy who’d once vanished from the 10th grade. Marquer also decided to reallocate the departed players’ scholarships to the remaining athletes, offering an extra $500 or $1,000 per player to help with books and board. Jones was particularly grateful for the extra money, which allowed him to trim back his hours as a Walmart delivery driver. “Financial stress has been a thing for me, from my teenage years,” he says. Without the scholarship, he adds, “I don’t think I would have been able to be a full-time esport player and go to school.”

Though Jones’ Vanguard team wasn’t as experienced as the Cold War unit that had made the national semifinals in the fall, its four members were more serious-minded than their predecessors. They started practicing right after New Year’s—Jones tracked their training on a shared spreadsheet—and they rapidly honed their ability to intuit one another’s positions within the game’s maps, a rapport essential to dodging traps and encircling foes. It was clear to anyone who watched their preseason scrimmages that they were going to be a force.

The opening Vanguard match took place on Valentine’s Day, and nearly the whole team turned out for the occasion, gathering around Marquer’s workstation in the back of the LCCC computer lab. Pitted against a rural Montana school with fewer than 400 full-time students, the Wyoming squad fell behind early in the best-of-five match. That first round took place in a Call of Duty map that was largely unfamiliar to them, a South Pacific island studded with palm trees and bombed-out ruins, and they initially stumbled into several ambushes. But they adjusted their tactics within minutes, determined where their opponents liked to hide out, and worked in sync to sow confusion by attacking from multiple angles. After coming back to tie the opening battle at 105 points apiece, they dominated the rest of the way to earn a 3-0 victory.

None of the team members lingered in the lab to savor the triumph. As he packed up his gear, Jones explained that he had a bunch of homework to complete for his classes on IP security and server installation. He didn’t want to fall behind—especially since that might risk wrecking his squad’s chances of winning the national title that had eluded them in the fall.

The spring season was not without its glitches. In late February, the Golden Eagles narrowly won a match against Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg Area Community College, but league officials voided the result, ruling that a brief server issue had affected the outcome. A rattled LCCC then lost the rematch in a blowout. The next week, Andy Santhuff had to return to Green River for a family emergency, and the team flubbed a contest against Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College in his absence.

But on more than one occasion, the brilliance of Isiaha Ahrens saved the Golden Eagles from racking up a third loss and missing out on the spring semester playoffs. He proved to be one of the best pure gunfighters in the entire league, capable of picking off even the most agile targets while leaping into the air or sprinting across a courtyard. In addition to putting the Vanguard team on his back, he also excelled at Call of Duty: Warzone, a battle royale game in which dozens of players fight until the last one’s standing. He and a player named Sam Devine operated as a duo in the game; the longer each one lasted, the better their cumulative score.

By going undefeated after the Northeastern Oklahoma debacle, the Vanguard team squeaked into the playoffs as the sixth seed. That meant they would have to knock off the top three teams in the country to win the title. Undaunted, Jones scheduled a grueling series of scrimmages to prepare. He insisted the team play again and again on two maps, one of Berlin and another of a Tuscan village. He knew the two would feature in the playoff matches; each bullet-torn shutter, every pixelated cobblestone had to be so ingrained in the gamers’ psyches that they could navigate by instinct.

They whooped at the top of their lungs and jigged around the vacant rows of PCs.

The team was anxious going into the opening round on April 22. Their opponents, from Sumter, South Carolina, scored 35 points before the Golden Eagles notched even one. But once the butterflies subsided, the comeback was on: LCCC ended up winning 3-0, thanks in large part to the uncanny marksmanship of Ahrens and Jones.

On April 26, feeling unusually confident, Ahrens competed in the NJCAAE’s Warzone championship; he and Devine formed one of the 25 duos in the three-game final. (There were no preliminary rounds for Warzone; any NJCAAE team could compete, regardless of how they’d performed during the regular season.) Ahrens and Devine smashed the competition, but it took a while for league officials to calculate and confirm final scores. So the Wyomingites kept their emotions in check and ordered Domino’s. The final verdict finally came down at 9:15 pm, well after the lab had emptied of other students: Ahrens and Devine had taken first place, nearly doubling the runner-up duo’s total score. They whooped at the top of their lungs and jigged around the vacant rows of PCs. It was LCCC’s first national title in any sport since 1992.

Three days later, the Vanguard team faced Harrisburg once again, now in the semifinals. The Golden Eagles were still bitter over the technical dispute—the faulty server—that had cost them a mid-season win. They came in determined for revenge, and got it: The match ended in another 3-0 romp for LCCC. Now they had a date in the championship against the top seed, Gogebic Community College from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Hours before that final match, on May 1, Jones was at home, throwing up. “I’m here dying,” he wrote to the team’s Discord channel. He wasn’t sure if it was a stomach bug or raw anxiety. He briefly thought about playing from home. But his internet connection wasn’t dependable enough—at such a high Call of Duty level, a few microseconds of lag can doom even the most skilled player. So the ailing captain forced himself to drive to campus to join his teammates.

All of the Golden Eagles’ hard work did them little good against Gogebic, another team from a frigid, remote corner of America: The Michigan players maneuvered with such grace and speed that they occasionally seemed to be capable of warping time. LCCC managed to steal one round, but the final 3-1 score was a fair reflection of how thoroughly they’d been thumped. The LCCC athletes pushed away from their keyboards and gave each other tepid fist bumps as they tried to mask their hurt; Santhuff was so stung by the loss he said he felt an urge to bash his head through a wall.

This time, the team hung around the lab after the match, wallowing in the dejection of missing out on the league’s ultimate prize. Marquer bought two extra-large pizzas and delivered an old-fashioned pep talk. “We didn’t get this victory today, but you are all still victorious,” he said as the athletes downed slices in the kitchen. “You all are so hungry and talented that even though you didn’t get it this time, it’s just something to look forward to next semester when we come back and wipe ’em.”

Then Marquer started talking about what lay ahead. Ahrens, Jones, and Santhuff were all on track to be back in the fall, and Marquer stressed that they’d soon have to ponder their post-LCCC options. If they could stay in the hunt for national Call of Duty titles, big universities might come calling with scholarship offers—an outcome that Jones, in particular, would have thought impossible the previous May, when he didn’t even have a high school diploma to his name.

Marquer did not mention his own status for the next semester, which had yet to be resolved. His contract was set to expire in a month, and he still hadn’t heard whether he’d be offered a full-time position. But after winning one national championship and coming so close to a second, he figured his case was strong.

The next Friday, Marquer was leaving the college cafeteria after lunch when he spotted the administrator who was his contact for discussing next year’s employment. He asked her whether she’d heard anything about his job. She hesitated, then suggested that they meet in her office in an hour.

The school’s hiring board, he says she explained, didn’t feel it possessed enough data to determine the esports program’s utility to the college. So it couldn’t justify offering Marquer a full-time coaching position, or any sort of increased compensation. His $15,000-a-year contract would automatically renew in early June, and they would try to have another conversation about his future in the spring of 2023. The process was over, the decision was final.

Marquer was bewildered, not least because of something he’d noticed driving onto campus that day. The huge electronic sign outside the front entrance bore a message that read, “CONGRATULATIONS ESPORTS TEAM. NJCAAE CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE NATIONAL CHAMPIONS.”

In the months I’d been talking to Marquer, he’d assured me time and again that he was confident he’d be coaching the Golden Eagles for years to come. He wanted to stick it out because of his connection to Wyoming, a place he loves so much that he has its state flower, the Indian paintbrush, tattooed on his left shin. “I know there’s a massive youth exodus in this state,” Marquer told me over coffee in February. “I want more young people to stay here. I take a lot of pride in the people that are here, and I know the gamers are good especially because it’s so cold. So I just know that I can build it from here.” But the school’s indifference to his devotion and his financial desperation had finally become too much to bear. As much as he wanted to be a rock for Wyoming’s gamers, he just couldn’t do it anymore.

When Marquer told his athletes about his impending departure, they were perplexed that the school had such paltry respect for a coach who’d altered the course of their lives. “I was a little shocked that they didn’t try and give him some type of recognition,” says Travis Jones. “But I’m happy for him, because that means he’ll get what he deserves. He deserves to get paid.” The college has told the team nothing about its plans, and it’s not clear whether it will hire a new coach in time to recruit fresh talent for the fall. With no guidance from above, Jones has assumed sole responsibility for the Vanguard squad: He has arranged a busy summer schedule filled with practices and tournaments, which he’ll fit in while working as a DoorDash driver and assembling his sixth homebrew PC.

The last time I spoke to Marquer about his plans, he was driving his girlfriend’s band to a show in Casper. Marquer has also gotten back to playing music himself, holding down guitar and drums, respectively, in two bands called Dirt Sucker and Stay Awhile. (The latter is named after a prominent character’s catchphrase in the early-2000s video game Diablo II.)

From the road, Marquer told me that, after much deliberation, he was leaning toward looking for another job in high school or junior college esports outside Wyoming. “It’s an incredible opportunity to be on the front lines of something that I’m lucky to know about,” he said. He and his girlfriend are willing to leave the state, and they’ve been talking about starting a family in the not too distant future. So he plans to look for a coaching position in a place where they might be able to afford a house someday. Based on his initial perusal of job boards, there are plenty of openings for those willing to relocate to far-flung locales: He says he found one opening in rural Wisconsin, for example, that offers a starting salary of $5,000 a month. With so many possible paths sprawled out before him, Marquer’s future is, for the first time in a long while, shaping up to be more than it seemed.

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization

Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors.

Matt Ribel  June 21, 2022 14:14 PM

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

To a photon, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.

The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core, it originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. But different latitudes on the molten star rotate at different rates—36 days at the poles, and only 25 days at the equator. Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. From afar, the resulting patches appear dark. They’re known as sunspots. Typically, the trapped matter cools, condenses into plasma clouds, and falls back to the surface in a fiery coronal rain. Sometimes, though, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires outward like a bullet.

The sun has played this game of Russian roulette with the solar system for billions of years, sometimes shooting off several coronal mass ejections in a day. Most come nowhere near Earth. It would take centuries of human observation before someone could stare down the barrel while it happened. At 11:18 am on September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a 33-year-old brewery owner and amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory, sketching sunspots—an important but mundane act of record-keeping. That moment, the spots erupted into a blinding beam of light. Carrington sprinted off in search of a witness. When he returned, a minute later, the image had already gone back to normal. Carrington spent that afternoon trying to make sense of the aberration. Had his lens caught a stray reflection? Had an undiscovered comet or planet passed between his telescope and the star? While he stewed, a plasma bomb silently barreled toward Earth at several million miles per hour.

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the bullet’s magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

Electrical current raced through the sky over the western hemisphere. A typical bolt of lightning registers 30,000 amperes. This geomagnetic storm registered in the millions. As the clock struck midnight in New York City, the sky turned scarlet, shot through with plumes of yellow and orange. Fearful crowds gathered in the streets. Over the continental divide, a bright-white midnight aurora roused a group of Rocky Mountain laborers; they assumed morning had arrived and began to cook breakfast. In Washington, DC, sparks leaped from a telegraph operator’s forehead to his switchboard as his equipment suddenly magnetized. Vast sections of the nascent telegraph system overheated and shut down.

The Carrington Event, as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

Activity on the solar surface follows a cycle of roughly 11 years. At the beginning of each cycle, clusters of sunspots form at the middle latitudes of both solar hemispheres. These clusters grow and migrate toward the equator. Around the time they’re most active, known as solar maximum, the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity. The sunspots wane, and solar minimum comes. Then it happens all over again. “I don’t know why it took 160 years of cataloging data to realize that,” says Scott McIntosh, a blunt-speaking Scottish astrophysicist who serves as deputy director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It hits you right in the fucking face.”

Today, in the 25th solar cycle since regular record-keeping began, scientists don’t have much to show beyond that migration pattern. They don’t fully understand why the poles flip. They cannot explain why some sunspot cycles are as short as nine years while others last 14. They cannot reliably predict how many sunspots will form or where coronal mass ejections will occur. What is clear is that a big one can happen in any kind of cycle: In the summer of 2012, during the historically quiet Cycle 24, two mammoth coronal mass ejections narrowly missed Earth. Still, a more active cycle increases the chances of that near miss becoming a direct hit.

When navigation and communication systems fail, the 10,000 or so commercial planes in the sky will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in.

Without a guiding theory of solar dynamics, scientists tend to take a statistical approach, relying on strong correlations and after-the-fact rationales to make their predictions. One of the more influential models, which offers respectable predictive power, uses the magnetic strength of the sun’s polar regions as a proxy for the vigor of the following cycle. In 2019, a dozen scientists empaneled by NASA predicted that the current solar cycle will peak with 115 sunspots in July 2025—well below the historical average of 179.

McIntosh, who was not invited to join the NASA panel, calls this “made-up physics.” He believes the old-school models are concerned with the wrong thing—sunspots, rather than the processes that create them. “The magnetic cycle is what you should be trying to model, not the derivative of it,” he says. “You have to explain why sunspots magically appear at 30 degrees latitude.”

McIntosh’s attempt to do that goes back to 2002, when, at the behest of a postdoctoral mentor, he began plotting tiny ultraviolet concentrations on the solar surface, known as brightpoints. “I think my boss knew what I would find if I let a full cycle pass,” he recalls. “By 2011, I was like, holy fuck.” He found that brightpoints originate at higher latitudes than sunspots do but follow the same path to the equator. To him, this implied that sunspots and brightpoints are twin effects of the same underlying phenomenon, one not found in astrophysics textbooks.

His grand unified theory, developed over a decade, goes something like this: Every 11 years, when the sun’s polarity flips, a magnetic band forms near each pole, wrapped around the circumference of the star. These bands exist for a couple of decades, slowly migrating toward the equator, where they meet in mutual destruction. At any given time, there are usually two oppositely charged bands in each hemisphere. They counteract each other, which promotes relative calm at the surface. But magnetic bands don’t all live to be the same age. Some reach what McIntosh calls “the terminator” with unusual speed. When this happens, the younger bands are left alone for a few years, without the moderating influence of the older bands, and they have a chance to raise hell.

McIntosh and his colleague Mausumi Dikpati believe that terminator timing is the key to forecasting sunspots—and, by extension, coronal mass ejections. The faster one set of bands dies out, the more dramatic the next cycle will be.

The most recent terminator, their data suggests, happened on December 13, 2021. In the days that followed, magnetic activity near the sun’s equator dissipated (signaling the death of one set of bands) while the number of sunspots at midlatitude rapidly doubled (signaling the solo reign of the remaining bands). Because this terminator arrived slightly sooner than expected, McIntosh predicts above-average activity for the current solar cycle, peaking at around 190 sunspots.

A clear victor in the modeling wars could emerge later this year. But McIntosh is already thinking ahead to the next thing—tools that can detect where a sunspot will emerge and how likely it is to burst. He yearns for a set of satellites orbiting the sun—a few at the poles and a few around the equator, like the ones used to forecast terrestrial weather. The price tag for such an early-warning system would be modest, he argues: eight craft at roughly $30 million each. But will anyone fund it? “I think until Cycle 25 goes bananas,” he says, “nobody’s going to give a shit.”

When the next solar storm approaches Earth and the deep-space satellite provides its warning—maybe an hour in advance, or maybe 15 minutes, if the storm is fast-moving—alarms will sound on crewed spacecraft. Astronauts will proceed to cramped modules lined with hydrogen-rich materials like polyethylene, which will prevent their DNA from being shredded by protons in the plasma. They may float inside for hours or days, depending on how long the storm endures.

The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate.

Through a weird and nonintuitive property of electromagnetism, the electricity coursing through the atmosphere will begin to induce currents at Earth’s surface. As those currents race through the crust, they will seek the path of least resistance. In regions with resistive rock (in the US, especially the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern Seaboard), the most convenient route is upward, through the electrical grid.

The weakest points in the grid are its intermediaries—machines called transformers, which take low-voltage current from a power plant, convert it to a higher voltage for cheap and efficient transport, and convert it back down again so that it can be piped safely to your wall outlets. The largest transformers, numbering around 2,000 in the United States, are firmly anchored into the ground, using Earth’s crust as a sink for excess voltage. But during a geomagnetic storm, that sink becomes a source. Most transformers are only built to handle alternating current, so storm-induced direct current can cause them to overheat, melt, and even ignite. As one might expect, old transformers are at higher risk of failure. The average American transformer is 40 years old, pushed beyond its intended lifespan.

If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, the US could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Prolonged national grid failure is new territory for humankind. Documents from an assortment of government agencies and private organizations paint a dismal picture of what that would look like in the United States. Homes and offices will lose heating and cooling; water pressure in showers and faucets will drop. Subway trains will stop mid-voyage; city traffic will creep along unassisted by stoplights. Oil production will grind to a halt, and so will shipping and transportation. The blessing of modern logistics, which allows grocery stores to stock only a few days’ worth of goods, will become a curse. Pantries will thin out within a few days. The biggest killer, though, will be water. Fifteen percent of treatment facilities in the country serve 75 percent of the population—and they rely on energy-intensive pumping systems. These pumps not only distribute clean water but also remove the disease- and chemical-tainted sludge constantly oozing into sewage facilities. Without power, these waste systems could overflow, contaminating remaining surface water.

As the outage goes on, health care facilities will grow overwhelmed. Sterile supplies will run low, and caseloads will soar. When backup batteries and generators fail or run out of power, perishable medications like insulin will spoil. Heavy medical hardware—dialysis machines, imaging devices, ventilators—will cease to function, and hospital wards will resemble field clinics. With death tolls mounting and morgues losing refrigeration, municipalities will face grave decisions about how to safely handle bodies.

This is roughly the point in the worst-case scenario when the meltdowns at nuclear power plants begin. These facilities require many megawatts of electricity to cool their reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Today, most American plants run their backup systems on diesel. Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear safety expert at MIT, warns that many reactors could run into trouble if outages last longer than a few weeks.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

If you thumb through enough government reports on geomagnetic storms, you’ll find that one name comes up almost every time: John G. Kappenman. He has published 50 scientific papers, spoken before Congress and NATO, and advised half a dozen federal agencies and commissions. The soft-spoken utility veteran is the man behind the cataclysmic Metatech projections, and he is either a visionary or an alarmist, depending on whom you ask. Kappenman spent the first two decades of his career climbing the ladder at Minnesota Power, learning the ins and outs of the utility industry. In 1998, he joined Metatech, where he advised governments and energy companies on space weather and grid resilience.

“They’ve only done things that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms.”

His end-of-days predictions first gained national traction in 2010, setting off such alarm that the Department of Homeland Security enlisted JASON, an elite scientific advisory group, to pull together a counter-study. “We are not convinced that Kappenman’s worst-case scenario is possible,” the authors concluded in their 2011 report. Notably, however, JASON did not challenge Kappenman’s work on its merits, nor did the group offer a competing model. Rather, its objections were rooted in the fact that Metatech’s models are proprietary, and utility industry secrecy makes it hard to run national grid simulations. Still, the authors echoed Kappenman’s essential conclusion: The US grid is dramatically underprepared for a major storm, and operators should take immediate action to harden their transformers.

The good news is that a technical fix already exists. Mitigating this threat could be as simple as outfitting vulnerable transformers with capacitors, relatively inexpensive devices that block the flow of direct current. During the 1989 storm in Quebec, the grid fell offline and stopped conducting electricity before the current could inflict widespread damage. One close call was enough, though. In the years after, Canada spent more than $1 billion on reliability upgrades, including capacitors for its most vulnerable transformers. “To cover the entirety of the US, you’re probably in the ballpark of a few billion dollars,” Kappenman says. “If you spread that cost out, it would equal a postage stamp per year per customer.” A 2020 study by the Foundation for Resilient Societies arrived at a similar figure for comprehensive grid hardening: about $500 million a year for 10 years.

To date, however, American utility companies haven’t widely deployed current-blocking devices to the live grid. “They’ve only done things, like moving to higher and higher operating voltages”—for cheaper transmission—“that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms,” Kappenman tells me.

Tom Berger, former director of the US government’s Space Weather Prediction Center, also expressed doubts about grid operators. “When I talk to them, they tell me they understand space weather, and they’re ready,” he says. But Berger’s confidence waned after the February 2021 collapse of the Texas power grid, which killed hundreds of people, left millions of homes and businesses without heat, and caused about $200 billion in damage. That crisis was brought on by nothing more exotic than a big cold snap. “We heard the same thing,” Berger says. “‘We understand winter; it’s no problem.’”

I reached out to 12 of the country’s largest utility companies, requesting information on specific steps taken to mitigate damage from a major geomagnetic event. American Electric Power, the country’s largest transmission network, was the only company to share concrete measures, which it says include regularly upgrading hardware, redirecting current during a storm, and quickly replacing equipment after an event. Two other companies, Consolidated Edison and Exelon, claim to have outfitted their systems with geomagnetic monitoring sensors and be instructing their operators in unspecified “procedures.” Florida Power & Light declined to meaningfully comment, citing security risks. The other eight did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At this point, curious minds may wonder whether utility companies are even required to plan for geomagnetic storms. The answer is complicated, in a uniquely American way. In 2005, when George W. Bush, a former oil executive, occupied the Oval Office, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which included a grab bag of giveaways to the oil and gas industry. It rescinded much of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authority to regulate the utility industry. Reliability standards are now developed and enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation—a trade association that represents the interests of those same companies.

Some find the NERC reliability standards laughable. (Two interviewees audibly laughed when asked about them.) Kappenman objected to the first set of standards, proposed in 2015, on the grounds that they were too lenient—they didn’t require utilities to prepare for a storm on par with 1859 or 1921. Berger took issue too, but for a different reason: The standards made no mention of storm duration. The ground-based effects of the Carrington Event lasted four or five consecutive days; a transformer built to withstand 10 seconds of current is very different from one ready for 120 hours.

Under pressure from the federal government, NERC enacted stricter standards in 2019. In a lengthy written statement, Rachel Sherrard, a spokeswoman for the group, emphasized that American utilities are now expected to deal with an event twice as strong as the 1989 Quebec storm. (Comparison with an old storm like Carrington, she noted, “is challenging because high-fidelity historical measurement data is not available.”) Though the new standards require utilities to fix vulnerabilities in their systems, the companies themselves determine the right approach—and the timeline.

If the utilities remain unmotivated, humanity’s ability to withstand a major geomagnetic storm will depend largely on our ability to replace damaged transformers. A 2020 investigation by the US Department of Commerce found that the nation imported more than 80 percent of its large transformers and their components. Under normal supply and demand conditions, lead times for these structures can reach two years. “People outside the industry don’t understand how difficult these things are to manufacture,” Kappenman says. Insiders know not to buy a transformer unless the factory that made it is at least 10 years old. “It takes that long to work out the kinks,” he says. In a time of solar crisis, foreign governments—even geopolitical allies—may throttle exports of vital electrical equipment, Kappenman notes. Some spare-part programs have cropped up over the past decade that allow participants to pool resources in various disaster scenarios. The size and location of these spares, however, are unknown to federal authorities—because the industry won’t tell them.

One day regulators may manage to map the electrical grid, even stormproof it (provided a big one doesn’t wipe it out first). Engineers may launch a satellite array that gives us days to batten down the hatches. Governments may figure out a way to stand up emergency transformers in a pinch. And there the sun will be—the inconceivable, inextinguishable furnace at the center of our solar system that destroys as indiscriminately as it creates. Life on this little mote depends entirely on the mercy of a cosmic nuclear power with an itchy trigger finger. No human triumph will ever change that. (But we should still buy the capacitors. Soon, please.)

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

GEAR

This Designer Guitar Is Made From a Bent Sheet of Steel

Meet the Cosmo, an all-metal electric axe with pickups that can be repositioned to create custom sounds.

Jeremy White, Michael Calore  June 20, 2022 11:11 AM

Photograph: Verso Instruments

Even if you've never held one of his namesake instruments, you may know that Les Paul designed one of the first solid-body electric guitars. Astonishingly, Gibson, which manufactured the guitar, was fearful this radical new direction in instrument design would flop, and it didn't even show the prototypes to the public for years.

But the Gibson Les Paul was far from being the first electric guitar. In 1931, the very first electrically amplified stringed instrument sold commercially was a simple, all-metal, cast aluminum lap steel guitar nicknamed the "Frying Pan"—and a certain Adolph Rickenbacker invented the electromagnetic pickups for it.

Now, 90 years later, the Kassell, Germany-based industrial designer Robin Stummvoll, founder of Verso Musical Instruments, is going back to basics, and is seemingly taking inspiration from the electric guitar's humble beginnings. With no formal training as a luthier, Stummvoll has decided to pare down the electric guitar to its minimum parts, reducing the amount of materials used to make each instrument.

"There's a guitar made in the '70s by Allan Gittler [held in the MoMA design collection] that is basically just a steel rod with steel frets welded on," Stummvoll says. “It's really the minimum a guitar needs to be, but it's very complicated to build and very expensive. So my approach on this was something that can be built in a smaller shop, yet creates a new perspective on luthierie.”

Rather than a lump of wood, the Cosmo's body is a carefully bent sheet of powder-coated steel. This ergonomic shape not only houses the necessary circuitry to make the guitar work, it also allows an innovative approach to the placement of the pickups, transducers that capture the strings' mechanical vibrations and convert them to electrical signals that can then be amplified and played through a loudspeaker.

Pickups are usually screwed in place on a guitar's body, but where they are placed affects the tone of the sound created. This is why you see multiple pickups in different locations on, say, a Fender Stratocaster or a Les Paul. Stummvoll has made his pickups mobile so they can be moved around and placed where the player chooses.

"This was a happy accident," explains Stummvoll. "It wasn't the intention." As pickups are magnetic, they naturally clamp themselves to the surface of the Cosmo's metal body. Realizing the potential benefits of this in terms of versatility of sound, Stummvoll made it a feature. You can watch and listen to some YouTube demos of this changing sound.

"It has its own character and sound, a very warm and resonant tone with lots of harmonic content, but it's nothing weird or strange," Stummvoll says. "I would say it's somewhere between electric guitar and an acoustic, because you have these added overtones—but more towards electric."

Photograph: Verso Instruments

Along with the $1,781 (€1,710) Cosmo and the brand's Gravis bass guitar, Stummvoll has now released his latest creation, the $1,935 (€1,860) Orbit, a baritone guitar. As well as featuring Verso's signature movable pickups, Stummvoll says the Orbit's long 28.5-inch (720-mm) scale gives this instrument precise and gritty bass response in standard B to B or A to A tunings, while that added length also apparently brings plenty of sustain.

Stummvoll also claims that the Orbit's “natural microphonic effect is less pronounced than on Cosmo, which makes it even more suitable to distorted sounds.” Metal fans, take note.

SCIENCE

A Photographer Captures Earth as a Strange New World

Inspired by an 18th-century naturalist, Christopher Edward Rodriguez set out to document our climate-changed planet with fresh eyes.

Zak Jason  June 20, 2022 10:10 AM

An abandoned prospector’s mine in Montana.Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

In 1799, the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt set off on a trip through the Americas, cataloging all he could find: plants, minerals, capybaras, canals, etc. Humboldt proposed that the world was “one great living organism where everything was connected”—a theory that would inspire Charles Darwin. He introduced the concept of ecosystems and was among the first naturalists to note humanity’s destructive impact on Earth.

In 2017, photographer Christopher Edward Rodriguez came across Humboldt’s writings. He’d been thinking about what a camera can really see when nearly every inch of the planet has been “shaped, directed, and photographed to death.” He adopted Humboldt’s ideas and set off across the Americas to create a series of images that show the planet “as if it’s never been seen before.” He used long exposures, artificial lighting, and colored gels to “circumvent the camera’s scientific accuracy.” His aim for the photographs was to convey a mood of “consistent strangeness,” one that embodies a forgotten tenet of Humboldt’s: “Everything is interaction and reciprocal.”

“Blusher” mushrooms. Salisbury, New York.

Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

Morpho peleides butterflies, one of the largest species in the world, caught mid-metamorphosis in Costa Rica.

Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

The photographer’s assistant inside a cave in Nevada’s Painted Hills.

Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

To create a surreal atmosphere, Rodriguez sometimes used colored gels in his work.

Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

Bumblebees are some of the most common and important pollinators of North American plants. Their buzzing vibrations help shake the pollen out of certain flowers.

Photograph: Christopher Edward Rodriguez

Christopher Edward Rodriguez is represented by Sasha Wolf Projects, Maybaum Gallery

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BUSINESS

After Layoffs, Crypto Startups Face a ‘Crucible Moment’

The hard times could be a harbinger for everyone else.

Arielle Pardes  June 16, 2022 22:22 PM

ILLUSTRATION: ABBR. PROJECTS

In May, the venture capital firm Sequoia circulated a memo among its startup founders. The 52-page presentation warned of a challenging road ahead, paved by inflation, rising interest rates, a Nasdaq drawdown, supply chain issues, war, and a general weariness about the economy. Things were about to get tough, and this time, venture capital would not be coming to the rescue. “We believe this is a Crucible Moment,” the firm’s partners wrote. “Companies who move the quickest and have the most runway are most likely to avoid the death spiral.”

Plenty of startups seem to be taking Sequoia’s advice. The mood has become downright funereal as founders and CEOs cut the excesses of 2021 from their budgets. Most crucially, these reductions have affected head count. More than 10,000 startup employees have been laid off since the start of June, according to Layoffstracker.com, which catalogs job cuts. Since the start of the year, the tally is closer to 40,000.

The latest victims have been crypto companies, and the carnage is not small. On Tuesday, Coinbase laid off 1,100 employees, abruptly cutting their access to corporate email accounts and locking them out of the company’s Slack. Those layoffs came just days after Coinbase rescinded job offers from more than 300 people who planned to start working there in the coming weeks. Two other crypto startups—BlockFi and Crypto.com—each cut hundreds of jobs on Monday; the crypto exchange Gemini also laid off about 10 percent of its staff earlier this month. Collectively, more than 2,000 employees of crypto startups have lost their jobs since the start of June—about one-fifth of all startup layoffs this month.

The conversation around crypto companies has changed abruptly in the past year. In 2021, they were the darling of venture capitalists, who showered them with billions of dollars to fund aggressive growth. Coinbase, which went public in April 2021 at $328 a share, seemed to suggest an emerging gold mine in the sector. Other companies, like BlockFi, started hiring aggressively with ambitions to go public. Four crypto startups took out expensive prime-time ads in the most recent Super Bowl.

Coinbase was also focused on hypergrowth, scaling its staff from 1,250 at the beginning of 2021 to about 5,000 in 2022. “It is now clear to me that we over-hired,” Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday, where he announced the layoffs. “We grew too quickly.”

“It could be that crypto is the canary in the coal mine,” says David A. Kirsch, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. He describes the contractions in crypto startups as one potential signal of “a great unraveling,” where more startups are evaluated for how well they can deliver on their promises. If history is any indication, those that can’t are fated for “the death spiral.”

Kirsch has spent years studying the lessons of past crashes; he is also the author of Bubbles and Crashes, a book about boom-bust cycles in tech. Kirsch says that the bubble tends to pop first in high-leverage, high-growth sectors. When the Nasdaq fell in 2000, for example, the value of most ecommerce companies vanished “well in advance of the broader market decline.” Companies like Pets.com and eToys.com—which had made big, splashy public debuts—eventually went bankrupt.

In today’s market, crypto startups are similarly exposed. “We could be seeing the collapse in that sector first,” says Kirsch.

Crypto advocates say it’s normal to oscillate between periods of exuberance and destitution, which the industry calls “crypto winters.” Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote about this cycle in 2020. When the price of bitcoin rises, people get excited, leading to more startups, projects, and people investing in the ecosystem. When the price of bitcoin plummets—as it did this year, to a fraction of last year’s peak—some of those startups disappear. But Dixon argues that the best of each cycle survives, leading to “choppy yet consistent growth” in the sector. (Dixon declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Kirsch isn’t as convinced that the sector can survive a more significant downturn. “It could be that the prior crypto winters were just small events in the end, because everyone involved was a true believer,” he says. Now that celebrities like Matt Damon and Tom Brady have brought more people onto crypto platforms, it will be harder for them to sustain growth. That could turn this crypto winter into something closer to a crypto ice age.

Still, entire sectors don’t tend to disappear, even after the bubble bursts. Plenty of ecommerce companies went out of business after the 2000 crash, but a few of them—like Amazon—continued to grow maniacally. Now isn’t the time to write off crypto altogether, but rather to watch how, and which, startups can evolve to meet real demand.

These challenges also won’t be exclusive to crypto. Instead, take that corner of the startup world’s struggles as a sign of the hard times coming for everyone else—if they’re not here already.

BACKCHANNEL

When Covid Came for Provincetown

In a queer vacation hot spot on Cape Cod, an ad hoc community proved that Americans can stifle large outbreaks—if they want to.

Maryn McKenna  June 14, 2022 10:10 AM

Photograph: VICTOR LLORENTE

It is July 10, 2021, a Saturday, and Sean Holihan is on a short flight down the East Coast of the United States. The nonprofit strategist and his partner are coming home from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they spent the week with friends they hadn’t seen since the pandemic began. Everyone was vaccinated, and the state had dropped its mask mandate, so the holiday felt gloriously normal. The group rented cottages and hung out together, sharing brunch and cocktails, hitting the beach in the afternoon and dinner and shows at night. Provincetown was its old delirious self: 60,000 visitors turned a mile-long portion of Commercial Street, the main thoroughfare, into an impromptu parade, and crammed into nightclubs so crowded that you had to slide skin to skin to get outside for some air. Holihan is exhausted, but happy.

On the same day, in New York City, a data scientist named Michael Donnelly is making plans with friends who are driving back from Provincetown. He and his husband try to go every summer, but this year things booked up crazy fast. They’re all planning to meet up tonight when everyone arrives. Donnelly maintains a Covid analysis site as a hobby and has been the nerd node for his friends when they need information. He’s looking forward to taking the night off.

On Cape Cod, Theresa Covell has just gotten back from her first vacation since the pandemic began. Covell is an assistant public health nurse for Barnstable County, the jurisdiction that stretches all along the arm of the Cape, from the shoulder joint at the Bourne Canal to the wrist curve that shelters Provincetown from the ocean. She and her colleagues have spent 2021 grinding—tracking cases, running vaccine clinics, trying to manage the emergency in a place that is low on revenue when the tourists are gone and short of housing and services once they arrive. When she left for her time off, the Covid curve was bending down. In all of June, Provincetown didn’t see a single positive case. But recently a local health organization has reported a surge among vaccinated people. That’s new, Covell thinks.

Holihan logs on to the airplane Wi-Fi, and he feels his phone vibrate. It’s a friend who checked out early this morning from their rental, complaining of a summer cold. He has gotten home and taken a Covid test. The text shows the bright double lines of a positive result. Holihan’s first reaction is disbelief: The authorities had said they were safe. His second is dread. I’m on a plane, he thinks. Am I going to give this to other people?

Commercial Street, the main drag in Provincetown.

Photograph: VICTOR LLORENTE

Donnelly’s phone lights up. His carload of friends just got word that someone they know tested positive, and they’ve pulled off the highway in Connecticut in search of rapid tests. They are all vaccinated, but three of the five soon test positive. Their plans to meet are off. By the end of the day, another 12 people who were in Provincetown tell Donnelly they’ve contracted Covid. This isn’t supposed to happen, he thinks. It feels like the floor is falling out from under him.

If you even remember the Provincetown outbreak a year ago—which, in Pandemic Time, probably feels like a century—this may be what you know about it: The shots had been available for seven months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said that vaccinated Americans could take their masks off. There was a delicious anticipatory buzz of life returning to normal, and then the ice-bucket shock of discovering hot vax summer was over before it started. The Delta variant caused breakthrough infections and illness even in vaccinated people, and the Provincetown outbreak was the proof.

Maybe you remember the disappointment of mask recommendations coming back, or the whiff of homophobia that floated through some of the coverage, or the sense that a summer capital for artists and queer people had been made responsible for the Delta variant rather than being its accidental host. (“How do we stop the press portraying us as a leper colony?” a local business owner asked on the town manager’s Facebook page.)

Whatever you remember, the actual story is this. The partyers in Provincetown didn’t spread the virus; they, and their allies, controlled it. On the fly, they created a model for how a community can organize against a disease threat. Even a year later, it is worth looking back at what they did—not just because Covid has not left us but also because other pandemics will come. Much of the US response to Covid has been fractured, hostile, or self-sabotaging. Provincetown was “a huge success story,” says William Hanage, codirector of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, who helped analyze the outbreak. “It should have been a message: We can avoid large outbreaks, if we want to.”

When Sean Holihan heard about the first breakthrough infections from Provincetown, his initial reaction was disbelief.

Photograph: VICTOR LLORENTE

Holihan and his partner reached their home in Washington, DC, and found some rapid tests tucked under their doormat—a gift from the friend who had texted his positive result. They both took them right away. Holihan’s test popped positive immediately. They masked up and maneuvered awkwardly around their apartment, trying to figure out where they could separately eat and sleep. The next morning, feverish and sweating, Holihan walked to a pop-up clinic for a PCR test, then went home to isolate.

The next day, Monday, he emailed his office—he is the state legislative director for a gun-violence-prevention organization—to say he wouldn’t be in. He was already feeling better, but when his test result arrived, it was positive. Of course.

“At that point I started texting everyone I’d come in contact with over the week,” he says. Realizing how many people visit Provincetown from across the country, he posted about being infected on Twitter and Instagram too. DMs flowed back, from people who thought they’d picked up some summer crud as they traveled. “They thought they were fine,” he says. “Then they tested themselves, and it turned out they also had Covid.”

Rumors about people testing positive were zipping through group chats: most of this house, everyone in that cottage, the Pennsylvania group, the California group, that couple from DC.

One of the people Holihan texted was Donnelly. This might seem odd, because Donnelly isn’t an epidemiologist. He is a policy geek who has done macroeconomic forecasting at the Federal Reserve Board and data analysis at Spotify and Facebook. But since early 2020, Donnelly had also been applying his skills to forecasting what Covid might do in the US, a way of making sense for himself of the data flowing from other countries and explaining to others why they ought to be more worried than they were. “Essentially, I wanted to convince my friends it was bad,” he says.

Donnelly’s analyses, which he initially published on Medium, had been solid. He had foreseen that federal action would be needed two days before President Donald Trump declared a national emergency. He had warned that New York City would have to shut down six days before Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the whole state would be put “on pause.” That prediction led to a consulting gig with New York state (forecasting possible case counts, bed needs, and ventilator orders) and then to founding a site called CovidOutlook.info, a home for reports and predictions that he spun up with Michael LeVasseur, an epidemiologist at Drexel University.

So by the time the Delta variant began creeping through Provincetown, Donnelly was an informal but thoroughly informed expert in what Covid was doing in the US. “I had been tracking variants over the previous six months and, broadly, thought concerns about them were overblown,” he says. When his friends started testing positive, he was surprised, and nettled. He didn’t like being wrong.

Early in the pandemic, Michael Donnelly became an expert in Covid data and a nerd node for his friends.

Photograph: VICTOR LLORENTE

Rumors about people testing positive were zipping through group chats: most of this house, everyone in that cottage; the Pennsylvania group, the California group, that couple from DC; 10 people positive, or 15, or 25. Text by text, Donnelly began verifying the stories, asking people about the symptoms they had and the tests they had taken, when they were vaccinated and which shot they got, and all the details of their visits to Provincetown—where they stayed, who they hung out with, which bars and restaurants and shows they went to. He started collecting information on Saturday afternoon, and by Monday he had more than 50 names in a spreadsheet.

“It’s the most accelerated response I’ve ever seen in public health. And Michael pretty much started that outbreak investigation himself.”

The list represented a shocking number of breakthrough infections for a young, healthy, affluent population, a group that should have been at the lowest risk. Donnelly felt an itch to do a study, but LeVasseur persuaded him to turn the project over to a bigger institution than their team of two. Donnelly got in touch with Demetre Daskalakis, the former head of the infectious disease programs in New York City’s health department, who was now at the CDC. On Monday night, Donnelly texted, offering the spreadsheet. Daskalakis asked for it immediately.

Within 24 hours, Daskalakis set up calls between Donnelly, the CDC, and the Massachusetts health department. By the end of the week, the agencies had created a task force, set up a phone number and an email for people to self-report, reached out to other states that visitors had gone home to, and gotten mobile testing units rolling toward Provincetown. “It’s the most accelerated response I’ve ever seen in public health,” Daskalakis says. “And Michael pretty much started that outbreak investigation himself.”

Donnelly’s refrigerator has pictures from his time in Provincetown.

Photograph: Victor Llorente

This ought to be obvious, but to make it clear: Everyone Donnelly interviewed, those who visited Provincetown and came away with a Covid infection, is gay. That was why they were in that place in one of its biggest tourist weeks of the year. But people don’t go to Provincetown just to party—they go for community. “Even if you live in LGBT-friendly neighborhoods, you’re still a minority,” says Rob Anderson, a former journalist who moved to the town a decade ago and owns a Commercial Street restaurant called The Canteen with his partner. “Even in New York, you can be walking down the street and get called a fag. When you come to Provincetown, you just get to be yourself. You feel normal, for the first time in your life.”

The physical setting helps with that. Provincetown is remote—it lies at the dead end of miles of two-lane highway—and pretty in an unthreatening way, made up of low, shingled buildings surrounded by tidal marshes and soft ocean light. But its social norms help too. It is a place that takes openness to sex and gender expression as a basic social contract. That openness might show up as a guy wearing heels and fairy wings to the corner store, or a mom bringing her kids cross-country to the beach because every child there will have queer parents—or the town collectively accepting that tens of thousands of smooching, shouting people will flood the streets and clubs for the themed holidays that segment the summer: Memorial Day for young lesbians, July Fourth for gym guys, Bear Week right afterward for big, hairy men, special weeks for Black queer men and women, a raucous costumed Carnival to close out the summer.

Despite the partying, there’s a shadow of trauma present in Provincetown, an acknowledgment of the long grief of the HIV pandemic—which was identified in the US 40 years, minus a few weeks, before Delta came to town. Provincetown has been a queer community for so long that AIDS is not past history there, even though it has been survivable for more than 20 years and preventable for just about 10. Before good treatments were available, some men who were infected fled there to escape stigma; across from the towering Pilgrim Monument, there’s a memorial to the lost, a massive slab of quartzite carved to resemble the surface of the ocean. In a way, Provincetown’s sex-positive culture owes its existence to the health-focused practices imposed by HIV: not just staying alert to the risk of infection and practicing safe sex, but also getting tested regularly and disclosing your status when it changes.

“We’ve had to develop social norms and expectations to share our risks and exposures,” says Donnelly, who is 37, born after the first, worst years of HIV. “I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about it: This is still work. We’re not perfect at it.”

Thus many Provincetown visitors and residents were primed, the way a vaccination primes the body to fight a later infection, to recognize that Delta was spreading among them and to be very public about it. People who realized they’d been exposed in the July Fourth week went further than simply admitting to Donnelly that they tested positive. They began doing contact tracing on themselves and looked for professionals to give the information to.

One of them was Daskalakis. “I got emails, and the emails went, ‘Hi, my name is X. On Monday I was here, on Tuesday I was here, on Thursday I had dinner with this person,’” he recalls. “It was amazing. Other CDC folks will tell you: It was unlike any other group they’ve dealt with in terms of getting information.”

The men identifying themselves were fully aware that there might be a cost to doing so. Some of the residents remember, and just about everyone has heard, about the ways in which HIV-positive men were blamed for their own illnesses. Speaking up about Covid meant risking that again—both from the wider world (right-wing media were vicious) and within the gay community. Holihan’s tweet about his positive result didn’t only draw encouraging DMs. “I had old friends reach out and say I had been irresponsible, almost like a little bit of slut-shaming,” he recalls.

“First it was the gay and bisexual population, then it was the seasonal workers, then it became residents and schoolkids. It just continued to grow.”

Theresa Covell returned from her days off to find her boss, Deirdre Arvidson, and her colleague Maurice Melchiono—the entirety of the Barnstable County public-health nursing team—turning back to the tasks they’d been doing for a year: Receiving reports of positive cases from the state. Identifying infected people and calling and counseling them. Making sure those people were isolating and finding out whether they had a workplace to be notified or kids who needed care. Getting them help if they needed pulse oximeters, grocery deliveries, a separate place to sleep. Calling again, to make sure they were managing. Calling again after that, to make sure they had recovered. Calling and calling and calling, from lists that had new names added every day.

Covell and her coworkers were stunned by the spread. They knew that some bars and clubs in town were checking visitors’ vaccination cards, and that most locals had gotten the shots. But this new wave of Covid didn’t seem to care. “First it was the gay and bisexual population, and then it was the seasonal workers, and then it became residents and then schoolkids, and it just continued to grow,” Melchiono says.

The spiraling case count made clear how much individual behavior and local conditions mattered to the transmission of the virus. A tropical storm had churned up the coast that holiday week, and the weather had been cold and rainy enough to drive people indoors instead of enticing them onto beaches and balconies. And though federal guidance said vaccinated people were safe indoors and face-to-face, that didn’t account for the unique context of Provincetown—especially its thousands of seasonal workers, some unvaccinated or undervaccinated, bunking in campgrounds and crowded temporary housing. The town government reacted by recommending masks on July 19 and mandating them on July 25, but the outbreak tore through the workforce.

Last summer, 60,000 visitors descended on Commercial Street for the week of July Fourth.

Photograph: VICTOR LLORENTE

Covell’s team had only enough resources and jurisdiction to investigate within Barnstable County. For tracking the people who’d left the Cape, there was a bigger, better-funded effort—the Community Tracing Collaborative, a 4,000-person corps created by the state health department and the global nonprofit Partners in Health. Its size suggested the scope of the job. Covid isn’t a disease that’s amenable to traditional contact tracing. It doesn’t transmit only one-to-one, the way Ebola, monkeypox, leprosy, and HIV do, but one-to-many as well. Boston itself had been host to one of the largest such events, a super-spreader biotech conference in February 2020 that over months caused more than 330,000 cases worldwide. There would have been no point in trying to understand which person at that conference infected which other attendee. But if officials had been able to warn all the attendees to isolate, they might have prevented later generations of infection.

That was what the Community Tracing Collaborative undertook for Provincetown. It was a practice of pattern recognition, using data analysis tools to map the relationships between people and the places they had gone and the other people who might have been present at the same time. It required a bending of the normal rules of disease investigations, which strictly define what constitutes a case and what qualifies as exposure—and it asked investigators to look at both where the risks had been and where they might go next.

This simultaneous tracing of people and gatherings was a newer approach in the US—the method was copied from Covid strategies in Japan—and it wasn’t easy. If you diagram the transmission of a disease that goes person-to-person, it looks like a family tree. In Provincetown, it looked like an overgrown forest. “There were so many overlapping interactions, across three different streets, in upwards of 20 different locations—so it was very difficult to pinpoint where someone was actually exposed,” says Perri Kasen, a management consultant who joined the Community Tracing Collaborative in 2020 and became one of the three lead investigators for the Provincetown outbreak. Among the hundreds of cases detected in the outbreak in the first half of July, contact tracers could identify only six people for whom it was reasonably certain that one had infected the other. But, as Kasen says, “you don’t necessarily need confirmatory evidence to act.”

On July 27, the CDC did act. In a bombshell media briefing, director Rochelle Walensky announced gloomily that vaccinated people should go back to wearing masks indoors, especially in schools and around the vulnerable. New data, she said, had shown that when vaccinated people developed breakthrough infections from the Delta variant, they carried the same amount of virus as infected people who had never been vaccinated, and could pass the virus to others. “It is not a welcomed piece of news,” she said. “This new data weighs heavily on me.” Three days later, the agency released the data in its weekly journal. It was an analysis of an outbreak in “a town in Barnstable County” during “multiple summer events and large public gatherings.” That day, there were 105,120 new Covid cases reported in the United States—six times as many as on July 1.

As the warm months went on and America mourned the loss of hot vax summer, Bronwyn MacInnis tried to figure out exactly how the outbreak happened. She is in charge of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute, a private research facility shared between MIT and Harvard. For more than a year, her team had been sequencing the viruses collected in Covid tests, helping the state understand its local epidemic. Like everyone else, she had started to relax as cases declined. Fewer samples came in; the vaccines seemed to be doing their job. And like everyone else, she had been shocked to hear about the Provincetown cluster. She got the call while she was riding her bike through Harvard Square. She remembers thinking: Maybe I’d better pull over.

She and her team zeroed in on the tiny mutations that occur when SARS-CoV-2 reproduces, both within a single person and also as it passes from one person to another. “Asking humans where they’ve been and who they have been in contact with can be really complicated,” MacInnis says. “But the viruses can tell you that information in black and white.” Whenever the researchers encountered a gap in the genomic narrative, they used data from state epidemiologists and contact tracers to fill it in.

Piece by piece, they built their model. By October they could define the outbreak’s full size: 1,098 people infected in the Provincetown area in July. Based on subtle genetic differences, they determined that varieties of the Delta variant were introduced to the town more than 40 times that month. Five of those introductions led to small clusters of cases, and one was responsible for most of the outbreak—83 percent. (This could have been one person or a family or other small group.)

Next, MacInnis’ team compared the signatures of the Provincetown strains with genomes from across the country. Though people infected in the outbreak had come from at least 20 other states and Washington, DC, those genetic signatures were almost nowhere to be found. The outbreak did not amplify across the US. Instead, it fizzled. Eight people got sick enough to be hospitalized. No one died. By the middle of September, the Provincetown strains accounted for no more than 0.1 percent of cases nationwide.

Bronwyn MacInnis (bottom row, right) and her team at the Broad Institute.

Photograph: Victor Llorente

“It was almost a moment of tears to see how limited the transmission appeared to be,” MacInnis said. “If we hadn’t had the sequences of those viruses, I have no doubt that the public narrative about this outbreak would have been very different.” The lightning group chats, the visitors offering up their data, the frantic phone-calling by the Barnstable County nursing team, the data massaging that Kasen and the contact tracers did—it had all helped. Even though Delta swamped the country anyway.

No occurrence of a disease is fortunate. Still, it was an extraordinary piece of pandemic luck that the first US explosion of Delta took place in a community so willing to offer up its lives for examination by strangers. It was a second piece of luck that those stories were told in a state that had the infrastructure to receive them, alongside a research institute equipped and eager to trace what the virus did next. None of that, though, was foreordained. Another reality could have played out just as easily: The Provincetown visitors arrive home, notice what they think are summer colds, and don’t test themselves. They tell no one. The authorities are slow to notice the outbreak. The contact tracing and genomic analyses take longer to spin up, and people spend weeks or months under the false impression that they’re fully protected. In this reality, more people would have gotten sick. Almost certainly, some would have died.

Those people were saved, whoever they were, because the men who visited Provincetown took on the burden of going public, and the nurses and contact tracers and scientists transformed their information into reasons to act. In a pandemic marked mostly by how much people have arrayed themselves against each other, they chose to act for others. In the never-ending battle between plagues and people, they chose—as anyone can—not to be on the side of the plague.

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

IDEAS

The Genre-Transcending Mastery of The Staircase

The true-crime tale lends itself to the fact-fiction danse macabre.

Virginia Heffernan  June 13, 2022 12:12 PM

Photograph: Shawn Michael Jones

A stack of DVDs landed on my desk one spring afternoon in 2005, when I was working as a television critic at The New York Times. The discs comprised The Staircase, a six-hour documentary about a murder in Durham, North Carolina. This voluminous chunk of culture was produced by a Frenchman with a name like a knight’s: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. Six hours! At the time, that struck me as a headache, and a highly auteurist duration for a single documentary. I was too pregnant to stay up past midnight for what I expected to be a droning subtitled critique of la condition américaine, possibly in black and white.

This was some 15 years before the rapid-fire “exploitation” of so-called true crime in a dizzying range of media, in which truth is worked, reworked, and overworked like failed bread dough. Pop culture has become ablaze with articles, podcasts, books, documentaries, and docudramas based on plots ripped from clickbait. A twisted dude runs a sex-trafficking cult named after an antacid (The Vow, Seduced, Escaping the Nxivm Cult). A woman gets suckered by a fake doctor and her daughter kills him (Dirty John). A woman murders her best friend and nearly gets off (The Thing About Pam).

But this frenzy is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old true-crime obsession. Pop culture, in fact, sometimes seems to exist entirely to facilitate the circulation of potboiler stories of foul play, and to scramble the twin pleasures of tabloid news and pulp fiction. In the 16th and 17th centuries, pamphlets, street lit, and bound books brimming with dreadful crime stories played to newly literate workers in China and England. The wildfire lust for true crime surfaces in Shakespeare, when Hamlet stages “The Mousetrap,” a mass-market play inspired by his father’s murder. Then, around 1617, Zhang Yingyu published The Book of Swindles in Ming Dynasty China; it was a bunch of parables about outrageous frauds he passed off as factual.

Back in England, Thomas De Quincey published “On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts” in 1827, and by 1924 the magazine True Detective, where the mystery novelist Dashiell Hammett made his bones, appeared in the US, selling millions of copies into the ’90s with its jumble of short stories and nonfiction. And while, yes, True Detective dropped the fiction label in the 1930s, its “true-crime” entries continued to be suspiciously well constructed and studded with noir tropes. (HBO’s full-on fiction series True Detective uses the magazine’s anthology format.)

The day I got the Staircase DVDs, however, I had no idea what genre I was looking at. Reality TV—the pop fact-fiction blend of the day—treated outrages and romances, but not murder. What’s more, Netflix had not yet started to stream movies, and I had no cultural reflex for bingeing anything but food. Movies ran around two hours, and a TV season appeared one episode at a time. Were these six hours of The Staircase a “season”? Maybe this was a miniseries. Or maybe The Staircase was what the movie critic Vincent Canby had dubbed The Sopranos: a “megamovie.”

I shouldn’t have worried. The Staircase turned out to be among the most captivating films I’ve ever seen—the sordid story of Michael Peterson, a purple-prose war novelist, who was tried and convicted of the exceptionally bloody murder of his wife, Kathleen, an executive. I inhaled it all. It built suspense with a technique I hadn’t seen before. Each episode ended abruptly, with not so much a cliffhanger as an unfinished sentence, as though the film itself had fallen off a cliff, down the stairs. Then, as the curtains rose on the next episode (it lived!), the narrative righted itself—or did it? Did it seem to walk with a limp now, irritation in its glance, a slur to its voice? With these hard ruptures and almost-repairs, de Lestrade created a radical revision of suspense tropes, perhaps the first since Hitchcock. In my review, I complained that, at six hours, it was too short. I called it a masterpiece. Then it disappeared for 13 years.

In 2018, I was startled to run into the film again on Netflix. Could it be the same Staircase? Better! It was longer! To the original eight episodes de Lestrade had added three more of sequel material, and a two-hour follow-up film he had made in 2012 about Peterson. A 13-episode omnibus. I binged, by now a pro. A new character made an entrance, holy moly: An owl—as a murder suspect!

Now we need to pause for what Wikipedia calls “disambiguation.” There are five staircases.

First, an actual staircase: the one on which Kathleen Peterson, wife to Michael, was found dead in 2001.

Second, The Staircase: de Lestrade’s 2004 documentary about Michael Peterson’s trial for Kathleen’s murder.

Third, The Staircase 2: the 2012 update by de Lestrade, which covers Peterson’s retrial for the murder.

Fourth, The Staircase: the 13–episode documentary that came to Netflix in 2018, which integrates the first two films and adds new material, including owls.

Finally, and most recently, The Staircase, a miniseries that unfolded in May on HBO Max, by Antonio Campos and starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette. The mention of actors “starring” should make it plain: This one is fiction.

As Survivor engendered Lost, so The Staircase engendered The Staircase. Both Staircases participate in the tug-of-war between TV reality and TV unreality, in which documentaries are filled with staged stuff, and fiction films use real names, real plot points, and often real dialog drawn from court records.

So somewhere back there is what actually happened on the Durham staircase. But de Lestrade’s Staircase makes clear that people have been dissembling about that event since it happened, most notably Peterson himself, a histrionic type, given to quoting Shakespeare and pantomiming acts of violence. De Lestrade’s Staircase is also a highly aestheticized artifact. Just one example: Where direct fly-on-the-wall documentaries, which attempt to do nothing but capture reality, use only found sound, de Lestrade’s Staircase is scored by Jocelyn Pook, who is known for putting music to psychological fiction like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

But, on top of the real event on the staircase, on top of the stylized documentary, there’s now yet another coat of varnish on the chronicle of Kathleen Peterson’s death: Antonio Campos’ Staircase, the fiction one, on HBO Max.

To my surprise, de Lestrade has complained he finds that one galling—a dip too low in the fact-fiction danse macabre. Though he’s credited as an executive producer on Campos’ docudrama, he told Vanity Fair he’s “very uncomfortable” with the film. “We gave [Campos] all the access he wanted, and I really trusted the man,” he said. “I feel that I’ve been betrayed.” The problem is that Campos ended up putting on the screen not just the Peterson story but the de Lestrade story.

Or a de Lestrade story. A fictional one, and one that de Lestrade fears misrepresents his team’s approach to their documentary. Specifically, de Lestrade argues that Campos’ film distorts the details of their filmmaking process to suggest that his team was biased in favor of Peterson.

I see de Lestrade’s point. If he were charged directly with putting a thumb on the scale for Peterson, that could conceivably hurt his chances of making straight news documentaries, which carry a pretense of neutrality. But no one is charging de Lestrade with bias. Instead, the misrepresentation of de Lestrade comes in a fiction film, which doesn’t just borrow the tropes of fiction, it is made with actors in makeup and costumes delivering lines entirely from a script.

I would almost say de Lestrade is sounding very un-French, forsaking the auteur’s devotion to creative license in favor of the very curious and American idea of fact-checking fiction, and wailing about defamation. But in the end de Lestrade, knight of the staircase, seems to understand that to vet true crime and pulp fiction in a court of law is to miss the point of the hybrid genre, which has always lived in the flicker of truth and poetry. De Lestrade seems unlikely to sue for damages; what he wants is to secure his place in the history of cinema. From Vanity Fair: “What irks de Lestrade ... most is that the original Staircase has been heralded for nearly two decades for its careful construction—and the fact that it leaves viewers uncertain of whether Michael was involved in Kathleen’s death. (In 2005, The New York Times gave it a rave review.)”

Now, even though it’s my own review Vanity Fair cites, I won’t presume that de Lestrade is concerned with my opinion. Instead, he wants to be seen, as no doubt the fiction filmmaker Campos wants to be seen, as an artist. In particular, de Lestrade’s supreme reticence in the making of his documentary does not operate as anything like the would-be “objectivity” of an American journalist (as if objectivity were possible). It is, rather, part of an aesthetic of calculated restraint. Campos too has an aesthetic, and—with staging, close-ups, and a thousand other directorial techniques—he smokes out emotional complexity from his main characters in a way no news story can do. Both films are suffused with compassionate curiosity about Peterson spiked, to my eye, with flashes of contempt. In these approaches are neither bias nor neutrality but, to quote the French, art.

This article appears in the July/August issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

Life Is Great in the Age of No Secrets

It was fun looking at the world as a huge conspiracy theory, but then I realized: There’s no such thing as hidden knowledge.

Paul Ford  June 12, 2022 11:11 AM

Illustration: Elena Lacey

it used to be that if you were a technophile you were also very possibly, to some degree, a conspiracist. The two were adjacent; some of the foundational texts of nerddom are basically conspiracies repackaged as fiction or parody—The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Book of the SubGenius. When the internet showed up, it became the place to go for the good stuff. It could teach you about the cabals that run the world, or about how ghosts are just time travelers. I took to it like a duck to tainted water, armed with the names of FTP sites written in a notebook. It was just the stuff for a powerless adolescent looking for order. The alternative—that I was a normal person instead of a suppressed genius—was unthinkable.

As the internet grew, becoming less about conspiracy and oddity and more about commerce, I did too. I put childish things away, began to take a daily paper (well, homepage), and in general came to believe that the world was run not by forces intent on evil chaos but instead by a network of goofballs acting out of a variety of motives, mostly greed. Malevolent? Sometimes a little. Satanic? Nah.

Still, a drop of conspiracist ink tinted my perception. I assumed that the people who ran the world—Bill Gates, say, or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk—just had more knowledge of its secrets. They have access to more information, I’d think. They know what the companies they run and invest in are working on, they can see reports, they can buy raw data and hire teams of consultants to synthesize it into recommendations. But it turns out that the books they read tend to be the same books everyone else reads. And their hobbies are normal rich-people hobbies. In the launch video for Windows 95, Jay Leno drives a car that looks like a computer mouse. Powerful people have a lot of data, but it is hard to guess what hidden knowledge they might possess.

In fact, it feels to me as if a large portion of humanity has entered the age of no secrets. Regular people do “open source intelligence,” trawling YouTube footage of war zones, triangulating with Google Maps, comparing notes on Reddit to define exactly what happened. If you’re meeting someone for coffee and you search for their name, you’ll slip right into their LinkedIn or their property records, and you’ll have to remember not to bring up the price of their house when you sit down. I used to download big Freedom of Information Act PDFs and poke around inside leaked databases, but who can keep up with the pace of releases now? Whole hard drives’ worth of data, so much data that we brand it: the Paradise Papers (1.4 terabytes), the Panama Papers (2.6 TB), the Pandora Papers (2.9 TB). And recently—did anyone notice aside from Wikipedia?—Suisse Secrets (affecting tens of thousands of banking clients). When the US government disclosed information about UFO sightings on military radar, people tweeted a little and moved on.

on some level, you can look at the entirety of modern telecommunications as a system for creating, then losing control of, secrets. DMs, group chats, video footage of our collective noses being picked on the elevator. In the future, more will get hacked, more will converge, more systems will arise to find patterns in other systems, to recognize the still images, to interpret the video. AI is pretty powerful this way: It can’t think, but it can tattle. Europe seems ready to regulate it all, while the US, when it comes to privacy, is trapped somewhere between fundraising and grandstanding. China just runs a wire directly from your computer to the government.

But does life in a networked panopticon have to be grim? I subscribe to a wonderful mailing list called Data Is Plural, which regularly sends out new sources of health outcomes, voting records, bird sightings, and so forth. It’s the only newsletter I open immediately. To release a data set is just so optimistic an act. Have you seen Microsoft’s Planetary? They have the whole world in there, more maps than you thought possible. Tree cover. Soil type. You can go to Wikidata.org and ask for a list of all the famous dogs, or cities with populations above a million. There’s a new data format, Zarr, that can take a file you put on the cloud and make it a geographic database. A beloved tool called Datasette turns your database into a website, lickety-split. The traditional line between client and server is blurring. It’s abstract stuff, but the upshot is that it’s getting easier and easier to put data out there, to give people something to grow on. The new commons is shaping up not as web pages (Wikipedia aside) but as web data.

When you sit down to process the world, you face a choice. You can become absorbed in the powers that be and decide to interpret them through the wild interconnected networks of the conspiracist. I’ve done that. You can look at the big bold names who run your industry, who run the government, and see how many of them serve on each other’s boards. I’ve done that too. Still do. A lot. Or you can look at just how much of the world is now available to anyone with a reasonable network connection and a desire to understand. Things seem pretty grim, but I have kids to raise, and that’s what I’m going to show them: Instead of worrying about other people’s power, think of what you’ll download. Hopefully you can do something better with it.

This article appears in the July/August issue. Subscribe now.

IDEAS

Prediction Engines Are Like Karma: You Get What You Stream

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on the virtues of sharing a streaming profile and screwing with algorithms.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  June 10, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: Mark Wang

“Streaming services often allow account holders to create multiple, separate profiles, which I appreciate. I want the recommendations I get to reflect my taste and not my partner’s. Is this selfish? Is there any virtue in sharing a profile with others?”

—Island in the Stream

Dear Island,

Sharing, at least as it’s often understood, is virtuous only in cases of finite resources. It’s generous for a child to share her lunch with a classmate who has none or for the wealthy to give money to the less fortunate. But I find it hard to believe that forfeiting an individual profile would be laudable when there are enough to go around. What’s bothering you isn’t the fear of selfishness but the realization that you see other people’s inclinations and preferences as a form of contamination, a threat to the purity of your personal algorithm. To insist on your own digital fiefdom suggests you believe your taste to be so unique and precise that any disruption to its pattern will compromise its underlying integrity.

At a basic level, prediction engines are like karma, invisible mechanisms that register each of your actions and return to you something of equal value. If you watch a lot of true-crime docs, you will eventually find yourself in a catalog dominated by gruesome titles. If you tend to stream sitcoms from the early 2000s, your recommendations will turn into an all-you-can-eat buffet of millennial nostalgia. The notion that one reaps what one sows, that every action begets an equal reaction, is not merely spiritual pablum, but a law encoded in the underlying architecture of our digital universe. Few users really know how these predictive technologies work. (On TikTok, speculations about how the algorithm functions have become as dense as scholastic debates about the metaphysical constitution of angels.) Still, we like to believe that there are certain cosmic principles at play, that each of our actions is being faithfully logged, that we are, in each moment, shaping our future entertainment by what we choose to linger on, engage with, and purchase.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to probe a little at that sense of control. You noted that you want your recommendations to align with your taste, but what is taste, exactly, and where does it come from? It’s common to think of one’s preferences as sui generis, but our proclivities have been shaped by all sorts of external factors, including where we live, how we were raised, our ages, and other relevant data. These variables fall into discernible trends that hold true across populations. Demographic profiling has proved how easy it is to discover patterns in large samples. Given a big enough data set, political views can be predicted based on fashion preferences (L.L. Bean buyers tilt conservative; Kenzo appeals to liberals), and personality traits can be deduced by what kind of music a user likes (fans of Nicki Minaj tend to be extroverted). Nobody knows what causes these correlations, but their consistency suggests that none of us is exactly the master of our own fate, or the creator of a bespoke persona. Our behavior falls into predictable patterns that are subject to social forces operating beyond the level of our awareness.

And, well, prediction engines couldn’t work if this wasn’t the case. It’s nice to think that the recommendations on your private profile are as unique as your thumbprint. But those suggestions have been informed by the behavioral data of millions of other users, and the more successful the platform is at guessing what you’ll watch, the more likely it is that your behavior falls in line with that of other people. The term “user similarity” describes how automated recommendations analogize the behavior of customers with kindred habits, which means, essentially, that you have thousands of shadow-selves out there who are streaming, viewing, and purchasing many of the same products you are, like quantumly entangled particles that mirror one another from opposite sides of the universe. Their choices inform the options you’re shown, just as your choices will inflect the content promoted for future users.

Karma, at least in popular culture, is often regarded as a simplistic form of cosmic comeuppance, but it’s more properly understood as a principle of interdependence. Everything in the world is connected to everything else, creating a vast web of interrelation wherein the consequences of every action reverberate through the entire system. For those of us who have been steeped in the dualities of Western philosophy and American individualism, it can be difficult to comprehend just how intertwined our lives are with the lives of others. In fact, it’s only recently that information technologies—and the large data sets they create—have revealed to us what some of the oldest spiritual traditions have been teaching for millennia: that we live in a world that is chaotic and radically interdependent, one in which the distance between any two people (or the space between any two vectors) is often smaller than we might think.

With that in mind, Island, sharing a profile might be less an act of generosity than a recognition of that interdependence. The person you’re living with has already changed you in countless ways, subtly altering what you believe, what you buy, the way you speak. If your taste in movies currently diverges from theirs, that doesn’t mean it always will. In fact, it’s almost certain that your preferences will inch closer together the longer you share a home. This is arguably a good thing. Most of us have experienced at some point the self-perpetuating hell of karmic cycles, the way one cigarette leads to an addiction or a single lie begets a string of further deceptions. Automated recommendations can similarly foster narrowly recursive habits, breeding more and more of the same until we’re stuck in a one-dimensional reflection of our past choices. Deliberately opening up your profile to others could be a way to let some air into that dank cave of individual preferences where the past continually reverberates, isolating you from the vast world of possibilities that lies outside.

If nothing I’ve said thus far has managed to bring about spiritual enlightenment—if you remain, instead, deeply unnerved by the extent to which your life is being monitored, predicted, and surveilled—then that’s all the more reason to let others influence your algorithm. The more we share in unexpected ways, granting friends access to our logins, watching content that falls outside what the system believes we will enjoy, the more we muddle those mechanisms that attempt to understand and manipulate our behavior online. Perhaps the internet of the future will be one that recognizes not only our radical interdependence but our fundamental contingency, one that reflects the fact that humans do not always behave with the predictability of lab rats. It’s true that no person is an island—but we are not even solid land. In our age of streaming, it might be apt to recall the old proverb about how it’s impossible to step in the same river twice. Our personalities are not fixed structures but are, much like the data we leave in our wake, patterns of energy that are influenced by everything we touch, fluid groupings of waves and eddies that are liable to shift, at any moment, into new arrangements.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

I just wanted to be a scientist, not a trailblazer. But in my field, people like me are anomalies—and we face constant scrutiny for our race and gender.

Katrina Miller  June 07, 2022 10:10 AM

Left to right: Andrea Bryant, LaNijah Flagg, Katrina Miller, and Ayanna Matthews connected as a group when Flagg arrived in Chicago.Photograph: Akilah Townsend

At the entrance to my lab’s clean room, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I look like a clown. I’m drowning in a disposable coverall that hangs off of me in droopy folds, and my size 7½ feet are swallowed up by the smallest rubber boots the lab had on hand—a men’s size 12. The thick mass of curls framing my face only accentuates the caricature.

Reaching for the box of hairnets perched on a nearby counter, I fish out a thin, papery cap with a sigh. How the hell is this going to fit over my fro? I flatten my roots and tie my hair into the tightest bun I can muscle. Stretched as far as it’ll go, the hairnet only covers the back of my head. I position another over my forehead and a third to straddle the middle. Has no physicist here ever been a woman or had to contend with hair like mine? With effort, I tug the hood of my coverall over the hairnets. The taut fabric rustles loudly in my ears as I open the door to join my peers.

I am here, in a basement lab at the University of Chicago, to work on a small-scale particle detector that might help in the search for dark matter, the invisible glue that physicists believe holds the universe together. Dark matter emits no light and, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t interact with ordinary matter in any familiar ways. But we know it exists from the way it influences the motions of the stars. The allure of dark matter is what inspired me to pursue a PhD in physics. But in more ways than one, I keep feeling like I just don’t fit.

I had stumbled into physics as an undergrad at Duke University, my curiosity piqued after watching characters in Marvel’s Thor zip across the cosmos using something the film called an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Intent on knowing what that was, I went back to my dorm room to do some digging, ultimately signing up for an introductory astronomy elective. In that class I discovered, to my amazement, that studying the universe was like time travel. On the chilly night in Duke Forest when I learned how to set up a telescope, I felt myself catapulting into the past as I peered up at starlight that had been emitted decades, if not centuries, earlier. I returned to campus a few hours before sunrise, exhausted but energized—because I knew I wanted to learn this stuff for real. Years later, when I told a mentor I’d gotten into grad school, he was elated. “You’ve worked very hard and deserve this,” he wrote in an email. “Never doubt your ability.”

I rode high on those words when, in 2016, I arrived at UChicago, one of the top physics departments in the country. I was one of two Black women in a department of about 200 grad students. It quickly became clear that she and I were novelties. “I’ve dated a mulatto like you before,” a peer told me in an attempt to make conversation. When I showed up at a weekly meeting that discussed articles in scientific journals, a professor handed me an abandoned backpack near his seat—as if the only reason I could be in that room was to collect a forgotten bag. (He blushed when I shook my head and sat down.) Another time, my adviser asked me to pose for a picture for his grant application. “Of course, I have other photos,” he said as he tossed me a wrench. “But it looks better if it’s a woman.”

One day, worn out by always feeling like an alien, I opened my laptop and poked around the department website. I was searching for signs of Black women who had come before me—to reassure myself that someone had once done what I was trying to do. No luck. So I turned to Google, where I stumbled on a database simply titled The Physicists, maintained by an organization called African American Women in Physics.

I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.

That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three.

I was used to being the only Black woman in any given physics classroom. But I hadn’t realized the full mathematical truth of how alone I was. When, in conversation with a Black administrator, I asked about being the third in the 132-year history of this institution, he offered a small token of relief. There’s one more, he said: Tonia Venters. She earned her doctorate through UChicago’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2009.

As time passed, I thought of these women often. I was desperate to know whether they too had felt out of place. Or if there was something wrong with me, and I did not in fact belong here. If they knew how to overcome these feelings, I needed to hear it. Because at my lowest points, I felt a strong temptation to leave it all behind—to walk away and never think about physics again.

So, as scientists do, I set off to investigate. I started at the beginning: Willetta Greene-Johnson.

Willetta Greene-Johnson teaches physics and chemistry at Loyola University Chicago.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

II

On a sticky August day, I stepped out of the blazing sun into a cool, dimly lit restaurant named Medici on 57th, a longtime staple of the UChicago community. Greene-Johnson was sitting at a table and wrapping up a call, phone tucked underneath a honey-blond bob and clacking against gold hoop earrings. As I sat down, I took in her sleek black turtleneck, Dolce & Gabbana cat-eye frames, and hot-pink stiletto nails. This is what a physicist looks like, I thought with a touch of awe. Settling into conversation, I realized that almost everything about her was exceptional.

Greene-Johnson grew up in Midland, Michigan, and had a knack for music. While in high school, she wrote her first concerto and performed it on piano to an audience. Her dream was to be a composer, but her parents, a chemist and an engineer, implored her to find a more lucrative career. So, in 1974, Greene-Johnson moved to the Bay Area to go to Stanford University.

She decided to study physics. It was, in a way, good timing—a Black American woman had just become the first of her kind to earn a physics PhD, back in Greene-Johnson’s home state. At Stanford, Greene-Johnson was the only Black student in her major, but that didn't surprise her. What did was the presence of six Black PhD students in the department. “I had brothers and sisters galore,” she told me.

Her adviser greeted her by saying, “I wanted the other one,” referring to one of the white women in her class. “But you’ll do.”

She’d turn to them whenever she was struggling with a homework problem or needed a friendly face. When she told her academic adviser she was considering a master’s degree, he encouraged her to reach higher. (That adviser, incidentally, was a white man whose efforts helped Stanford, over the next three decades, produce numerous Black American physicists with PhDs.)

Five years later, Greene-Johnson returned to the Midwest to begin graduate school at UChicago. There were two other women in her class, both white. No other Black grad students were in the department, despite the university’s being situated in the city’s historically Black South Side.

She joined a research group at the intersection of physics and chemistry. She recalls her adviser greeting her by saying, “I wanted the other one,” referring to one of the white women in her class. “But you’ll do.” In the following months, Greene-Johnson barely heard from him; he preferred to relay information through his postdoctoral researcher. At the end of one group meeting, in which their adviser was on speakerphone, the postdoc asked, “Is there anything you want to say to the students?” The adviser simply hung up.

It was a poor environment for everyone, Greene-Johnson says, but as a Black woman she felt she was “someone to be tolerated.” When she earned the third-highest score on her qualifying exams, she remembers her adviser reacting with shock at her success.

Nevertheless, he ended up kicking her out of his lab, on the premise that her research wasn’t moving fast enough. “It was basically, ‘Clear your desk, and good luck,’” she recalls. Greene-Johnson didn’t protest. She waited until the rest of the students left for lunch and quietly packed up her things.

Humiliated, she hid out in her apartment. She was at a loss for what to do next. She also learned that her adviser had tried to get her fellowship taken away, which would have made it impossible for her to continue in another lab. After more than a month away from school, Greene-Johnson decided to regroup. She grabbed coffee with the postdoc, who had recently accepted a position at the nearby Argonne National Laboratory. “You’re a good scientist,” he told her. “Come work for me”—and leave the PhD program behind.

Those words were the validation she needed. More than anyone else, that postdoc had known Greene-Johnson and the culture of their previous lab group well enough to recognize that the problem had been with their adviser—not with her. But she still wanted to earn her degree. I’m not leaving until I have to, she remembers thinking.

For the next few weeks, she shopped around for a new adviser, this time paying close attention to the interactions between professors and their students. The one she settled on was aloof but neutral—at least he wasn’t expecting her to fail. In this new lab, she’d be theorizing about how small, gaseous molecules bond to a slab of metal.

Four years later, Greene-Johnson was the sole author on a study set to publish in The Journal of Chemical Physics—a feat so impressive that she was allowed to submit it in lieu of an extensively written dissertation. She defended her research to an audience of physicists, family, and friends. Afterward, her adviser popped a bottle of champagne for the crowd, shook her hand, and proclaimed, “Congratulations, doctor!” Greene-Johnson was euphoric. Though she didn’t yet know it, she’d just made history.

The Machine Lab at The University of Chicago.Photograph: Akilah Townsend

III

I left my brunch with Greene-Johnson feeling conflicted. I wanted to be a part of her legacy. I wanted my name added to the African American Women in Physics database. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how many of her experiences echoed my own. Hadn’t she shattered the glass ceiling? So why was I still pounding against one?

Part of the answer lies in the number of years that passed before another Black woman joined the graduate program: 17. In 2004, Tonia Venters enrolled as an astronomy and astrophysics grad student, eager to probe the nature of the universe by studying its tiniest particles. Her research was similar to my own, so when we arranged to meet on Zoom, I was especially keen to hear what she had to say.

Venters is, as much as anyone, a born scientist. In elementary school, she peppered her teachers with questions. In high school, she cajoled academic counselors to let her take more advanced science coursework. When she got to Rice University, Venters was the only Black student in the astrophysics major—but it didn’t seem to matter. She had found her passion, and being the only one wasn’t going to deter her.

To Venters, the criticism seemed relentless. There was always something she didn’t say, know, or do well enough.

At UChicago, however, Venters immediately felt like an outsider. The environment was intimidating, and she became self-conscious about being outspoken in lectures. In study sessions with classmates, she observed that they often brushed off her suggestions or outright ignored them. One time, she submitted a research proposal for a prestigious fellowship and shared a version of it with a peer. That student tore into it, saying he didn’t like her writing style. She landed the fellowship—but couldn’t shake his cutting feedback.

Venters started to get quieter. “I was very afraid of making mistakes, and having my mistakes color somebody else’s perception of all women, or all African Americans, or all Black women,” she says. “I could do a hundred things right, and to me it felt like the only thing that mattered was the one thing I did wrong.”

Her performance started to tank. “What happened to her?” a professor asked Venters’ adviser after she stumbled through a presentation. “She used to give such good talks.”

Venters didn’t like staying silent in her classes and research meetings. She felt like she was becoming a worse, less curious scientist, who held back on sharing ideas—the currency of her field. She feared that other physicists wouldn’t take her seriously because she was Black, and a woman. To better fit in, Venters chose to keep her hair straightened and adopted unassuming attire—boxy button-down shirts and loose-fitting jeans—that mirrored the clothing choices of the men surrounding her.

One day Venters was sitting in the waiting lounge for an upcoming appointment with the physical sciences dean. His administrative assistant, a Black woman, suddenly asked her: “Are you the first from your department?” Embarrassed, Venters mumbled that she did not know. The question had often popped into her mind, but she had always pushed it aside. In this space, she’d tell herself, you just don’t go there about race.

But race—and gender, for that matter—were the unavoidable subtexts. To Venters, the criticism seemed relentless. There was always something she didn’t say, know, or do well enough. By the time of her dissertation defense, she had all but given up trying to prove herself. It doesn’t matter how well I do, she thought, these people are not going to be satisfied. But she got through it. She passed, and in 2009 she earned her PhD.

Tonia Venters studies high-energy particles in blazars and star-forming galaxies.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

Venters got a job at NASA as a theoretical astrophysicist. She was resigned to being the only Black woman scientist in the room for the rest of her career. And she was—until one remarkable summer day in Rome, where Venters was attending a symposium on gamma-ray astronomy. She was chatting with other attendees during a coffee break when, across the room, a hint of purple and a flash of brown skin caught her eye. Do my eyes deceive me? Venters thought, stunned.

She weaved through the sea of conference-goers to a woman whose jewel-toned blouse and natural hair stuck out against the backdrop of white walls, whitewashed tiles, and mostly white people. As Venters approached, she couldn’t help but think: Are you actually here? And by the look on her face, it seemed the other woman was feeling the same.

That woman was Jedidah Isler, then a grad student who was about to become the first Black woman to earn an astrophysics PhD from Yale. They fell into animated conversation, excited to discover that they both studied blazars, supermassive black holes that lie at the core of faraway galaxies. As they chatted, Venters wondered—but couldn’t find the words to ask—if Isler was always this confident. Wow, somebody owning her Blackness, she thought.

Toward the end of our Zoom call, Venters wonders aloud where the women in the African American Women in Physics database ended up, since to this day she encounters so few of them. “Willetta Greene-Johnson,” she says. “What happened to her?” I tell her that Greene-Johnson has been teaching at Loyola University Chicago since 1991.

For a moment, Venters is speechless. “In Chicago?” she finally responds. “Wait. So she was there the whole time?” I nod. “There was another Black woman in the city … who had gone to Chicago … that I could have talked to. And I had no idea,” she says, as the pieces come together. “That blows my mind. Yeah, I’m going to be processing that for a long time.”

IV

In the fall of 2008, the third woman on my list—and the second in the Physics Department—arrived at UChicago. Cacey Stevens Bester was a Louisiana native who had attended Southern University and A&M College, a historically Black school in Baton Rouge. There, she took her first physics class, where she found her first academic mentor. For weeks, Bester nervously jotted down notes while her instructor scribbled equations on the chalkboard. Over time, the professor told Bester about his research, guided her through simple experiments in his lab, and shared with her all the things she could do with a physics degree. By the end of the semester, Bester says, “I was pretty hooked on physics.”

She was also a part of Southern’s Timbuktu Academy, a mentorship program that gave her research opportunities, financial support, and test prep—the tools she needed to be a competitive candidate for graduate school. At physics conferences, she heard inklings of Black students’ difficulty in navigating their primarily white institutions, but Bester could never relate. She knew she could succeed, because the people around her believed she could. She could focus on science, because she didn’t have to worry about anything else.

Graduate school was a complete reversal. Classmates commented on her Louisiana drawl, sometimes saying they couldn’t understand her. They were confused about her hair—how one day it might be straight and the next, curly—and asked her to explain. Growing up in Black neighborhoods, Bester says, she’d heard jokes about these sorts of interactions. But to experience them in real life was jarring.

For the first time, Bester started getting low marks on her assignments. Compared to Southern, where people in her department were proactive about making sure she succeeded, at UChicago she felt entirely on her own. There were pockets of support here too, but a student had to know how to find them, and Bester didn’t. When the scores were posted for her quantum mechanics midterm, she was crushed to learn she had flunked with a grade far below the class average. Her professor pulled her aside and questioned whether she was prepared for the class, saying that she didn’t seem to understand the subject even at an undergraduate level. He recommended a tutor. “I guess he thought he was doing his best to help me,” she says. “But it definitely made me feel inadequate.”

Cacey Stevens Bester works on experimental soft matter and granular physics.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

Bester thought often about leaving. She’d wake up some mornings and hate the path she was on. “I loved physics,” Bester says, “but there were times when the love of physics wasn’t enough.” Giving up didn’t feel like an option, though. I’m the only Black girl here, I gotta represent, she thought. So she took her professor’s advice and started getting tutoring from a peer in class. When her grades improved, she realized why she had been doing poorly: Other students were getting better grades because they were studying together. Bester wasn’t in those groups.

Fitting in, she realized, was about more than finding a social outlet—it was a means of survival. She worked to mask her accent and stopped using the slang she threw around back home. “I molded myself to find a way to get through,” Bester says. She took part in activities that, at first, didn’t interest her, such as going camping and playing Catan, a board game popular among her class. On the days when she felt especially disconnected from her heritage, Bester enticed students to her apartment with the promise of shrimp creole and other Southern cuisine. The invitation was also strategic: Once the plan was in motion, Bester would ask, “Since you guys are coming over for food anyway, why don’t we do the mechanics homework together?”

When that wasn’t enough, Bester scoured the internet for stories of other Black women in physics. It was during one of these sessions that Bester came across Willetta Greene-Johnson. From time to time, Bester Googled her name, curious what she was up to. Eventually, she managed to get Greene-Johnson invited to speak on campus. When she finally met her, Bester was starstruck: “You mean so much to me,” she told Greene-Johnson.

In 2015, on the cusp of earning her PhD, Bester attended a lunch at the National Society of Black Physicists conference in Baltimore. All of the women with PhDs climbed onto the stage for a group photo. Bester watched longingly from her seat as the women—many of whom she recognized from her online searches—crowded together. Here, in one room, was the academic lineage that had kept her going: talented Black women PhDs who were now slamming through glass ceilings as professors, postdocs, and industry professionals around the nation. “I felt like a little girl,” she says, “looking up at the beautiful women I wanted to be one day.”

V

i was lucky enough to cross paths with Bester when I was an undergrad at Duke and she was a postdoc. Someone mentioned her to me, so I reached out to grab lunch. Often, I think back on our meeting and wish I had known enough to ask her: What do I do when I feel like I don’t belong?

I tried my best to fit in at UChicago, but I learned the hard way that who I was at home was not who I could be at school. Anytime I changed my hairstyle (as many Black women frequently do), it opened the door for comments that made me cringe. When I came to school in mini twists—an attempt to circumvent my struggles with the hair nets in the clean room—my adviser said, “I like it better the other way,” as he gestured around his head in the shape of an afro. From then on, I restricted myself to different hairstyles on the weekends only.

Burned out and alone in the library on a Saturday night, Bryant was unable to remember the spark she had once felt for studying life among the stars.

Still, it was impossible to steer clear of awkward conversations, and assumptions, about my appearance. I laughed it off when a colleague asked me for weed, because I wanted to believe it had nothing to do with my race. “You like Dave Chappelle?” a white male student asked one day in the lab. I tensed and chose to lie. “Nah, never heard of him,” I mumbled. He pulled up a Chappelle skit on YouTube. “Check this one out,” he said. “It’s about a white family with the last name Niggar!”

I swallowed my anger and excused myself to the women’s restroom, where I knew I’d be alone. There, I stared at my reflection, wondering what I had done to make him so audacious, and I said out loud the things I wished I had said to him.

Other times I felt invisible, or at best inconsequential. I’ll never forget the day I came to my desk to work, and my officemates—five men—were discussing the validity of the Google Manifesto, an employee’s 10-page anti-diversity memo. For an hour, they debated whether women should, or shouldn’t, be equally represented in science and tech. I fumed silently and searched for words to capture how I felt. But my mind went into a fog.

When I opened up to my PhD adviser about moments like these, he was sympathetic but skeptical. “Are you sure you’re not overanalyzing?” he asked. “Maybe you should stop looking at things through the lens of a minority.” He also warned me to be careful about what I voiced out loud, should I potentially harm the budding careers of the people around me.

Sometimes I turned to Andrea Bryant, the other Black woman in the department working toward a PhD. Her experiences paralleled my own, but in many ways they were worse. We had both joined UChicago through the department’s bridge program, a now defunct initiative to increase the number of underrepresented scholars earning doctorates. Bryant arrived with dreams of becoming an astrobiologist, someone who studies the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. Because she had a background in biology, Bryant began her first year with beginner-level coursework in physics.

Although the bridge program had promised otherwise, she struggled to find help when she needed it. “Work harder,” a professor responded when Bryant reached out for advice. When she asked a teaching assistant for help on a quantum mechanics assignment, he replied, “Aren’t you a graduate student? Why are you taking this class?” Bryant fumbled through a response, searching for words to prove to him that she did deserve to be here.

Andrea Bryant (L) simulates "titanquakes" to learn about Saturn's largest moon. LaNijah Flagg (R) studies the evolutionary dynamics of yeast.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

She was directed to focus on classes during her first two years, but when a supervisor chided Bryant for how far behind she was on research, she felt lost. She had tried working in more than five research groups, only to be let go from each one for not learning fast enough. “Do you even know what an integral is?” one adviser asked. (She did.) “Maybe your personality is just not fit for theoretical physics,” another colleague told her.

Burned out and alone in the library on a Saturday night, Bryant was unable to remember the spark she had once felt for studying life among the stars. But she refused to quit, for the same reasons that Greene-Johnson, Venters, and Bester stuck it out—to not reinforce the stereotypes they all felt weighing them down. Still, the misery could be overwhelming. “I was hoping for some other event in my life to maybe pull me away from physics, and for that to be my out,” Bryant says.

I was also struggling. We tried to lean on each other, but between teaching, research, and coursework, we barely had the chance. The moment it all became too much for me: I had just sat through an hour-long meeting about my research with my adviser and a postdoc, and I couldn’t get a point across without being interrupted. Flustered, I went silent, waiting for someone to notice that I had checked out. No one did. After the meeting, I rushed to the stairwell—which had become my usual spot to cry—and called my mom. “I just can’t do this anymore,” I choked out. “I’ll just finish up this quarter and master out.”

Mastering out, as academics call it, meant making the very stigmatized decision to end my studies with a master’s degree, which is viewed, to many in my field, as a consolation prize. Was I ashamed? Yes. I would not be known as another Black woman who persevered. But I was too broken to care. I never came here to be a trailblazer—I just wanted to be a physicist. Instead, I would join an even more invisible group: that of the Black women who had loved physics but who had decided this burden wasn’t worth it.

Days later, I awoke to an email: We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as an awardee in the Ford Foundation 2018 Predoctoral Fellowship Competition! A few days after that, I received a similar message from the National Science Foundation. I had submitted these applications months before and had pretty much forgotten about them, my thoughts instead growing more certain that I would never be fully accepted in this space. The awards were more than a credibility boost. They offered me freedom to do research anywhere, on anything.

Now I had not one but two golden tickets—and some thinking to do.

Katrina Miller studies neutrinos and what they might reveal about the universe.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

VI

Physics taught me that time moves like an arrow, always pointing forward. But I’d argue time is more like a tightly wound spiral. The names and faces are new at each turn, but this feeling that we don’t belong has hardly budged.

Over and over, that truth resurfaces. When I connected with the person who created the African American Women in Physics database, Jami Valentine Miller, I learned that her project began as a simple list of names in 2004. While pursuing her PhD at Johns Hopkins, she started keeping track of other Black women to remind herself that she had company, even if she couldn’t see it. “For me, it was a lifeline,” she says. Miller kept the list on her student website, and after she graduated in 2007 she moved AAWIP to its own server and incorporated it as a nonprofit. So far, she says, the total number of Black women who have earned physics PhDs in the US is, depending on which related fields are included, around 100.

That so many of us have found solace in Miller’s list answers, for me, the question of what we do when we feel like we don’t belong. We find community where we can, and often that’s in history. Without Miller, I would not have begun to identify the women who came before me or pieced together our lineage. Still, this account may be incomplete. It leaves out any Black woman who may have started on this journey but then chose to leave.

I don’t know if there are any women who left. But I always wonder, since—with a big lift from Miller—we have only recently been able to keep track of one another. Even Miller didn’t know until well after she graduated that she was the first Black woman physicist to earn a PhD from her university. In fact, it was only through the AAWIP database that Greene-Johnson discovered—decades after the fact—that she’d been UChicago’s first, and among the first 10 in the nation.

Greene-Johnson ended up seeking tenure at Loyola, spending a good 70 hours a week on work before realizing she was sacrificing a rich life outside of the ivory tower: one that included her husband, a growing son, and a career in music. Ultimately, she withdrew her tenure application, opting instead to teach full-time as a senior lecturer. She takes summers off to compose, and even won a Grammy for a gospel album whose lead song she wrote.

Venters also had aspirations of becoming a professor but found her place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She sometimes incorporates statement earrings into her outfits as a small, but significant, protest. Bester, meanwhile, is an assistant professor at Swarthmore College—the only one of us so far to keep chasing a dream that, at some point, we all had.

At the end of my second year, rather than leave with my master’s, I decided to switch labs. I abandoned two years of research, and my dream of studying dark matter, to restart my dissertation on an experiment that hunts for a different ghost particle: the neutrino. Life improved almost immediately. When I gave my adviser updates on my research, I’d brace myself for criticism that never arrived. It took a year of therapy, healthy amounts of praise, and a collection of supportive mentors to stop feeling preemptively anxious. I eventually became comfortable wearing my hair in different styles again.

Still, I am wary. I shy away from forming friendships, avoid social events, and often work at home or in the library. Those choices hurt me as a student researcher. But they protect me as a Black woman. My days simply feel easier when people don’t notice me.

Bryant is doing better too. After a string of advisers within the department, she took an internship on NASA’s Dragonfly mission, studying seismic wave patterns of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, to learn about its interior structure, including an underground ocean that may be hospitable to life. She’s continuing this research with a Dragonfly adviser outside of the university. The experiences are “night and day,” Bryant says. “I feel so valued.”

Last year, I received an email that made my jaw drop. Another Black woman had just been accepted into our PhD program. Her name was LaNijah Flagg. I couldn’t wait to meet her. I was also dead set on making sure she knew what she might face. I immediately emailed her and Bryant, congratulating Flagg on her success and suggesting we talk soon. “I’m definitely glad to connect,” she responded. “I have a lot of questions about how to operate in this new space.”

LaNijah Flagg returned to her hometown of Chicago to start graduate school.

Photograph: Akilah Townsend

We planned to grab dinner a few weeks before the school year started. “Y’all mind if I bring a friend?” Flagg asked the group chat. She invited a second-year biophysics PhD student, Ayanna Matthews, whom we had never met because of the pandemic. We think she’ll be the first Black woman to graduate from her department too.

Laughing over pasta and drinks on a cool August night, I soak in the sight of us. “To Black women in physics,” I say with a smile, as we raise our glasses for a toast. Having a seat at this table, surrounded by physicists who look like me, I feel lighter than I have in years. All of us are bursting with laughter and conversation that effortlessly moves between the details of our research and the best salons in Chicago to get our hair and nails done. We stay at the restaurant well past closing—until a server politely asks us to leave—then walk home together to hold onto the moment a little longer, promising, as we part ways, to keep in touch throughout the school year.

And we do. In the group chat, Flagg shares her experiences at UChicago: how, after she failed her first exam, someone suggested she register for a learning disability. The way a professor insinuated that her undergraduate coursework was not sufficient for her studies here. The time a student invited her to a Halloween party, saying, “It’s last minute—but that’s OK, because your hair is like a costume, anyway.” Often, though, she surprises me. She’ll find just the right words to clap back. Having us around, she says, gives her the confidence to keep going.

Our group has been cathartic for me too. For the first time in years, school doesn’t feel like a place to escape from. I am more free to be myself. But reporting this story has confirmed what I had suspected: The problem is not with us. It’s systemic, and it can only begin to change once there are more of us—taking up space, sharing our views, being ourselves. That’s why it’s so disheartening that this everyday sense of community is rare in physics. Realizing this, I now long for a life where I’ll feel more at home—if not in the work itself, then in a career that leaves room for the cultivation of community elsewhere.

I am also reclaiming my voice. I started writing this story to bring my academic lineage to light, to understand why there were so few of us and how the women who came before me had persevered. It ended up being something more—a way to make up for the times when silence and invisibility felt like our only options.

As I round out the final year of my PhD, it feels risky—but empowering—to unapologetically proclaim my truth. I hope to finish my studies by the end of this summer. After that, despite the protests of so many in the field, I am leaving academia. I will be embarking on a new journey: as a writer.

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Volodymyr Zelensky on War, Technology, and the Future of Ukraine

In a one-on-one interview with WIRED, the embattled president expresses clarity amidst the chaos.

Geoffrey Cain  June 02, 2022 10:10 AM

“The drops of rain are as visible on me as on any other person.”Photograph: Yan Dobronosov

Ever since Russian forces started their all-out invasion in February, Ukraine has been hailed as an exemplar of how to defend against violent tyranny on the 21st-century battlefield. The country spun up an “IT Army” of volunteer hackers to take down Russian websites, used the Starlink satellite internet system to maintain communications as its own infrastructure was being destroyed, and launched a social media blitzkrieg to win support from around the world.

By contrast, Russia’s leaders, despite having a far more powerful traditional army, have been stuck in the obsolete strategic thinking of the previous century. They were seemingly unprepared for the powerful, precise, Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones that Ukraine has used to decimate Russian tanks and ships. Russian cybersecurity systems were frail too: Hackers who had signed up for the IT Army told me how they were continually launching distributed denial of service attacks against Russian websites, as well as posting pro-Ukrainian propaganda and news on sites Russia had not yet censored. These hackers weren’t master cyber warriors with black ops training, but teenagers and twentysomethings in bedrooms and living rooms around the world. With Google searches and WikiHow articles, they learned the art of basic hacking in a few days. With a few weeks of practice, they said, they were able to punch through Russia’s weak defenses and its vast cloak of wartime censorship.

So when I arrived in Ukraine in March, I wanted to understand how technology was reshaping war. I spoke to soldiers about how the use of drones had upended the balance of power with Russia. I talked to hackers about their successes and failures. And as the conflict wore on, I began to hear from Ukrainians about how their experience of the war has morphed from an intense and enthusiastic defense of the nation into long stretches of eerie silence, punctuated by moments of joy, fear, or panic with each new announcement of a Ukrainian or Russian advance.

Finally, in mid May, I met Volodymyr Zelensky at the presidential palace in Kyiv. The comedian-turned-president who has captivated global attention and successfully guilted world leaders into rallying behind his country did not look like the confident, charismatic person we’re used to seeing on TV and social media. He appeared exhausted and haggard, his hands jittery and his eyes sunken. He seemed deeply anxious and uncertain. And yet, as he answered my questions about the state of the war, the world’s reaction to it, and the role technology had played in helping Ukraine resist the Russian military machine, his answers became lyrical, interspersed with a spontaneous smile or a tartly comic retort—a Zelensky trademark.

In this wide-ranging interview, which has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity, Zelensky called on Big Tech to do more to pull out of Russia, praised Elon Musk’s Starlink, and explained why modern leaders have to appeal to the distracted social media generation. “We just live in another time, no longer the time of postmen,” he said.

But he acknowledged that the war has taken its toll on Ukrainians and is deeply personal to him. So I asked: Did he have any regrets? Would he have done anything differently? He answered, flatly: “I think this question should be asked of the Russian president.”

WIRED: Many say that you are a skilled social media communicator. How do you keep the attention of an audience known for its short attention span? How do you keep people from forgetting about the war?

Zelensky: We are all in a social network. It is no longer about whether it is good or not; most of our lives are already online. People study online, get information; people read, people use it. This is our world now. It is divided. The internet is a reality. It is not another world, but rather a modern reality. So if you want people to perceive you as you are, you must use what people use.

Unfortunately, sometimes young people won’t digest long pieces of information. They want to scroll through and get newer and newer information. Such fast consumption leads to the fact that you need to give people 10, 20, or 30 seconds of video so that they do not lose interest.

But each generation is still smarter than the past one. The future is still wider than the past, and if you try to relate to people, you will find a common language. Sometimes your long answers, long questions, and long programs will also have a lot of support, and people will get used to it. People won’t stay with  something uninteresting. People won’t abide something deceitful; people won’t abide dictators. If you talk to them honestly, truthfully, openly, then you will connect with people.

Protesters listen to a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky screened during a demonstration against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, on March 4, 2022, at Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czech Republic.

Photograph: Getty Images

You have called on many companies—including some Big Tech firms—to end their operations in Russia. Do you feel that they are doing enough?

Sanctions are in effect now, so many Russian military factories are not working at the moment. They will not be able to build some equipment because of these sanctions. We are very happy with that.

Unfortunately, there are many other companies still operating there. When we have recovered Russian weapons during or after battles, we’ve found that many shells and parts of weapons were made by Western companies. So, in fact, we are fighting not only against Russia but against all those companies as well. We have appealed to those countries to stop such cooperation.

Are you willing to name those countries and companies?

I’m ready, but I don’t think they’re ready to hear that about themselves.

Are social media companies doing enough now to comply with sanctions and maintain the flow of verifiable information? What else can they do?

Some platforms and social networks have already left Russia, which I think is very important, because I would not like them to be influenced by the country’s internal policies. The thing is that those companies are the ones who have all of the influence now. There is an information—call it what you want—a wall, or an information submarine, where the people of the Russian Federation are. Because of this veil, made by the political elite of the Russian Federation, they are in their own informational space, and that space is fueled by the Kremlin, which only gives the information that is favorable to them. There is no freedom in their space.

Some big, cool platforms—despite being blocked in Russia—should find a technological, ideological, or some kind of creative way to show them the truth of our reality so that Russian people would understand that they live in another world. The main thing is that people on social media platforms live in freedom, and Russians are outside of it, as if on another planet.

Can sanctions be improved?

For sanctions to work, they mustn’t be partial. The exchange rate of Russia’s national currency has almost returned to where it was before the sanctions, which means that they have found a way out of the constraints imposed by sanctions. [In fact, by the time of the interview, the ruble was even stronger than at the start of the war: 65 rubles to the dollar, compared to nearly 85 rubles to the dollar on February 24.] It is necessary to implement sanctions completely and remove any opportunities to bypass them. Otherwise, all sanctions become artificial.

Like the oil embargo, for example. Up to 80 percent of all the European Union countries say they will support the oil embargo being implemented, but what is going to happen with the 20 percent of the countries that do not? They will be able to receive the oil. But who will check and monitor this process? Those countries will be allowed to get a bigger capacity of oil than they need and may sell portions of it to countries that publicly supported the sanctions.

I want our allies to follow the sanctions to the end, block Russia, and show that the civilized world is stronger than any energy resource.

Is the Starlink system—the constellation of satellites from SpaceX that provides people internet access—effective?

Very effective, very effective. It helped us a lot, in many moments related to the blockade of our cities, towns, and related to the occupied territories. Sometimes we completely lost communication with those places. To lose contact with those people is to lose control completely, to lose reality. Believe me: People who got out of the occupied cities, where there was no such assistance as Starlink, said that the Russians told them that Ukraine doesn’t exist anymore, and some people even began to believe it. I am really grateful for the support of Starlink.

Has Ukraine’s IT Army been vital?

In the first few days of the war, we dedicated a lot of time to the logistics of a battle in cyberspace. I believe that this is the future, and it became our, I believe, third army. We probably have several armies: our People’s Army, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the IT Army. The IT Army did a lot for the cyberdefense of institutions that were heavily attacked. The invaders wanted to make the National Bank and the Cabinet of Ministers fall. They wanted to cut down everything so that we could not give people their salaries and pensions, so that there was no light and no communication, so that people could not hear me and hear us all, hear live information. Our IT Army worked well here.

Did your role in the political satire Servant of the People prepare you for your presidency?

Some Ukrainians live here and think, “Maybe I should find something else, move to another country.” I think the series helped people to understand that for Ukrainians, Ukraine is the best and that everything is possible here. I think it improved something inside each of us; it improved this faith in ourselves and the belief that everything is possible. I was influenced by the show in that way too.

When the war is over, what will be your biggest challenge?

The return of people from abroad. We need to give them conditions that are not worse than the conditions where they are today. They are in Poland, Germany, Canada, in the United States. Different countries provide different support, different infrastructure, different comfort, different salaries, and different opportunities. We have an advantage, as this is their homeland, but we’ll need to restore living conditions, security conditions, and salary conditions. We will not give the same salaries as in Britain, for example. But we have to offer comparable living conditions. The middle class should feel like a middle class, not lower, when they return. We have to do everything to make people feel like this is the same unified Europe and that they’re not returning to a different planet.

How has the war changed you?

Honestly, I don’t know. This question is difficult. In most cases, I want to remain an ordinary person, since I am the same person I was before, like everyone else. The drops of rain are as visible on me as on any other person.

The value of life has changed. So let’s say that my attitude has changed, as I do not pay attention to trivialities anymore, and there are clear aspects on which I am focused. The question of the price of freedom, which we learned from books in school, has now become a reality. You know this price. You have seen the number of people who died. You can clearly see the number of tortured people.

On the contrary, you understand that this price of freedom does not exist in absolutely measurable terms, because you do not know how many people will still lose their lives for the sake of striving to live, for the sake of freedom.

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

GEAR

It's Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message

The live chats of the past are now in our pockets and inescapable. We need better boundaries.

Lauren Goode, Arielle Pardes  May 31, 2022 15:15 PM

AOL Instant Messenger debuted 25 years ago this month. It came with one particular feature we should resurrect.Courtesy of Alamy

In the beginning, there was AOL Instant Messenger. That wasn’t actually the beginning. Talkomatic, Compuserve’s CB Simulator, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) all preceded it. But AIM was the beginning of something, a gateway to real-time, all-the-time internet communication for the normies.

You didn’t need to be a computer nerd to ride the AIM train. Your parents got the compact disc in the mail, you plugged your clear plastic corded phone into a modem connected to your Gateway 2000, and you were off. Rather, you were on. Very online, and unaware at the time that the portal would disappear behind you once you crossed through, that you would never again live a wholly offline life.

AIM, which launched 25 years ago this month, represented that moment for me. It propelled me into a universe of limitless pixels, endless distractions, and a penchant for bland screen names (my only embellishment was my basketball jersey number, tacked onto my initials). It was also a live social network. A digital door creaked open, and millions of us scrambled to our seats to see who had just signed on, who was down to chat.

Sometimes you had to step away. So you threw up an Away Message: I’m not here. I’m in class/at the game/my dad needs to use the comp. I’ve left you with an emo quote that demonstrates how deep I am. Or, here’s a song lyric that signals I am so over you. Never mind that my Away Message is aimed at you.

I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person before they IM’d you.

Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps. Oh fine, you’re going to insist I mention some of the messaging guardrails tech companies have rolled out in recent years. On iPhone and iPad, there’s “Do Not Disturb” and “Focus” mode, while Android OS supports “Do Not Disturb” as well as “Schedule Send,” which, as a Google spokesperson put it, “is great when you’re texting across time zones, such as when you want to send an early morning Happy Birthday to your friend in London.” And yes, you can “Mute Notifications” on WhatsApp.

The always-on workplace chat app Slack offers “Update Your Status,” the closest thing we have to Away Messages today. You can give fair warning that you’re Out of Office or slap a “sick” emoji on your profile. You can write “Writing, please DND,” because you’re once again behind on a deadline. This, it turns out, is an invitation to be disturbed anyway.

These are not guardrails. These are squishy orange cones that we all plow through, like 15-year-olds in driver’s ed. Even the names of these features—Focus, Schedule Send—are phrases born of a work-obsessed culture. Bring back the ennui, the poetry, the pink fonts, the tildes and asterisks.

What I’m reminiscing about is, of course, an entirely different technology protocol. There’s instant messaging, and there’s text messaging. Today the two are practically indistinguishable, but 25 years ago these experiences were disparate. AIM was a desktop client that sent bits of information to an internet server when you logged on, blasting your arrival to the folks on your Buddy List and displaying the same information to you when your friends logged on. It used a proprietary protocol called OSCAR, which stood for Open System for CommunicAtion in Realtime. Realtime meant live chat. Text messaging, on the other hand, referred to SMS, or Short Message Service. And this mostly happened on mobile devices connected to cellular networks.

Technology aside, the social interactions around these messaging forms were distinctive. Think of it as synchronous messaging versus asynchronous messaging, says Justin Santamaria, a former lead Apple engineer who helped launch Apple iMessage (now Messages). Back when he was working on iChat, a Mac client that supported live AIM chats and was the precursor to iMessage, the mentality was that “SMS was very much about asynchronous communication, a kind of ‘fire and forget’ model,” he says. “If I want to tell you something I send it, you receive it, and then you respond on your time.”

Now, “asynchronous” messaging has become the dominant form of text-based remote communications, Santamaria says. We’re all glued to Messages, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal on our phones, and in many instances we receive the same messages at the same time on our laptops. With that evolution, our social contracts have changed.

Catapulting even further back into the past for a moment: Old-fashioned phone calls used to, and sometimes still do, start with “Hey, you free?” Santamaria points out. “You were going to tell me if you could talk before we started the conversation.” There’s a version of this today—someone might preface their message with “Not urgent, respond when you can,” for example—but for the most part, we just send the text message without consideration, Santamaria says. Interruption is the default.

Continuing to make the distinction, though, between synchronous and asynchronous messaging only damages my own argument, which is that asynchronous messaging is real-time chat now. We are always on. That clear plastic corded phone that dialed up and signed me on has morphed into the world’s most powerful pocket computer that also happens to make phone calls. Provided we’re in range of cell service or Wi-Fi, we can be reached at literally any time. The dreaded ellipsis—the dot dot dot as someone types a response—has made us captive audiences. We are all walking live chats.

Does anyone pay any mind to the fact that a person appears to have their notifications silenced when we initiate a text message to them? I think not. Instead, as Santamaria points out to me with a chuckle, we see that as a signal that it’s OK to send a message because the person won’t be disturbed.

This is a fair point, and it’s also worth acknowledging that some people (not me) are just better at managing their messages than others. Not long ago I was both horrified and fascinated by a screenshot a prominent tech CEO shared on Twitter, in which he inadvertently showed that he had well over a hundred unread text messages in his Messages queue.

I inquired about this via Twitter DM, no doubt interrupting him, and he told me he treats his text messages very much like he treats email. He triages, which is a very CEO thing to say. “I just respond to the stuff I need and mark anything as unread I need to get back to … the numbers don’t stress me out.”

This seems smart. This guy is smart. Although the author Sam George might diagnose him with a totally made-up condition called Dyscommunication Syndrome, or DCS, the basis for his book I’ll Get Back to You. The subtitle of the book is “The Dyscommunication Crisis: Why Unreturned Messages Drive Us Crazy and What to Do About It.” (I haven’t read the entire book; I’ve been too distracted by messages.)

George makes a case for closing the gap between messages and their response times, rather than taking a pause or breaking the feedback loop entirely. Some of his advice is sound—take the conversation offline when possible and channel empathy when someone doesn’t respond right away, making sure to ask if they’re OK before firing off an accusatory text. The book also includes such gems as, “What you do with a dick pic is up to you.”

Lest I’m perceived by others as a communications curmudgeon, I’ll just own up to it: I’m a communications curmudgeon. A deluge of notifications drives me wild, and not in a good way. Reminders of “memories” from a year ago, or nine years ago, today? No thanks. I’ve given up on my inbox—well, for the most part. On days when I do have the energy to address email, I gleefully mark as spam and unsubscribe, rinse and repeat.

People send too many messages. I send too many messages. The first step in making messaging amends is to admit that you, too, are an inconsiderate messaging maniac.

But I’ll never stop, and neither will you. Quick messaging is a utility. It is, in many cases, the most efficient and meaningful form of communication we have. It’s crucial for relationship building, for organizing, for supporting others through hard times. It can be joyful. It’s an accidental social network, an observation I’ve been making about Apple’s Messages for a long time (acknowledging that Messages is extremely US-centric; outside of the US, people use WhatsApp, Telegram, or WeChat in similar ways). It’s not even accidental: Meta, née Facebook, knew exactly what it was doing when it acquired WhatsApp.

Would something like the Away Message, a relic from an era when we just didn’t message so darn much, actually put up the guardrails we need? Maybe not. But I’m willing to try anything at this point. If we can’t ever get away from messages, at the very least we can create a digital simulacrum of ourselves that appears to be away. What else is the internet for?

BACKCHANNEL

The Multifarious Multiplexity of Taika Waititi

He makes big movies and little movies, funny movies and sad movies—but mostly big-little funny-sad movies. Waititi is a bundle of contradictions.

Jennifer Kahn  May 31, 2022 10:10 AM

Waititi’s movies are a sustained high-wire act where moods mix and shift in exhilarating ways.Photograph: Jessica Chou

About seven minutes into my second conversation with the actor, writer, and director Taika Waititi, he confessed, somewhat abruptly, that he doesn’t like being around people. There was “absolutely nothing loaded” about the remark, he assured me—but he also seemed to mean it. “It’s just really draining,” he said. “With whoever—it doesn’t matter who. Even my family. But definitely people I’ve never met before.”

It was a hard claim to believe. Outwardly, Waititi can seem extroverted in the extreme. He’s goofy and antic, with an easygoing familiarity and a seemingly bottomless amount of energy. While filming, he’s known for keeping his sets lively: playing music, launching into bits of oddball comedy, and sometimes doing directorial “costume changes” where he vanishes and then reappears in a different outfit. Cate Blanchett once described the set of Thor: Ragnarok as “one long Mardi Gras parade.”

Like many performers, Waititi can be charming, but his default mode is sillier, in a way that feels obscurely flattering, like a private game you’ve been invited to join. He’s also instinctively good at reading people and slipping into whatever mode they find comfortable. In interviews, I tend to be anxious and earnest, and Waititi, in turn, became unusually calm and reflective. At the time, I thought this meant that I was seeing something closer to the “real” Taika: the person he becomes when he doesn’t feel obliged to be amusing. The more we talked, though, the more it became clear that Waititi wasn’t being especially real with me, or especially fake. Every person Waititi spends time with comes away feeling like they have a special connection. It’s a taxing feat. As Waititi observed at several points in our conversation, “I just want everyone to be happy.”

Waititi grew up in New Zealand—his father was Maori of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent, his mother Russian-Jewish—and spent his thirties making small, cultishly popular films. Two of these, Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, featured primarily Maori characters and actors and were set in poor, rural areas similar to where Waititi was raised. Both movies felt radical—the unfamiliar characters and situations, the startling mix of brutality and humor—but also sweetly affectionate, even loving. Waititi has said that he doesn’t make “Cannes-style films”: the kind of depressing dramas where, as he once put it, “everyone is a prostitute and they all die in the end.” But he also doesn’t make conventional comedies, with their two-dimensional characters and steady barrage of jokes. Instead, his movies are somewhere in between, or both at once—a sustained high-wire act where moods mix and shift in exhilarating ways. While dramatic movies tend to build slowly, in a single dark register, Waititi’s will often move abruptly from a slapstick moment to a tender or heart-rending one, with devastating effect.

In the six years since Wilderpeople, Waititi’s career has gone vertical. In 2016 he made Thor: Ragnarok, reinvigorating the stale franchise in part by poking fun at it. After that, he wrote, directed, and starred in the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit, about a lonely boy in Nazi Germany who has Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi, as his imaginary friend. Since then, Waititi has directed and acted in episodes of The Mandalorian, produced and costarred in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, played the tech-bro villain in Free Guy, and cocreated—the man works a lot—the FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs, an Atlanta-style mood piece about four teenage friends on a Muscogee reservation in Oklahoma that plays deliriously with Native American tropes while cutting deeply to the heart of dispossession and its effects.

This mercurial range—and chameleonic shifting of tone and sensibility—seems deeply rooted in Waititi himself. He’s someone who seeks out company and attention but quickly tires of both. He’s easily amused and yet, it seems, just as easily bored. In conversation, Waititi can be forthcoming—he admitted that he struggles to order in restaurants because he’s so worried about making the wrong choice—but also comes across as profoundly guarded; in general he dislikes talking about his feelings, even with friends, and has a tendency to pivot away from emotional topics, either changing the subject or turning detached and jokey. More than once, he told me that he doesn’t trust adults and has a particular dislike for authority, even as the director of formidably large and expensive movies—including this summer’s Ragnarok sequel, Thor: Love and Thunder, and a new Star Wars film, set for 2025.

Waititi has spent time in therapy, in part, he said, because he realized he needed to “decipher what I’m doing” as a writer and director. What’s trickier, though, is deciphering Waititi himself. He is now solidly into middle age (he’ll turn 47 this summer)—a time when mounting responsibilities tend to make life significantly less spontaneous and fun. Waititi still manages to be both, though he resents when people interpret his on-set hijinks as a sign that he’s just messing around, because, as he said, “I’m also really committed to work, and serious about work.” The result is a kind of tension: a restless toggling that feels both deliberate and, as with all of Waititi’s competing impulses, a little unsettling.

“My biggest fear is running out of ideas,” Waititi said. “Or making something I’ve done before—repeating myself.”

Photograph: Jessica Chou

When i visited Waititi in Los Angeles this past February, he was just back from spending two months in Australia and New Zealand, where he had been working on scripts for several projects while spending time with his two young daughters, Te Kāinga o te Hinekāhu and Matewa Kiritapu. (He and Chelsea Wistanley are divorced, and his daughters spend most of the year in New Zealand.) Waititi is known for his snappy and eclectic style—in 2017 he wore a matching pink pineapple-print shirt and shorts set that was the talk of Comic-Con—but on the day we met, he was dressed casually in worn blue corduroy pants and a sea-green button-down shirt, plus an oversize gold-link necklace borrowed from his girlfriend, the singer Rita Ora.

Waititi is occasionally assumed to be queer—as he put it to me, “I come off as very gay”—partly because of his clothes, but also because the characters he plays often have an edge of camp. In Jojo Rabbit, Waititi’s Hitler veers between childish confidante, cheerful camp counselor, and dithering, slightly effeminate authority figure. In the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, which follows the daily lives of four vampires living in a shared house in a Wellington suburb, Waititi plays the 379-year-old Viago as a sweet-natured and fastidious dandy—a foil to the lecherous 862-year-old Vladislav, played by Jemaine Clement.

What We Do in the Shadows is Waititi’s most purely funny film. In it, we see the vampires turn into bats and feed on humans, but also bicker about household chores, ride the bus, make bad pottery, and fret insecurely about their social status. Released in 2014, the movie was Waititi’s third feature, and the first to develop a worldwide following, largely because of its loopy, earnest dialog. (Viago: “Yeah, some of our clothes are from victims. You might bite someone, and then you think, ‘Ooh, those are some nice pants!’”) But even that movie has a vein of melancholy. Viago pines over a lost love, while Vladislav obsesses about his archnemesis, the Beast, an all-powerful evil being who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend Pauline.

Waititi never went to film school, and his skills are largely self-taught. Unlike directors who meticulously study technical details like framing or the transitions between scenes, Waititi works more intuitively. Sometimes, he said, he will simply watch a rough cut of one of his own films and mark down all the places where he feels embarrassed. But he’s also exacting, especially when it comes to fine-tuning a movie’s emotional currents: noticing moments when a film turns overly jokey or serious and dowsing his way toward the right balance with obsessive precision. This is true off-set as well. Even when getting dressed, he will abandon an outfit if something about it feels microscopically off: the socks, maybe, or a subtly wrinkled shirt. “And then I’ll just take the whole thing off because the socks ruined it,” he said. The process is part of why he occasionally arrives late, but far worse are the mornings when no amount of fiddling seems to fix the problem. When that happens, he said, “it’s almost like it’s jinxed the day.”

In the early stages of writing, Waititi often begins by making a playlist of songs that he listens to again and again—not a soundtrack so much as an aural mood board. He also tries not to assign characters a gender, at least at first, and will sometimes swap roles, giving “female” parts or lines to a male character, and vice versa. (On Reservation Dogs, Willie Jack, played by Paulina Alexis, was originally scripted as male.) Waititi’s screenplays tend to have unusually long gestations—seven years for Boy, 11 for Wilderpeople, nine for Jojo Rabbit—and are further revised on the fly, with Waititi lobbing new lines at actors in take after take. It’s a risky strategy, he acknowledged. Every change in dialog can create follow-on effects in later scenes or subtly shift the emotional arc of a character. In an industry that’s heavily dependent on bringing shoots in on time and staying within budget, such compounding adjustments have consequences, to the point that a director might lose control—or get kicked off their own film.

That risk is outweighed, for Waititi, by the desire to experiment, both in the moment and, later, during editing. Clement, who has been Waititi’s close friend and collaborator since college, remembers him being similarly restless as a performer. When the two did live comedy shows together in their twenties, Clement recalled, Waititi would initially follow the planned beats but would soon get bored and start to improvise. “He’s good at so many things,” Clement said. “But he’s not good at sitting still. He’s really not good at that.”

The actor Chris Hemsworth told a similar story. On the set of Thor, he said, Waititi would sometimes play the theme song from the 1981 war drama Gallipoli—which culminates with Mel Gibson running through the trenches trying to stop the troops’ fatal, and futile, final charge—and then sprint back and forth across the set. The memory made Hemsworth laugh. “I don’t know why he did it,” he said. “Whether it was his way of loosening things up, or mixing it up, or just reminding us that we should be enjoying ourselves.” (“When there’s life around me, I feel more creative,” Waititi later explained, somewhat complicating his remark about finding people draining. “If it’s quiet, it feels like school. For me, the more stimulus, the better.”)

Waititi seems to actively cultivate his anarchic impulses. As a filmmaker, he is uncommonly good at capturing the inner lives of children, and his work can often seem like an ongoing exploration of what it means to grow up. In his own life, Waititi seems driven by a more complicated question: how to be childlike without being childish. On the podcast Visitations, with the actor Elijah Wood and the producer Daniel Noah, Waititi described himself as “deeply attracted to disruptive forces in my life—like chaos, or big changes.” Filmmaking, he added, fed that desire. “With film, there’s no stability. It’s a tumultuous environment where you’re always on edge, always stressed, and everything could fall over at any moment. It’s like Russian roulette with art: You put yourself in that firing line all the time.”

“When you laugh, you want more, you‘re more receptive,” Waititi said. “That’s when you can deliver a message that‘s more profound.”

Photograph: Jessica Chou

One of the central themes in Waititi’s movies is disillusionment, and the ways imagination can both protect and imperil. His characters frequently get lost in their own thoughts, often as a way to cope with loss. Adults barely seem to exist; when they do appear, it’s usually as a cautionary tale. The men, in particular, are unreliable: immature, mercurial, and stunted. While they tend to end up stuck in their fantasies, children, at least as Waititi writes them, ultimately emerge clear-eyed: They wake up.

Waititi’s mother, Robin Cohen, was a schoolteacher from a family of Jewish tailors who had fled the pogroms in Russia, first for London and then for Wellington. An intellectual and a communist, Cohen regularly read over Waititi’s homework, critiquing his essays and insisting that he rewrite them. His father—named Taika, but everyone called him Tiger—belonged to a small iwi (tribe) in Waihau Bay, a remote area on the island’s rocky East Coast. In his twenties, he left and founded a motorcycle gang, Satan’s Slaves, and spent time in and out of prison. He also farmed, wrote poetry, and painted: primarily landscapes and portraits but also idealized images of Native Americans. The two met when Cohen was on a charity visit to the prison, bringing books for the inmates, and Waititi has described the relationship as “the most improbable match you could imagine.” Even now, he said, “I can’t envision what their conversations would have been like.”

The couple separated when Waititi was 5, and his mother stayed in Wellington while his father moved back to Waihau Bay, a two-day drive away. For years, Waititi went back and forth between the two places, developing a knack for moving between different groups. For a time, both families were poor. In Waihau Bay, adults collected shellfish for food, drank at the town bar, and sometimes got into fights. “I learned at a very early age that you can’t trust adults,” Waititi said. “Like, you can’t really rely on any of them.”

As a kid, Waititi spent hours watching American television shows and movies, including ’80s classics like The Young and the Restless and Love at First Bite, and he still finds TV comforting: “It’s always there for you.” He also spent long days roaming the countryside, walking for hours along Waihau’s rocky coast and rugged fields, explorations that were blissfully unsupervised. Given that Waititi’s childhood was often fraught, with money tight and his father not around, he recalled the time with a surprising amount of nostalgia. “We’d just rove around in these little gangs of kids, having full control of our world,” he told me wistfully.

More often, he simply enjoyed retreating into his own imagination: sketching, making radio plays using a cassette recorder, or inventing adventure tales in which he would play all the parts. At one point, he went through a phase of compulsively drawing swastikas in his school notebooks, which he just as compulsively hid: turning the swastika into a window, then making the window part of a building, which eventually became part of a city. (Waititi mines this, lightly, in Jojo Rabbit, when 10-year-old Jojo admits that he’s “massively into swastikas.”) In his early teens, Waititi acted in a few plays put on by his mother’s friends, mostly avant-garde shows that mixed spoken word with contemporary dance, but he didn’t find the experience particularly inspiring. “There was a lot of prancing around,” he remarked.

Waititi eventually channeled these experiences into one of his most iconic films, Boy, which tells the story of an 11-year-old (Boy) and his younger brother, Rocky, who live with various cousins under the loose care of their grandmother while their father is in jail. Although the film isn’t strictly autobiographical, it was shot in Waihau Bay, in the same house where Waititi lived, and many of the details, like the rusted Toyota that can be started with a teaspoon, come from Waititi’s life. In the movie, Boy fantasizes about his absent father, whom he imagines as a deep-sea diver, master carver, and rugby star, but who is ultimately revealed to be self-deluding and petulant. Growing up, Waititi and his cousins would lie on the bed and make up similar stories. “We all knew that we were lying,” Waititi said in an interview with Mariayah Kaderbhai, the head of programming for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. “It was almost like we were trying to top each other with these excuses of why our parents weren’t around.”

Waititi has said that his films are not “an exorcism of [his] own trauma,” but when I spoke with Kaderbhai, she pointed out that Waititi’s work could be seen as a way to control his own narrative: to transform tragedy or dysfunction into something empowering and redemptive. “As children, we can’t control our world,” Kaderbhai observed. “When we tell that story as an adult, we can.”

The unstated question behind Boy is whether the young kids we meet—dreamy, artistic Rocky; intelligent, determined Boy—will end up trapped, stuck in lives like those of their parents. Many of Waititi’s cousins in Waihau Bay wound up repeating those patterns, and Waititi has described his own, very different life as “kind of a miracle.” In the film, Boy eventually learns to see his father and his self-deceptions clearly. It’s the story’s cathartic moment and one that seems to set Boy on a different path: He won’t become his father. But it’s equally clear that he’s also still a kid, surrounded by forces—poverty, lack of opportunity, a kind of stagnant resignation—that work against his abundant promise.

For years, Waititi’s own future was similarly uncertain. After graduating from the University of Wellington, he did comedy shows and toured. He also busked on the street and was the lead guitarist in a band. He spent almost 10 years as an artist, painting and making etchings, and for a while lived in a commune in Berlin. Some of the work from this period had a comic edge; one early piece, of a landscape and buildings seen from above, is titled What Clouds See When They Daydream. Other projects, like a series of altered New Zealand dollars featuring figures from history in place of Queen Elizabeth, reflected a growing awareness of colonialism. More often, Waititi simply seemed to be experimenting. At one point, he admitted, he painted nudes using his own blood—though when I asked for details, he seemed to regret having mentioned it. “Even as I was doing it, I was like, ‘I don’t see the point,’” he said. “I was really just getting a taste of everything and seeing which thing I wanted to do.”

Waititi moved back to Wellington in the late ’90s, drawn by the anarchic performance scene. “There was a lot of creativity flowing through the city,” recalled Carthew Neal, who runs the production company Piki Films with Waititi. “There were people making shows in black-box theaters and old car parks. It was like a giant creative hive, just all sorts of people doing different things.” Wellington was small and hilly, with a cluster of theater and music spaces where everyone hung out. For a while, Waititi spent time in an artists’ collective located in a warehouse opposite the national museum that hosted an endlessly cycling cast of visitors, including musicians and actors. The warehouse had no interior walls, remembered Jo Randerson, a writer and director who was also a tenant, so residents just “took over a zone” while working on a project. “It was a buzzy crew to be part of,” Randerson said. “It felt like such a concentrated batch of talent.”

For several years, Waititi performed in a comedy duo, Humourbeasts, with Jemaine Clement (who would go on to cocreate the radio and TV series Flight of the Conchords), often playing to sold-out houses. He also took small film and TV roles, most famously as a student turned drug lord in the black comedy Scarfies, and as one of five male dancers at a woman-run club on the TV series The Strip. Socially, Waititi was popular, but he could also be aloof. At dinner parties organized with his housemates, Randerson recalled, Waititi would sometimes stay downstairs by himself and draw. “He never seemed interested in doing the hustle, or playing the games, or being socially acceptable,” she added. “He had a capacity to just follow his wont.”

Waititi made his first significant film, the 10-minute short Two Cars, One Night, in 2003, after writing the script during downtime on the set of The Strip. (In interviews, Waititi has said that he decided to take the leap one day after “sitting in the green room in my G-string, staring at the ingrown hairs on my legs, and thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’”) The movie, a subtly tender snapshot of a young boy and girl idly waiting in adjacent cars while their parents drink in the pub, won a slew of film festival awards and was nominated for an Oscar. “In New Zealand, if you do anything well, you basically get encouraged by the prime minister to keep going,” Waititi has joked. “So it was like an arranged marriage. I was forced to fall in love with film. And eventually I did.”

It wasn’t an obvious pairing. New Zealand films at the time were known for being tense and dark: the so-called cinema of unease. (Or as Waititi put it: “Someone always dies. Usually a child.”) At first, Waititi tried to work in a similar vein. In 2004 he was hired to adapt a much-loved book by a New Zealand bushman, which would later become Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Neal, who produced Wilderpeople, recalled that the original script was unrelentingly bleak. “I think it was called ‘Land of Tears,’” he said dryly. “In case that gives you a sense of the tone.” Waititi eventually put the script aside in order to make his first feature film, the awkward relationship comedy Eagle vs Shark, followed by Boy, and gradually began to hone his style, with its distinctive mix of absurdity and compassion.

Waititi workshopped both Boy and Eagle vs Shark at Sundance in 2005, where he became part of a tight-knit group of Indigenous filmmakers, including Sterlin Harjo, with whom he would go on to make Reservation Dogs. When I spoke with Harjo, he said that he and Waititi had developed the idea for Reservation Dogs partly with the aim of subverting how Indigenous characters are typically presented in film and TV. Among other things, the cast includes Dallas Goldtooth as a laconic and absurdly inappropriate spirit guide who dispenses rambling advice, and a pair of rapping brothers, played by Lil Mike and Funny Bone, who cruise the neighborhood on matching kid-size bikes spreading gossip. “One of the things that Taika and I first bonded over is that our stories from home weren’t sad stories,” Harjo told me. “They were hilarious. The people in them were funny. And that was totally missing from Native film and storytelling.”

These days, Waititi has an extraordinary ability to get projects greenlit—he has a standing deal with FX—and will often go out of his way to hire Indigenous actors and crew. It helps that Hollywood studios have a penchant for elevating certain indie talents and seem to have embraced Waititi’s quirks; it also helps that his work has found new levels of respect. In 2020, Jojo Rabbit was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, while Waititi was nominated for two Emmys, for his voice-acting on The Mandalorian and as a producer on the TV adaptation of What We Do in the Shadows. Despite these accolades, Waititi has occasionally been frustrated by the way comedy can be treated as something frivolous—as “a kind of subform of art.” In his films, he noted, the comedy is there in part to disarm the audience: “When you laugh, you want more, you listen more, you’re more receptive. That’s when you can deliver a message that’s more profound.”

“I’ve never been happy just with one project,” Waititi said. “I feel like I’ve got more energy than that—and more ideas than that.”

Video: Jessica Chou

For contractual reasons, Waititi couldn’t tell me much about Thor: Love and Thunder, which comes out on July 8, aside from the fact that he tried to write it as a love story, and that his visual touchstones for the film were Jack Kirby comics and the cover art of old Mills & Boon romance novels. But he did say that he tried to make the film “unexpected,” at least within the confines of the genre. It’s the same approach he used in Thor: Ragnarok, where he deftly subverted the classic superhero beats by transforming Thor from a stiff, standard-issue warrior-god into a funny, awkward, surprisingly sweet, occasionally sulky man-child: in effect, an overgrown kid. “It’s really about trying to make it interesting to myself,” he said. “And not do what everyone thinks I should do. Or what they’re expecting me to do.”

So far, Waititi has managed to hold on to his offbeat sensibility, even as his projects have become bigger and more mainstream—forces that tend to encourage caution and homogeneity. (Waititi has semi-joked that he will agree with everything an executive says and then simply do what he wants. As he put it, “It’s literally me trying to not do whatever the grown-ups say.”) But he also admitted that he was struggling to recapture the exhilaration of his early career and the joyful thrill of doing something purely because he wanted to. “I do miss the feeling where I was excited to wake up and write,” he said. “So much of what I do now is associated with deadlines and with people wanting something from me. And then it starts to feel like you’re just sitting in traffic waiting to go to work.” It’s a familiar dilemma, but one that’s particularly thorny for Waititi, whose work is rooted in the ability to channel a childlike silliness and a rare feeling of innocence and vulnerability. People love Waititi’s films, noted Jo Randerson, because they have “that special ‘Taika thing,’ with its strange rhythm and weird gags and all of that. But how do you keep that alive, with this whole huge infrastructure around you?”

Part of the answer, at least for Waititi, is to lose some of the infrastructure. One of his current projects, an adaptation of the documentary Next Goal Wins, tells the story of a Dutch coach determined to get American Samoa’s national soccer team to the World Cup. The film is small—at least compared to Thor—and stars a number of Pacific Islanders. “The plot is basically ‘white guy comes to the islands to save them and gets saved himself,’” Waititi said. “But it happens through some really interesting characters, the most significant being this fa’afafina, this trans player, who changed the team.” Waititi said that he was drawn to the film partly because it was a great true story, but also because it was a sports story, which he had never done before. “My biggest fear is running out of ideas,” he added. “Or making something I’ve done before—repeating myself.”

On the rare occasions when Waititi takes time off, he likes to cook, do the crossword, and watch TV. Years ago he played online chess, but had to stop when he became too obsessed. (“I would sneak out of bed at 2 am. My girlfriend at the time would be like, ‘What are you doing?’”) He also talked longingly about an alternate life, in which he painted and tinkered. “The idea of doing something with my hands—that’s kind of my Zen place,” he said. “I can make hours and hours disappear doing that.” For the most part, though, Waititi just works relentlessly. When I said that simply listing all his projects made me feel vicariously panicky—he’s currently writing, editing, or directing three feature films and five TV series, including a Time Bandits TV series with Clement and an animated spin-off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—he shrugged. “I’ve never been happy just with one project,” he said. “Some people will focus really hard on a single film, for two or three years. I feel like I’ve got more energy than that—and more ideas than that.”

From the outside, at least, it was hard not to wonder whether this sprawling buffet of projects might backfire, feeding Waititi’s desire for variety at the expense of quality. But rather than feeling paralyzed by that prospect, he seemed energized, like a juggler equally exhilarated by the challenge of keeping everything in the air and the possibility that it could all come crashing down.

Not long after visiting Waititi in Los Angeles, I rewatched Jojo Rabbit, arguably his most ambitious and beautiful film. Waititi adapted the story from a book by Christine Leunens but changed it significantly—among other things, there was no imaginary Hitler in the original. The book was also much darker, in part because it followed the lives of Jojo, Elsa, and the other children beyond the end of the war, into its grim and protracted aftermath. Waititi, instead, chose to stop the camera on a moment of hope. Jojo has woken up to the bullying insecurity of his provisional father figure, Hitler, and by extension to the self-serving deceptions of Nazism. The war has ended. He has experienced devastating loss but is also giddy, and silly, and capable of joy. Like Boy, he’s a child just beginning to grow into his potential. He has, more than ever, full control of his world.

Updated 6-1-22, 6pm EDT: This story has been updated to correct the name of the comics that influenced Thor: Love and Thunder.

Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk. Opener: top and pants by Issey Miyake and shoes by Ermenegildo Zegna. Second image: suit by Dzojchen, shoes by Christian Louboutin. Third image: suit and shoes by Thom Browne, shirt by Hermes.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

IDEAS

The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

A little HTML widget gave us all-powerful Amazon and Facebook. There's no closing Pandora's text box now.

Paul Ford  May 26, 2022 13:13 PM

Illustration: ELENA LACEY

The web was born to publish documents—in particular, physics papers from CERN, the great laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee, the very first web developer, was employed to do smart information things. But technology evolves … Actually, forgive the digression, but technology doesn’t evolve. Everyone says it evolves, but true evolution includes a whole lot of death. Not all software survives, of course (I’m typing this in Google Docs, not on a Xerox Alto), but as anyone who has investigated the Windows control panels can tell you, there’s a lot of decades-old code in our systems. If people evolved like technology, you’d be 6,000 lizards, 30 chimps, and a couple Neanderthals all glued together with an anguished human face stretched across it as a “visual refresh.” </digression>

Anyway, the World Wide Web may be the most proudly agglutinative technology in history. After a few early tweaks and changes (e.g., removing the <blink> tag), HTML has almost never thrown things away, so that every subsequent version of a browser can work with all the web pages that came before. In its earliest days it grew <img> tags to become visual; it grew <table> tags to become tabular—and more than 25 years ago (version 2) it added the <form> element, making it interactive.

It is the <form> element, and the lesser elements that comprise the form, like <input> and <textarea>, that let you put little text boxes and credit card numbers and password fields into the page, along with a variety of drop-downs and checkboxes.

I have argued many times, to the despair of anyone within range, that the <form> element was a pivot point for the entire technology industry. It is what changed the web from a read-only medium for physics papers into a read-write medium for anything. But lately I’m not so sure I think that was a good idea. Perhaps the <form> element was a terrible mistake, the original sin of the web industry. We weren’t ready. Nearly every problem we face on the internet—in society—comes back to this one HTML element.

Point to anything driving us all to distraction and you’ll find <form> at the root: Elon Musk’s tweets, for example, and his bid to buy Twitter? Well, obviously the Twitter text box was born as an HTML form (even if it is now a highly dynamic custom JavaScript thingamajig). But that’s today; <form> also made Musk’s first fortune at PayPal, by allowing people to set up accounts and pay. Jeff Bezos is another one: Amazon without the <form> element is just a big catalog.

No one ever knows what they’re unleashing. They don’t even know there’s a leash.

What forms enable are transactions. Transactions of all kinds—commercial or social—can be consolidated into platforms, and platforms are where you find your margins. And margins are what yield your fortune, and that’s how you get power. Freakin’ forms. Twitter’s many disasters, Amazon and its global megapower, Facebook’s wall, Google’s search box (and the ads that followed), the Netflix password you share (that they don’t want you to share now that their subscriber numbers are tanking), every forum conversation, every eBay bid, every web-based banking system that logs you out after 10 minutes, pretty much all of Salesforce, every blog post, every leak and hack—all of it comes back to <form>.

Who could have known?

“Well that’s not our problem today,” you might say. “The real problem online is that giant companies are creating enormous machine-learning models that inherit tremendous bias, and they are using that to guide the future of the web.” Exactly: The data they are spidering, all that text, all those photos, comes from people uploading stuff via forms.

I’ve been given a time machine. Would I send a Terminator back to the web standards meetings circa 1994 to eliminate the <form> element? I don’t know. If anything could defeat a Terminator, it’s attending a web standards meeting. The Terminator would likely end up being assigned to draft a document type definition; who better to define how to parse text than a robot? Besides, if you look at who owns and invests in the companies most likely to create Terminators, it’s the giant consolidated tech firms that were utterly dependent on the <form> element. So any murderous robot intelligence that eliminates <form> eliminates itself. Also, many of the early web folks were do-gooders, so I’d feel guilty taking out a hit on them. Have I focused too much on the Terminator aspect in this scenario? Imagine instead that the web standards people are on a trolley …

Here’s the thing: If it hadn’t been <form>, it would have been another element—maybe one with a more accurate name, like <money-vacuum> or <robot-food> or <privacy-destroyer>. The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer. You can run browsers on the computers you run inside your browser on your computer. If I wanted to build a Terminator, I’d probably prototype it using web technologies. And since the web still displays HTML just fine, I’d encourage that Terminator to blog.

It is easy to look back and say: “They should have known what they were unleashing.” But no one ever knows what they’re unleashing. They don’t even know there’s a leash. What is valuable, though, is to look back and think: What could we have done to change the outcome? Could we have created a <form> element that made it easier for small local manufacturers to sell online instead of Amazon rolling everyone up? How would that have worked? A text box that had some kind of privacy control built in, so that all our passwords wouldn’t leak? A drop-down that worked reliably on mobile? Why didn’t we do those things? What aren’t we doing now? In 1994, they were doing the best they could to make a better society using these cool tools. They knew they were going to change the world. Then everyone showed up and proved them right.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

BACKCHANNEL

‘How Are They Weapons? That’s Only a Flashlight!’

During the protests in Hong Kong, young people carried laser pointers, umbrellas, and plastic ties—objects that sometimes led to their arrest, and years of legal limbo.

Suzanne Sataline  May 26, 2022 10:10 AM

ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG

On the morning of August 6, 2019, merchants along Apliu Street unbolted the padlocks to their metal stalls and heaved open the heavy gates to their stores. They had resumed their place in the solar system of Hong Kong’s local economy—selling everyday items at bargain prices. At the far end of the street, a saleswoman fussed with her stock of flashlights and laser pointers. Throughout the day, the street hummed with pedestrians. That evening, Keith Fong, a 20-year-old college student at Hong Kong Baptist University, arrived to peruse the wares. It was boiling hot, and Fong was dressed in the uniform of the young: untucked dark tee, black shorts, and sneakers.

If the merchants had remained closed that day, no one would have blamed them. The day before, the city had shuddered to a halt as citizens set off the biggest labor strike in half a century. They had organized to fight a proposed amendment to Hong Kong’s extradition law. That change, citizens feared, would give China the chance to further meddle with the city's criminal justice system. Hong Kongers blocked roads with metal barriers and trash. Young people sprawled across the entrances of subway cars, jamming doors open and stopping entire train lines. Teachers skipped school; lifeguards and construction workers called in sick. Hong Kong International Airport grounded more than 200 flights, as many air traffic controllers failed to show up to work.

This anger had simmered for decades. Since July 1, 1997, when Britain transferred its colony of Hong Kong to China, the central government in Beijing has eroded boundaries and protections designed to safeguard Hong Kong’s government, which operated, ostensibly, as part of “one country, two systems.” Beijing refused to grant democratic elections that many citizens felt had been promised in the constitution.

Keith Fong was an activist and the leader of one of the student unions in the city. As a child, he had lived in the Sham Shui Po district, amid the dense warren of crumbling cement tenements, where families from Pakistan squeezed into 200-square-foot apartments next door to refugees from Nigeria. Fong was quick, intense, and driven. Students elected him to the post as a freshman. Now, about to start his second year, he was preparing to recruit new blood to the union’s various councils, executive committees, and editorial offices.

Fong stopped at the booth on Apliu Street that sold flashlights and lasers and talked with the saleswoman about the features and strengths of various models. He bought 10 laser pointers the size of handheld flashlights. Each beamed a vivid blue. Fong would later say that he went to Apliu Street to prepare for a student orientation activity. The laser pointers, he would insist, were meant to help new students gaze at the stars.

With his purchases secured in a white plastic bag, Fong headed toward a nearby 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes. When he was just outside the shop, a man in plain clothes flashed an ID. “Police. Stop.”

Most of the world remembers images from Hong Kong in the summer of 2019: the young people in black packed into streets as Molotov cocktails flew overhead, the police smashing their batons, the clouds of blinding tear gas. Today, three years after the protests, Hong Kong is a city suppressed. During the Covid pandemic, government orders kept people home and gave police incentive to stop and search anyone not wearing a mask properly. After Omicron ripped through nursing homes earlier this year, the government continued to ban groups larger than four from gathering in public places.

Much of this was due to an unprecedented new security law that Beijing imposed on the city in June 2020. Its broad provisions and unpredictable enforcement gutted the city’s democracy movement, and the richness of civic life vanished. Once-frequent rallies, public debates, open forums, and large campus meetings about opposition politics are no more. Most human rights and democracy groups have closed down. No journalist, academic, or artist who works with words feels completely secure. Documentaries that officials say could endanger national security interests, including those about 2019, are banned. Public libraries have locked up books by activists, as well as journalists’ accounts of the protests. The city’s broadcaster, RTHK, has scrubbed its website of most reports from that time. Gone are the official archives of Apple Daily, Stand News, and Citizen News, after arrests and threats forced the media companies to close.

The laser pointers, Fong insisted, were meant to help new students gaze at the stars.

By spring 2020, Hong Kong police had arrested 10,270 people and no doubt detained more, in what the government euphemistically refers to as the “social unrest.” Prosecutors brought charges against a fourth of those arrested. Since the imposition of the new security law, more than 160 people have been arrested, including many prominent activists.

The “social unrest” still lingers, at least in the court system. As of February, the government had brought charges against 2,800 people, about half of whom were found guilty or signed orders to obey the law. Hundreds of people arrested during the protests are serving terms in prison and juvenile detention centers. Each day, in courthouses all over the city, magistrates and judges oversee cases of public disorder, assault, weapons, and riot. Protest nights play out inside courtrooms, as prosecutors show video snippets of black-clad youngsters at barricades, sometimes throwing bricks and smashing windows. The prosecutors portray the protesters in the videos—which are stripped of context and background, with almost no views of police actions—as violent offenders. New cases begin in court all the time; most crimes in city ordinances carry no deadlines for filing charges. A person who was accused by police of unauthorized assembly in 2019 could wind up charged months or even years later. Hong Kong’s young are a generation in limbo waiting for this era to end.

In 1984, when Britain agreed to relinquish the colony of Hong Kong, Beijing officials promised that when China took over, the city’s government would have “a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defense affairs.” By the time the transfer happened, at midnight on July 1, 1997, it became clear that autonomy had notable asterisks. Hong Kong would exist as a special part of China—with its own rights, legislature, and legal system—until 2047. Yet the final interpretation of the city’s constitution would lie not with Hong Kong’s courts, but with China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.

Soon, China’s involvement extended into Hong Kong's economy and development. Since SARS rocked the city’s economy in 2003, Chinese state-controlled companies poured money into the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Such companies supply much of the city’s food, develop transportation and commercial real estate, and wield enormous influence over the territory’s politics.

The public’s unease with China’s growing influence erupted in February 2019, when Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's chief executive, proposed amending the city’s extradition law to allow criminal suspects to be transferred for trial to other jurisdictions, including Taiwan and the mainland. The amendment’s trigger, she insisted, had been the murder in Taiwan of a young, pregnant Hong Kong woman. After her boyfriend ditched her body and fled to Hong Kong, where he confessed to police, authorities could arrest him only for using his girlfriend’s credit cards. With no extradition treaty in place, Hong Kong could not legally return him to Taiwan for trial. The prospect of forced transfers to the mainland—where secret prisons and closed trials ensure a near-perfect conviction rate—didn’t just anger Hong Kong citizens. It frightened them. Critics saw the move as carte blanche for the authoritarian government to undermine Hong Kong’s Common Law legal system, a legacy of the city’s British colonial past. Dissidents, human rights attorneys, clerics, businesspeople, and expatriates—everyone would be vulnerable.

On June 9 of that year, an estimated 1 million residents marched through the city, days before lawmakers were scheduled to discuss the extradition amendment. Three days later, tens of thousands of people jammed the streets that surrounded the legislature, preventing members from entering the building and winning a short break in the proceedings. On June 16, nearly 2 million packed the streets, demanding that the bill be killed and Carrie Lam step down.

The participants’ resolve surged into a broader campaign for democracy. The cause electrified college campuses and high school assemblies, public hospitals and government offices. Millions of citizens rearranged their lives to devote their free time to the protest's almost daily actions. Some rallies were long and silly, as when young people twice besieged the police headquarters, tossing eggs at the building. Others protests were long and scary, as when Molotovs arced overhead as riot police pounded the crowd with rubber bullets and swung their batons at protesters.

On the street, Hong Kong protests were remarkable not just for their tenacity, but also for their creative use of hardware store merchandise to thwart police. Protesters could not match the firepower of law enforcement—guns are tightly regulated in the city. Hong Kongers fashioned their defenses out of everyday objects. Aluminum plates and plastic traffic cones snuffed out tear gas shells. Open umbrellas deflected rubber rounds. Silicone goggles lined with tin foil warded off bright lights and offered cover from street cameras.

Hong Kong’s young are a generation in limbo, waiting for this era to end.

At one point, someone figured out that blasting police with strong green or blue laser beams made it difficult for officers to video the scene and identify protesters. When thousands of protesters besieged police headquarters in June, many people outside waved laser lights at the windows as employees fumed inside. After enduring bean bag rounds and rubber bullets—in several cases police fired directly at people’s heads—protesters believed that lasers were a clever response.

For years, the government had tried to discourage protests and control their size with a stringent permit process. If a participant veered off route or ignored police directions, at most they might get fined for violating a minor assembly offense. Frustrated that citizens were ignoring police orders, Lam’s government sought a tactical way to suppress crowds and punish participants. Prosecutors under justice secretary Teresa Cheng realized that the protesters' implements could be used as evidence of potential crimes. After police tackled protesters, officers logged the items inside their backpacks: scissors, wire cutters, slingshots, plastic zip ties, Allen wrenches, heat-resistant gloves, cigarette lighters, aerosol cans, goggles, respirators, wooden boards, aluminum poles, and laser lights.

In court, some of the items protesters had carried became evidence of criminal intent. Mostly, the objects themselves weren’t illegal. But at a protest, prosecutors implied, these tools possessed more sinister powers, especially when carried by a young person wearing black clothes and a face mask, standing amid a chanting crowd. (The Hong Kong Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.)

As the pettiness of the charges increased, so did the volume of cases. One defendant went to prison for hauling chili pepper spray and two baseball bats in his car trunk on a night without protests. A videographer who was shooting footage of a university siege for a Taiwanese news station still faces charges of illegal assembly and possession of instruments fit for a crime. A reporter who collected street detritus was charged and convicted with possessing ammunition: 38 spent tear gas canisters, an empty rubber bullet cartridge, and the inert projectile from a sponge grenade. Prosecutors were building cases not only on what the protesters did, but on what the government feared they might do.

ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG

On July 28, 2019, a young bank teller named Ella and thousands of others in head-to-toe black clothing and helmets walked on Connaught Road West toward a police cordon. Ella has a sunny personality and a warm, open face. She is devoted to yoga and her cats and has large, geometric tattoos that peek out from beneath her shirt. She was a gentle presence in a good-hearted tribe of protest newbies who bonded over drinks and late dinners. In the movement’s early weeks, she had been convinced that the demonstrators should not destroy property; after protesters had smashed their way into the legislative chambers, she cried in frustration. Yet each week, she inched closer to the front line. She showed off a new tattoo, the Chinese characters for Hong Kongers’ favorite motivational cry: “Add oil!” (The phrase is derived from the Cantonese equivalent of “Go for it!”)

That night, Ella and her friend crowded onto a narrow street, backing up people at the front line. At one point, some people tossed bricks and police fired off tear gas. With participants separated on side streets, it was possible to be in a peaceful throng, unaware of the chaos unfolding one block over.

Suddenly, men in black helmets and blue uniforms tore through the crowd. Tactical police, ones the protesters called “raptors,” grabbed for arms and legs. As an officer snatched a protester, Ella reached out and fell, according to video footage later presented at her trial. Standing a bit over 5 feet, she was an easy mark for police to snag. After she spent 46 hours in a cell, she was charged with the offense known as “riot.”

Hong Kong’s colonial government created the crime of riot after Maoist sympathizers planted bombs throughout the city, killing dozens of people in 1967 and 1968. The government rarely lodged a riot case again until 2016, when it charged several young people who clashed with police, including members of a group that favored independence from China. Hong Kong law defines riot as an illegal assembly of three or more individuals who breach the peace. The crime carries a potential prison sentence of 10 years. Starting in 2019, the government routinely brought riot cases against protesters, and 750 people have been charged. Several days after Ella was charged, she laughed about it over dinner. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “We did nothing.”

Ella’s trial plodded on for 67 days, one of three trials linked to that night's events. Inside the courtroom, prosecutors showed videos of toughs in construction helmets on darkened streets, nothing like the scrubbed youngsters in the defense box. One defendant, prosecutors noted, held a megaphone that night. Another person had a walkie-talkie, and a third, plastic ties. One wore a motorcycle helmet. Ella wore swim goggles and carried a hiking pole. In the climate of that time, such a tool might have made a tiny woman feel safer.

In his ruling, the judge noted that Ella’s presence on the defense line strengthened the scale of the confrontation with police. He said that the hiking pole, which could have been wielded as an offensive weapon, proved she would “attack or resist the police with force if necessary.” Ella’s guilt was sealed with 34 paragraphs. The judge sentenced her to three years and four months in prison. Her boyfriend expects she’ll be free in late 2023.

On that sweltering August evening near Apliu Street, Keith Fong said he was distracted by his phone when the officer approached him. He initially thought that he was being mugged, so he bolted. The cop snagged Fong by his dark green T-shirt in a nearby alley. A video filmed by a passerby captured the confrontation. Three more officers appeared, fit men with close-cropped hair and plain dark shirts. They wrestled the student against a building. One held Fong’s arms and then shifted his hands to the base of Fong’s neck.

“Stop moving,” one officer commanded. The group bickered as Fong asked questions. The officer restraining Fong moved his hands higher.

“Why are you clamping my neck?” Fong said.

“You were running,” the officer snapped.

“Calm down,” another cop ordered.

“You put your hands on me,” Fong said, his voice rising, his eyes wide and searching. “I’m scared.” Fong demanded to see the officer’s identity card.

The sergeant waved his ID and made a phone call.

“If you don’t cooperate,” one officer said, “I will arrest you for obstructing police.”

“Hey, hold on,” Fong shot back, “it’s you who’s clamping my neck.”

“Keep on, keep on resisting,” one officer said.

Fong followed orders to hand over the plastic bag with the 10 laser lights. The officer extracted one, slim and silver.

“What are these?” the officer barked.

“Flashlights,” Fong said. Asked again, he added “laser flashlights.”

“I think these are offensive weapons,” an officer said. “I am now arresting you for possessing weapons.”

Fong’s mouth hung open. “How are they weapons? That’s only a flashlight!”

“Save it for the judge,” the cop said.

As a crowd around them needled the officers, demanding that police let the young man go, Fong slumped to the ground. In the ambulance to a local hospital, Fong sat between officers holding his phone, which the police had warned him not to use.

He was released without charges two days later.

When police announced the arrest to reporters, officials referred to the flashlights as “laser guns that shot blue light” and said that such strong beams could “flash-burn” eyes. To prove it during a press conference, an officer picked up a device said to be Fong’s, that had been equipped with batteries. He trained the beam on a piece of paper about an arm’s length away. In seconds, a tangle of smoke rose from the paper.

ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG

By late August, as the government continued to stonewall the protesters' growing demands, many young people became more desperate. They routinely relied on Molotovs, bonfires, bricks, lighter fluid, and anything metal to shatter windows. After one officer shot and wounded a young protester in the gut, a protester elsewhere lit a man afire. The tension grew.

In the neon-lit shopping district of Causeway Bay, Chan Chun-kit, a 33-year-old property manager, stepped into a crowd that had gathered near Victoria Park to drum up interest in an upcoming election. Officers ordered the group to move along. “Haak ging!” someone shouted, according to court documents. Black cops. It was a frequent taunt, rooted in the belief of many Hong Kongers that police had ties to organized crime.

Chan wore black clothes and a black face mask. Four weeks earlier, Carrie Lam had signed a decree banning face coverings during illegal assemblies. “Remove the face mask!” an officer commanded. Chan walked off but didn’t get far. Inside Chan’s bag, police found a helmet and gloves, a gas mask, and 48 six-inch plastic zip ties.

Prosecutors were building cases not on what the protesters did, but on what the government feared they might do.

Plastic ties are legal to carry, then and now. But they offered new uses during the protests: to hang banners, create barricades, and in a few notable cases, to restrain people. Within this context, police made plastic ties evidence of a crime. Prosecutors charged Chan with possessing instruments fit for unlawful purpose, a petty offense created during British rule to thwart burglaries before they happened.

At trial, Chan’s friend testified that the two had planned to move furniture from an office and use the ties to secure everything in transport. The magistrate rejected the story. In the ruling, he inferred that the defendant intended to use the ties to create barricades and “further the unlawful purpose of using them in armed confrontations, fights, [and] inflicting injuries.” The court found Chan guilty in August 2020 and sentenced him to five and a half months in prison.

Chan appealed. Before the bench, his lawyer, Steven Kwan, argued that plastic ties did not fit the definition of an instrument fit for unlawful purpose. Hong Kong law prohibits specific restraints, such as handcuffs or finger cuffs that could subdue someone, along with devices like a skeleton key that could open a locked room. The appellate judges rejected the appeal but found there was an important legal question about the law and let Chan appeal to the city’s highest court. His petition is scheduled for June.

In prison, Chan met people who were serving similar sentences for carrying knives. The inmates, Kwan said, found the idea of plastic ties as weapons to be hilarious.

In June 2020, China’s legislature approved a national security law and lodged it in Hong Kong’s constitution. It listed four new crimes—secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces—and gave police seemingly unchecked powers to investigate, search, seize, and detain. It didn’t take long for people to see the law’s true intent. After police arrested Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher who advocated for foreign sanctions, the government targeted politicians who organized their own primary elections to seize the majority in the legislature, and activists who ran the annual vigil to honor people gunned down by Chinese soldiers in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Before long, civil society organizations and labor unions closed, fearing arrests.

Just after dawn on December 2, 2020, nearly two dozen officers banged on the door of Keith Fong’s family’s apartment. Armed with a search warrant, police then charged the student leader with carrying offensive weapons in public, as well as two new counts: obstructing justice and resisting police work. Sixteen months after his arrest on Apliu Street, Fong, then 22, faced years in prison.

“In a normal country that has democracy and freedom and rule of law, my case would not go to court,” Fong said in our first conversation by phone in January 2021. He was riding in the passenger seat of his mother’s car on the afternoon of his weekly check-in at a local police station, one of his bail conditions. His voice trembled with nerves, perhaps anger. “They are going to destroy us mentally,” Fong said, sounding distracted and anxious. “Some people will tell us to be careful. But how can we be careful? We have no other choice.”

For two years, Fong’s defense team had tried to remain hopeful. He had not put batteries into the laser pointers, and when police stopped him he was nowhere near a protest. What's more, some defendants had beaten their laser-light charges, including a 19-year-old high school graduate named Parco Pang, who represented himself at trial after his attorney recommended he plead guilty. After his acquittal, Pang promptly sued the secretary of justice, accusing the government of withholding evidence from his defense.

As Fong’s case dragged on, friends felt he became more cautious and fretful, especially after police charged dozens of activists with security offenses. Fong wasn’t worried about himself, said an activist friend, but for others. When police arrested a few suspects under the security act, the friend staged a tongue-in-cheek protest action by handing out leaflets on the street to provide information about the law’s reach. Ten or so officers showed up to question him. After that, Fong asked the friend to stop. Fong knew many people in prison; he often visited one good friend serving time on the far end of Lantau Island. He didn’t want more to follow.

ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG

Keith Fong’s trial finally began in December 2021. Day after day, prosecutors hammered on about the power of the lasers that he carried that night. The lights were the strongest class, designed for military uses such as guiding weapons, overkill for a leisure pursuit. Green beams would have been more appropriate for pointing out Pegasus and other constellations. Clearly, the prosecutor asserted, Fong intended to damage the vision of unsuspecting officers, as other protesters had done. What’s more, prosecutors argued, Fong had chosen not to cooperate with law enforcement in a way that had been willful and deliberate. When police examined his phone they found it contained no instant messaging applications, contacts, or call records. Clearly, Fong had tampered with it, prosecutors said.

Fong’s team argued that just because other people had used laser pens at other protests in a dangerous way did not mean Fong had the same intention. If Fong had resisted the police, why had they not charged him then, asked senior counsel Wong Ching-yu during his closing arguments. If police intended to confiscate the defendant's phone, why did they not seize it from the defendant in the ambulance or hospital? The prosecution, the attorney said, had not proved that Fong reset the phone or intended to obstruct the case. While they didn’t say so in court, Fong’s team wondered privately if police had added the second and third charges to justify the arrest 16 months later.

After the new year, the parties gathered in Judge Douglas Yau’s cramped courtroom to hear the verdict. Reading from the bench, Yau said he believed Fong had lied about stargazing and pointed out that Fong wasn’t a member of any astronomy club and owned no books on the subject. However, the judge said that merely carrying laser lights, without any clear goal to create or cause harm, was not a crime. The government needed to prove that Fong planned to blast the officers with the bright beams, and it had not. The judge found Fong not guilty on the weapons charge.

Fong’s struggle with police on Apliu Street, however, was another issue. The judge sided with the prosecution’s claim that Fong had removed the phone’s SIM card and reset his password while at the hospital. The only reasonable conclusion, the judge ruled, was that Fong had deleted the device’s information to hinder the police investigation into the 10 laser pens.

In the Plexiglas defense box, Fong leaned his head against the wall in resignation. The verdict was neither victory nor defeat. He was sent to a detention center until sentencing, leaving his tearful mother to accept condolences from supporters.

For more than two decades, judges in Hong Kong have walked a perilous tightrope as they serve two governments, the local one and the central government in Beijing. In recent years, verdicts in protest cases have often portrayed acts of civil disobedience as potential threats to society. Since the summer of 2019, nearly every judge who presides over such cases speaks of a need to deter criminal acts, even when little mayhem or violence took place. This deterrence language crept into Fong’s ruling as well.

On April 7, Fong’s defense counsel presented letters in support of their client’s character, along with admission offers from two universities in Great Britain. The court, Wong said, should consider Fong’s promise. The young man had a strong sense of justice, Wong told the judge. “He is not a criminal.” Two months in custody, the lawyer argued, had been punishment enough. The judge sentenced Fong to nine months in prison.

“In a normal country that has democracy and freedom and rule of law, my case would not go to court.”

Outside the court, his friends said the sentence could have been much worse. Still, Fong’s life, and that of his family’s, had been turned inside out since his arrest in August 2019. His single mother juggled work and her son’s court hearings. Fong suspended his studies and couldn’t find much work. By the time he is released, likely late this summer, the case will have consumed three years of his life.

Today, many protesters charged with riot are still waiting for their trials to start. Some cases are scheduled for late 2023, or even 2024. The justice system is not equipped to quickly move hundreds of defendants in complex cases swiftly through trial. As the protesters wait, Hong Kong has moved from a liberal society to a security state. On July 1, John Lee, the former security secretary, will assume Carrie Lam’s role as chief executive on the 25th anniversary of the handover. Lee oversaw the sometimes brutal policing methods used on protesters and supervised the enforcement of the new security law. He had no challengers in his selection for the post; Lee had assisted Beijing’s overhaul of Hong Kong’s elections, a process that erased nearly all opposition.

I met with Fong in mid-2021 inside the student union office at Baptist University. Pamphlets, posters, and liquor bottles littered the room, which bore a faint scent of cat urine. I sensed it had fallen into disuse. In the months before, administrators had pushed students at other university unions to quit. Several current and former student leaders faced criminal cases for everything from assembly offenses to national security charges.

Fong looked thoughtful yet ragged as he sucked on cigarettes and considered the legacy of the 2019 movement. During that summer, many young people had adopted a political code called lam chau, a kind of mutually assured destruction. On walls, they spray-painted a phrase borrowed from The Hunger Games: “If we burn, you burn with us.” The protesters aimed to sacrifice and destroy Hong Kong so they could damage China’s economy and the reputation of the Communist Party. They had brought their battle to the international stage, Fong said, and showed “the evil of this government.”

He knew that China’s crackdown on Hong Kong would be long and harsh, a crisis worse, he said, than the bloodbath at Tiananmen Square. I thought that seemed like an overwrought comparison, but Fong pressed on. Soldiers hadn’t gunned down people in the streets in 2019, but the past few years had become a slow-motion torture that had silenced citizens: Lawmakers were ejected, activists, professors, and editors were arrested, civil groups disbanded, and young people flew into exile. “They kill every citizen who pursues freedom,” he said, “mentally and spiritually.”

Hong Kongers have long been unwilling patriots, but in prison, one cannot fight back. The commissioner of correctional services recently disclosed that inmates aged 18 to 30 were invited to join a voluntary program of “de-radicalization.” It consists of Chinese history and national moral and civic education, lessons on the national security law, and “psychological reconstruction to achieve de-radicalization progressively.” The goal would be to “enhance their sense of national identity … and guide them back on the right track.”

There were still young people like Keith Fong who have endured years of limbo before their trials, never admitting guilt or giving an inch. China had achieved obedience and apparent acquiescence in just 18 months. Indoctrination might take longer. Fong and his fellow protesters were still burning China, bit by bit.

Source Images: Getty Images and Alamy

Cover: Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

IDEAS

Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story

Video dispatches from the Ukrainian president skillfully dissolve Putin’s delusions. We would all do well to listen.

Virginia Heffernan  May 22, 2022 11:11 AM

Photograph: Shawn Michael Jones

In 2003, VOLODYMYR Zelensky, then 25 and freshly licensed to practice law, formed an organization “to make the world a better place using humor and creativity.”

The organization was Kvartal 95 Studio, a production company that has created, among other hits, a sitcom about the zany burden of in-laws. The In-Laws suffered a setback in 2017 when one of its stars was banned from Ukraine for publicly supporting the Russian annexation of Crimea.

But it's Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the president of Ukraine, for which Zelensky, who is now the president of Ukraine, is best known. Stagecraft was practice for statecraft, and he now produces nonfiction video dispatches from the front lines of the war. They serve as field reporting, pleas for weapons, and arias that glorify Ukraine. But the videos have done more than win Ukraine moral and military support. They have created a serialized manifesto—one that makes the case for liberal democracy over oligarchic autocracy. Evidently the punch-drunk world needs a primer. So Zelensky has been calling the world to its senses, clarifying, day by day, democracy's reason for being in the modern world.

The videos are apparently written in collaboration with Dmytro Lytvyn, a sharp-tongued, controversial Ukrainian pundit whose coy Twitter bio says simply, “I think you heard what I'd written.” Others from the old studio, including Yuri Kostyuk, a writer on Servant of the People, are also said to be involved. Though the crew is no longer using sight gags about big people on small bicycles to improve the world, they still use dense wordplay and irony—along with bellicosity and rage.

Watch the whole series and what first comes through is a Lucasian monomyth about the defiance of evil by the forces of good. That master narrative has been so effective in valorizing Ukraine and Zelensky that his approval rating in the US has been more than 70 percent; in his homeland, it's at 90 percent. Kremlin propagandists, in apparent desperation, have given up distributing counterpropaganda about Nazis in Kyiv. Instead, at the end of April, they stooped to producing fake videos of Zelensky with cocaine on his desk—shallowfakes—in an effort to smear him. This effort failed, as when a sitcom pilot fails to win viewers from the top-rated one, and the new show is quietly canceled.

Zelensky's first video of the war appeared on February 23, the eve of the invasion. In Russian, he addresses “grazhdanam Rossi”—the citizens of Russia—as a “grazhdanin Ukraini”—citizen of Ukraine. The word citizens and not people reminds listeners that they're members of a modern nation and not infantry in a holy war for an ethno-state. Zelensky also notably zeroes in on a Kremlin talking point that vexes him. He says, “You are told that we hate Russian culture. But how can you hate culture? Any culture?” In that moment of incomprehension, Zelensky dexterously clarifies for all the world the absurdity of a “culture war.”

A culture has no budget, no government, no army. It collects no taxes; it has no CEO, bible, or headquarters.

Let's slow it down. Broadly speaking, a culture is a patchwork of dialects, customs, habits, music, arts, mores, ways of living. In Russia, culture might include everything from forest folklore to vigorous strolling to the rave band Little Big. Deeper in, you might find Chagall, Turgenev, Anatoly Karpov, the Bolshoi, Lyudmila Ulitskaya. How can a culture be hated?

I'd never thought of it that way, but of course. A culture has no budget, no government, no army. It collects no taxes; it has no CEO, bible, or headquarters. If it can't be precisely identified, how can a nation's whole culture, which is made up of innumerable artifacts and practices, be loathed? And yet the constant warning of the far right in Russia—and France, and the US—is that someone, somewhere, hates your culture and thus deserves to die. No one but Zelensky has ever dissolved this hollow alarmism with such dispatch.

“Europe must wake up now,” Zelensky says in a video from March 4. Where he'd been in a funereal black suit and necktie a week earlier, now he wears the olive-drab that has become his trademark. “Russian troops are firing upon the nuclear power plant in Ukraine.” He again calls his audience into being and reminds us who we are: citizens with rights, not serfs with superstitions. Specifically, he addresses “all people who know the word ‘Chernobyl.’”

I dare you to read that and not call to your mind's eye the story of Chernobyl (in the news in 1986 or on HBO in 2019) and however you understand that nuclear disaster. This is shrewd. Comprehension of this byword does indeed mark a person as informed, familiar with the dangers of nuclear tech, and mindful that lethal catastrophes are never merely local. Our understanding of history has now been both flattered and enlisted in the fight.

The other video from that day serves as Part II, and it's aimed at Russian citizens. Again Zelensky is in army green. But this time he doesn't expect his audience to startle at the mention of Chernobyl, so he issues a stern, scolding, vivid reminder of 1986 and how Russians and Ukrainians fought together as Soviets to contain the meltdown. “You have to remember irradiation,” he says, seemingly hoping the video will find its way to those who have been denied an education in history. For them, he issues a more primordial threat: “Take to the streets and say that you want to live, that you want to live on Earth without radioactive contamination. Radiation does not know where Russia is, radiation does not know where the borders of your country are.”

These videos lay out two significant ideas about Russian culture. First, there's nothing to hate in it. A culture is grounded in sensory-emotional experience; it is too vast, multifarious, and shape-shifting to be hated as a monolith. Second, Russia as an authoritarian kleptocracy is a matter of utter indifference to the planet Earth, which is the source of our shared humanity. To poison Ukraine is to poison Russia. Say that you want to live, that you want to live on Earth.

Finally, on April 15, Zelensky seizes on a concept he has developed throughout the war: “reality.” Reality is where Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians live; Putin, by contrast, is lost to it. “We have withstood 50 days already,” says Zelensky, “although the occupiers gave us a maximum of five. That's how they ‘know us’”—here he mocks Russia's grievous underestimation of his country—“that's how they ‘make friends with reality.’” The scare quotes indicate a terrible closeness that's far from a friendship. The Kremlin didn't find the abject deference it forecast from Ukraine. Instead, in Zelensky's telling, Russia got forced into intimacy with the reality of its own weakness and failure.

And Zelensky's telling is now the only telling of the war there is. Lionizing any world leader is dicey business, but this is surely Zelensky's moment. To have monopolized the media main stage for months in his own videos is an extraordinary feat. To have built, brick by brick, a grand narrative that attracted aid from around the world is another. But to have reminded the world of the cultural interplay, home planet, and grounding in reality that make us humans is to pull off a rhetorical rout comparable to any heroism on the battlefield.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

BUSINESS

The US Military Is Building Its Own Metaverse

Defense tech companies have latched on to the metaverse hype—but what they’re building will be a far cry from Meta’s virtual world.

Will Knight  May 17, 2022 11:11 AM

Mike Killian Photography/Red 6

On May 10, two fighter pilots performed a high-altitude proto-metaverse experiment. A few thousand feet above the desert of California, in a pair of Berkut 540 jets, they donned custom AR headsets to connect to a system that overlaid a ghostly, glowing image of a refueling aircraft flying alongside them in the sky. One of the pilots then performed a refueling maneuver with the virtual tanker while the other looked on. Welcome to the fledgling military metaverse.

It isn’t only Silicon Valley that’s gripped by metaverse mania these days. Just as tech companies and corporations are scrambling to develop strategies for virtual worlds, many defense startups, contractors, and funders are increasingly talking up the metaverse, even if its definition and utility aren’t always clear.

The key technologies needed for the metaverse—augmented and virtual reality, headmounted displays, 3D simulations and virtual environments built by artificial intelligence—are already found in the defense world. The result is a lot less polished, cutesy, and spacious than Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world vision, but that’s partly the point. And there’s a good chance that the underlying tech could take off, even if it stutters in the civilian realm.

Courtesy of Red 6

A mix of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and video game graphics, for instance, have enabled fighter pilots to practice dogfighting against virtual opponents, including Chinese and Russian warplanes, while pulling several Gs. Red 6, the company that’s developing the technology, says this delivers a far more realistic test of a pilot’s abilities than a conventional flight simulator. “We can fly against whatever threat we want,” says Daniel Robinson, founder and CEO of Red 6. “And that threat could be controlled either by an individual remotely or by artificial intelligence.”

Red6’s AR technology has to work in more extreme conditions, with lower latency and higher reliability than consumer AR or VR headsets. Robinson adds that the company is now working on a platform that will allow many different scenarios to be represented in augmented or virtual reality. “What we’re building is really a military metaverse,” he says. “It’s like a multiplayer video game in the sky.”

Metaverse-related ideas are already part of some of the latest military systems. The high-tech helmet for the new F-35 fighter jet, for instance, includes an augmented reality display that shows telemetry data and target information on top of video footage from around the aircraft. In 2018, the US Army announced that it would pay Microsoft up to $22 billion to develop a version of its HoloLens augmented reality system for warfighters, known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS).

VR and AR have become routine aspects of military training in recent years. In 2014, the Office of Naval Research and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California developed Project BlueShark, a system that allowed sailors to drive vessels and collaborate in a virtual environment. Another effort, called Project Avenger, is now used to help train US Navy pilots. The US Air Force is using VR to teach pilots how to manage aircraft and missions. VR is also used to help treat veterans for chronic pain and post-traumatic stress. And Boeing has created an AR environment that lets mechanics practice working on planes before stepping aboard a real one.

Recently, the US military has begun exploring more complex virtual worlds. There is also growing interest in connecting and combining virtual worlds in a way that resembles metaverse thinking. In December 2021, the US Air Force held a high-level conference involving over 250 people in locations stretching from the US to Japan, via a virtual environment. “The promise is integrating these technologies,” says Caitlin Dohrman, general manager of the defense division of Improbable, a company that develops virtual world technologies, has created sprawling virtual battlefields featuring over 10,000 individually controlled characters for the UK’s military wargames, and also works with the US Department of Defense (DOD). “It is an extremely complex type of simulation, especially given the fidelity that the military demands,” Dohrman says. “You can either have live players who are participating in the simulation or [characters] can be AI-enabled, which is often what the military does.”

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, a VR company Facebook acquired in 2014, says Zuckerberg’s decision to go all-in on VR and the metaverse created a massive amount of expectation in the commercial world. “Everyone on their quarterly corporate calls, like a week or two later, they’re being asked by investors, ‘What’s your metaverse play?’,” he says.

In 2017, Luckey cofounded the defense company Anduril. He says that despite all the recent metaverse hype, there is big defense potential, partly because military training is so important and costly. But he says the technology does not have to be hyper-realistic to be useful, and he wants Anduril to focus on only using the technology where necessary. “Everything we’re doing with VR is something where it is uniquely better than any other option,” he says. This includes using VR to train people to operate Anduril’s drones, he says, or to display information about an area using data from sensors on the ground.

As with Zuckerberg’s planned metaverse, newer military systems rely heavily on AI to be effective. In October 2020, the AR technology developed by Red6 was used to pit a real fighter pilot against an aircraft controlled by an AI algorithm developed as part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AI dogfighting project. The AI top gun, created by another startup called EpiSci, learned how to outmaneuver and outgun an opponent through a process of trial and error. The AI pilot eventually developed superhuman skills and was able to beat its human opponent every time.

Another DARPA project, called Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance, aims to create an AI assistant that watches what a soldier is doing and offers advice through speech, sound, or graphics. In contrast to the augmented reality system developed by Boeing, which only works in a specific setting, such a system would need to make sense of the real world. Bruce Draper, the DARPA program manager responsible, says the real value of technologies being explored by the military lies in merging the real and the virtual. “The metaverse is mostly virtual, and virtual worlds are useful for training, but we live in the physical world,” he says. “The military domain is inherently physical, it’s not about an abstract metaverse.”

But efforts to merge the virtual and the real world have encountered problems. In March 2022, a leaked Microsoft memo reportedly showed that those working on IVAS, the US Army version of the HoloLens AR headset, expected it to be received badly by users. And an audit released by the DOD in April 2022 concluded that the US Army could waste its money as a result. Jason Kuruvilla, a senior communications manager at Microsoft, shared several statements from high-ranking army figures proclaiming the potential of the IVAS. He also pointed to a 2021 DOD report that discusses the importance of developing IVAS rapidly, allowing problems to be ironed out along the way.

Such high-profile and expensive endeavors have only boosted the confidence of those pushing the military metaverse. “I know that this is the future of military training,” says Doug Philippone, global defense lead at Palantir, a defense company that has invested in Anduril. Philippone is also a cofounder of Snowpoint Ventures, which has invested in Red6. “But I also see it as the future of the way that the military fights and makes decisions. So it's not just about fighting, it's about making decisions.”

Luckey says Anduril is already working on technology that could do this in training missions and combat. “The next big step for us, which I am really excited about, is taking from our core product and piping that data to heads-up displays that troops on the front line are going to be able to wear,” he says.

But how much of this cutting-edge tech makes it to the front line—or even into training exercises—remains unclear. Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has developed virtual battlefield training platforms for the US military, says the tech deployed will often be considerably simpler than metaverse boosters imagine. He suggests that a simpler version of the IVAS headset may eventually be integrated into an AR rifle scope. “When you are out there shooting and being shot at, the last thing you want to worry about is another piece of equipment,” he says. And technology does not need to be as expansive as a metaverse to be useful. “We need to think a bit more about this metaverse metaphor—which is powerful but also has its limitations.”

Updated 19/05/2022, 11:00 am ET: The article previously stated incorrectly that Palantir has invested in Red6.

BACKCHANNEL

Bill Gates Is So Over This Pandemic

The acerbic optimist thinks anxious people (like me) need to move on from Covid and start planning for the next vicious pathogen.

Steven Levy  May 12, 2022 10:10 AM

Bill Gates says pandemics can be abolished, but that world leaders need to start preparing for the next threat now. Photograph: Ali Cherkis

When Bill Gates took the stage at this year's TED conference, he brought with him a battered wooden bucket he'd made by hand. With a wide mouth and small handles at the top, the water pail was a replica of one from ancient Rome. In the year 6 AD, a devastating fire prompted Emperor Augustus to organize the Cohortes Vigilum—the night watch. The watchmen relied on this not-so-disruptive technology to fulfill their duties as Rome's dedicated firefighting squad.

Standing in front of the crowd in Vancouver in his usual crewneck sweater and dress slacks, Gates used the prop to illustrate one of the points in his new book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He proposed a modern version of the Cohortes Vigilum that sounds almost like a pitch for a television series: a permanent team of 3,000 people around the globe called GERM—Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization. The group would monitor potential outbreaks, develop close relationships with public health officials around the world, and oversee drills to prepare for the inevitable—and potentially even worse—sequels to Covid.

The insistent optimism he brought to this idea and much of his speech was nothing like the bleak alarm of his 2015 TED talk, a jeremiad about our lack of preparedness for an imminent pandemic. That presentation has garnered 43 million views on the TED site; unfortunately, he says, 90 percent of them came after Covid made his prediction tragically accurate.

“The most profound thing that’s going to happen in software is to have truly intelligent agents. That’s way more important than the metaverse, way more important than Web3.”

Still, it wasn't until I sat down with Gates a few hours after this year's speech that I realized how fully his attention has shifted away from what, to my mind at least, is an ongoing crisis. He even took it in stride that conference-goers had to make their way past anti-vaxxers calling for his imprisonment and worse. He was less amused at how Covid has (understandably) drawn attention and resources away from the other diseases of interest to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Even though the eponyms of the foundation have divorced, they are, at least for now, still working together.)

Such complaints aside, he was doggedly upbeat, not just about pandemics but in his view of the state of the world, which, it turns out, is much sunnier than mine. Only days after our interview did I learn that the Cohortes Vigilum failed to contain the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, a fact I definitely would have asked him about had I known.

I have interviewed Gates dozens of times, and as the years go on, I find he is more likely to employ the pointed (and often funny) sarcasm he used to only display privately or in internal meetings. This was no exception, as he met with derision and mockery my suggestions that (a) even for the privileged, there are significant risks in the current crisis, and (b) in general, the world is becoming scarier and more resistant to logic and science. Reflecting his confidence in vaccines, we conducted our conversation maskless. The interview is edited for space and clarity.

LEVY: In 2015 you talked about a global institution to prepare for future outbreaks. In the new book you pitch a more specific vision: a billion-dollar organization you call GERM, which among other things would concoct elaborate mock-ups of outbreaks.

GATES: We were trying to get the world to do disease simulation drills. But they always ended up being just desktop simulations, where you don't really call up the diagnostic companies and see if they can give you PCR machines, or you don't really say, “Let's impose a quarantine—where are we going to put 3,000 people, and how are we going to enforce it?” When the military or the fire department do drills, they do physical, in-the-world exercises.

It's about the importance of practice. If you look at the countries that were successful with Covid, it's basically places like Australia that came to understand that public health labs don't have 100 percent of the capacity to do the job of testing everybody. After a practice run, you'd write at the top of your piece of paper: Call the PCR companies and make sure you have the budget to stand behind whatever commitments you're making. This was a huge failure in the US.

We were supposedly the most prepared country, right? Was all that preparation wasted?

Yes, it was wasted.

A premise of your book is that Covid has made it easier to take steps to prevent the next pandemic. But I wonder if that's true. We now have millions of people who are skeptical of public health, with knee-jerk resistance to anything the government proposes, creating a weird headwind.

Most of the elements of my plan are not controversial. Diagnosis and quarantine aren't that controversial. I guess extreme quarantine could be. Therapeutics didn't end up being that controversial. It's really only masks that became controversial. You know, we have a half a million dead bodies—

More.

Well, the US has 600,000 now. [Note from Levy: As of publication it's more than a million.] So I expect this will be like a war, where, after it's over, we think seriously about how to prevent it from happening again.

Well, it's still happening. Some people even question whether it's wise to gather for TED.

Because why?

We're still in a pandemic.

The greatest risk of people coming to this conference was getting into a car. Should they have taken a car? It's very controversial! People should think hard about getting into cars! I mean, people are dying. I think somebody died today. We could look it up. I mean, let's be serious. Is no one willing to be numeric anymore?

[Levy: I looked it up later. In March, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina wrote that the chance of dying from driving 250 miles is 1 in a million, or what's called 1 micromort. In a year, the average American driver racks up about 54 micromorts. For plenty of TED-sters (vaccinated, boosted, roughly 65 years old), the chance of dying after a Covid infection is 6,000 micromorts—“a little more risky than one year of active service in Afghanistan in 2011,” she wrote.]

Are you saying the pandemic is essentially over, at least for rich countries?

No, it's not over. We don't know enough about variants. Nobody predicted the Omicron variant. It's one of the great unexplained events. And we've always been pretty stupid about the science of transmission. I've been calling Congress and saying, be more generous on the international response, and I've been calling Germany, the UK, and France. When the US doesn't take a leadership role in global health, it creates a vacuum.

We no longer have a supply problem with vaccines. The only question left is, are you limited by demand or by logistics. In less vaccinated countries, there isn't much demand. In Nigeria, Covid would be, like, the 15th-largest cause of death—you've got HIV, TB, malaria, diarrhea. So when you say to them, “Hey, number 15,” they're like, “Well, what about number one, number two, number three, number four—show me some dead bodies!”

I love these articles that say, “Hey, if these countries don't vaccinate themselves, they're going to generate variants and screw us.” There's not much science to support that.

Wait, you're saying that vaccinating globally wouldn't reduce the chances of a more dangerous variant?

What science do you have that suggests that? These are not transmission-blocking vaccines. Do you have that through your head? Vaccines do not reduce the number of cases. Where's the logic? You're going to get less variants because … ? What the hell is this?

[Levy: OK. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist whom Gates cites in his book, says it's true that with Omicron, the current vaccines did a relatively poor job of preventing transmission. But they still cut the likelihood of getting sick, and they shorten the course of the disease in infected people, giving potential variants less time to emerge. “Anybody who says that vaccinating as many people as possible is not important in preventing variants is making a mistake,” says Brilliant.]

I've been struck by the pushback on vaccines. It seems that in terms of being a science-based, logic-based society, we're going backward.

I think you're a naive person. How popular was evolution before the pandemic? Less than 50 percent.

[Levy: He's close. A University of Michigan study of the last 35 years reported that acceptance of evolution became the majority opinion in 2016.]

People weren't taking to the streets or blocking borders to demonstrate against biologists like they are with vaccines.

We're not a broadly scientific debating society. Are you sure that we went backward?

Well, you've been the object of criticism for years, but before the pandemic very few people were marching around outside and calling for your arrest or execution.

Now I'm a focus. Anthony Fauci and me. There's some pretty crazy stuff, right up there with QAnon, Pizzagate, all that stuff. I wouldn't have anticipated that. To the degree that people don't want to use masks, that's a problem.

On top of everything else, we have Ukraine. You're not alarmed that we're going backward?

I'd rather be alive today than at some time in the past. And I'd highly recommend that to other people. So if you think we're going backward, wow.

In some respects, I do think that. We're not too far apart in age. The years when we grew up and conducted our careers were, for some people, a sort of a golden age in this country.

Would you have wanted to be a gay person 40 years ago? Would you rather be a woman then than now?

I said for some people.

What does “for some people” mean? The kings have always done OK. The dukes have too. So, recently, for the earls, it got a little tough.

They're passing anti-gay laws in Florida.

No, they're not passing anti-gay laws. Sodomy used to be illegal in the United States. There was no gay marriage. The idea that you think that's a complete retrace, that maybe the 1950s were better, that's a complete loss of perspective.

So you're cool with the trends that we're seeing now?

The polarization of US politics, and what that might lead to, is something that I can't fit in my normal framework that things improve.

OK, there's something that we both agree is a regression.

I still think we can improve the human condition. I think innovation is very much on our side.

It seems to me a lot of the trends you point to as improvement—better education, life expectancy, civil rights—are tied to the liberalization and democratization we saw in the latter half of the 20th century. That seems to have been halted or reversed.

I'm a big fan of liberalization. But if you take what it was like to be a Chinese citizen in 1980, compared to a pre-pandemic year like 2019, you see better life expectancy, education, health, and most things we care about. They're way better off, without much credit going to liberalization. It's true that innovation tends to occur in places that are liberal. Mostly, those have also been the rich places.

How does the Russian invasion of Ukraine affect your causes?

The war in Ukraine is a gigantic setback for the work we do. Attention levels will be down for the causes we work on.

There's an odd afterword to your book that talks about workplace technology and the metaverse. It's almost like you couldn't hold back your optimism about it.

In the case of remote meetings, the metaverse is pretty cool—3D immersive technology can make them more like face-to-face meetings than Hollywood Squares meetings. But the big thing is computers becoming more intelligent. That's more important than 3D immersion or glasses as a form factor. The computer today is still not very intelligent. It doesn't know your activities, your priorities. You wouldn't even trust it to take your new mail and text messages and sort them for you based on your context. So the most profound thing that's going to happen in software is to have truly intelligent agents. That's way more important than the metaverse, way more important than Web3.

You've been talking about intelligent agents for a while.

Yes. And I will keep talking about it until my damn agent can do it for me.

STEVEN LEVY (@stevenlevy) wrote about the metaverse in issue 29.12/30.01

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

IDEAS

Can Social Media Be Redeemed?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on Jack Dorsey’s remorse for his role in creating a centralized internet and what it signals for the rest of us.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  May 11, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: Simone Noronha

“I read that Jack Dorsey, a cofounder of Twitter, claims to regret his role in creating the centralized internet. Given what we know about the divisiveness, violence, and misinformation that social media promotes—and now Dorsey's remorse—is there anything left to redeem it?”

—Following @Jack

Dear Following,

It's never a good sign when the creator of a technology disowns his own creation, though it happens with surprising frequency. Einstein regretted his work on nuclear chain reactions, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Toward the end of his life, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian military engineer who designed the AK-47, realized with a pang of guilt that his invention had been responsible for more deaths than any other assault rifle. One might wish these men had displayed a greater dose of foresight, but how much can we expect of humans when God himself failed to anticipate the destructive potential of his own creation? In the book of Genesis, God looks down on the evil taking place on earth and sees he has made a grave error: “The Lord regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved.” His unsuccessful effort to wipe humans from the planet with a flood and embark on a new, more virtuous start proves the ultimate uselessness of such regret. It is an unfortunate but reliable truth that creators tend to recognize their oversights only after it's too late to undo them. Their tears of remorse may flood the earth, but they cannot wash away the damage.

Given the pervasiveness of ancient myths that imagine an Edenic world descending into chaos, you would think we'd be more wary of the promises of virtual utopias. Throughout the mid-1990s, techno-idealists (many of them writing in the pages of this magazine) argued that “the Net” would level social hierarchies, enable new forms of political organization, and put an end to corporate power. With the arrival of Web 2.0, these hopes coalesced markedly around Twitter, whose role in organizing protests during the Arab Spring suggested that the site could unite the masses against unjust powers. Dorsey himself emerged like a prophet from the wilderness, a young man who spoke in aphorisms and was often described as “ascetic,” thanks to his fasts, his Shaker furniture, and his simple, yet pricey, Filson bags. Profiles routinely rehearsed his childhood fascination with cities and systems and described him looming over the panorama of San Francisco from the heights of the Square (now Block) headquarters. Here was a “visionary” in the word's most literal sense, a godlike figure who could anticipate the complex functions of the world that so few of us could glimpse from the ground. “At the core of his being, he really wants to make the world a better place,” said a mentor of his in 2011.

Today, 57 percent of internet traffic is controlled by six behemoths—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. Although Twitter is not among them, it has become yet another seedbed for the problems that have sprouted from these centralized powers: misinformation, ideological polarization, data mining, mass surveillance, and algorithms that amplify the most extreme and sensationalist voices. The empyrean heights from which we have fallen are evident in Twitter's most popular endearment, “this hellsite,” a phrase parroted by those who hate the world they cannot bring themselves to leave. The fact that you have to ask whether these platforms have any redeeming values, Following, suggests that you too have come to detest your existence there. I'm not sure I can convince you otherwise. If there remains anything constructive about social media, it's perhaps what it can teach us about human nature and the ways in which horrible effects can stem from good intentions.

In theology, this problem is called “theodicy,” the question of how evil can emerge in a world created by a being who is both entirely powerful and entirely good. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, once argued that theodicy might offer a useful way to think about our own role as technological creators. In his 1964 book God & Golem, Inc., he noted that many religious narratives, including “Paradise Lost” and the book of Job, suggest that the Creator is not in complete control of his creation—that these stories are only coherent “if we do not lose ourselves in the dogmas of omnipotence and omniscience.” God, in other words, is more limited than we believe him to be, and if that's true, then no creator can be in total control of their creation. Just as the world took its own course, despite God's benevolent intentions, the consequences of the digital tools we create cannot always be foreseen in advance.

And our limitations as creators will only become more pronounced as our technologies evolve in complexity. “The penalties for errors of foresight, great as they are now, will be enormously increased as automatization comes into its full use,” Wiener wrote. He proposed that we should regard human creators less like gods or prophets than like the character in a fable who discovers a magic lamp and must ask the genie to fulfill a wish. Creators must be extremely careful in how they word those wishes (genies, like machines, are prone to literalism)—as they cannot fully anticipate the ripple effects they might generate.

Creators like Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg made platforms that turn users into limited creators themselves. Seemingly innocent posts can be taken out of context, go viral, and ruin the life of the poster turned creator—or find their way into some dank corner of the internet where they become fodder for conspiracy theories. These sites flatter us into believing we are the gods of our own cosmos, creating our own bespoke realities ex nihilo by choosing which accounts to follow, which posts to linger on, which threads to engage with. But each of these actions is encoded in algorithms that then perpetuate and intensify those choices, shaping and ultimately limiting our understanding of reality. Even as the breadth of our vision narrows, the echo chamber of consensus strengthens our belief in our views, leading us to believe that they are—we are—foolproof and omniscient.

The favored solution to these problems is, increasingly, eschatological. Many long for the arrival of a new world: Web3, the blockchain-based postdiluvian cosmos that will return the internet to its original, decentralized perfection. Dorsey has himself expressed skepticism about the promise of this New Jerusalem. In December, he received blowback from the Ethereum/blockchain crowd for suggesting on Twitter that Web3 was already in the hands of venture capitalist firms like Andreessen Horowitz. When one of the investors of that firm tweeted a quote that is often mistakenly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, Dorsey replied, “You're a fund determined to be a media empire that can't be ignored … not Gandhi.”

Despite Dorsey's responsibility for some of these problems, his brand of skepticism might offer a model for the rest of us to emulate. Given our history of seeing the powerful as prophets, we would do well to remember that the “visionaries” of our age are not divine entities but ordinary humans who have stumbled on magical instruments they do not fully understand. (See: Elon Musk.) Whatever shape social media and the internet take in the future, one would hope we might reach a point where “constrained media”—Dorsey's preferred term for Twitter's minimalist ethos—becomes not merely an aesthetic criterion but a genuine ethical ambition.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution

The new movement wants to free us from Big Tech and exploitative capitalism—using only the blockchain, game theory, and code. What could possibly go wrong?

Gilad Edelman  May 10, 2022 10:10 AM

It's getting late on a Saturday afternoon in Denver when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. Pizza crusts and empty potato chip bags are piled up around me, evidence of the feverish hours I’ve spent hacking together a project with a trio of blockchain developers. I’m not a programmer, just a journalist with a law degree. Yet somehow I’ve gotten swept up in creating my own DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization, a favorite concept among the starry-eyed proponents of Web3—and it’s supposed to launch tomorrow.

No doubt you have questions. So do I. Like: What happened to me? Three days ago I was a crypto skeptic who could barely figure out how to buy ether. Now I’m speaking in complete sentences about multisig treasuries and quadratic voting. The devs have almost integrated our site with non-MetaMask wallets, and I’ve just dropped $85 for a domain on the Ethereum Name Service despite having no clear use for it. And rather than feeling exasperated or baffled, I seem to have caught the same thrill, however fleetingly, as everyone around me.

I am among the estimated 10,000 people who arrived in Colorado a few days ago for this year’s ETHDenver conference, the biggest and oldest event in the world of Ethereum and Web3. Most of these folks came here to be among their people. I came to try to understand them. And I think I finally do.

The term Web3, as you may or may not have noticed, emerged from obscurity last year, buoyed by rising cryptocurrency prices and some canny marketing by venture capitalists. Its meaning is hard to pin down. In the media and on Twitter, Web3 has become a catchall for anything having to do with blockchains and cryptocurrency: People paying tens of thousands of dollars for digital collectibles known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, with neither practical nor aesthetic value, then flipping them for even ungodlier sums. “Play-to-earn” video games that lure gamers into flimsy virtual worlds with the promise of riches. Celebrities shilling crypto exchanges during the Super Bowl. A ceaseless parade of scams, hacks, and frauds.

But to a core of true believers, Web3 stands apart from the garish excesses and brazen misbehavior of the flashing-neon crypto casino. If cryptocurrency was originally about decentralizing money, Web3 is about decentralizing … everything. Its mission is almost achingly idealistic: to free humanity not only from Big Tech domination but also from exploitative capitalism itself—and to do it purely through code.

Bitcoin, the original blockchain-based cryptocurrency, created a way to send and receive digital money without needing a bank to approve those transactions. Instead of regulators and cops, a set of carefully designed incentives would, in theory, keep everyone acting in the best interests of all Bitcoin users. Web3 aims to apply these two concepts—decentralization and game theory—to all of digital life. The main vehicle for this is Ethereum, a blockchain that borrowed Bitcoin’s key features and added a major innovation: It was designed with its own programming language so developers could build apps, and eventually a whole new decentralized digital infrastructure, to run on it.

If Bitcoin attracts anarcho-capitalists who want to dethrone the central bankers, the culture around Ethereum and Web3 has a more progressive bent. After I walked into the Denver Sports Castle, a massive former sporting goods store turned events space that served as ETHDenver’s main venue, the first panel I caught was about using blockchains to build “public goods.” Another was titled “Navigating the Web3 Workforce as a BIPOC, Queer, Marginalized Individual.” (The overall crowd skewed heavily white and male.) Aesthetically, ETHDenver embraced a spirit of collaborative, LARPish make-believe; there was quite a bit of talk about the Bufficorn, the cartoon buffalo-unicorn hybrid that was the event’s NFT mascot. (It fuses the magic of the unicorn with the strength of the buffalo.) People communicated with all manner of cheerful memes: gm, for “good morning,” was the universal greeting, regardless of the time of day; wagmi meant “we’re all gonna make it.”

The Bufficorn, ETHDenver's mascot, and Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum.

Photographs: Jesse Morgan/ETHDenver; Alexandra Masihy/ETH Denver; Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

During the opening ceremony, the conference organizers emphasized Web3’s idealism. “It’s not about money,” said John Paller, founder of ETHDenver. “We don’t care about that.” The theme of the conference, he explained, was “BUIDLing.” The term, which everyone pronounced “biddling,” is a riff on the crypto meme “HODLing”—holding one’s assets no matter how grim the market looks, as an expression of faith in its long-term value. (In crypto, as in all internet culture, typos are a rich source of memes.) “BUIDL is the rally cry of the Bufficorn,” Paller said.

What exactly were they BUIDLing? It’s easy to find brilliant, idealistic, experienced technology experts who think Web3 is pure nonsense. But it’s almost as easy to find ones who think it’s the real deal—humanity’s best chance of redeeming the entire promise of the internet.

On day two, the toilets broke; the venue’s plumbing wasn’t ready for so many people. Ethereum has a similar problem.

One way to think about Web3 is right there in the name: It’s the successor to Web 2.0, the era that was supposed to democratize the internet but instead became dominated by a handful of huge platforms, like Google and Facebook. Web3 is about re-decentralizing the web.

From its Darpa-funded infancy, the internet was designed to be decentralized. This had a very practical Cold War–era purpose: A network of computers spread around the country couldn’t be wiped out in a single nuclear blast. Early enthusiasts also saw in this distributed structure an inherently liberating tendency, a spirit captured in John Gilmore’s famous 1993 dictum, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

As the 1990s wore on, however, the dream of decentralization frayed. During what would later be dubbed the Web 1.0 era, the typical internet user, though theoretically empowered to create web pages, was in practice doing little more than viewing those made by others. And as a mature economy developed around the internet, powerful companies began to centralize on top of its open protocols—like Microsoft using its operating system monopoly to take over the browser market with Internet Explorer. Then came the dotcom crash, which called into question whether the internet would ever fulfill its potential.

Hope reemerged in the mid-2000s, when new platforms and technologies allowed ordinary users to create and upload content that could reach thousands or even millions of people. If Web 1.0 saw the masses passively consuming media created by publishers, in Web 2.0, the masses would be the creators: Wikipedia entries, Amazon product reviews, blog posts, YouTube videos, crowdfunding campaigns. Time captured the spirit of the moment with its 2006 Person of the Year selection: “You.”

But something very different was happening beneath the surface. User-generated content was free labor, and the platforms were the bosses. The big winners slurped up user data and used it, along with old-fashioned mergers and acquisitions, to build competitive moats around their businesses. Today, one company, Meta, owns three of the four largest social apps in the world, in terms of users. The fourth, YouTube, is owned by Google, which also accounts for around 90 percent of all internet searches. As these companies conquered more and more of the web, it became clear that the user was less a creative partner than a source of raw material to be perpetually harvested. Escape is difficult. Meta controls access to your Facebook and Instagram photos, plus your friend lists. Want to ditch Twitter or find a streaming alternative to YouTube? You can’t take your followers with you. And if a platform chooses to suspend or cancel your account, you have little recourse.

In hindsight, there’s no shortage of explanations for why Web 2.0 failed to deliver on its early promise. Network effects. The unforeseen power of big data. Corporate greed. None of these have gone away. So why should we expect anything new from Web3? For believers, the answer is simple: Blockchain is different.

Gavin Wood, an English computer scientist who helped program Ethereum, coined the term Web3 in 2014, the year Ethereum launched. (He first called it Web 3.0, but the decimal thing has since become passé.) In his view, Web 2.0’s fatal flaw was trust. Everyone had to trust the biggest platforms not to abuse their power as they grew. Few seemed to notice that Google’s famous early motto, “Don’t be evil,” implied that being evil was an option. To Wood, Web3 is about building systems that don’t rely on trusting people, corporations, or governments to make moral choices, but that instead render evil choices impossible. Blockchain is the crucial technology for making that happen. Brewster Kahle, the creator of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, has described this goal as “locking the web open.” Or, as Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund and a leading Web3 booster, puts it, “Can’t be evil > don’t be evil.”

A blockchain is a database that lives across a network of computers rather than on one server. No single person or organization owns it. Every computer, or node, stores a complete record of every transaction, so no one can control or destroy the network without first taking over a majority of the nodes. This makes it impossible for anyone to manipulate the database, say by giving themselves more tokens. Every change and transaction is logged on the chain, for all the world to see. There’s no central authority that must be trusted to enforce the rules.

So how exactly are blockchains supposed to lock the web open? Right now, platforms like Instagram and TikTok own the data that you generate while using them, store it on their servers, and make extracting it hard or impossible. In a Web3 world, the theory goes, your data would live on a blockchain, not a central server. Instead of platforms owning it, you would, controlling access to it via a private cryptographic key that only you possess. If you got tired of one service, you could take your data to another. And a platform couldn’t change the rules of the game by erecting walls around its data, because it would never have owned the data in the first place.

Innumerable Web3 startups are trying to apply this theory by creating blockchain-based alternatives to just about any platform you can name: Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Google Docs. The liberal billionaire Frank McCourt has pledged $25 million toward developing a protocol for putting your social graph—the interlocking map of relationships that you’ve built up over the years but that is probably owned by Facebook—on the blockchain. A company called Sapien purports to be building an entire Web3 metaverse.

Faith in blockchain infrastructure as a forcing mechanism for decentralization is Web3’s first tenet. There are other tenets—but we’ll get to those later. Because the infrastructure is making some ominous creaking noises already.

On day two of ETHDenver, the toilets broke. The plumbing at the Sports Castle wasn’t ready for so many people. Ethereum has a similar problem. Like the Sports Castle, it can’t handle the load of transactions going through its pipes.

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, operates on a system known as “proof of work.” Computers in the network “mine” new tokens by being the first to solve complex math problems and get paid a fluctuating “gas fee” for verifying transactions on the blockchain. The more demand on the network, the higher the gas fee. Ethereum has grown so popular that gas fees are often prohibitively high. During its wild surge late last year, they topped $55 per transaction. The math problems also require a ton of electricity. By one estimate, if the world’s countries were ranked by energy consumption, the combined nation of Bitcoin and Ethereum would slot in between Italy and the United Kingdom. While many Bitcoiners shrug at this, Web3 proponents are torn up at the thought of contributing to the climate crisis.

It seemed like every third person at ETHDenver was working on some kind of fix for these issues. Ethereum’s core developers have long been trying to execute a shift to “proof of stake,” a more eco-friendly (but possibly less secure) alternative to proof of work, that after years of delay is supposed to launch this year. There are also competing blockchains that don’t use proof of work and thus don’t incur the environmental costs or gas fees of Ethereum. Then there are “Layer 2” blockchains that do most of the work on their own network before logging the results on Ethereum in big batches to lower the cost per transaction.

Beyond the bandwidth problems, there was broad agreement among the ETHDenver crowd that the technology is far too difficult to use. Doing anything in Web3 is unbelievably confusing. I needed help just to redeem my crypto lunch tokens when I checked in at the hotel. If you want to get anything done and aren’t a programmer, you end up just clicking “OK” on a bunch of prompts that you don’t understand. This is a great way to get ripped off. During the conference, word got around that a phishing attack was hitting OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace. In the end, almost $2 million worth of NFTs would be stolen. So common are these episodes that the news hardly raised eyebrows.

Crypto’s user-unfriendliness puts tremendous pressure on the whole ecosystem to do the one thing it was designed not to do: centralize. In January, Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptographer and creator of the open source encrypted messaging app Signal, wrote an incisive takedown of Web3’s underlying premises on his personal blog. In it, Marlinspike argues that because most people crave convenience, centralized services always end up imposing themselves on top of decentralized technologies. In the early days of Web 1.0, some people thought “we’d all have our own web server with our own website, our own mail server for our own email,” he writes. “However—and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough—that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers.”

This pattern, Marlinspike points out, is already repeating itself in Web3. It’s quite cumbersome, if not impossible, for an app on your phone to interact directly with a blockchain. So almost all Web3 apps rely on one of two companies, Infura and Alchemy, to do that. Likewise the digital wallets that most people use to store their crypto assets. In other words, nearly every Web3 product relies on a middleman to say what’s happening on the blockchain. That’s a whole lot of trust for a system designed to make trust obsolete.

The situation is even more centralized than Marlinspike lets on, because one company, ConsenSys, owns both Infura and the most popular wallet, MetaMask. Yes, your data lives indelibly somewhere on the blockchain, but in practice, any Web3 app you might use probably relies on these centralized services to access it. As an illustration, Marlinspike writes that when a satirical NFT he created got pulled from OpenSea, it also stopped appearing in his MetaMask wallet, even though it still existed on the blockchain.

Marlinspike notes that Web3 defenders tend to reply to critiques by insisting, “It’s early days still.” It took exactly one day for Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, to prove his point. In a response to Marlinspike that he posted on Reddit, Buterin wrote that many of Marlinspike’s points “strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem, but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going.”

A small faction within the Web3 fold argues that blockchain is getting more attention than it deserves—a medium that has come to stand in the way of the true message, which is decentralization. “I would very strongly say, Web3 is not synonymous with blockchains,” says Jeromy Johnson, an engineer at Protocol Labs, a Web3 R&D organization. Johnson works on blockchain projects, but he also helped code the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer alternative to the hypertext transfer protocol (that “http://” bit at the front of every web address). Using IPFS prevents content from disappearing from the web just because a certain URL expires or changes. It’s a leading example of decentralized tech that isn’t blockchain.

“There’s a lot of things that people try to use blockchain for that you don’t actually need a blockchain for,” Johnson says. “People try to build social networks on blockchains, and they put every tweet, or whatever they call it, and every ‘like’ on the blockchain, and it’s like, What are you doing? That’s so dumb!”

Johnson worries that blockchain has become a fetish. But I came to Denver wondering whether the same could be said of decentralization itself, as Web3 people understood it. Because the biggest barriers to decentralizing power may not be technological at all.

Crypto’s user-unfriendliness keeps pushing the system to do the one thing it was designed not to do: centralize.

Centralization is a vague term. One of cryptocurrency’s original aims was to remove intermediaries—banks—from financial transactions. (Hence its appeal among a certain set of libertarians, criminals, and lately Russian oligarchs.) That’s one way to think about centralization: A bank sits at the center of a transaction between two or more entities. But centralization and decentralization can also be framed as a matter of choice: How many options do you have? Is there just one player in the market, or can you shop around? By that standard, the banking industry is pretty decentralized. There are thousands of banks operating in the US alone.

A decentralized technology does not guarantee a decentralized market. Take email. Email is a decentralized protocol. Anybody can, in theory, set up their own email server, but very few people do, as Marlinspike pointed out. Instead, people use email clients, and the market has centralized heavily around a handful of providers, especially Gmail. Even if you personally opt out of Gmail, the person on the other end of every second email you send probably uses it, meaning a copy of your email lives on Google’s servers whether you want it to or not.

Art by Andre Rucker

Centralization is one word for this; consolidation is a better one. Consolidation is a feature not of technology but of markets. There is a much older protocol for dealing with consolidated markets than Web3. It’s called antitrust law. But government policy does not really figure into the Web3 blueprint.

On the morning the toilets broke, I moderated a panel titled “Why Decentralization Matters.” At one point, one of the panelists, Nick Dodson, an engineer at Fuel Labs, observed that “traditional fintech”—personal finance apps that don’t use blockchains or crypto—is arguably more decentralized than Web3 “because, to be honest, there’s more companies doing things.”

Did you know, I asked, that the fintech sector owes much of its existence to a piece of federal legislation? The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis, has a section requiring US banks to let customers access their account data in a format that can be read by computer applications. You can thank that provision for the ability to sync up your data with personal finance apps like Betterment and Mint. On the back of this observation, I turned to one of the other panelists, Frankie Pangilinan, an accomplished blockchain programmer. Given the daunting technical challenges facing Web3, I asked, wouldn’t a simpler path to decentralization be for Congress to pass laws mandating data portability and interoperability? Wouldn’t that be easier than trying to iron out the kinks in all this complicated, unwieldy tech?

“Oh my God, what—could you just re-ask that question? I’m so sorry,” Pangilinan said, with the half-smile of someone unsure whether their leg is being pulled. I repeated myself. Wouldn’t a data portability law be easier than the whole Web3 thing?

“Government moves way slower than software does,” she said, with an incredulous laugh. “They’re an archaic system that we’re replacing, essentially.”

Pangilinan was channeling the dominant view within the Web3 movement. Her skepticism is understandable. The internet economy arose during a period of deregulation and historically lax antitrust enforcement. The US government, in particular, has yet to prove itself capable of passing a significant law regulating Silicon Valley or winning a major lawsuit against a platform giant. Congress is, objectively speaking, an archaic system.

And yet law, with all its faults, is still pretty much the most effective technology ever devised for preventing people and corporations from abusing their power—and forcing them to share it. Even within the tech sector, there’s a robust history of government intervention spurring innovation and user choice. Sometimes this comes through dramatic legal confrontations. In the 1950s, antitrust pressure from the federal government forced AT&T and its Bell Labs subsidiary to license out thousands of patents, including one for a little thing called the transistor. Other times, the role of government in decentralizing markets is practically invisible. It’s thanks to a little-known Federal Communications Commission regulation, for example, that Americans get to keep their cell phone numbers when they switch carriers.

But even members of the progressive Web3 community have essentially zero interest in directing their formidable resources toward influencing public policy. They tend to think, instead, as Pangilinan put it, that government is the problem being designed around: just another institution, like Google or Facebook, that demands our trust without earning it.

Later on, I chatted backstage with the third panelist, a former Ethereum core developer named Lane Rettig. He was frank about the shortcomings of crypto and Web3. But he strongly agreed with Pangilinan about the futility of government regulation. Rettig is working on a blockchain called Spacemesh. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which require tremendous computing power to mine, anyone can mine Spacemesh tokens using spare processing power on their laptop or smartphone, just by downloading an ordinary-looking app—meaning the network could be distributed among millions of participants, rather than the tens of thousands of people who run Bitcoin or Ethereum nodes.

That sounded interesting, so I pulled out my iPhone. Could I download it right then? No, Rettig said; unfortunately, Spacemesh wasn’t available on phones yet. The mobile app hadn’t been built, but even if it had, Apple blocks most crypto-related apps from its App Store. In a call-back to my “regulation is good” routine, I joked that the Open App Markets Act—a bill that has bipartisan momentum in Congress and would force Apple to permit downloading apps not offered in its App Store—would help with that.

Rettig’s eyes lit up. “That’s a bill?” he said excitedly. “That’s huge. I can see that having big implications.”

Art by Andre Rucker

It’s not quite right to say that crypto people are wholly uninterested in regulation. According to a recent report, the amount spent on crypto lobbying has quadrupled since 2018. But this effort isn’t aimed at using regulation to achieve the goals of decentralized markets or data portability. It’s mostly about blocking new regulations that might stop the gravy train, making sure the state stays out of crypto’s way.

That gravy train has a name: DeFi. Short for “decentralized finance,” DeFi is essentially a crypto betting market, with financial products that allow investors to gamble on cryptocurrencies via options, derivatives, and other avenues. A common one is “yield farming,” which in essence means lending out your crypto in exchange for interest payments. DeFi is big business. The ETHDenver conference may have been a pageant of high-minded ideals, but it was overwhelmingly underwritten by DeFi companies. At any given moment, almost all the most popular Ethereum apps are some form of DeFi platform or exchange. Unlike in traditional finance, these are largely unregulated. If someone steals your money, the bank doesn’t have to pay you back—because there is no bank. This is far from an idle concern. One analysis found that more than $10 billion was stolen from DeFi platforms in 2021 alone.

On my first night in Denver, I headed to a happy hour sponsored by Uma, which bills itself as “a fast, flexible, and secure way to create decentralized financial products.” The event was crawling with DeFi people, each of whom assured me that their product promised super-high yields with minimal risk. Arisa Toyosaki, a former investment banker, told me about the startup she was launching, called Cega. With Cega, she explained, crypto holders will be able to invest in exotic crypto derivatives and generate healthy returns. And, she assured me, it will be nearly impossible to lose money unless the market drops more than 50 percent.

How is this possible?

“I used to do this at investment banks,” Toyosaki said. The DeFi derivative market, she said, “exploded in the back half of 2021.” For the first time, there are enough crypto products to slice and dice into derivatives. To do that well, Toyosaki explained, you need a team of quants who can build advanced statistical models of markets. This was evidently meant to be reassuring. Just in case the parallels to the eve of the 2008 financial crisis were too subtle, my next stop was a performance by the Dutch DJ Tiësto that was hosted by Bacon Coin, a startup that offers mortgage-backed crypto tokens.

Even as DeFi dominated the sponsorships and party calendar, many of the Web3 true believers viewed it with disdain. The rows of tables where crypto companies pitched their wares was labeled the “Shill Zone” on the official conference map. As I was leaving a coffee shop one day, I overheard two guys sitting at a table outside. “I’m not into DeFi,” one said. “Oh,” said the other, “you’re not a Ponzinomics person?” Vitalik Buterin was at the next table, by the looks of it gamely letting someone shill their business to him. Even Buterin publicly worries about the cash grab taking place in the Ethereum universe he created. “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable,” he recently told Time. “And those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.”

But there’s a paradox. As much as Web3’s dreamers might shun the crypto casino, the fact remains that cryptocurrency—money—is the driving force of what they’re trying to build. This is where all the game theory comes in, along with the other, higher tenets of Web3. It’s also where the Web3 movement breaks with the economic innocence of past waves of internet utopianism.

In case the parallels to the eve of the 2008 financial crisis were too subtle, my next stop was a startup that offers mortgage-backed crypto tokens.

Back in the early days of Web 2.0, the open source movement—that era’s generation of idealists—was guided by a perhaps naive belief in the willingness of people to volunteer their energies and talents for the greater good. Linux die-hards believed software should be free, recoiling at the profit motive. The platforms born in this era played to that spirit, deploying lofty rhetoric about making the world a better, more open, more connected place—while, in the background, quietly setting up global surveillance operations to spy on their users for the benefit of advertisers.

“A lot of open-web, open source people always thought that money was dirty,” says Julien Genestoux, a veteran of the open source movement who created Unlock Protocol, which seeks to put memberships and subscriptions on the blockchain. “One of the things crypto has been doing is putting money front and center,” he says. “By doing this, it removes the ability of corporate actors to capture the value from everybody else without us knowing. By making it explicit, a thing we’re all staring at, we’re making it harder for the people who want to take it from everybody else.”

At the most basic level, Web3’s approach to financial incentives is an ingenious way of solving new technology’s adoption problem. Let’s say you make a new decentralized platform built on the blockchain, one that works so smoothly that people can use it without getting a PhD in cryptography. Users control their own data and everything is open source. The thing is, those ordinary users probably don’t care much about data ownership or immutable public ledgers. They care about convenience and fun and being where their friends are. So how do you get anyone to use your new Web3 app?

The answer is tokenomics. The business model of nearly every proposed Web3 platform entails distributing tokens to everyone involved, thus incentivizing them to use and improve the platform to make the value of those tokens go up. In Web3-speak, this is called “aligning the incentives.” The concept has its roots in Bitcoin, whose pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, devised a set of rules to prevent conflict between an individual’s self-interest and the interests of Bitcoin. Using game theory principles, Bitcoin could incentivize everyone to act for the collective good. Even if someone took control of enough of the network to be able to rewrite its history and inflate their account, they would have a powerful reason not to: Such treachery would kill confidence in Bitcoin and thus crater the value of their own holdings.

Many people see Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as pyramid schemes, since their value is a pure function of there being someone else who wants to buy in. But tokenomics can, at least theoretically, serve a useful purpose out in the real world. Take Presearch, a Web3 search engine. Presearch is distributed across a network of nodes that anyone can set up on their computer or a virtual private server. Your search term gets passed to one of the nodes, which queries a range of sources before returning a response. People who run nodes are rewarded in the form of PRE tokens, Presearch’s custom crypto coin. Users can also be rewarded with tiny micropayments of the token for performing searches. As the platform gets more popular, the tokens should become more valuable. That value has a real-world reference point: Advertisers have to buy tokens in order to appear above search results. Will this work? Perhaps not. But it’s not a Ponzi scheme.

Web3 apps promise not just to pay users but to give them a say in how the platforms are run. In the case of Presearch, for example, the PRE token will confer ownership and some kind of governance power over the platform. In theory, that distributed structure should prevent anyone from pushing Presearch in any shady or exploitative directions. “Why are we not going to end up like Google?” says Presearch’s founder, Colin Pape, referring to the search giant’s well documented privacy issues. “Because we have everyone aligned around this one value unit, and if we try to extract too much value from users, and they get pissed off, the value of the token goes down.”

That sounds plausible in the abstract, but it raises all sorts of practical questions. How do you keep someone from buying enough tokens to exert unilateral control? How do you know the crypto accounts holding tokens belong to separate human beings? If you do manage to keep things decentralized, how will you act quickly enough to compete with traditional businesses that don’t have to put every single decision to a vote?

The answers are all speculative, because none of that governance stuff actually exists yet. Pape admits that decentralized control remains an aspiration for Presearch. The reality is that the company, meaning Pape, controls the search engine, just like Alphabet controls Google. This is something of a theme in the Web3 world. Everyone has a white paper spelling out how their new platform will be governed by “the community” … eventually, ultimately, at some future point yet to be determined, once a whole bunch of other issues are sorted out and the platform gets big enough to remove the training wheels. Oh Lord, give me decentralized control, but not yet.

If the vision of collectively run mega-platforms sounds implausibly far out, the highest tenets of Web3 are somehow even more ambitious. Using blockchain technology and tokenomics to get people to buy into a set of decentralized apps? That’s just the beginning. For some Web3 luminaries, the real goal is to use cryptocurrencies to lock human beings into a more cooperative, less self-destructive society. I didn’t fully understand this until I met Kevin Owocki.

Art by Andre Rucker

Few people are trying harder to turn the idealism of Web3 into reality than Owocki. A resident of Boulder County, near Denver, Owocki is the founder of GitCoin, a platform for funding open source Web3 projects that has raised and distributed roughly $60 million so far. He was one of the most Colorado of the many Colorado guys on hand at ETHDenver, with long hair past his shoulders, a trim beard, and an athletic build. At one point, when I said I was thirsty, he pulled a can of kombucha out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

Owocki was something of a rock star at the conference. He is credited with coining the term BUIDL in 2017. Admirers approached him nonstop to talk, express their support, or ask for a copy of his book, GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate the World, which was the talk of the conference and quickly sold out of the 400 copies he had ordered. Owocki is about as far from a casino person as you’ll find in the crypto world. In one of several presentations he gave, Owocki told the crowd that since research shows money stops increasing happiness after about $100,000 in annual income, Web3 founders should maximize their happiness by giving their excess money to public goods that everyone gets to enjoy. “There’s cypherpunk, which is all about privacy, decentralization: hardcore libertarian shit,” he told me. “I’m more of a leftist. I’m more solarpunk, which is, how do we solve our contemporary problems around sustainability and equitable economic systems? It’s a different set of values.”

The internet, he explained, made it possible to move information between computers. This revolutionized communication. Blockchains have made it possible to move units of value between computers. Owocki believes this can be harnessed to revolutionize how human beings interact through something he calls “regenerative cryptoeconomics.” Cryptoeconomics, he writes in GreenPilled, “is the use of blockchain-based incentives to design new kinds of systems, applications, or networks.” Regenerative cryptoeconomics means doing this in a way that makes the world a better place for everyone. The goal is to break free from the zero-sum, rich-get-richer patterns of capitalism. Owocki believes that the right cryptoeconomic structure can help solve collective action problems like climate change, misinformation, and an underfunded digital infrastructure.

The key tool for achieving this is a decentralized autonomous organization. In theory, a DAO (yes, pronounced the same as the ancient Chinese word for the way of the universe) uses cryptocurrency to boost collective action. Typically, members join by buying some amount of a custom token issued by the DAO. That entitles them to an ownership stake in the DAO itself. Member-owners vote on what the DAO does—which is mostly to say, what it spends money on, since a blockchain-based entity can do little besides move funds from one address to another.

The young concept already has a checkered history. The first DAO, named simply “The DAO,” collapsed in 2016 after someone exploited a loophole in its code to siphon off what was then worth some $50 million in Ethereum currency. Similarly colorful failures have followed. DAOs were nonetheless all the rage at ETHDenver, where attendees waxed on about their world-changing potential. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s photogenic brother, spoke about his Big Green DAO, a food-related charity. Giving away money via a DAO, he insisted, got rid of all the painful bureaucracy of philanthropic nonprofits. “It’s way better,” he said, though he also granted that “there are many ways to fail, and this one could fail spectacularly.”

What is it about a DAO that—unlike, say, a Kickstarter page—frees humanity from the collective action problems that threaten to doom the species? According to Owocki, it’s the ability to write code in ways that tinker with incentive structures. (In this sense, the first DAO was arguably Bitcoin itself.) “Our weapon of choice is novel mechanism designs, based upon sound game theory, deployed to decentralized blockchain networks as transparent open source code,” he writes in GreenPilled. Indeed, the book has very little to say about technology, per se, and much more to say about various game theory concepts. These range from the sort of thing you’d learn in an undergrad econ class—“public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous”—to things that wouldn’t be out of place in a sci-fi novel: “community inclusion currencies,” “fractal DAO protocols,” “retroactive public goods funding.”

It’s hard enough for me to grasp how a DAO works. So while I’m in Denver, I create one.

One of the most powerful incentive design techniques, according to Owocki, is something called quadratic voting. Standing near the edge of the Shill Zone, Owocki turned around to show me the back of his purple baseball jacket, which said “Quadratic Lands.” The Quadratic Lands, Owocki explained, are a mythical place where the laws of economics have been redesigned to produce public goods. “It’s just a meme,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you it already exists.” (Everyone at ETHDenver was concerned, rightly, about my ability to separate metaphorical claims from literal ones.)

In a quadratic voting system, you get a budget to allocate among various options. Let’s say it’s dollars, though it could be any unit. The more dollars you allocate to a particular choice, the more your vote for it counts. But there’s an important caveat: Each marginal dollar you pledge to the same choice is worth less than the previous one. (Technically, the “cost” of your vote rises quadratically, rather than linearly.) This makes it harder for the richest people in a group to dominate the vote. GitCoin uses an adaptation, quadratic funding, to award money to Web3 projects. The number of people who contribute to a given project counts more than the amount they contribute. This rewards ideas supported by the most people rather than the wealthiest: regenerative cryptonomics in action.

Glen Weyl, the polymathic Microsoft researcher who came up with quadratic voting, is far more cautious than Owocki about its applicability to blockchain. In a foreword to Owocki’s book, he writes, “I am deeply ambivalent about Web3.” He has positioned himself as a sort of insider critic of the movement, one who supports its broad goals of decentralization and digital public goods but questions its faith in the potential of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in their current state.

Weyl walked me through the weaknesses of using quadratic voting in a DAO. A major problem is Sybil attacks, in which one person creates a thousand “sock puppet” accounts and uses them to take over the voting. Even if you come up with a solution to the proof-of-identity problem so that it’s hard to make duplicate accounts, someone could just get people in the analog world to create accounts on their behalf. Imagine, Weyl said, if the Chinese government wanted to take over a DAO. All it would have to do is instruct its citizens to join and hand over control of their wallets.

Owocki believes he and his co-revolutionaries can sort out these problems. He asked if I’d heard of the Matthew Effect, which, he explained, is how economists refer to the fact that the rich tend to get richer. “It’s a fundamental law of economics,” he said, but that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. Conquering laws of nature is what technology is for. “An airplane upends gravity; what if you can build an economic system that upends the Matthew Effect? Dude, quadratic voting is it.”

All of this is getting a little heady for me. Never mind the furthest reaches of Owocki’s theory; it’s hard enough for me to grasp how a DAO is supposed to work. So while I’m in Denver, I decide to create one.

My friend Jacksón Smith works for a nonprofit called Learning Economy Foundation that researches the use of blockchain in education. He’s at the conference and agrees to help me create the DAO. We settle on an admittedly low-stakes idea: Our DAO will try to win The New Yorker magazine’s weekly cartoon caption contest, in which readers compete to supply the wittiest punch line to a captionless cartoon. Each week, the DAO members will vote on each other’s submissions and submit the internal winner to the actual contest. We call it lmaoDAO.

I put in serious hours on the DAO over the weekend, but not as many as Jacksón and a couple of his coworkers, who actually know how to program and generously volunteer time to build it, and whom I half-jokingly start referring to as “my core devs.” I should say, to BUIDL it. We’re BUIDLers, officially hacking together a Web3 application in the spirit of ETHDenver. I am somewhat surprised to find that, when I explain what I’m doing, people at the conference are unfailingly supportive. I thought they might take exception to a journalist creating a DAO as a stunt, an act of mild trolling, but the general sense is that we’ve come up with a clever idea.

Web3 is a realm where coders can feel good again about working in tech.

Two things become very clear as we create the DAO. First, a DAO is nothing more than a group whose membership requires owning a crypto token—in our case, a custom LMAO coin that we mint out of thin air. Like most DAOs, ours is organized on Discord, a Web 2.0 application. Our DAO isn’t really decentralized; we control the Discord, Jacksón controls the voting website, and I manually submit the captions to NewYorker.com. We've committed in principle to building out decentralized governance, but who knows when that will happen. In the meantime, everyone else has to trust that we’re doing what we say we are.

The second thing that becomes clear is that BUIDLing is really fun. Setting up a DAO is a bit like designing a video game. You have to create incentives and rules that will keep people playing and can’t be easily exploited. In fact, it feels like a game within a game, because Web3 itself is not unlike an immersive RPG—an alternate reality with its own rules, customs, and language. Play for long enough and you stop having to check the instructions. All kinds of esoteric jargon starts making sense. Switch your wallet from the Ethereum mainnet to the Gnosis chain to claim your LMAO tokens. Sync your tokens with the collab.land Discord bot to prove you’re a member and get access to the locked Discord channels.

The real fun of BUIDLing lies in the problem-solving. How will we get people to join, for example? Nathan, one of my devs, comes up with an idea: He can scrape every crypto wallet that holds either a Bufficorn NFT or ETHDenver meal tokens, and use that as a proxy for people who attended the conference. Then we can “airdrop” our custom token to everyone on that list. Most intoxicatingly, this all takes place in a relatively closed system. Very few of these decisions require us to think much about the messy world outside the confines of our DAO. It all helps me understand the draw of Web3. The sense of moral valor that once accompanied working in Web 2.0 is harder to find these days. Whatever else Web3 is, it’s a realm where coders and technologists can reconnect with the joy of hacking, where they can feel good again about working in tech. Jacksón, who in fact builds elaborate board games as a hobby, tells me that escapism is part of Web3’s appeal. The question is whether the escape hatch leads to a real place or a fantasyland.

As those pizza crusts and empty snack bags pile up, I realize that it’s Saturday evening, and dinnertime is approaching. There’s a rumor that Snoop Dogg, who recently announced his intention to turn Death Row Records into an NFT music label, is throwing a party somewhere. But I have plans to meet up with my childhood friend Dave, who lives in Denver.

As Dave and I catch up over tacos and margaritas, I feel slightly crazed, struggling to explain what I’ve been up to: Web3, cryptoeconomics, BUIDLing a DAO. I’m a bit like Dorothy returned from Oz. Gradually, talk drifts to normal stuff: his family, my job, a trip we’ve been planning. That night, I sleep in Dave’s basement, and on Sunday morning I’m woken early by the patter of his 2-year-old daughter’s feet. The guys at the conference seem to really believe they’re building a better world for her, but in the morning light it’s hard to take seriously the idea that her future depends on precisely calibrating a bunch of incentives in a blockchain membership organization. It all feels like a game that I’ve unplugged from.

Then my phone buzzes. My services are needed before the DAO can officially launch. Without thinking much of it, I plug myself back in.

Source images: CGTrader and Shutterstock

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise

The Chinese company has become a fast-fashion juggernaut by appealing to budget-conscious Gen Zers. But its ultralow prices are hiding unacceptable costs.

Vauhini Vara  May 04, 2022 10:10 AM

Photograph: Meiko Takechi Arquillos; Prop Styling: Amy Taylor

Last fall, in the stagnation of pandemic life, I became fascinated with videos of influencers standing in their bedrooms and trying on clothes from a company called Shein.

In the TikToks, hashtagged #sheinhaul, a young woman would hold up a big plastic bag and rip into it, releasing a cascade of smaller plastic bags, each containing a neatly folded item of clothing. The shot would then cut to the woman wearing one piece at a time, rapid-fire, interspersed with screenshots from Shein’s app showing the prices: an $8 dress, a $12 swimsuit.

Down this rabbit hole were variations on the theme: #sheinkids, #sheincats, #sheincosplay. The videos invited the viewer to marvel at a surreal collision of low cost and abundance. The comments, in keeping with the mood, were performatively supportive (“BOD GOALS”). At some point, someone would question whether such cheap clothing could possibly be ethical, but a chorus of voices would leap in to defend Shein and the influencer with equal zeal (“There so cute tho.” “It her money, leave her alone.”) and the original commenter would go silent.

What made this more than random internet arcana is that Shein has stealthily become an enormous business. “Shein emerged very quickly,” says Sheng Lu, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the global textile and apparel industry. “Two years ago, three years ago, nobody had ever heard of them.” Earlier this year, the investment firm Piper Sandler surveyed 7,000 American teens about their favorite ecommerce sites and found that while Amazon was the clear winner, Shein came in second. The company claims the largest slice—28 percent—of the US fast-fashion market.

In April, Shein reportedly raised $1 billion to $2 billion in private funding. The company was valued at $100 billion—higher than the combined worth of fast-fashion titans H&M and Zara, and higher than that of any private company in the world besides SpaceX and Byte-Dance, the owner of TikTok.

Shein’s success at attracting this kind of capital startled me, given that the fast-fashion business is among the most harmful industries in the world. Its dependence on synthetic textiles damages the environment, and, by encouraging people to refresh their wardrobes nonstop, it produces tremendous waste; the volume of textiles in US landfills has nearly doubled over the past two decades. Meanwhile, the workers stitching the clothes are paid little to labor in exhausting, sometimes dangerous conditions. In recent years, many of the largest fashion companies have felt pressure to make small moves toward reform. Now, though, an emerging generation of “ultrafast-fashion” companies has come along, and many are doing little, if anything, to adopt better practices. Among them, Shein is by far the biggest.

One evening in November, while my husband put our 6-year-old to bed, I settled onto the living room couch and opened the Shein app. “THIS IS BIG,” read a banner across the screen advertising a Black Friday sale, the words flashing for emphasis. I tapped on an icon of a dress, sorted all the listings by price, and, curious about the quality, selected the cheapest item. It was a skin-tight, long-sleeved red dress made of sheer mesh ($2.50). In the sweatshirt section, I added a cute color-block pullover ($4.50) to my cart.

Each time I chose an item, of course, the app showed me similar styles: Mesh body-con begat mesh body-con; color-block comfort wear begat color-block comfort wear. I scrolled and scrolled. When the room darkened, I couldn’t bring myself to stand and turn on a light. The situation felt vaguely shameful. My husband, coming through the living room after our son had gone to sleep, asked, with a tone of faint concern, what I was doing. “Nothing!” I cried. He turned on the light. I selected a cotton puff-sleeve T-shirt from the site’s premium collection ($12.99). After the Black Friday discount, the total came to $80.16 for 14 items.

I’d been tempted to keep buying partly because the app encouraged it, but mostly because there was so much to choose from and it was all so cheap. I was in high school when the first generation of fast-fashion companies trained shoppers to expect a passably cute top to cost no more than a night of takeout. Now, more than 20 years later, Shein was undercutting a deli sandwich.

Here’s some of what’s known about Shein: It’s a Chinese-born company with nearly 10,000 employees and offices in China, Singapore, and the US. Most of its suppliers are located in Guangzhou, the Pearl River port city about 80 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

Beyond that, the company has shared surprisingly little information with the public. Being privately held, it doesn’t disclose financial information. Its CEO and founder, Chris Xu, declined to be interviewed for this article.

As I began looking into Shein, it seemed almost as if the brand existed in some liminal space occupied by people in their teens and twenties and no one else. In an earnings call last year, a financial analyst asked executives at the fashion brand Revolve about competition from Shein. Mike Karanikolas, a co-CEO, responded, “You’re talking about the Chinese company, right? I’m not sure how to pronounce it—s-h-e-i-n.” (It’s SHE-in.) He dismissed the threat. One federal trade regulator told me he had never heard of the brand, and then, that evening, emailed: “Postscript—not only did my 13-year-old daughter know the company (Shein) but was wearing a pair of their corduroys tonight.” It occurred to me that if I wanted to understand Shein, I should start with the people who seemed to know it best: its teenage influencers.

0ne bright afternoon last December, a 16-year-old named Makenna Kelly greeted me at the door of her house in a quiet suburban neighborhood of Fort Collins, Colorado. Kelly, a redhead with the vibe of a glamorous Cabbage Patch Kid, is famous for ASMR content: tapping on boxes, tracing words in the snow outside her house. On Instagram, she has 340,000 followers; on YouTube, she has 1.6 million. A couple of years ago, she started filming hauls for a Shein-owned brand called Romwe; she posts a new one about once a month. In a video I first watched last fall, she twirls around in her backyard, in front of a tree with golden leaves, wearing a $9 cropped argyle sweater. The camera is trained on her midriff, while, in voice-over, her tongue makes juicy sounds. People have watched it more than 40,000 times; the argyle sweater is sold out.

I had come to watch Kelly film a haul. She skipped off to the living room to dance around—a warm-up—then led me upstairs to the carpeted second-floor landing where she does her shoots. There was a Christmas tree, a cat tower, and, in the middle of the landing, an iPad mounted on a tripod and haloed with a ring light. On the ground lay a mound of shirts, skirts, and dresses from Romwe.

Kelly’s mother, Nichole Lacy, scooped up the clothes and headed to the bathroom to steam them. “Hello, Alexa, play Christmas music,” Kelly said. She joined her mother in the bathroom, then, over the next half-hour, emerged wearing one new outfit after another—heart-patterned cardigan, star-print skirt—and silently modeled in front of the iPad camera, making kissing faces, kicking a leg up, fingering a hem here or a tie there. At one point, the family’s sphynx, Gwen, sauntered into the frame, and they cuddled; later, the other cat, Agatha, made an appearance.

For years, Shein’s public face has taken the form of people like Kelly, who make up a federation of influencers filming hauls for the company. According to Nick Baklanov, a marketing and research specialist at a company called HypeAuditor, Shein is unusual in the industry for the enormous number of influencers it sends free clothing to. They in turn share discount codes with their followers and earn a commission on the sales. This strategy, HypeAuditor says, has made it the most talked-about brand of any kind on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Along with the free clothes, Romwe also pays Kelly a flat rate for her posts. She wouldn’t name her fee, though she said she makes more in a couple hours of video work than some of her friends with normal after-school jobs make in a week. In exchange, the brand gets relatively low-cost marketing, in the places where its target audience, teens and twentysomethings, prefers to hang out. While Shein has collaborated with major celebrities and influencers (Katy Perry, Lil Nas X, Addison Rae), its sweet spot seems to be the ones with medium-size followings.

In the 1990s, before Kelly was born, Zara popularized a model of borrowing design ideas from whatever was getting attention on runways. By manufacturing clothing near its headquarters in Spain and streamlining the supply chain, it offered up these already proven styles in a matter of weeks at prices that felt shockingly low. Connie Chan, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz who invested in a Shein competitor called Cider, told me that Shein represents a newer phase of fast fashion: Now, what appears on runways and in fashion magazines matters less, and people look to one another for what to wear. “They don’t care that Vogue doesn’t think it’s a cool piece,” she said. Boohoo, a UK-based company, and Fashion Nova, based in the US, are part of the same trend.

After Kelly finished filming, Lacy asked me how much I thought all the pieces—21 of them, plus a decorative snow globe—cost on Romwe’s website. They looked better than what I had bought by intentionally clicking on the cheapest items, so I guessed $500, at least. Lacy, who is around my age, smiled. “It was $170,” she said, widening her eyes as if she couldn’t believe it herself.

Every single day, Shein updates its website with, on average, 6,000 new styles—an outrageous figure even in the context of fast fashion.

By the mid-2000s, fast fashion was the dominant paradigm in retail. China had joined the World Trade Organization and had quickly become a major clothing production center, and Western companies moved much of their manufacturing there. It was around that time, in 2008, that the name of Shein’s CEO first appeared in Chinese business filings, as Xu Yangtian. He was listed as a co-owner of a newly registered company, Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology, along with two others, Wang Xiaohu and Li Peng. The filing shows Xu and Wang each owning 45 percent of the business and Li having the remaining 10 percent.

Wang and Li shared their recollections from that time. Wang said that he had met Xu as a work colleague, and in 2008, they decided to start a marketing and cross-border ecommerce business together. Wang took on business development and some aspects of the finances, he said, while Xu was in charge of a range of more technical matters, including SEO marketing.

That same year, Li gave a talk about online marketing at a forum in Nanjing. Xu—a slender young man, with an oblong face—introduced himself and said he was looking for business advice. “He was a novice,” Li said. But Xu seemed tenacious and diligent, so Li agreed to help.

Xu invited Li to join him and Wang as a part-time consultant. The three of them rented a little office in a modest low-rise building, with a big table and a handful of desks—no more than a dozen people could fit inside—and their company was incorporated in Nanjing in October. At first, they tried selling all kinds of things, including teapots and mobile phones. Wang and Li said the company later added clothing. If foreign companies could hire Chinese suppliers to make clothes for customers abroad, certainly a Chinese-run company could do the same more successfully. (A spokesperson for Shein disputed this account, writing that Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology was “not involved in the sale of clothing products.”)

According to Li, they began sending buyers to a wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou to purchase individual samples of clothing from various vendors. Then they listed those products online, using all kinds of different domain names, and published basic English-language posts on blogging platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr to improve SEO; only when an item began selling did they place a small bulk order with a given wholesaler.

Photograph: Meiko Takechi Arquillos; Prop Styling: Amy Taylor

As sales rose, Li said, they began studying online trends to predict which new styles might become popular and placing orders in advance. They also used a site called Lookbook.nu to find small-time influencers in the US and Europe and started sending them free clothing.

All this time, Xu worked long hours, often staying at the office well after the others had gone home. “He strongly wished to succeed,” Li said. “It would be 10 pm, and he would be nagging me and buying me late-night street food and asking more. And then it could end at 1 or 2 am.” Li gave Xu advice over beer and meals—boiled and salted duck, vermicelli soup—observing that Xu listened carefully and learned fast. Xu didn’t speak much about his personal life, but he told Li he’d grown up poor, in Shandong province, and was still struggling.

Li remembers that early on, the average order size they received was small, around $14, but that they sold 100 to 200 items a day; on a good day, they might surpass 1,000 items. The clothing was cheap, and that was the point. “We were going for low margins and large quantities,” Li told me. Plus, he added, the low prices kept expectations about the quality down. The company grew to around 20 employees, all of whom were paid decently well. Xu fattened up and expanded his wardrobe.

One day, after they had been in business for more than a year, Wang showed up at the office and found Xu missing. He noticed that some company passwords had been changed, and he became concerned. As Wang describes it, he called and texted Xu and got no response, then went in search of Xu at his home and at the train station. Xu was gone. Worse, he had control of the PayPal accounts the company used to receive international payments. Wang informed Li, then eventually paid the company’s remaining expenses and dismissed the employees. Later, they learned that Xu had defected and continued in ecommerce without them. (The spokesperson wrote that Xu was “not in charge of the company’s financial account” and that Xu and Wang “separated peacefully.”)

In March 2011, the website that would become Shein—SheInside.com—was registered. The site called itself “a leading worldwide wedding dresses company,” though it sold a range of women’s clothing. By the end of that year, it described itself as a “super international retailer” bringing “the latest street fashions from the high-streets of London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai & New York quickly to the shop floor.”

In September 2012, Xu registered a company with a slightly different name from the one he had founded with Wang and Li—Nanjing Dianshang Information Technology—in which he held a 70 percent stake and a partner held 30 percent. Neither Wang nor Li were ever in touch with Xu again—which, as far as Li is concerned, is for the best. “When you are dealing with someone with bad morals, you can’t tell when he’s going to hurt you, right?” Li said. “If I can stay clear from him early on, at least he’s not able to hurt me later.”

In 2013, Xu’s company raised its first round of venture capital funding, a reported $5 million from Jafco Asia, according to CB Insights. In a press release from that time, the company, calling itself SheInside, describes itself as having been “launched as a website in 2008”—the same year Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology was founded. (Many years later, it would start using a founding year of 2012 instead.)

In 2015, the company scored another $47 million investment. It changed its name to Shein and moved its headquarters from Nanjing to Guangzhou, to be near its supplier base. It quietly opened a US headquarters in an industrial part of Los Angeles County. It also acquired Romwe—a brand that, as it happens, Li had started with a girlfriend years earlier but had left before the acquisition. In 2019, Coresight Research estimated, Shein brought in $4 billion in sales.

In 2020, the pandemic gutted the apparel industry. Shein’s sales, though, kept growing, to an estimated $10 billion in 2020 and $15.7 billion in 2021. (It’s not clear whether the company is profitable.) If some god had decided to invent a clothing brand tailored to the pandemic era, in which all of public life contracted into the rectangular space of a computer or phone screen, it might look a lot like Shein.

I had been reporting on Shein for several months when the company agreed to let me interview a few of its executives, including George Chiao, the US president; Molly Miao, the chief marketing officer; and Adam Whinston, the director of environmental, social, and governance. They described to me a model that’s fundamentally different from how traditional retailers operate. A typical fashion brand might design a few hundred styles a month in-house and ask its manufacturers to make thousands of pieces for each style. Those pieces go on sale both online and in brick-and-mortar stores.

Shein, in contrast, works largely with outside designers. Most of its independent suppliers both design and produce clothing. If Shein likes a design, it places a small order, 100 to 200 pieces, and the clothing gets the Shein tag. To get from concept to production takes as little as two weeks.

The finished clothing is sent to Shein’s huge distribution centers, where it gets sorted into packages for customers, and those packages are shipped directly to people’s doorsteps in the US and more than 150 other countries—as opposed to first sending huge amounts of clothing all over the world on shipping containers, as retailers have traditionally done. Many of the company’s decisions are made with the help of its custom software, which quickly identifies which pieces are popular and automatically reorders those; for styles with disappointing sales, the software halts production.

Shein’s online-only model means that, unlike its largest fast-fashion competitors, it can avoid the expense of operating and staffing physical stores, including dealing with racks full of unsold clothing at the end of each season. Its reliance on suppliers for design, aided by software, makes the work faster and more efficient. The outcome is an endlessly flowing stream of clothing. Every single day, Shein updates its website with, on average, 6,000 new styles—an outrageous figure even in the context of fast fashion. Lu, the University of Delaware professor, found that in a recent 12-month period, the Gap listed roughly 12,000 different items on its website, H&M had about 25,000, and Zara had some 35,000. Shein, in that period, had 1.3 million. “We offer something for everyone at very affordable prices,” Chiao told me. “Whatever customers need, they’ll be able to find it on Shein.”

Shein isn’t the only company that makes small initial orders with suppliers, then re-ups when products do well. Boohoo helped pioneer that model. But Shein has an advantage over Western competitors; while many brands, including Boohoo, use suppliers in China, Shein’s own geographical and cultural proximity allows it to be extra nimble. “It’s very difficult to build this kind of company and almost impossible for a team that’s not based in China to do this,” Chan, from Andreessen Horowitz, said.

Simon Irwin, a Credit Suisse analyst, has spent time puzzling out Shein’s low prices. “I cover some of the most efficient sourcing companies in the world, companies that source on a vast scale, have 20 years of experience, have incredibly efficient logistics systems,” Irwin told me. “Most of them admit that they couldn’t get product to market at the same price as Shein.”

Irwin is skeptical, though, that Shein’s prices are kept low entirely, or even mostly, by efficient sourcing. Instead, he points to how Shein cleverly takes advantage of the international trade system. Under an international agreement, it often costs less to ship small packages from China to the US than from other countries, or even from within the US itself. Also, China hasn’t taxed exports by Chinese direct-to-consumer companies since 2018, and US import tariffs don’t apply to shipments worth less than $800. Other countries, Irwin said, have similar provisions allowing Shein to avoid import taxes. (The spokesperson for Shein said it “complies with tax laws in the regions where it operates and is subject to the same tax regulations as industry peers.”)

Irwin made another point, too: Many retailers in the US and Europe are spending more, he said, to comply with regulations and norms governing labor and environmental policies. Shein, he added, appears to be doing far less.

During a cool week in February, just after the Lunar New Year, I asked a colleague to visit the district of Panyu in Guangzhou, where Shein has operations. Shein had declined my request to speak with suppliers, so my colleague had come to see their working conditions firsthand. A modern white building with Shein’s name painted boldly along one wall stood in an otherwise quiet residential village, amid schools and apartments. During the lunch hour, restaurants filled with workers wearing Shein badges. Around the building, bulletin boards and utility poles were densely packed with ads for jobs at garment factories.

In a nearby neighborhood—a dense warren of small, informal factories, some housed in what seemed like repurposed residential buildings—bags printed with Shein’s name could be seen stacked on shelves or lined up on tables. Some facilities were clean and uncluttered. In one, women worked quietly at sewing machines, wearing sweatshirts and surgical masks. On a wall, Shein’s code of conduct for suppliers was prominently plastered. (“Employees must be over 16 years old.” “Pay salary on time.” “No harassment or abuse of employees.”) In another building, though, bags stuffed with garments were piled on the floor, requiring complicated footwork for anyone trying to get through.

Photograph: MEIKO TAKECHI ARQUILLOS; Prop Styling: Amy Taylor

Last year, researchers visiting Panyu on behalf of a Swiss watchdog group called Public Eye also found large bags of clothing blocking corridors and exits in some buildings, an apparent fire hazard. Three workers interviewed by the researchers said they typically arrived at 8 am and left around 10 or 10:30 pm, with breaks of around 90 minutes for lunch and dinner. They worked seven days a week, with one day off per month—a schedule that is prohibited under Chinese law. Whinston, the director of environmental, social, and governance, told me that after learning of the Public Eye report, Shein “took it upon ourselves to investigate.”

The company recently earned a score of zero out of 150 points on a rubric maintained by Remake, a nonprofit advocating for better labor and environmental practices. The score partly reflects Shein’s environmental record: The company sells an enormous volume of disposable clothing, and it discloses so little about its production that it’s impossible to even begin to gauge its environmental footprint. “We still don’t have any real insight into their supply chain. We don’t know how much product they make, we don’t know how much material they’re using in aggregate, we don’t know their carbon emissions,” Elizabeth L. Cline, Remake’s advocacy and policy director, told me. (Shein did not respond to questions about the Remake report.)

Earlier this year, Shein published its own sustainability and social impact report, in which it committed to using more sustainable textiles and disclosing its greenhouse gas emissions. An audit the company conducted of its suppliers, though, discovered big safety problems: Of nearly 700 suppliers audited, 83 percent were operating with “major risks.” Most violations were of “fire and emergency preparedness” and “working hours,” but some were considerably more serious: 12 percent of suppliers had committed “zero tolerance violations,” which could include underage labor, forced labor, or severe health and safety issues. I asked the spokesperson what those violations were, but she didn’t elaborate.

Shein’s report states that the company will provide training to suppliers that commit serious violations. If a supplier fails to fix issues within an agreed-upon time—immediately, in severe cases—Shein might stop working with them. Whinston told me, “There’s more to do—just as any business needs to improve and grow over time.”

Labor rights advocates say that focusing on suppliers can be a superficial response that fails to address why dangerous conditions exist in the first place. Fast-fashion companies bear ultimate responsibility for pushing manufacturers to produce ever more quickly at cut-rate prices, they argue, a demand that makes poor labor conditions and environmental damage all but inevitable. This isn’t unique to Shein, but Shein’s success makes it especially notable.

Cline told me that when companies such as Shein brag about how efficient they are, her thoughts leap to the people, often women, whose bodies and minds wear out so that the company can maximize revenue and minimize costs. “They’re the ones who have to be flexible and work all night so the rest of us can press a button and have a dress delivered to our door for $10,” she said.

One former supplier, Liu Zhiyong, said he appreciated Shein’s prompt payment, within 30 days, as opposed to an industry norm of 45 days or more. But he stopped producing for the brand last year, partly because employees struggled to learn so many new designs and turn them around so quickly.

Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, also worries that Shein’s reliance on Chinese suppliers may mean that its clothing contains textiles sourced from Xinjiang. (The region, known for widespread use of forced labor by the oppressed Uyghur population, is the source of more than 80 percent of China’s cotton.) In December, President Biden signed a law barring the import of products made in Xinjiang; it goes into effect in June. But since Shein’s packages are generally sent by mail, rather than on shipping containers that are scrutinized more thoroughly by US Customs, the law may be difficult to enforce. “We should know where Shein products are coming from in the same way that we know where Zara products are coming from,” a congressional aide told me. (They asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record.)

While many countries, including the US, have denounced the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, the Chinese government denies a problem exists, and Chinese shoppers have boycotted businesses that have suggested otherwise. When I asked Whinston if Shein’s suppliers use textiles from Xinjiang, his answer was vague: “We have a program in place to identify the origin of cotton, we do transparency exercises, we talk with our suppliers, and we make sure that all of the product that we’re sourcing and buying is compliant with the market that that product is going into.” When he paused, Shein’s spokesperson, who was on the line, interjected: “We’re not going to say anything else on that, given the politics of it.”

In December, a bulging white bag, like a pillowcase made of plastic, arrived at my doorstep. It was my Black Friday order. I tore into it in anticipation, but of the 14 items, none looked as good in reality as they had onscreen. The $2.50 mesh dress could be balled up and stuffed in a pocket; the $4.50 color-block pullover had the texture of a panty liner, thin and spongy. The $12.99 premium T-shirt was made of richer material, a firm cotton, though it didn’t fit quite right. The return address, on the bag in which the order had come, was in California.

Shein’s US base is in Los Angeles; the company also recently opened an Indianapolis-area distribution center and an office near Washington, DC. Its growing US presence comes at a time when Shein is already attracting the attention of regulators. In January, Congress introduced the Import Security and Fairness Act, which, if signed into law, would eliminate the tax exemption for packages from China worth less than $800. It would also require Customs and Border Protection to collect more information on those kinds of shipments. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon congressman who introduced the bill, told me that Shein is an especially large beneficiary of the tax exemption and expressed concerns about the business as a whole. “They’ve got it set up at an industrial scale, to take advantage of modern technology and the cheapest possible manufacturing operations, and there’s no guarantee that they’re following the rules,” he said.

Photograph: Meiko Takechi Arquillos; Prop Styling: Amy Taylor

Then, in March, the European Commission introduced a proposal meant to address fast fashion’s environmental harm. It included setting standards for how durable and reusable clothes must be and requiring companies to include information about sustainability on labels.

Pressure is coming from inside Shein’s workforce too. In interviews or lawsuits, several US employees described an unpleasant, disorganized work environment where complaints went unaddressed. A former US Shein employee with years of experience in her field told me, “I worked at Shein because I needed a job, and it was remote and easy as heck.” She was surprised, though, to see Shein cutting corners in the design and safety of its products. She noticed that offensive items, such as a swastika necklace and a Muslim prayer mat sold as a decorative rug, were removed only after customers complained.

She also saw children’s clothing that seemed not to meet safety standards set by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. In July 2021, following testing, the commission announced a recall for thousands of Shein-branded children’s sleepwear sets that violated the federal flammability standard, leaving children exposed to potential burn injuries. In December, a Canadian health agency recalled a Shein children’s jacket after a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation found that it contained dangerous amounts of lead. When she raised concerns, the former employee said, her supervisors didn’t respond. Disillusioned, she eventually left.

On social media, stories have circulated about outright design theft. Leah Flores, a photographer and artist in Portland, discovered last year that Shein had copied a photo of hers—foamy waves crashing into sand, the sky pinkish-orange behind it—and was selling it on a tapestry for $10. As she scrolled deeper on Shein’s website, she found seven additional works belonging to her. Flores sued Shein and, last June, obtained a $40,000 settlement. Then, a couple of days after receiving her first settlement check, she found four more of her images on Shein and Romwe. “My lawyers were like, ‘I can’t believe this,’” she said. Again, she took action against the company; again, they settled, this time for an amount she would only describe as “substantial.” (Shein did not respond to a request for comment.)

In far more cases, though, small designers seem to be simply taken advantage of. Last spring, a 26-year-old musician named Katie Bailey found a strangely familiar image on Shein’s website: a T-shirt she had commissioned from an illustrator to promote her band, Southbound 17. The page had dozens of reviews from people who for months had been buying the T-shirt, listed at $9. But Southbound 17 hadn’t even started selling the shirt yet.

After Bailey posted about her experience on social media, she got an Instagram message from Shein: “Hello,” it began. “Please allow us to apologize for what happened.” The message explained that the “unlicensed items” had been sent to Shein by a supplier who promised there were “no copyright issues.” While no further explanation was offered, Bailey suspected that someone working for the supplier had pulled the design from the Instagram feed of the illustrator she had hired to create it. In her exchange with Shein, the company representative wrote that the T-shirt had been removed from its site, and that it wouldn’t work with the supplier anymore. They promised to review designs more thoroughly in the future. But a month later the T-shirt resurfaced, with slight edits, on Romwe. Exhausted, Bailey dropped the issue; the T-shirt sold out. By then, her initial TikTok about the ordeal had been viewed more than 300,000 times.

Shein’s growth is not unstoppable. Irwin, of Credit Suisse, published a research note in February arguing that it is “highly likely” that in the future US lawmakers will try to rein in fast-fashion companies—and that Shein in particular will struggle to comply.

Shein’s executives seem to be bracing themselves for scrutiny. Since last fall, the company has posted numerous job listings for positions concerning regulatory and legal matters: director of sustainability, senior product safety and labeling counsel, senior privacy counsel, marketing counsel, intellectual property counsel.

In an October guidance document about copyright violation that I reviewed, the company’s legal team wrote, “There have been many IP infringement complaints recently, leading to millions of dollars of damages and attorneys’ fees being paid and negative news articles and social media posts about the company.” It goes on, “Copyright infringement is a straight liability offense, meaning ‘We did not know’ is not a defense.”

The document suggests that Shein’s reliance on suppliers for fast, cheap designs—which the company publicly describes as a competitive advantage—might be a problem. “It appears that our suppliers are searching the internet, including Instagram and Etsy, and copying other people’s works, then selling them to us.” The legal and PR costs fall on Shein, they write, hurting its reputation. While urging its buyers not to purchase non-original, unlicensed designs from suppliers, the document also warns Shein’s own designers who find original works on the internet to modify the work enough so as to make it “no longer recognizable.” Chiao told me Shein now has a team of more than 100 employees reviewing products before they’re added to the site, and uses image-recognition technology to make the process more accurate.

On his LinkedIn page, Whinston recently posted the listing for a director of sustainability at Shein. Someone asked, in a comment, how an ultrafast-fashion business like Shein can be sustainable. Whinston didn’t respond, though he told me later he believes it’s possible. (In April, Shein announced a line using “responsibly sourced materials” called evoluSHEIN.) But people who follow the industry say that if Shein improved its labor and environmental practices, its costs would inevitably increase, a price the company might be reluctant to bear.

In any case, even if Shein does make changes, another startup may well come along to take its place. Other companies based in China are following a similar business playbook. Last year, Alibaba, the giant Chinese ecommerce company, launched a low-cost shopping site for the European market called AllyLikes.

So far, though, Shein dominates. Rui Ma, an analyst specializing in Chinese tech companies, told me she envisions Shein becoming even bigger by moving beyond fashion: “We’ve been comparing it to Zara, but it could become like an Amazon.” When I ran this comparison by Chiao, he stopped short of endorsing it but pointed out the wide range of products that Shein offers: pet items, household goods. “I think of us as more than just a fashion company,” he said. “We look at ourselves as a go-to online retail location for all things fashion, beauty, and lifestyle.”

In a recent article in Techonomy, a tech publication, Miao wrote: “In a perfect world, fashion companies should be able to offer customers close to infinite style options.” She pictured companies producing exactly one item of each style at a time, restocking after each customer’s order “in a moment’s time.” Shein’s goal, she added, is to gradually move “toward this ideal model.”

The vision seems startling on the face of it—at best an offering that no one really needs, at worst a perversion of the concept of choice, an infinite scroll of thumbnail-sized images of clothing standing in for a more meaningful version of self-determination. But then, companies offering endless but meaningless choices, in turn requiring endless but meaningless consumption, is hardly new.

In the absence of well-enforced regulations that adapt to the practices of fast-rising global ecommerce companies, the burden of making fashion more ethical will continue to rest largely on individual consumers—a strategy sure to fail. Shoppers have long been trained to prize getting the best deal over such slippery concerns as labor rights and climate change. The online tech publication Rest of World reported that, last year, when a $16 crop top from Amazon went viral, TikTok users pointed out that a similar piece could be found on Shein for $13 and on AliExpress, owned by Alibaba, for $3.83.

I’m reminded of the comments I’d see on the #sheinhaul videos, in which well-meaning but ineffective calls for sustainability were drowned out by defenders of the industry. Contorting the language of equity and justice, viewers would ask: In a world in which the minimum wage isn’t enough to properly live on, can’t Shein’s prices be seen almost as a public service? As ableism and fat-shaming abound on the internet, isn’t Shein a haven for all kinds of bodies?

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, Shein sent customers a push notification with three raised-fist emoji in varying shades of brown. “I had a dream … That every one of all shapes, sizes, and colors can access fashion!” the text read. That afternoon, I noticed in my closet a bag that I’d almost forgotten about. Months earlier, I had been shopping at my local Goodwill and found, browsing in the red section, a fuzzy oversize sweater for $5.99. It was from Shein. The sweater had sat untouched in my closet all this time. That evening, I searched for the sweater online and spotted an almost identical one, in a yellowish color the company was calling “apricot,” listed at $6.99. For a moment, I felt relieved that at least Shein couldn’t undercut its own secondhand clothing. But then, as I moved the apricot sweater to my digital cart, a 15 percent discount was automatically applied—in honor of King—nudging the price down to $5.94.

Zeyi Yang and Wency Chen contributed reporting to this article.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

IDEAS

With the Clock Running Out, Humans Need to Rethink Time Itself

Time is political by nature—governing everything from election cycles to environmental policies. Could reconfiguring the hours restore humanity's hope for the future?

Eleanor Cummins  April 26, 2022 13:13 PM

Illustration by Ben Denzer. Source photographs by Austin Abitz (countertop), Eric Li (clock), and Dillon Reisman (rolling pin)

Another day, another deadline: To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025,” according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. This is how we live now—not in the Biblical end times, but in a permanent “time of the end,” in the words of 20th-century German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders. Between the possibility of nuclear war and the forward march of climate change, for at least 70 years a distinctly secular apocalypse has always seemed just around the corner. Time itself is one of the victims.

Just take a look around: The mega-droughts, wildfires, and category-busting hurricanes we see today are the result of emissions past—a hauntological quirk of the carbon cycle. The acute stress of the Covid-19 pandemic slowed time for some, while for others things sped up—both natural responses, psychologists say, to the immense stress of lockdown. News of the war in Ukraine, which once might have arrived in a morning paper or nightly program, is transmitted through our screens 24/7. And TikTok trends move at the speed of a micro-video, pulling fast fashion and even fast furniture along with it. Everywhere, the past, present, and future appear to be collapsing into each other.

Speed has been the name of the game since the Industrial Revolution, according to the German political scientist Hartmut Rosa, author of Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. For centuries, Westerners have bought into the narrative that “we can overcome material scarcity through economic growth, scarcity of time through faster technologies, and a better, free life through changes in science and politics,” he said in 2015. People are pushed to pack in more labor, more consumption, more everything. Yet the more we cram, the less those experiences register in our minds and memories, leading to a profound sense of alienation.

Now, time is not only accelerating; for many, the future also feels foreclosed. In a 2021 survey of more than 10,000 young people in 10 countries, more than half agreed that “humanity is doomed” and many described the sense that they have no future. Individualized “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief,” while real and potent, are not the only consequences of this change in tempo. It’s modern liberal democracy that is struggling to keep a hold on its authority and imagine a future for everyone. What citizens do with their changed relationship to time is sure to have profound effects for governments around the globe.

Conceptions of time have changed dramatically across human history, from cyclical to linear, religious to secular. But “scientific” time, based on a traditional Newtonian conception of time’s arrow moving forward at a regimented speed, is the timepiece of modernity, of capitalism, and of liberal democracy. While more recent physics research has challenged this premise, “clock time” is still used to structure our electoral cycles, prison sentences, immigration policies, and more, says political philosopher Elizabeth Cohen, author of The Political Value of Time. In this context, time is not an inert substance, but the very soil from which democracy springs.

Many wealthy countries, however, are increasingly post-clock. Instead, people’s day-to-day lives operate on “network time,” says Robert Hassan, a professor of media and communication at the University of Melbourne and author of Empires of Speed. Since the 1960s, networked computing, which makes everything from social media to Zoom calls possible, has allowed for a kind of connectivity that collapses both space and time. The result is that democratic politics seems interminably slow relative to the pace of commerce and culture, and people’s dual identities as citizens and consumers feel more and more at odds.

The itch to press fast-forward on politics may be one reason 40 percent of Americans—54 percent of the Republicans surveyed and 31 percent of Democrats—say they would support a military coup in a hypothetical scenario where “there is a lot of corruption” in government. Other models of governance, from illiberal democracy to fascism, can act much more decisively, which holds obvious appeal in our deadlined moment. “Only an enlightened despot could push through the measures needed to navigate the 21st century safely,” British astronomer Martin Rees has written. Younger people feel it, too: One of environmental science professor Sarah Jaquette Ray’s students “emailed me to say she was so distressed that she’d be willing to submit to a green dictator if they would address climate change,” Ray wrote in Scientific American last year.

But good decision-making—the kind democracy intends to elicit—takes time. A lot of it. Bills must be read, ideally in full, and debated. Citizens deserve time between elections to reflect on the future they want. Politicians should be afforded patience as they try to enact their campaign promises. And history shows us despots are rarely enlightened. While authoritarian environmentalism “may excel at producing policies, [it appears to] be no better than democratic environmentalism at producing good outcomes,” according to The Economist. In China, for example, the Communist Party’s “policy output has been prolific,” yet its actions are inconsistent with its stated goals. As of 2021, the country is constructing coal plants in 60 new locations to avoid power shortages; if used as intended, the plants will remain active into the 2050s.

Just as importantly, democracies require a shared belief in a contestable future—a vision inherently at odds with apocalypticism. Today, supposedly evidenced-based environmental doomism is regularly on display, including in the “now or never” language used in the recent IPCC report. With an eye toward Armageddon, this kind of climate doomism can feel eerily akin to religious fundamentalism, says Phil Torres, a philosopher who studies eschatology in all its forms. While people often frame hope as a psychological necessity in the face of ecological collapse, it is also an essential ingredient in democratic governance, which too easily buckles under the weight of determinism.

The problem and the solution, then, both lie in reconceptualizing our sense of time—and the way we plan around it. Instead of merely accelerating politics to match the speed of culture, democratic citizens need to devise mechanisms to slow other sectors down and weigh political time more accurately. For too long, democracy “has enabled us to colonize the future,” the public philosopher Roman Krznaric has written. While it is almost impossible to predict what comes next, it is the responsibility of every generation to imagine what their successors might need. In an era of escalating climate chaos, that obligation has never been more pressing.

While politics at the speed of TikTok must be discouraged, democratic reform can help us better account for deep time. For example, the voting age in the US should be lowered—to at least age 12—to give those who will be living with the fullest effects of climate change and other policy decisions a voice. Democracies should also employ age-weighted voting, which gives certain demographics more votes than others as a means of elevating their perspective. For example, everyone under 21 might get three votes, while those between 22 and 59 would get two votes, and those over 60 would only get one vote. Together, these interventions would help overcome our default devaluation of the future and put more power in the hands of those who will live through it.

Even as democracy is protected, some of its more arbitrary electoral timetables can be redesigned for a modern world. To reflect longer lifespans, for example, appointments of the US Supreme Court Justices should be limited from lifetime appointments to a nonrenewable term between 12 and 18 years. This way, the court could remain comfortably outside of the churn of politics, but not so far outside that it fails to represent the times in which we live. Similar limits on congressional tenure could be adopted as part of a larger effort to bring the average age of representatives down from the current average, which hovers around 60 years old.

To reduce the pressure of reelection and encourage executives to focus on governance, the presidential term cycle should also be reformed. Political theorist Rick LaRue has advocated for expanding first terms from four years to six and shrinking subsequent terms from four years to three. Among other possible benefits, this strategy could condense the amount of time a president is a “lame duck” from half of their presidency to one-third and pull second terms out of the muck of midterm elections. While no one can guarantee that the public or their representatives act thoughtfully, we must always preserve the possibility and, where possible, design systems that incentivize reflection.

There’s no reason our political reforms must stop with the human species, either. Bangladesh, Ecuador, and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota have all enshrined the rights of non-human entities, like rivers, trees, and other natural entities, which can outlive humans by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years—time horizons our species naturally struggles to comprehend. While these ecosystems may not be able to vote for themselves, legal representation, likely in the form of a conservatorship or trust, can advocate on their behalf.

Though many of the most urgent reforms target the federal government, communities of all sizes can and should build longer-term thinking into every decision. Appointed representatives, like the Future Generations Commissioner of Wales, may help. But grassroots movements like Future Design in Japan, which brings locals together to imagine how today’s policies will play out decades down the line before those decisions are made, have already shown great potential for building community. The goal is not to embrace age discrimination. After all, there are octogenarians who have been fighting for the planet and other just causes their entire lives. Rather, it’s to adequately enfranchise those who will live in the future we are creating together.

Time’s unraveling can feel overwhelming. More than anything, though, it feels as if Europeans and their settler-colonial descendants are waking up from dream time, and only seconds from midnight. For decades, endless growth seemed achievable to many, and monied interests muffled the sounds of the ticking clock. Now that the peril—to the climate, to democracy, to the future itself—is clear, so is the potential for change. It’s not “now or never,” but now and forever.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The race to rebuild the world's coral reefs

- Is there an optimal driving speed that saves gas?

- As Russia plots its next move, an AI listens

- How to learn sign language online

- NFTs are a privacy and security nightmare

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones

BUSINESS

Broken Charging Stations Could Be Stalling the EV Movement

Range anxiety is bad enough. But even when they find a station, drivers often have to deal with broken equipment.

Aarian Marshall  April 26, 2022 11:11 AM

Photograph: Getty Images

Matt Hirsch has long loved the idea of electric vehicles and first leased his Hyundai Ioniq in 2020. He even installed a charger right next to the driveway of his suburban Boston home, where he does most of his topping up. But lately the relationship has started to fizzle.

Sometimes he takes longer trips, forcing him to use multiple apps and websites to meticulously plot out the charging stations on his journey, so he doesn’t get caught without a charge. One frequent drive, to a brother’s home in New York, often takes him by a station run by Electrify America in the Massachusetts town of Chicopee—where he often finds some if not all of the four available plugs broken.

It’s a vexing situation for Hirsch, and he worries about the effects that broken and slow chargers will have on the nation’s wider electrification project. “It’s hard to convince someone to change their behavior unless [the alternative] is much easier and much cheaper,” he says. Right now, that’s not always true for electric cars. Range anxiety, the fear of being stuck somewhere without a charge, has prevented some Americans from seriously considering electric cars as a viable option. They worry a charging blunder will leave them stranded on the side of the road.

“I do think those experiences can really make a negative mark and discourage someone from buying an electric vehicle.”

Dan Woodward, Legwork Local Delivery

More than a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions stem from the transportation industry. Policymakers argue that mass adoption of electric cars will be vital to combating climate change. Last summer, the Biden administration made it a national goal to have electric vehicles account for 40 percent of all car sales by 2030. But if the US is to pull off a transition to electric vehicles—and other greener transportation alternatives—it’s going to need a lot more charging stations. The vast majority of electric vehicle drivers today do their charging at home, and the country has nearly 46,500 public fast chargers, which can typically charge a battery in 20 to 30 minutes, to fill in the gaps. But it will need 180,000 of them by 2030 to cover more of the US, predicts the International Council on Clean Transportation. Plus 856,000 more “level 2” chargers, which are cheaper to install but take longer to charge up a car.

US governments—states, municipalities, and above all, the feds—seem willing to spend a whole bunch of money to get there. California, whose governor has pledged to phase out gas-powered vehicles sales by 2035, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building out its charger network. New York has pledged almost a billion dollars to the effort. A federal infrastructure bill, passed last year, dedicated $5 billion to a network of half a million chargers along interstate highways.

But based on their track record, it’s not clear whether any of those new chargers will work for as long as they need to. It’s hard to find definitive data on public electric vehicle charger maintenance, or how today’s chargers are performing in the wild. Companies that build chargers tend to say they have a 95 to 98 percent nationwide “uptime,” an industry term meaning the tech is charging or ready to charge. But talk to an electric vehicle owner for a while, and you’re likely to hear complaints about slow or broken chargers.

A recent survey of 181 San Francisco Bay Area public charging stations, partially funded by the nonprofit Cool the Earth, suggests that 23 percent of them might be “nonfunctioning” at any given time, stymied by broken screens, shoddy credit card or payment systems, network connection failures, or damaged plugs. Only half of the functional chargers tested by the research team successfully completed a payment transaction with just one swipe of a credit card. “A 50 percent success rate in any other retail transaction would not be considered acceptable, and it shouldn't here,” said Patty Monahan, a commissioner of the California Energy Commission, in an industry meeting earlier this month. A survey of EV drivers by one California agency found that more than a third of them, and nearly 60 percent of those who said they used public chargers, had encountered nonfunctioning ones. Sixteen percent had run into payment problems. Nearly half had needed to call customer service for a charger-related issue.

While the people who build and maintain electric vehicle chargers say issues aren’t as widespread as the anecdotes suggest, some acknowledge that slip-ups come with any new technology. Charger problems are a “first-generation thing that was industrywide,” says Michael Farkas, the CEO of Blink Charging, which owns and operates charging equipment. “I don’t think it’s as prevalent today.”

But when it comes to charging equipment, a lot can go wrong—and a lot of different people, institutions, or companies might be responsible. First, the power electronics have to function, and utility companies have to get the electricity to the charging station. The station then has to maintain a stable internet and cell-phone connection, so the charging company’s software can monitor what’s going on. And automakers have to make sure their cars’ software can “speak” to each kind of charger on the market. Charging companies like Electrify America and EVGo run their own test labs, so that car manufacturers can ensure their vehicles work with their charging equipment. But sometimes bugs slip through the cracks, says Rob Barrosa, the senior director of sales, business development, and marketing at Electrify America. He says the issue comes up less often than it did two or three years ago.

Even when charging points work, there can be payment issues, which car owners say can be the most frustrating part of the whole experience. Credit card machines break, or the screens become illegible under strong sunlight. Many companies require drivers to create a login to use their stations and encourage drivers to use tap-enabled membership cards or download proprietary apps to smooth the transaction. But these can also fail to connect.

Sometimes, drivers themselves make mistakes, because they don’t know how their new cars work and can cause occasional physical damage to plugs by pulling or shoving too hard if they don’t have the right adapter. Others arrive at chargers to find they’re incompatible with their vehicles. Tesla’s Supercharger network is one of the most thorough in the US, for example, but its stations are compatible only with Teslas. Even if stations are serviced regularly, nature occasionally interferes: A charger repair technician working for the company ChargerHelp recently found a wasp’s nest snuggled into a charger’s electronic guts, the company’s cofounder said at a recent industry event.

Dan Woodward runs Legwork Local Delivery, a small, all-electric delivery company in Portland, Oregon. The business is, above all, mission-driven, motivated by Woodward’s “ton of anxiety about climate change,” he says. But his work has been stymied by shoddy Level 2 public chargers, including ones that were marked as operational on online maps but didn’t hook up when his team arrived, and others that were vandalized, their connectors severed. Getting stuck without a charge “can be not just frustrating but kind of scary,” he says. So the company has invested in building out its own mini charging network around the city: One at its HQ, one at Woodward’s own home, and another, he admits with a laugh, at his parents’ house. Running into broken chargers is “so discouraging,” he says, “because if somebody who is driving an EV for the first time has trouble charging, I do think those experiences can really make a negative mark and discourage someone from buying an electric vehicle.”

Getting a broken charger diagnosed can be its own challenge. For one thing, it can be difficult for charging companies to determine from afar whether a charger is broken or whether it’s just not being used that often—a not-uncommon predicament as Americans slowly adapt to the new tech.

What’s more, not all early US charging station projects set aside funding for regular check-ins or maintenance, said Thomas Ashley, vice president of policy and market development at Shell Recharge Solutions, in an email to WIRED. Some early projects did not require the companies installing or managing the chargers to maintain a certain level of reliability or uptime, he says. Even in today’s charging infrastructure contracts, “where uptime or reliability requirements exist, they’re generally not strong enough to meet driver expectations and are not granted sufficient budget for longer-term maintenance needs,” Ashley says.

Some state governments are trying to get smarter about building chargers that work. The California Energy Commission, which oversees charging-related policy in the state, now requires companies to track and hand over information about how often their equipment is offline. California is also working with other states to come up with nationwide maintenance standards, though the process has just begun. The US Departments of Transportation and Energy are working together to hammer out standards for federal infrastructure funding—that $5 billion dedicated to building out electric vehicle chargers—a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson said.

Fixing a charger is its own issue. More than half of charger problems can be resolved with a remote reset, says Lance Sabo, the Americas’ senior vice president of service at ABB, a Swedish–Swiss firm that builds and operates charger networks. But other problems need to be looked at in person. Charging companies say they are still building out their networks of employees and subcontractors who know how to diagnose and fix chargers, and that many more workers will be needed. “Part of the challenge here is that it’s a really young industry,” Sabo says. His company has been in the space only for about a decade, he points out. But if anyone wants to meet climate goals, charging will have to grow up fast.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- A farmer’s quest to beat waves of drought and deluge

- Hospital robots are helping combat nurse burnout

- How to download videos to watch offline

- Humanity is vibe-checking itself to death

- The climate cost of the humblest battery material

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones

BACKCHANNEL

Welcome to Janelle Monáe’s Dreamworld

In her new book, the artist and Afrofuturist icon conjures an apocalyptic—and hopeful—vision of the future.

Mary Retta  April 26, 2022 10:10 AM

ILLUSTRATION: DAVID ALABO

There’s an old story about Octavia Butler that I often return to: A young man once asked the visionary science fiction novelist the answer to ending all the suffering in the world. “There isn't one,” Butler replied. “So we’re doomed?” he asked, confused. “No,” said Butler. Then she delivered the words that would remake my understanding of the future: “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

Black futurist artists are often regarded as prophets, and expected, unfairly, to foretell the path that will lead us to a brighter tomorrow. Butler, who started writing during the Black Power movement and died, at 58 years old, in 2006, was looked to as an oracle of her time. Today, one of Butler’s most vital successors is the multifaceted artist Janelle Monáe. But if Monáe knows the future, she’s not quite telling. Speaking with her feels less like questioning an oracle than it does scheming with a wiser, older friend.

I am talking to Monáe about her new book, The Memory Librarian, a collection of science fiction stories she cowrote with five writers. During our conversation, which takes place over Zoom, Monáe’s voice is soft yet unhesitant, casually commanding attention. Ever a performer, her face is dramatically half-concealed under a fuzzy, black-and-white-checkered bucket hat. In her responses to my questions she speaks carefully, as if slowed by the gravity behind her vision and work.

Like Butler before her, Monáe works in a genre called Afrofuturism. Loosely defined, it imagines the future of Black liberation from a hostile world—ours. Although she’s publishing a book and stars in movies, Monáe is best known as a musician, and it was her 2018 concept album, Dirty Computer, that defined her Afrofuturist visions. “What Afrofuturism does is it allows Black people to tell our stories, from our voice, of how we see ourselves in the future, thriving,” Monáe tells me. With The Memory Librarian, Monáe seamlessly translates the detailed dystopian world of Dirty Computer from sound to page. We see many of the same characters: an android named Jane, her love interest Zen, a smattering of government workers and civilians. We see rebellion forming against a violent surveillance state, and queer desire in the midst of an apocalypse.

In her book, Monáe offers us a warning, but also a way out. Look around, she says. More and more, we are being stripped of our flesh-and-blood identities and extracted into data. But this transformation doesn’t have to destroy us; even the computerized body, Monáe insists, can preserve its humanity. Flawed, dirty, proudly glitching, the queer robots of Monáe’s vision refuse to be so easily boiled down into 1s and 0s. The Memory Librarian might not be the answer to the social and political upsets of our time, but it is an answer, and a fiercely inspiring one: a deepening of Afrofuturism’s potential to weaponize our dreams for a freer, more joyous world.

Afrofuturism’s central proposition is that Black people can control their own futures and that, moreover, they can escape the suffocating limits of time itself. Past becomes future becomes present; memory becomes prophecy becomes reality. Freedom is not just a dream for the future but a history we know we’ll relive once more. In The Memory Librarian, Monáe’s titular character collects and keeps people’s memories, wielding a terrifying power. She understands that the withholding of memory can be deployed as a weapon, while its resurgence can act as a means of survival.

This motif of memory plays on a historical truth: White people have controlled the individual and collective memories of Black Americans for centuries. When slaves were first brought to the American continent, their names were changed, their languages suppressed, their marriages undocumented, their graves unmarked. Families were separated; Black folks had the image of their mother’s face, their sister’s smile, taken from them. Many Black Americans today struggle to trace their family members back more than a few generations. Their lineage, their names, and their identities are remembered only to the extent that whiteness allows.

In resistance to this, Black speculative fiction often blows up linear or chronological time: a way to move forward while keeping hold of the past. Perhaps the best example is Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, in which Dana, a young Black woman and writer, travels between 1970s California and an antebellum Maryland plantation, where she meets her enslaved ancestors. In one version of this story, a modern-day woman is thrust violently into the era of slavery; in an alternative reading, the protagonist is an enslaved woman, traveling to a better future. When Black people travel through time, then journey to space, and then arrive in the present once more, their movements contend: You cannot rule my days with your arbitrary hours. The pace of my clock is mine to decide.

Beyond literature, Black musicians have been imbuing Afrofuturist themes into their artistry for decades. During the 1950s and ’60s, experimental jazz musician Sun Ra pioneered a kind of Afrofuturist music. (The term Afro-futurism, coined in 1994 by the white culture critic Mark Dery, is retroactively applied here.) With songs like “Spaceship Lullaby” and “Love in Outer Space,” Ra blended smooth jazz and inventive, hopeful lyrics to create a musical dream of intergalactic harmony. Ra’s music led the way for a second Afrofuturist musical wave in the 1970s, when artists such as jazz legend Alice Coltrane and the psychedelic-funk group Parliament sang of universal consciousness and outer space connection. As Monáe broke out in the music scene in 2010, she became contemporaries with the likes of Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot, whose music at the time also played with themes of space and Black futuristic aesthetics.

Despite its current cultural ubiquity, Afrofuturism has no singular definition. The genre has become associated with a diverse set of Black creatives, including writer and activist adrienne maree brown, comedian and filmmaker Jordan Peele, and novelist Jesmyn Ward, all of whom make art with a political bent. In her 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha L. Womack locates Afrofuturism at “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.” Womack’s insistence that the obsessions of Afrofuturism are not only technology but also imagination and freedom speaks to the genre’s political purpose: Black liberation.

More recently, Kathy Brown, an art professor, noted in an interview with D Magazine that Afrofuturism requires both “forward thinking as well as backward thinking, while having a distressing past, a distressing present, but still looking forward to thriving in the future.” Brown’s inclusion of “backward thinking” in the making of a Black future provides an element of comfort: To imagine a time that Black people lived free of the horrors of colonialism, we can look to the Continent, look to our ancestors, and know that the way of life we are fighting for is possible. Afrofuturist art asks of us, How can we resolve the problems of tomorrow by employing the solutions of yesterday? And for Monáe, both the problem and the solution come back to one entity: the computer.

Dirty Computer came to Monáe in a dream: One evening, a woman sits by herself in a crowded movie theater. She is reclined in her seat, quietly absorbed by the story on display. Her face shines, illuminated by the warm glow of the screen, while the corners of the theater recede into the dark. The night is still—until it bursts. Suddenly a group of mysterious beings emerge from the shadows, grab the woman, and drag her from her seat. She gasps; the ushers try in vain to save her. Who are they, what do they want? Nothing less than to erase the woman’s memories of who she is and where she came from: her loves, her wants. They are successful—she is never seen or heard from again.

That is, until Janelle Monáe woke up.

Some nightmares dissipate with daylight, but not this one. Monáe’s nightmare disturbed her. She rose out of bed and fetched her voice recorder to speak the memory of her dream into the machine. If she allowed herself to forget this, she felt, she might forget everything—maybe even her name. “I knew that I had to speak so that the real me wouldn’t be erased,” Monáe tells me.

At the time, she was several years off the release of her 2013 album The Electric Lady, which weaves between soul, funk, rock, and pop sounds to riff on queer desire (“Am I a freak because I love watching Mary?”), futurist visions (“My seed will grow / I’ll be further to my dreams tomorrow”), and inter-galactic utopia (“My spaceship leaves at 10:00 / Oh I’m where I wanna be, just you and me”). Already in that album Monáe was fascinated with androids—singing of a woman who is “electric,” who can “shock me one good time.” Meanwhile, she launched an acting career, starring in the Academy Award–winning film Moonlight as well as Hidden Figures, in which she plays the real-life 1950s NASA engineer Mary Jackson. The beginnings of the Trump presidency, too, sharpened Monáe’s public commitments to feminism and to sexual and racial freedoms. On some of her songs, the artist’s rage is explicit: “If you try to grab my pussy cat, this pussy grab you back.” In others, she is less direct but no less pointed: “I am not America’s nightmare / I am the American cool.” Monáe’s nightmare crystallized these thoughts; then they came to the fore in Dirty Computer.

Monáe offers us a warning, but also a way out.

The album tells the story of Jane 57821, a woman who is apprehended by a mysterious authoritarian regime. The woman has been flagged and categorized as a “dirty computer,” a term for citizens who are Black, queer, or other-wise outside the norm. The government’s aim is to erase the memories of all dirty computers by physically incapacitating them and forcing them to ingest a gaseous poison that eliminates all traces of autonomy, resistance, and desire in the subject, thus bringing society into “a New Dawn,” where everyone unthinkingly obeys the ruling power.

In a film made to accompany the album, Jane, played by Monáe, attempts to preserve her personal memories by enacting them in musical numbers. In “Crazy, Classic Life,” Monáe smuggles her friends to a rager in the trunk of her car, narrowly avoiding the careful watch of cop-like drones; in “Pynk,”an ode to her sapphic desires, she dances in vulva-shaped pants through a salmon-colored desert. Then: Two bored government workers touch a button and the brilliant, multicolored scenes are erased from her mind. The album is both cautionary tale and Afrofuturist prophecy: a testament to Black queer survival in unbearable conditions.

The Memory Librarian builds on the universe of Dirty Computer first in its collaboration. By cowriting the book with five women and nonbinary authors—Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas—Monáe, who is pansexual and nonbinary, has literally created a network of dirty computers, programmed to contaminate the system from the inside out. Seshet, a librarian appointed under the New Dawn’s government, struggles to reconcile the responsibilities of her position with her desire for Alethia, a transgender woman with anti--establishment politics. There is a power imbalance in their relationship: Seshet, as an official, has been allowed to recover her memories of a pre-Dawn life, while Alethia, marked as a dirty computer, lives without a history of her own. More troubling, Seshet can intervene directly in Alethia’s memories; when their love affair becomes too dangerous, she simply erases Alethia’s memory of them having ever met. Other stories have brighter thrills. In “Never Mind,” Jane and Zen, also dirty computers, take refuge in the Pynk Hotel, a place where queer and trans people can create new memories to replace the ones stolen by the New Dawn.

It’s not difficult to see the connections between The Memory Librarian’s dystopian universe and contemporary America. During our conversation, Monáe passionately condemned the recent conservative efforts to ban children’s books containing LGBTQ characters or references to slavery in school libraries. “They are trying their best to stop us from remembering the horrors of America,” Monáe says.

Reading The Memory Librarian, I felt an acute sense of dread, not just in anticipation of the fictional apocalyptic future that Monáe describes, but for how closely this future mirrors the world we live in. The book calls on you to ask yourself, Who was I before the coronavirus pandemic, before Trump became president, before the glaciers began to melt into the sea? When I lost a day scrolling on Instagram or clicked “yes” when a shopping site asked to take cookies from my computer, did I allow an unknown entity to steal a piece of who I am? And even knowing this, will I do the same again tomorrow? The New Dawn may not arrive as dramatically as Monáe writes, but it is coming, or maybe it’s already here.

Science fiction is particularly rich terrain for Black authors to explore the evils of the world, because Blackness and technology have historically been in tension. For centuries, Black bodies were exploited and used as machines, sites of experiment, and other vehicles for white discovery. I’m reminded of HeLa cells, an immortal cell line widely used in medical research—including for the Covid-19 vaccine—and named for Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman from whose body the cells were taken without compensation or consent.

In an unclean world, being dirty is the purest state of all.

Today’s tech climate is no less saturated with anti-Blackness. Scholar Simone Browne draws a direct line from the practice of slave branding to biometric identification, and from the figure of the overseer to modern surveillance tech, which disproportionately targets Black people. Racism operates on a more literal level as well: In 2011, Safiya Noble entered “Black girls” into Google, looking up activities for her young stepdaughter and nieces, and turned up pages of pornography. She documented the ways everyday search tools present racist perceptions as factual reality in her book Algorithms of Oppression; a decade later, our most commonly used algorithms—including many that govern policing, health care, and social services—are still encoded with racial bias.

Monáe’s response to technology’s hostile effects is to refuse to lose sight of the humanity of her subjects, whether or not they are actually human. Much of her work suggests provocatively that man and machine are perhaps not so dissimilar, allowing for a simultaneous humanizing of computers and a strangely tender optimization of people. In her song “Take a Byte,” a computerized body experiences desire and is desired in return: “Your code is programmed not to love me, but you can’t pretend.” It’s an artful vision that subverts the categories of “person” and “computer” and moves them out of opposition, into harmony. Her characters are computers yet dirty, metal yet flesh, sterile yet mysteriously impure. They are coded, miraculously, to love.

Monáe is not the only artist to flip the script on Blackness and technology. In Ryan Coogler’s quintessentially Afro-futurist 2018 film Black Panther, residents of the fictional African country Wakanda mine a metal called vibranium to develop technology so advanced, so far beyond the rest of the world, that the nation is able to covertly pose as a developing country to protect itself from the colonizing interests of Western nations. It’s a clever move that brings to mind writer and curator Legacy Russell’s concept of “glitch feminism.” If the political and economic machine in which we live is broken, the idea goes, then being a glitch in this machine is a sign of decency rather than deformity. “This glitch is a correction to the ‘machine,’” Russell writes, “and, in turn, a positive departure.” Russell’s glitch is Monáe’s dirty computer—in an unclean world, being dirty is the purest state of all.

One way to think about Afrofuturism is what it is not: a presentation of the past as clean and whole, with previous tragedies living at a neat and soothing distance from the present. In other words, the inverse of Afrofuturist thinking is nostalgia. And nostalgia is precisely what drives much of contemporary cultural production today. Fashion from the early aughts is making a comeback; TV series from the ’90s and 2000s are getting modern reboots. The algorithms that determine what we watch, what we listen to, what news we read, and what we buy recycle the habits of our consumption history and reiterate the same familiar content in an endless loop. There is something remarkably white about this type of engagement with the past: Things are bad now, so let’s remember the “before times” fondly—as if the racism, homophobia, and xenophobia in the narratives of today haven’t been there all along. In comparison, Afrofuturism’s promise to liberate us from the cycles of past time feels startlingly new, even risky. It requires a trust fall.

If the goal of Afrofuturist art is to create a new future, then the genre is not only inherently Black but also intrinsically queer. Some Afrofuturism writers, like adrienne maree brown, are openly queer, and cornerstone novels such as Butler’s Fledgling and N. K. Jemisin’s The Inheritance feature queer characters and relationships. More than that, the genre draws on the author bell hooks’ definition of queerness as not only “about who you’re having sex with” but rather “about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

The sort of nonstandard, nonlinear time popular in Afrofuturism is often said to be queer time, in part because to bend time’s one-way direction makes it possible to live a warmer, safer future in the here and now—something that queer people, as well as folks of other marginalized identities, are constantly seeking. Straight time is oppressive—and oppressively boring—while the chronologies of Afrofuturism are elastic, kinky, multiplicitous. “Queerness is not yet here,” as José Esteban Muñoz writes in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. “The future is queerness’ domain.”

In Monáe’s universe, queer love sets one free. The heroes of her Dirty Computer film are a Black, queer, poly-amorous couple who ultimately escape their captivity. For me, though, the clearest image of her vision comes from one of her earlier music videos, “Tightrope.” It takes place in a prison-like world where dancing has been forbidden for its “subversive effects” and its “tendency to lead to illegal magical practices.” Naturally, Monáe and her comrades proceed to sing and dance themselves to freedom, moonwalking gracefully across the prison floors.

Janelle Monáe is a dreamer, in every sense of the word. She falls asleep and tumbles into a fascistic, dystopian nightmare; she wakes up, still living inside it, and invents a way out. For some this cycle would horrify; for Monáe, it animates. “You can’t turn off the soul of a computer, you just can’t,” she says. Whether she’s referring to her own mind or to a different machine is unclear, and perhaps irrelevant. “Even when we sleep, we’re dreaming. When I’m resting and I’m in my dreams, what am I doing? I’m waking up with something; it never ends.”

Portrait by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- Sober influencers and the end of alcohol

- For mRNA, Covid vaccines are just the beginning

- The future of the web is AI-generated marketing copy

- Keep your home connected with the best wi-fi routers

- How to limit who can contact you on Instagram

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones

IDEAS

Do I Really Need to Back Up All My Data?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on external hard drives and the value of digitized memories.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  April 25, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: Mark Wang

Recently my laptop started glitching. I backed up 90 gigs of photos, videos, and ideas for a novel, fixed the issue, and moved everything back again. It took three weeks. Managing my digital life is becoming my life. But I don’t want to lose the memories attached to these bits and bytes. What can I do?

—Curating My life

Dear Curating,

The glitching laptop is a rude awakening, not unlike a brush with death. One day you’re blithely opening and saving files as though the device and everything it contained were immortal; the next, the contents of your hard drive are flashing before your eyes—wedding photos, videos of your kids, novels or dissertations in various stages of completion—and you see, with sudden clarity, the headlong folly of storing so many invaluable items in one place. I’m not being facetious. Not entirely. To watch all that information disappear, in one fell swoop, would be devastating, similar to losing all your possessions in a fire or flood, acts of God that have, at least, the compensatory benefit of endowing the victim with an aura of cosmic tragedy. The saga of a dead hard drive, on the other hand, is so commonplace, so lacking in tragic vision, that it’s unlikely to garner more than a few performative murmurs of condolence, along with the inevitable question: “You didn’t have backups?”

All worldly possessions are prone to attrition and decline. The more you have, the more your life becomes devoted to the vigilant, custodial work of maintenance and repair. This is why so many spiritual traditions advise against becoming attached to material things. When Christ recommended storing up one’s treasure in heaven, “where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal,” he was drawing on a Jewish tradition that envisioned heaven as an eternal storehouse for spiritual rewards. The teaching also reflects a much deeper strain of Western philosophy, one that goes back to Plato and persists today: the notion that the physical world is inferior to the unchanging realm of the immaterial, that we should not become entranced by the elusive objects here on earth but look instead to the higher, intangible things (virtue, relationships, intellectual pursuits) that are immune to the inexorable wear and tear of time.

If it seems odd to think of files and personal data as “possessions,” it’s because they appear to already belong to the spiritual realm. Information has no visible substance. It’s not composed of matter or energy, at least not in the same sense as a table or a lump of gold. Our files, photos, and music appear magically across multiple devices, much like the Greek psyche, which could, through the mysterious work of transmigration, manifest in different physical bodies after its host had died. It’s easy to believe that data will exist forever—or, at the very least, survive us, carrying our spirit (our voice, our words, our image) into the eternal ether.

This is not a particularly new delusion. Long before the advent of the digital age, information was a vehicle for immortality, the means by which artists and intellectuals attempted to live on after death. Nietzsche pointed out that the thinker who has “put the best of himself into his work” can rest easy as he watches the erosion of his own body: “It is as if he were in a corner watching a thief at his safe, while knowing that it is empty, his treasure being elsewhere.” We too sleep soundly knowing that our most valued thoughts and memories reside in the cloud, our own celestial storehouse, where neither flood nor fire, moths nor malware can harm them.

I suppose what I’m trying to say, Curating, is that there appears to be a deeper, existential angst lurking within your question, one that extends beyond simple concerns about file management. Your acknowledgment that your memories are “attached to these bits and bytes” signals an awareness that your identity is mysteriously bound up with those files, that to lose them would be to lose, in a very real sense, an extension of your own mind. Would you be able to remember that trip to Europe without the photos you took? If you can never again read through the folder of journal entries you wrote in college, will you have lost that period of your life?

We are constantly offloading parts of our minds to our tools, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and our devices. The fragility of those externalized memories dawns on you slowly with age, as portions of your former selves get buried with defunct hardware or fade into the digital void from whence they came, casualties of content drift and link rot. The sudden nostalgic impulse that spurs you to Google your undergraduate blog ends at the impasse of a “Page not found.” Or you sign in to a long-abandoned Yahoo account only to discover that an entire decade of email correspondence has disappeared. Even cloud storage is not immune to the indomitable forces of nature, as Google discovered when one of its data centers in Belgium was hit by a series of lightning strikes.

But I’d argue that your angst is even more complex. It’s difficult to witness a device on the fritz without thinking about the fragility of your own personal OS (so to speak). Our culture’s long-standing dualism endures in the popular notion that the mind is a software program running on the hardware of our physical forms. If the glitching laptop awakens you to the obvious fact that your data is entirely dependent on material processes—forcing you to recall the silicon and copper embedded in your SSD, the ghostly blue light of server farms housed in the bowels of corporate facilities—it also drives home the larger truth that all things, no matter how lofty or transcendent, depend on some kind of material substrate. Just as your data is tethered to so much ungainly hardware, so your own mind—perhaps, even, what you think of as your spirit—is fastened, as Yeats memorably put it, to a dying animal.

Poets and writers have been contending with this problem for centuries, and you might find some solace in their words. D. H. Lawrence, for example, wrote memorably about the human desire to endure, after death, as information. He was skeptical of the philosopher who believed he would live on in his work, or the saint who believed his teachings would make him immortal. Even the most prolific human “ends in his own finger-tips,” and the idea that one’s work can take on a life of its own is pure delusion. “The message or teaching of the philosopher or saint, isn’t alive at all, but just a tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message,” Lawrence wrote.

Although our technologies have since advanced, the truth of his words remains: Data is merely a fragile vibration, capable of traveling across great distances but stuck, ultimately, in a meaningless limbo so long as it is without witness. All those files you have stored on external hard drives or ensconced in the cloud are not “informative” in any meaningful sense unless they are experienced by another mind—or, as Lawrence put it, until they “reach another man alive.” Perhaps you should let go of the notion that your identity is forever encrypted in your data and instead focus on communicating that information to someone else. Forward to friends those old email chains you discovered in your long-abandoned mailbox. Consider trying to finish and publish that half-completed novel that’s been lingering in your files—not as some misdirected gesture toward life extension but as a genuine transmission to a good-faith reader. Ensure that your diaries and photos will be handed down to your descendants. It’s only in those minds, and in those living spirits, that you will continue to exist long after your own hardware has failed.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- Jacques Vallée still doesn’t know what UFOs are

- When should you test yourself for Covid-19?

- How to leave your photos to someone when you die

- TV struggles to put Silicon Valley on the screen

- YouTube's captions insert explicit language in kids' videos

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones, soundbars, and Bluetooth speakers

IDEAS

The Intoxicating Pleasure of Conspiratorial Thinking

What a remorseful January 6 insurrectionist taught me about why we believe.

Virginia Heffernan  April 25, 2022 11:11 AM

Illustrations: SR García

“The seeking is a never-ending circle until one is satisfied,” Justin reflected, runically, in an email to me. “For me, that satisfaction was never really present until the theories of QAnon started emerging.”

Yes, QAnon—the undead cosmology that still haunts the internet. Justin, a Brooklyn entrepreneur who once worked for TED, is best known for having been so jazzed about the QAnon-Trump conceit that he joined the Stop the Steal protest in Washington, DC, on January 6 last year. He now says he wouldn’t have gone if he’d known it was going to turn violent.

I had seen a news story about a penitent QAnon adherent called simply “Justin,” and I wanted to hear more; I thought I could find him. (After I did, he asked me to use only his first name.) In our exchanges, he sounded fully deradicalized—candid, earnest, thoughtful about his own choices.  “I dissociated so much from my reality,” he told me about the years leading up to January 6. He had lost friends. “I acted in a condescending manner to a lot of people, and it was wrong of me to do that.”

He was repairing his friendships, helping build a new business, trying to put Stop the Steal behind him. “Anyone who invited or incited violence on Jan 6 I do not support,” he wrote. Did he still believe in the vast child-abuse network that defines QAnon’s muddled worldview? He said no. Then he added: “It’s my hope that such does not exist.”

His hope. I left it at that, though, later on, righteousness caught in my throat like a thorn. Why wouldn’t Justin fully reject QAnon? How could I prove to him it’s horseshit? I briefly imagined enlightening him with sniper-fired bullet points and rhetorical virtuosity. But the aggression in my fantasy disturbed me. I’m not the policewoman of all rationality, and people’s creeds are their own. Maybe this is what missionary zeal feels like. I must tear out these pagan lies, root and branch.

In general I believe what Freud did: that it doesn’t matter, for purposes of human connection, whether another person’s private apprehensions comport with reality or not. If something’s true for a person, and she’s not harming anyone, a good friend suspends disbelief. This seems self-evident for religious faith (“I believe in one God”) or private credos (“we manifest our destinies”). But then there are false empirical claims, like “5G kills” or “a secret cabal of cannibals runs the world.” Can people who live in fantasy worlds at such steep odds with reality be good friends and citizens themselves? At the very least, maintaining such worldviews means vigilance about rejecting facts—and the perceptions of other, clearer minds. This estranges others. People who believe lies certainly could, like Justin, act in a condescending manner to a lot of people. If things escalate, they might even invite or incite violence.

John Mack, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2004, was an eminent Harvard psychiatrist who wrestled manfully in the ’90s and aughts with the question of what to do about other people’s false beliefs.

Starting in 1990, he set out to study people who said they had been abducted by aliens. He first hypothesized that they were mentally ill, but determined to record their worldviews without bias. To the supreme embarrassment of some of his Harvard colleagues, Mack didn’t just establish trust with the would-be abductees. By 1994, he had come to share their outlandish beliefs, for which there was no empirical proof.

Mack’s credentials lent credence to the stories of his research subjects, just as certain credentialed MDs these days throw in with anti-vaxxers and give them unearned authority. In the late ’90s I managed to catch Mack on his road show in New Hampshire. He patiently took the audience through the experiences of his research subjects whose accounts of abduction he found credible. The stories, he said, were consistent; the tellers were uninfluenced by a therapist’s suggestions, and sane. To Mack, that was proof enough: Aliens were routinely snatching people up into flying saucers, and humanity needed to face facts. (The next speaker at the road show was a man who preached that aliens had made crop circles in the Scottish Highlands.)

In The Believer, a 2021 biography of Mack by Ralph Blumenthal, Mack admits he had never witnessed alien abductions or gathered material evidence. Instead, he says, the idea of the abductions eased his grief about losing his mother when he was an infant. Mack once told a therapist: “The abduction story is a welcoming story because it means that—Ooooo, I’m getting goose pimples as I think of this—I’m not alone. There is life in the universe!”

To Mack, the stories were also factual. How could they not be? The aliens in the stories always looked the same: gray, short, with slits for mouths and no noses or ears. They drew blood and other bodily fluids from their hostages.

The abductees, too, fit a type: “unusually sensitive, spiritual individuals who chafe against social constraints and are flexible in accepting diverse or unusual experiences,” as Robert S. Boynton described them in an article about Mack for Esquire in 1994. “Abduction runs in families; you are more likely to be taken if your parents or siblings have been.”

I was still dwelling on Justin. Like Mack, he got goose bumps from fictions that strike most people as disturbing. This feeling was evidently intensified when he believed the stories were literally true; he couldn’t see them as science fiction and get the same high. As Justin told me of his period of most excitement about QAnon, “In 2020 … I felt that the truth was giving me a new lens on the world, and this made me feel very good … The euphoric feeling was a deep spiritual awareness of pure love and joy … I was unabashed, free-spirited, loving, communicative, and wanting to help—whatever that meant.”

An unusually sensitive, spiritual individual, Justin in another era might have entertained alien-abduction fantasies. Notably he had also suggested that his supernatural ideas—or his own susceptibility to disinformation—might run in his family. “I started as a young boy seeking meaning to life’s deeper questions. I would write poetry to try and get my thoughts on paper, but … much of the impetus came from my father and what he bestowed upon me … It’s in my blood, so to speak.”

When a person grounds their serenity and joy in a false claim about reality, you do little but cause pain if you try to root it out.

All these weird tales—about blood-sucking elites and blood-sucking extraterrestrials—serve psychological purposes, and they’re highly stylized along the lines that make pulp fiction pleasing. But none of them have anything to do with evidence. What Mack and Justin, and others who hold outrageously false ideas, mean by “true” may be better understood as “pleasurable.” Perhaps this is why such beliefs are so difficult to dislodge. You don’t debate with people about the merits of their kinks. Instead, you hope that we all maintain some ironic distance from our cherished stories, especially the pulpy and frightening ones, while recognizing that they don’t have to be empirically factual to be emotionally meaningful. When a person forgoes this irony, and grounds their serenity and joy in a false claim about reality, you do little but cause pain if you try to root it out.

Justin, unlike Mack, ultimately saw that the high provided by his strange beliefs wasn’t serving him. “The downside of this was, I was in such a state of euphoria that I decided to leave my job with no recourse, not pay my rent, etc.,” he wrote. “I paid less attention to ‘adulting.’” For a person in his twenties to stop adulting for a passion of any kind—art, love, a political movement—seems not atypical; to right one’s course comparatively quickly is impressive.

I had a last question for Justin, whose self-possession I had come to admire.

“Do you believe now that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden?” I hit send.

A one-word answer came back: “Yes.”

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The infinite reach of Facebook's man in Washington

- Tech can fix the climate mess—but not without help

- Peloton is betting big on body tracking tech

- 15 books you need to read this summer

- What Twitter is really planning for crypto

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones, soundbars, and Bluetooth speakers

SCIENCE

Extreme Heat Is a Disease for Cities. Treat It That Way

The “urban heat island effect” creates extra-hot temperatures that kill. But cities can prescribe powerful treatments, like green spaces and reflective roofs.

Matt Simon, Katie M. Palmer, Matt Simon  April 25, 2022 11:11 AM

Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

For millennia, cities have thrived by attracting people with diverse backgrounds and talents. But as the world warms, urban areas are attracting something less desirable: heat. A city’s roads, buildings, and other infrastructure absorb the sun’s energy, raising temperatures far above those in surrounding rural areas. This “urban heat island effect” varies dramatically not only from neighborhood to neighborhood, but from block to block and even house to house. Because it’s so hyperlocal and erratic, it’s hard to factor into predictions; a person’s actual experience of heat may be out of step with their local weather forecast. And with climate change, it’s increasingly difficult to keep vulnerable (and rapidly growing) populations safe during extreme heat events.

“I often talk about heat as the silent killer, and I say that because it doesn't get the headlines that tornadoes, flooding, and blizzards get,” says Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, the forecasting service. “We think heat-illness deaths are woefully undercounted because people oftentimes have other medical conditions that yes, may have contributed to or caused their death, but it was aggravated by a heat situation.”

Predicting extreme heat is paramount so public health officials can prepare. But forecasts only go so far. AccuWeather, for instance, blends over 170 forecast models that are run by meteorologists with decades of experience. They can partially account for the heat island effect by incorporating land use data that shows which parts of a city have vegetation, which helps cool things off. That’s because plants “sweat” as they photosynthesize, releasing water vapor and cooling the air.

Heavily industrialized areas, on the other hand, tend to be devoid of vegetation. “You've got a lot of surfaces that are basically just reradiating heat, a lot of concrete and particularly asphalt, because it's dark,” says Carl Parker, a meteorologist and climate specialist at the Weather Group, which runs the Weather Channel. “Then on top of that, you've got these artificial sources [of heat], including air conditioning units, and then cars that are also putting excess heat into the atmosphere.”

Other extra-granular factors contribute to making hotspots hard to predict. For example, different kinds of building materials, like brick or wood, absorb and release heat differently. And tall buildings block winds that would otherwise cool a landscape. Weather models consider wind generally, but there’s no way for them to model how air moves between every building in a city. So while meteorologists (and their algorithms) have gotten very good at predicting overall temperatures across the span of a city, these kinds of factors can make two individual spots a hundred feet away from each other very different.

There’s also the fact that you, standing on a street, will experience heat differently than a weather station would. These stations include sensors for temperature, wind, and pressure, among other indicators, and are dotted throughout cities: in parks, at schools, and along roadways. “The standard for taking temperature measurements, believe it or not, is in the shade,” says Porter. “Those are all temperatures that are being taken outside of the direct impact of sunlight. Which understandably is done that way, because depending upon the time of the day, that can have a huge impact on what the temperature is.” If you’re out in the open, that 90 degrees on your weather app isn’t going to feel like 90 degrees to your body.

To create a more representative value of what it actually feels like outside, AccuWeather produces a metric called RealFeel. It’s driven by an algorithm that incorporates other factors, like cloud cover, the angle of the sun, wind speed, and humidity. The last one gets extra complicated because the wetter the air, the less efficiently you sweat, which is why a humid heat feels so oppressive.

It’s critical to know how heat actually feels because people forced to be outside—construction workers, postal workers, the unhoused—are among those most at risk of heat illness and death, says the University of California, Los Angeles’ Edith de Guzman, director and cofounder of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative, a partnership of researchers who work with communities on cooling strategies. If public health officials know a given neighborhood is about to get particularly hot because of the heat island effect, they can focus resources there, for instance handing out water and getting people to cooling centers, which are typically public buildings with air conditioning.

This is a problem that doesn’t end when the sun goes down, because the built environment slowly releases its warmth throughout the night, keeping temperatures high. “The body doesn't even necessarily have an opportunity to just chill out, literally, in the evening,” says de Guzman. “And that, too, is problematic, because it's just a longer period of stress for the body.”

A person’s long-term exposure to heat increases their chances of heat-related illness and death. The young and the elderly are most at risk, since their bodies can’t cool themselves as efficiently. (Infants sweat less, while the elderly can have chronic conditions that change how they respond to heat.) Extreme heat also exacerbates underlying medical conditions like asthma because hot air creates ozone, which further irritates the lungs. On a typical summer day in Los Angeles County, 150 people might die of all causes. “What we see is that on occasion, the number of deaths above that 150 can be bumped up by about 30 percent during extreme heat,” says de Guzman. “So that's a significant number of extra deaths.” And that’s probably underestimating the true toll, as Porter says, because what might be counted as a death from a preexisting condition might have actually been precipitated by heat.

Low-income neighborhoods have it worse, as apartments often lack AC to bring cool air in and proper insulation to keep warm air out. These neighborhoods also have less tree cover, which in richer neighborhoods helps attenuate the heat. For example, during the brutal heat dome that settled over the Northwest last year, data showed air-conditioned houses were a comfortable 75 degrees while other households were 125 degrees. “That 50-degree difference, I'd never seen that before,” says Portland State University climate adaptation scientist Vivek Shandas. “And it's really telling, in terms of how the structures that most of our cities are built with mediate temperatures.”

That discrepancy is no accident, says Shandas, who has studied the heat island effect in Portland, New Orleans, and dozens of other cities. “These areas were historically disinvested, through various exclusionary zoning practices, or racial covenants and redlining processes,” he says. “It's almost like a magnet, and it attracts these very land-hungry projects, like big-box stores or highways.” In New Orleans, for example, Shandas has found that the hottest areas ended up being 14 degrees warmer than the coolest areas, a lingering consequence of discrimination against the poor and people of color.

Perhaps it's time to think of heat as a treatable disease that affects a city, not just its people. Working with community leaders, cities like LA can develop more green spaces, for example. Researchers are also playing around with reflective roofs and pavements, which bounce the sun’s energy back into space. “I like to think of Los Angeles, or whatever city, as being studied as a patient that is suffering from extreme heat, and what would we prescribe that patient,” says de Guzman.

De Guzman and her colleagues actually modeled this out in a paper they published last month. They simulated heat events in Los Angeles, with and without strategies in place to mitigate the heat island effect, and calculated what those improvements would mean for mortality. “We tried these different dosages, so to speak, of trees plus reflective surfaces,” she says. “Then through a process that involves creating algorithms and understanding actual mortality numbers that were collected and reported by the state, we're able to see how many of the excess deaths that we saw would have been prevented.” They found that making simple tweaks to the built environment, primarily adding trees and painting roofs light colors, would save one in four lives that would normally be lost to heat events.

Better understanding the urban heat island effect, how it differs within cities, and how to mitigate it, would help growing urban areas better prepare for a world that’s only getting hotter—and fast. “Even though we're in a very dire situation,” says de Guzman, “and we're seeing changes occurring faster than most scientists even thought, there are very practical solutions that we can implement at the local level.”

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- Sober influencers and the end of alcohol

- For mRNA, Covid vaccines are just the beginning

- The future of the web is AI-generated marketing copy

- Keep your home connected with the best wi-fi routers

- How to limit who can contact you on Instagram

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones

BACKCHANNEL

The End of Alcohol

Glamorous influencers are blending science and superstition to help people “change their relationship to drinking.” Did I miss out by getting sober the old-fashioned way?

Virginia Heffernan  April 19, 2022 10:10 AM

ILLUSTRATION: GENIE ESPINOSA

She was dressed in a cartoon-spangled onesie, while he wore a tiny denim jacket and wide-legged pants. It was a bluebird day in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I was eavesdropping on the couple at a crosswalk.

“Sobriety is a big thing these days,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “For babies.”

Babies are sober, and adults drunk. Browsing in a cavernous thrift store, I rolled the idea around. It’s true I sometimes feel remedial and juice-boxy holding a Sprite at a cocktail party, as I often have over the past 10 years. But I also remember someone sharing in a 12-step meeting that she used to think she was a cold, calloused femme fatale when she was blackout drunk—the soul of sophistication. I used to think the same thing. Later, she realized that she drank because she couldn’t bear one electron of pain. Some alcoholics call this Queen Baby Syndrome. She self-soothed, she said, by sucking on a bottle of Georgi. (I’ve changed some details here to protect privacy.)

This person hit bottom, she said, when she woke up on a deflated air mattress spooning with a drag queen who looked like Ted Cruz. I’ve never forgotten that.

Though I still describe myself as an alcoholic, the word has fallen out of favor with marquee nondrinkers, and for good reasons. Above all, it’s a coarse portmanteau, one that has set off its share of linguistic crises, notably “chocoholic.” But “alcoholic” also confounds because it designates not an ordinary person with a problem (cf. “diabetic,” “asthmatic”) but a problem person whose intractable nature somehow includes an eccentric orientation toward an otherwise benign if flammable organic compound, ethanol. Ethanol is not as ubiquitous as (say) gluten, but, as desperate alcoholics know, it can be found not just in whiskey sours but in perfume, mouthwash, and windshield-wiper fluid.

In traditional 12-step treatments for alcohol addiction, as opposed to the beguiling new ones that I’m now curious about, inveterate boozers are also represented as having an eccentric orientation to lying, cheating, stealing, boasting, and mean-spiritedness. But are these eccentricities measured in numbers, divined by introspection, or evaluated with respect to cultural norms? Maybe none—or all three. In 1633, the English poet and priest George Herbert brilliantly tried his hand at alcoholism analysis in “The Church-porch.” He warned that drinkers court shame, and perhaps emesis, if they don’t dump excess booze:

Drink not the third glasse, which thou canst not tame,

When once it is within thee; but before

Mayst rule it, as thou list; and poure the shame,

Which it would poure on thee, upon the floore.

Herbert’s special worry about the shame brought by the third drink brings to mind another three-stage adage about the progression of alcoholism: “The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man.” Herbert then switches to the personal pronoun and imagines that the third drink would cast him on the floor, where he would literally hit bottom.

It is most just to throw that on the ground,

Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.

Herbert, of course, wrote centuries before the habit of consuming more than a third of a six-pack was considered a pathology rather than a failure of will. But the 20th-century disease model, often associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, brings more confusion. Why does the affliction that’s said to define the alcoholic—“alcoholism”—lack clear biological markers? Finally, it’s “ism,” not “itis.” Is alcoholism a disease or an ideology?

If etymology is any help, “alcohol” comes from the Arabic al-kuhl, referring to kohl, the black eyeliner powder dating back to the fourth millennium BC; kohl was made of a refined mineral, and then it came to be used for anything distilled. I Googled this once when I was drunk. Another spelling of the word, in Latin, is alcool. All cool.

ILLUSTRATION: GENIE ESPINOSA

Sobriety is a big thing these days.

The hip crosswalk woman was right. And she was especially right if sobriety has something to do with “changing your relationship to drinking,” talking about it all the time, and exploiting sobriety’s market potential. Instagram is fully awash in pastel George Herberts—dancing soberfluencers who soberglow while soberaf. The 21st century has been a boon to young abstainers who reject the word alcoholic, and to anyone who wants to quit drinking without becoming a sad sack or a prig.

It’s hard to know when AA lost its luster. One starting point is the early aughts. Since then, an increasingly robust swath of people testing the zero-proof waters of sobriety has sworn off drink and joined the international reverse-rave known as Dry January. In 2013, Dry January launched as a branded public-health initiative in the UK, attracting some 4,000 people. By 2021, that number had jumped to 130,000. The fever for abstemiousness also caught on in the US, which will forever be known as both puritanical and hedonistic; the challenge of refraining from drinking for 31 days has seemed to energize those eager to observe secular Lents. Last January, nearly one in five American adults tried Dry January.

For years, too, there’s been a stampede of self-help books by alcohol skeptics, most of them women, many of whom once had trouble drinking not the third bottle. These books have included My Unfurling, by Lisa May Bennett; Her Best-Kept Secret, by Gabrielle Glaser; This Naked Mind, by Annie Grace; The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, by Catherine Gray; Mindful Drinking, by Rosamund Dean; Drink?, by David Nutt; Sober Curious, by Ruby Warrington; and Quit Like a Woman, by Holly Whitaker. The subtitles run together, but they make big promises. If they follow the instructions, readers of these books—and listeners to adjacent and spin-off podcasts, including Recovery Happy Hour and Edit Podcast—will break up with alcohol, emerge from the grip of anxiety, radically defy patriarchy and capitalism, and become happy, healthy, and even wealthy. As 12-steppers will tell you, traditional recovery from alcoholism guarantees none of these marvels.

Some of the intoxication with nonintoxication may be more than a pose. People really do seem to be cutting back on drinking. According to Gallup, in 2019, 65 percent of American adults drank alcohol; in 2021, even after the claustrophobia and worry of the plague years, that number went down to 60 percent. What’s more, Americans went from (an avowed) four alcoholic drinks weekly in 2019 to 3.6 in 2021.

To cater to these newly temperate types—that is, to get those who decline to consume to keep consuming—sober-friendly bars have shot up like crocuses in New York, Denver, Miami, Austin, and San Francisco. Some of these places serve no booze at all. Others feature extravagant mocktails alongside full bars. At these places, someone with a drink the color of rust or algae can generally pass as a habitué. Amid chic decor, mixologists lace soft drinks with sophistication-signifiers and wallet-declutterers like orgeat, tobacco syrup, and chinotto orange.

In the last year, household-name mocktail moguls including Blake Lively, Bella Hadid, and Katy Perry have introduced their nonalcoholic beverages in collectible, high-design containers. The promises made by these drinks, which are largely water and tea plus high style, complement the ones made on the covers of sobriety books. Several available on Amazon, including Tranquini and Recess, come with herbal adaptogens, the latest wide-spectrum panacea for stress, in place of alcohol, the best wide-spectrum panacea for stress. Töst, one sober beverage brand, offers a “grown-up, complex” fake wine, while another called Seedlip distills plants to make a “flavorful, sophisticated, adult option.” Maybe sobers do fear being perceived as babies.

Just the way Big Food engendered Big Diet, Big Alcohol seems well on its way to engendering a new market sector with Big Sobriety. That could mean hefty payouts for opportunists who are more entrepreneurial than sober. Already, an 8-ounce can of Katy Perry’s De Soi Purple Lune drink, a fizzy tea with rose and myrrh that comes with outlandish health claims about balance and stress relief, can be yours for $6. This is nearly five times the price of a can of Bud.

All the better, I guess, to toast the charismatic influencers who inhabit the highly nonanonymous sobriety … space. (There’s always a space.) You might think there would be an oligopoly in neo-sobriety superstardom, but no, it’s a thousand points of light, and each soberfluencer has staked out a niche approach or at least some trademark design elements. Many also sit in Venn patches with lifestyle masters in apparently related realms: exercise, spirituality, prosperity, productivity, and even conspiracy. From what I’ve divined from a heady three-day scrolling bender, the biggest influencers in the sobriety space fall pretty clearly into three categories: mystical gurus who ground their sobriety in rococo superstitions, professional habit-breakers who regard sobriety as a happiness hack, and reps from the managerial class who advocate for medical interventions and cognitive science to treat a brain malfunction they now refer to as alcohol use disorder.

On the ground floor of sober influence is of course Russell Brand (Perry’s ex-husband), the flamboyant one-time heroin user who swapped drugs for the sober papacy in 2002. He now calls himself prophetic, dresses like the Lizard King, and flaunts a crucifix tattoo and rudraksha mala beads. His florid self-promotion and orientalist affectations (including zeal for dime-store Hare Krishnaism) are at odds with both the anti-mysticism of science-based sobriety and the imperative to humility of traditional 12-step sobriety. Lately, Brand has espoused so-far-left-it’s-right politics that confuse the principles of liberal humanism with the market-driven neoliberalism he naturally despises, and occasionally he seems determined to consign the whole liberal project—including science and voting—to the trash heap of history. On YouTube, Brand-branded sobriety comes packaged with his ideology of rad individualism, conspirituality, and kitchen-sink disinformation about vaccines, Russia, and Hillary Clinton.

On the softer side of gurudom is Ruby Warrington, a lifestyle influencer in the so-called Now Age and creator of an astrology “tool” called the Numinous Astro Deck. “Little old middle-class me,” as Warrington describes her pre-franchise self in her memoir, used to overconsume chardonnay and cosmopolitans. She then found herself #sobercurious, as she has tirelessly memed it. In 2016 she helped launch an event series called Club Söda NYC—the sober umlaut strikes again—and she now hosts other happenings for people who are kind of thinking about quitting drinking, or thinking about kind of quitting drinking.

Before the pandemic, these events featured “plant-based family-style brunch” meals, TED-style sermons-on-the-mount, and high hopes—the usual aesthetic comforts of the WeWork/Obama era. From the photos, Warrington’s events are also abuzz with Instagram-farm vibes. At Club Söda (“sober or debating abstinence”), quitting drinking is not styled as a last-ditch way to address “incomprehensible demoralization,” as the soul’s dark night is known in AA, but as the royal road to bliss, focus, and deep connection. Sex and productivity, it sounds like. Good gig if you can get it; the 12 steps tend to scare away dates more than they spike libido.

A less astral influencer is Holly Whitaker, a social-justice optimizer and author of the 2019 bestseller Quit Like a Woman. In 2013, Whitaker, a San Francisco Bay Area rise-and-grinder, decided that drinking was a drag on her girlboss well-being. One year later she founded an online alcohol-counseling startup called Hip Sobriety (now Tempest) that offers its paid services to help people, yes, “change [their] relationship with alcohol.” Whitaker’s programs use techniques like coaching and online communities, and with fewer fireworks and less insight than Russell Brand, she connects patriarchy and capitalism to boozing, because those things kindle overconsumption. At the same time, she describes her online business as a product and a business model: “a for-profit, consumer-focused, design-forward thing … geared toward people like me.” In 2020, she gave an interview to How I Raised It about how to get venture capital in Silicon Valley as shrewdly as she did, having raised $15.4 million for Tempest in three investment rounds. By contrast, the only venture money in 12-step programs, which have no dues or fees, is crumpled singles dropped into a hat during meeting breaks.

Gabrielle Glaser, a distinguished health journalist who has never had a drinking problem, is committed to data over all spiritual folklore, from AA’s “higher powers” to Warrington’s astrology cards. But she’s not a personal brand; she has no recovery story of her own. In 2013, her densely researched book Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—and How They Can Regain Control had 12-step programs squarely in its sights. As Glaser underscores, AA doesn’t have much science backing it up. The anonymous program is notoriously hard to track, and Glaser is right that it’s tricky to prove empirically that it works.

What Glaser recommends instead is a less absolutist approach, notably touting naltrexone, an opiate antagonist, as a way to cut back on booze. When you take opiate antagonists, alcohol stops bringing pleasure to the brain, which reduces cravings. John David Sinclair, the psychologist who created this regimen for addiction and died in 2015, published his discoveries in peer-reviewed journals over four decades. Glaser cites a 2001 study by Sinclair in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism that shows a 78 percent success rate of naltrexone alone in helping patients cut their drinking down to 10 drinks a week.

Oh … OK. So 78 percent sounds like a good chunk, but holy smokers: Ten drinks a week, which easily could still fuel my old weekend blackouts and hangovers, plus a new pill that antagonizes my brain’s own pleasure systems? That’s success?

Leafing through thousands of influencer posts, a hundred ads for top-shelf celebrity soft drinks, and a dozen journal studies of brain receptors doesn’t, blessedly, make me want to drink. But all of this does make me want to drop my last name, grab a steel folding chair, and indulge in some old-time AA, complete with sloganeering in a musty church undercroft. Keep it simple, stupid. Or my favorite: Easy does it. I’ve decided these new abstainers have an entirely different goal than the anonymous alcoholics of yesteryear.

ILLUSTRATION: GENIE ESPINOSA

For every culture that includes fermented drink among its sacraments or refreshments, there is a unique perspective on drunkenness. Over a century ago, the French poet Charles Baudelaire counseled, “Be always drunk”; the Nigerian Afropop singer Joeboy advocates wine as a break from troubles in his 2021 hit "Sip (Alcohol).” Among the European colonizers of North America, drunkenness became a religious issue, a lapse from Christian virtue. In the 1870s, Protestant women, long before they could vote, centered their politics on the temperance movement as a way to keep their men in line and keep the rowdies away. By 1900, nativism had crept into the temperance discourse, as immigrants from Ireland and Italy were associated with drunkenness and moral turpitude. Some proponents of temperance required that churchgoers keep pledges of abstinence, on pain of damnation.

Later, after Prohibition ended in 1933 as a failed experiment, public-heath officials tried a new approach, condemning drunkenness less as a sin, like adultery, or an unhealthy lifestyle choice, like smoking, and more as a threat to public safety, like brawling. The states made laws to curb drunk driving, and programs sprang up to educate students about how drunkenness can lead to every kind of violence. Public health as a framework for alcoholism is Janus-faced. On the one hand, when drunkenness is framed as a shared public problem with social remedies, hard drinkers might be faulted less often for personal failure. On the other, when law enforcement gets involved, some people get stopped for speeding or frisked for drugs far, far more than others. Twelve-step groups are filled with white drunks marveling at how often they got away with driving drunk while people of color describe being jailed for far lesser offenses.

In parallel with the post-Prohibition approaches to hard drinking, Alcoholics Anonymous, which was formed by a doctor and a stock broker in 1935, evolved as a project of moral betterment. Yes, you’re expected to stop drinking in the program. But the longer you sit in the rooms the clearer it becomes that AA doesn’t see abstinence from alcohol as an end in itself but as a baseline precondition for a life of honesty, faith, and service to others.

A therapist once told me that people don’t come to therapy to change; they come to get out of pain. You have to coax them into changing. The same is true in 12-step programs. People come into the rooms heartbroken, bruised, unemployable, and in dire need of comfort (and, often, money). Within days, even if they’re trembling with withdrawal symptoms, they’re urged to help others, if only by mopping the floor and stacking chairs. Soon after, they’re encouraged to seek a “power greater than ourselves” in which to invest their faith. The so-called “God stuff” has turned people off from the start, although atheists have cooked up plenty of higher power workarounds, like ”the universe” or “nature.” The self-important but amusing AA manual known as the Big Book even offers a chapter called “We Agnostics,” which tries to allay fears that sobriety requires specific pieties. Some sober nonbelievers find the chapter disingenuous.

Still, if you stick around, the helping-others part almost always sinks in. As does the imperative to self-examination. It also becomes a source of wry humor. Some months in, while most drunks are fuming about the garbage people who’ve done them wrong, you’re encouraged to write out an inventory of the people you, the original garbage person, have harmed. If you’ve ever once padded your expenses or faked an orgasm, a guide to the program—your sponsor—might make you add it to an inventory. You’re a thief. You’re a liar. It stings.

One of my favorite stories from the rooms was told by a 12-stepper who noticed a friend reading The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama.

“I doubt I’ll read it,” the guy said, morosely. “Can you just tell me the secret?”

“You’re not going to like it,” his friend replied.

“Oh no. It’s not—”

“Yep.”

“Please say it’s not.”

“It is.”

“It’s ‘help other people,’ isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fuuuuck.”

When I came into a 12-step program, I hated the idea that helping others was supposed to take the place of screw-top wine and benzos. Helping others is the key to happiness? What do you know. I really thought it was money.

This old-fashioned parable of sobriety, in which the untreated drunk is a scoundrel and not a wellness entrepreneur, showed up in an unexpected place this year: a sitcom on Hulu called Single Drunk Female. Created by TV writer Simone Finch, who is herself a recovering alcoholic, this extremely charming show, which premiered in January, stars Sofia Black-D’Elia as Sam, a blackout drunk who is remanded to 12-step meetings after an assault charge.

To my surprise, scenes of meetings and deep cuts of AA jargon in Single Drunk Female don’t exist entirely to set up exciting relapses, as they do in many shows that feature problem drinkers. In fact, Sam’s recovery with the 12 steps was so spot-on and moving to me that I wondered if someone else might see the whole show as merely AA propaganda, like that run of Archie comics that had an unnerving undertow of Christianity. Archie and his crew would be having normal fun in a convertible, facing midcentury temptations like cigarettes or making out, and one would say something like, “You know, Jughead, read John 14:6! God has a perfect plan for us!” My partner assured me that Single Drunk Female was not like this. But I noticed he didn’t choke up like I did when Sam got her 30-day chip. And when she finally realized the world doesn’t owe her a living and started coming through for other people? Forget about it. I cried.

A big criticism of AA is that the hair-shirting—AITA? Yes and always—can tilt into moral masochism. Though the bracing inventories of my own “defects of character” seem to keep me honest, some in the program who suffer with trauma see AA’s insistence that alcoholics are all sinners as victim-blaming. Searching for your part in your life’s low ebbs might lead you to repress your own suffering or, worse, compound it.

There’s plenty more to dislike. Though the rooms are more socially heterogeneous than just about anywhere I’ve been on earth, talking about politics is essentially forbidden in the program’s loose guidelines, which are called its “traditions.” (I was once kicked out of a meeting for complaining about Brett Kavanaugh.) What’s more, the sexism in parts of the Big Book is preposterous. In the horrifying chapter “To Wives,” the ideal handmaidens of boozers are instructed to forgive their drunken men everything from profligacy (“the checking account melted like snow in June”) to violence (“they struck the children”) to bad company (“the sheriffs, the policemen, the bums, the pals, and even the ladies they sometimes brought home”).

But, though some 12-step members are textual fundamentalists and cultural conservatives (the tenor of meetings is highly regional), the programs live less in scripture than in the eclectic lore and aphorisms accumulated in the rooms over the past 80-plus years. This never-ending document includes “qualifications” and “shares.” Through these ritual forms of storytelling, alcoholics discuss their experience, the perspective they’ve gained, and the hope they cultivate. The bulk of the Big Book is also not gospel from midcentury white men. Instead, after the opening chapters that explain the program, it contains mini-memoirs by diverse alcoholics, including queer drunks, indigenous drunks, doctor drunks, and hobo drunks who rode the rails. In many meetings, members read from these stories, sometimes taking the “I” pronoun into their own mouths, embodying identities foreign to them; when an elderly auntie drunk reads the words of a young felon drunk, there are ironies—but also the supreme sweetness that comes from acknowledging the expansiveness of other minds and the universality of suffering. Good sponsors also keep sponsees from zeal, and help you laugh at the program’s dogma, contradictions, and anachronisms.

Less pleasantly, a sponsor will also remind you that you don’t get sober in order to win “cash and prizes.” These are things like cars, sex, fame, dough, or even physical health—the super things sober influencers model, and even offer. Nor do sponsors countenance drinking “in moderation,” much less 10 drinks/week. A hazard of drinking for a traditional alcoholic is that it invariably leads to dishonesty. A formidable matriarch in the room once warned me not to “get cute with this disease” when I asked whether I could taste a dessert with a touch of cooked-off Grand Marnier. She definitely doesn’t mess with near beer or Katy Perry’s $6 mocktails.

ILLUSTRATION: GENIE ESPINOSA

Part of why I can’t take too seriously the scientific rejections of AA like Glaser’s is that researchers seem to use a vision of success that, in 12-step programs, would not count as sobriety, which the fellowship generally sees as a moral and spiritual state that only starts with “putting down the drink.” In the end, AA makes an extremely modest set of promises. According to a list called the Ninth Step Promises, recovering alcoholics who make amends to people they’ve hurt can expect only a few vague dividends. By not drinking and by helping others, you get a measure of peace, renewed interest in others, keener intuition, and freedom from regrets, self-pity, bafflement, and fear of economic insecurity. (nb: Freedom from fear of economic insecurity ≠ money.)

So much of the new sobriety flex is anathema to the captious alcoholics of 12-step groups. But carping that others aren’t doing sobriety right is such a common mistake among recovering alcoholics that Bill W., the founder of AA, came up with excellent slang for the carpers: “bleeding deacons.” God knows where that phrase comes from, but I imagine gaunt figures in black pope hats with open, oozing stigmata. According to popular interpretation in the rooms, bleeding deacons insist that if you stray from their narrow path—failing to pray, say, or arranging coffee cups wrong—you’ll literally die.

I have no authority at all when it comes to quitting drinking. It took me till I was 41 to quit. (Russell Brand was 27; yes, I compare-and-despair about that.) Very little love or light informed my pissed-off cold-turkey detox. Quitting with the use of opiate antagonists, hot yoga, and nonalcoholic tequila seems every bit as righteous—and evidently more effective—than sweating it out in the rooms.

But the way I learned it, to get sober is not to stop drinking. It’s to undertake a program that is chronically uncool in the quaint hope that it will make you a better person. People in the rooms talk less about drinking than about yielding to other drivers, feeding a stranger’s meter, buying a sandwich for a panhandler. The new sober influencers have convinced me that this cornball 12-step stuff isn’t for everyone. Certainly, its benefits can’t be tabulated by science. In my experience, they are indeed beyond measure.

This article appears in the June 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The infinite reach of Facebook's man in Washington

- Tech can fix the climate mess—but not without help

- Peloton is betting big on body tracking tech

- 15 books you need to read this summer

- What Twitter is really planning for crypto

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones, soundbars, and Bluetooth speakers

IDEAS

Time Got So Much Weirder. The World Needs a New Lexicon

Our days aren’t ruled by the sundial or the pendulum clock anymore. They’re measured in binges and darkmodes.

Paul Ford  April 14, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: Elena Lacey

Friends, we need to revamp the calendar. Our years start arbitrarily, based on “the sun,” which people rarely see anymore. And months, they’re a scam, a way to keep peasants tilling and monks distilling. Those people didn’t have social media; they barely had vellum media. Weeks, days, hours, minutes—especially minutes—are just more mechanisms for keeping humans in thrall ultimately based on astronomy, astrology’s lesser sibling. In the globalized information environment we currently enjoy, we should and must construct better timescales. I propose some new terminology.

Demic: The duration of a pandemic; split into waves, which are further split into prepanic and panic. (Some have conceptualized a post-panic phase, but none has yet occurred.) Examples: “I’ll get a new job after the current demic.” “We should get dinner while it’s still prepanic.”

Loopmas: A season of good cheer surrounding the randomly scheduled release of new Apple hardware. Replaces “the holidays.”

Binge: Replaces “weekend”; refers to the amount of time necessary to watch a streaming video series in its entirety. The period formerly known as Friday night to Sunday morning is good-binge, and the period formerly known as Sunday morning to Monday morning is sad-binge. “Babe, the panic is starting soon. Why not come over and spend good-binge with me?” A binge can optionally be experienced at tubespeed, a state of heightened awareness in which you partake in culture at 1.25X, 1.5X, or 2.0X. “I went hard tubespeed last sad-binge and finished both seasons.”

Demoquadrennial: An election-focused political season, equivalent to 48 months on the old calendar, stretching from prenomination through postelection. Each demoquad is broken into a series of shorter periods known as surely-thises. “With the revelations in Washington yesterday, this demoquad enters its record ninth surelythis.”

Lightmode/darkmode: The new “day” and “night,” but no longer tied to the 24-hour solar cycle. A person can opt into them at any time. “I’m off to bed—have a great lightmode!” “It was a long lightmode’s journey into darkmode.” Transitions between the two are fades: “The mode is darkest before the fade.”

Pushings: Improvement over “hour”; it increments whenever a new notification or update is pushed to your phone. This allows you to easily characterize the quality of a so-called day: “It was a long lightmode, and I got hungry around sixth pushing and went out for drinks.” Or: “Twelve straight pushings and I’m ready for a binge.”

Deckade: The time spent watching someone make a live presentation on Zoom or Google Meet (a scenario in which tubespeed is unavailable).

Freshing: Short for “refreshing.” The new “minute.” “I’ll be there in 20 freshings.” Or: “I need a few freshings before I come down to dinner.” Or: “I have 15 freshings before my plane leaves, and then I’m in the air for about a thousand freshings unless I go darkmode.”

Wakemare: The period of 20 freshings when one fades out of darkmode and into full consciousness by looking at a steady flow of misery on one’s phone. “Hon, try to keep your wakemare to a few freshings, then come down for some toast.”

Beandad: Replaces the antiquated “week.” Refers to the time it takes for a main character to rise, fall, and flame out on Twitter. “The Putin mommy poem already feels like 50 beandads ago.”

Cryptolude: A duration of time during which nothing confusing or scammy happens on the internet. Rarely lasts more than two freshings. “I enjoyed a nice cryptolude with my coffee, but now it’s time to log on to Discord.”

Sprint: The new “work week.” Derived from Agile nomenclature. (Time has historically been extremely Waterfall, which we know is bad for team-based technology work.) The “days” are now referred to as Planspan, Scrumspan, Kanbanspan, Pushspan, and Retrospan, with two days for binge. “Eileen, pace yourself. It’s only Scrumspan. We’ve got three lightmodes to go before good-binge.”

Brushknocks: A “second” on the old calendar, characterized by the sound of a Slack notification. “I’ll be there in two brushknocks.”

Littlebreak: A period of partial logoff, often expected to last a full demic but typically ending after several darkmodes. “I’m not going to measure my life in freshings any longer,” says the person entering their littlebreak. (They always return.)

Logoff: Replaces “death.”

This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The race to rebuild the world's coral reefs

- Is there an optimal driving speed that saves gas?

- As Russia plots its next move, an AI listens

- How to learn sign language online

- NFTs are a privacy and security nightmare

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones

BACKCHANNEL

This Startup Wants to Get in Your Ears and Watch Your Brain

Born from Alphabet's “moonshot” division, NextSense aims to sell earbuds that can collect heaps of neural data—and uncover the mysteries of gray matter.

Steven Levy  April 14, 2022 10:10 AM

Can a teeny-tiny earbud open a window to the body's most mysterious organ? Jen Dwyer, NextSense's medical director, and her team aim to find out.Photograph: Christie Hemm Klok

Konstantin Borodin is an ear nerd. He’s been looking into them, literally and professionally, for more than a decade. Even in social situations, he’ll find his attention drifting lobeward. “Sometimes I get weird looks,” he says.

I met Borodin when he measured my ears and their outer canals for custom-fit buds that can pick up my brain waves. To create a mold, you usually have to fill the ear with a warm waxy substance, but Borodin uses a device called the eFit Scanner that measures its precise dimensions with a laser. The size of an Oculus Quest, the scanner has twin eyepieces and a metal camera nozzle that looks like a long stinger.

I swab my ears with rubbing alcohol—to make them less shiny, he says—and he positions me on a stool. At his urging, I wedge my head into a brace. “It helps to stabilize things,” says Borodin, who is now swooping toward me, gripping the gadget with both hands. He tilts my head and zeroes in on my left ear. “Hold that position,” he says.

“How many of these have you done?” I ask him.

“Over 30,000,” he replies. Even after all those ears, Borodin marvels at them–that no two are the same, that the nose and ears are the only organs that grow as one ages. But what has brought us together for this fitting is another useful property of ears: They are in the perfect spot to eavesdrop on the brain.

After acting as the scanner-in-chief for the company that invented the eFit, Borodin is now the lead ear spelunker for NextSense, which was born at Google and spun out of Alphabet’s X division. The startup’s focus is brain health—improving sleep, helping patients with epilepsy, and eventually enriching the lives of people with a range of mental conditions. The idea is to use its earbuds to capture an electroencephalogram, a standard tool for assessing brain activity. Just as an ECG tracks the fibrillations of the heart, an EEG is used to diagnose anomalies in brain activity. While some smart watches—Apple, Samsung, Fitbit—offer versions of an ECG and aim to spy on your sleep, collecting neural data has mostly been a can’t-try-this-at-home activity. Until now.

Standard EEGs are “a mess,” says Arshia Khan, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who has done studies of those devices. To use the expensive machine in her lab, she has to fix electrodes to a person’s scalp. (“It leaves indentations on the head for a few hours, and if you use gel, it’s hard to shampoo it out.”) The device only works in a clinical setting and isn’t suitable for long-term studies. A handful of off-the-shelf, consumer EEG headsets are portable, but look incredibly awkward. If earbuds could deliver good results, that would be “fantastic,” she says. And not just for scientists.

For years, people have been shifting from tracking their health through sporadic visits to a doctor or lab to regularly monitoring their vitals themselves. The NextSense team is gambling that, with a gadget as familiar as an earbud, people will follow the same path with their brains. Then, with legions of folks wearing the buds for hours, days, and weeks on end, the company’s scientists hope they’ll amass an incredible data trove, in which they’ll uncover the hidden patterns of mental health.

For now, that’s the stuff of dreams. What’s real is that on one day in 2019, a patient tucked a bud into each ear, fell asleep, and proceeded to astound NextSense’s scientists—by churning out brain waves that showed exactly how this product could save a person's life.

Jonathan Berent is the CEO of NextSense. On a recent evening, the 48-year-old was talking like a podcast at 1.5 speed while we waited for our entrées on the patio of an Italian restaurant in Mountain View, California. The subject of his filibuster was how he’d gotten into brain health. His obsession wasn’t ears or wellness; it was sleep.

Raised by his single mother and a coterie of relatives in Seymour, Indiana—the small town John Mellencamp sings about—Berent says he struggled to fit in and often got into trouble at school. He threw himself into his hobbies, among them writing tiny games that could fit into Commodore 64 cartridges. As a teenager, he stumbled upon a book on lucid dreaming, a semi-conscious middle ground where dreamers have a measure of control over their visions. Written by the field’s top expert, Stephen LaBerge, the book got Berent hooked on the slumbering mind. “The physical laws don’t apply, and the social laws don’t apply,” Berent says of sleep. At 18, he made his first journal entry in what has become a lifelong project of documenting his dreams.

Berent managed to get into Stanford, where he started studying computer science, only to freeze on a final in an introductory course. He switched to philosophy, figuring he’d catch up with his fellow geeks in the workplace later on. A philosophy major isn’t a gateway to great Silicon Valley jobs, however. After some searching, Berent landed an entry-level position at Sun Microsystems, in a backwater division reviewing contracts.

By 2011, he’d made his way to Google, where he joined a sales team supporting AdWords (now called Google Ads). He was good at it. He managed a large team and worked out of an office that he decorated like a wellness retreat, with a yoga mat and a “wisdom library” of be-here-nowness. (“I don’t think incense was burning there, but in my memory it kind of is,” says one visitor.) All the while, he was experimenting with polyphasic sleep—going to bed around 10 pm, waking up three or four hours later, and taking 20-minute naps throughout the day.

It wasn’t long before he crossed paths with another sleep obsessive, in a different AdWords office. Joe Owens had a doctorate in neuroscience focusing on sleep and circadian rhythms. Their first conversation was a marathon Google Meet session. Berent detailed his adventures in sleep hacking: As a morning person, he explained, his naps effectively gave him multiple fresh starts in which to energetically read about neuroscience, consume novels, and practice the drums. Owens was impressed. “I’d never met anybody going this hard at sleep from a personal point of view,” he says. Both wound up guest-lecturing in a famous Stanford course on the science of sleep, and soon the two men were batting around ideas for products that might enhance sleep. LaBerge, the lucid dreaming expert, had become a mentor, and he shared with Berent a research paper in which playing a sound to slumberers increased the slow waves that correspond to deeper sleep. Berent thought a product built on that insight might allow people to rest more efficiently—compressing eight hours of shut-eye into six.

In April 2016, Google announced it was starting an incubator called Area 120, its artisanal take on Y Combinator. Berent and Owens applied and got rejected, but they were pointed to X, Alphabet’s “moonshot” division, which takes on riskier, longer-term projects than Area 120. X picked up the project to supercharge sleep, and Owens started running it full-time. Berent stayed in the ads division but devoted some of his time to the project.

One of their first efforts was to launch a study with Phyllis Zee, a well-known neurologist at Northwestern University. They committed $500,000 to the experiment, in which they tried sending audio signals to earphone-wearing subjects to boost the slow waves of deeper sleep. That’s when they hit their first snag: Some participants responded as they’d hoped but others not at all, and they couldn’t figure out why.

Thinking again about the earphones from their sleep study, Berent wondered if he might be better off trying to collect brain data from the ear. That would help him observe not just sleep, but perhaps everything happening inside our heads. He discovered that a Georgia Tech professor—who coincidentally happened to be the technical lead and manager of Google Glass—was working along those lines. The researcher put him in touch with United Sciences, where Konstantin Borodin was doing laser-guided earbud fittings. That company had tried to build a system to perform EEGs through the ear. It had even launched a Kickstarter campaign. But the product never shipped, and the company abandoned the effort.

Berent got in touch and arranged to get fitted for the device himself. Naturally, he tried to test it in his sleep, even though the ear molds were made of an uncomfortable hard plastic. To his delight, he was able to get some measurable brain data. Berent quickly made a deal with the company. Now the ad exec turned brain hacker was on the hook to somehow make it work.

Jonathan Berent, the CEO, set out to help people hack their sleep—and ended up with a way to collect unprecedented amounts of brain data.

Photograph: Christie Hemm Klok

An EEG is a finicky thing. In a gold-standard setup, a person’s scalp is covered in many electrodes smeared with a gooey gel to cut down on electrical noise. Once pasted to a person’s head, the electrodes can detect when huge cohorts of neurons fire together, producing signals in different frequency bands. That’s how an EEG can reveal roughly what the brain is up to—various frequencies correlate with stages of sleep, rest, or intense focus. It wasn’t obvious that Berent could do all that with only two electrodes (and no conductive goo). So he flew out to Atlanta to get some expert opinions.

Along with a team from United Sciences, Berent and a small group of renowned neurologists crowded into a tiny examination room at the Brain Health Center at Emory University. The head of the center, Allan Levey, was excited at the prospect of ear EEGs. “We know about our blood pressure, cholesterol, and respiratory system,” Levey says. “But the most important organ is our brain. We don’t assess that systematically.” He figured patients could get better care if they were also tracking the electrical activity inside the skull.

Levey had lured some colleagues to get fitted for earbuds with him; one professor had literally written the textbook on EEGs. But some of the scientists were skeptical. They weren’t convinced that the tiny sensors in earbuds could pick up the relatively weak electrical brain signals. If they could, though, the payoff could be huge, allowing for persistent and portable measurements. “The problem was squeezing in all the electronics that would make it work,” says Dan Winkel, an epilepsy researcher who participated in the demo.

The Emory scientists inserted their custom buds, closed their eyes … and thought. Then they turned to a computer monitor to see what data the buds had captured. “All of a sudden, the line begins to travel across the screen,” Winkel recalls—just as it would with a normal EEG setup. “I was pretty shocked, as were most of the people in the room.”

Levey told Berent that if he could eventually match the quality of a true EEG, he’d be on to something—a sort of Apple Watch for the brain. But, he added, the earbuds could be immediately put to use on an important problem: monitoring epilepsy.

In refining the earbuds, NextSense's team had to figure out how to amplify useful signals and cope with noise.

Photograph: Christie Hemm Klok

There is no easy, noninvasive way to observe a seizure, which is a critical step in treatment, both to assess the efficacy of drugs and to predict when the next seizure might strike. A patient might spend up to a week under observation at a hospital or get electrodes surgically implanted in the brain. The latter approach is expensive and painful. But by studying individuals who have undergone it, scientists have identified patterns of brain activity that seem to predict an impending seizure. With that kind of weather forecast for the brain, patients can better plan their lives, choosing to not get behind the wheel or climb tall ladders.

Berent left Atlanta feeling optimistic. A few months later, he decided to take a three-month transfer—a bungee, in Google parlance—to work full-time for X. But just as he arrived, the sleep project got axed.

Owens quickly moved to another team. Berent, however, had to scramble to remain at X. He had to somehow, quickly, pick up the pieces of his project and make a new case for himself. In February 2018, he met with one of X’s top moon-shotters, John “Ivo” Stivoric, to see if he could salvage his dream of ear EEGs. But Stivoric was more interested in a brain device that could control a computer. Such a project would fit into an existing X initiative called Intent OS, which was exploring the future of how humans and computers might interact. Perhaps the earbuds could reveal what a person was focusing on. Or provide other data useful for controlling a computer or augmented reality display. Berent was game, and the new project was dubbed Heimdallr, after the Norse god who used his keen eyesight and hearing to watch for invaders. His teammates started conducting an experiment on how they might use the earbuds to refocus a person’s attention. It involved streaming two audio books simultaneously, one in each ear.

Berent, however, was still obsessing over the idea of replicating medical-quality EEGs. He and his team had to figure out how to amplify more distant signals to make up for the fact they only had two electrodes. The United Sciences prototype wasn’t quite up to snuff; it couldn’t pick up alpha waves, which occur during both sleep and wakeful periods. The X’er also had to miniaturize the electronics of a traditional EEG to fit inside the two buds.

Berent felt that with Google’s knowledge, equipment, and talent, these tasks were possible. He also had on hand 5,000 ear scans from United Sciences, which revealed that it was critical to create a tight seal—to filter out electrical noise that could erode the brain signals. He had to improve on United Science’s hard plastic molds. While casting about, Berent discovered a product called Tecticoat, a super-pliable, conductive coating. When he put it on the buds, suddenly the brain waves they collected became far sharper, and the earbuds far more comfortable. (Berent eventually acquired the intellectual property related to the polymer.)

Impatient with the rate of progress, Berent one day grabbed a lead from a $50,000 portable EEG machine, smeared some gel on it, and jammed it into his ear. To his relief, the electrode registered alpha waves—now he just had to make the same thing happen with his buds. A more definitive clinical test came months later, when a Heimdallr prototype performed roughly on par with an EEG.

Stivoric, who’d been skeptical of Berent’s obsession, was impressed. “One of the worst sensors in the world is an EEG sensor—there’s environmental noise, surface noise, motion of the body, and so forth,” Stivoric says. “I thought, OK, it shouldn’t work. But it does work. These signals are showing up. How is this even possible?”

On October 18, 2019, Berent took a meeting with Google’s chief economist to discuss the privacy implications of reading people’s brain waves. A few minutes in, Berent began feeling poorly. He looked at his Apple Watch, which informed him that he could be in atrial fibrillation. Berent went to the hospital for tests, and a few days later, he underwent a cardiac version of a reboot, where his heart was stopped and restarted. The experience made Berent view his work differently. To hell with Intent OS–he now realized that all he wanted was to build a device that could do for his brain what his watch had done for his heart.

On November 8, 2019, Jen Dwyer was working at her desk on the third floor of Moonshot Central, inside a converted shopping mall. Dwyer, who is the team's medical director, holds a doctorate in computational neuroscience and a medical degree, and she joined Berent's project because of a deep-seated interest in sleep and epilepsy. “I just got really fascinated with the electrophysiological waveform,” she says, calling it “mesmerizing and beautiful.”

She opened up a file of patient data from an earbud study she’d set up at Emory, under Winkel’s supervision. As one person’s brain waves marched across her screen, a pattern caught her eye. At first the lines on the chart were neatly spaced out and undulating. “Then, all of a sudden—boom,” she says. The lines started to jump wildly, as if the calm waters of the EEG had surged into an angry sea. It was the signature of a seizure—the first time ear monitoring had detected one. The subject, who had been sleeping, probably never knew anything had happened. But both the earbuds and the implanted electrodes confirmed the event. “We all gave each other high-fives,” says Berent. “This was what we really needed.” As the study progressed, the earbuds would log more of them, picking up 16 of the 17 seizures detected by the electrodes.

But Heimdallr was in trouble. It was still an awkward fit at X. In June 2020, Berent learned that X would stop funding the project. So he spun out an independent company. He worked out a deal where X got a stake in the new firm in exchange for the intellectual property. Five people made the jump from X to the startup, including its medical director. The team hired a new head of product who had worked on the Apple Watch. Now called NextSense and touting itself as a platform for brain-health monitoring, the company got $5.3 million in funding.

In the months since, NextSense has struck up partnerships with universities and drug companies to explore the medical uses of its earbuds. A multinational pharmaceutical firm called Otsuka hopes to use NextSense’s earbuds to assess the efficacy of medication, not only for epilepsy but for depression and other mental health issues. NextSense plans to submit its device for FDA approval this year, and Emory is conducting more studies in hopes of developing an algorithm to predict seizures, ideally hours or days in advance. (The Emory doctors are now consultants for NextSense, and have some equity in the company.)

But while the immediate uses of NextSense’s earbuds are medical, Berent hopes to eventually build a mass-market brain monitor that, if enough people start using it, can generate enormous quantities of day-to-day brain performance data. The catch, of course, is that since no one has ever done that, it’s not yet obvious what most people would get out of the information. That’s also what’s exciting. “We don’t necessarily know what we would learn because we’ve never had access to that type of data,” says Emory’s Winkel.

Berent and his team envision a multipurpose device that can stream music and phone calls like AirPods; boost local sound like a hearing aid; and monitor your brain to provide a window into your moods, attention, sleep patterns, and periods of depression. He also hopes to zero in on a few sizes that would fit a vast majority of people, to dispense with all the ear-scanning.

Far along on the NextSense road map is something unproven, and kind of wild. If artificial intelligence can decode tons of brain data, the next step would be to then change those patterns—perhaps by doing something as simple as playing a well-timed sound. “It’s almost a transformative moment in history,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a bioengineer at UC San Diego, who licensed some of his own ear-EEG technology to NextSense. Like Berent, he is fascinated by the prospect of using audio to nudge someone into a deeper sleep state. “It’s so convenient, it doesn’t bother you,” he says, “people are wearing stuff in the ear typically anyway, right?” Yeah, but not to screw around with their brain waves.

NextSense's Richa Gujarati, Jonathan Berent, Stephanie Martin, and Jen Dwyer hope that patients will use the earbuds to keep an eye on their health and treatment.

Photograph: Christie Hemm Klok

Ten days after my scanning appointment, Berent introduces me to my custom set of earbuds. We are in NextSense’s Mountain View office, which consists of two cluttered rooms in a shared suite on the building’s first floor. I tuck the buds into my ears and find they fit perfectly—unlike my Airpods—and are much more comfortable than the molded hard-plastic hearing aid I sometimes wear.

Berent pulls out an Android phone and fires up NextSense’s app. It takes data from the buds and displays it on a number of charts and graphs—kind of like the display you see in a hospital room, the one where you hope that none of the lines goes flat. On the screen, I get an instant look at my brain waves, a thick green spiky line on a chart logging the amplitude. He taps to pull up different views and to flip between the two buds. “That looks like a typical EEG,” Berent says, maybe as much to reassure me that I’m normal as to assert that his product is capturing brain waves.

Another exercise had me alternate between a semi-meditative state and alertness. In my alert stage, I sat on a small orange couch—Ikea, maybe?—and looked around the room to note the busy desktops and a low bookshelf jammed with self-help volumes, medical texts, and coding manuals. On top of the unit is a turntable, two small speakers, and a life-size model of an ear; a cover of a vinyl Prince album leans against the wall. Another wall is a giant whiteboard scrawled with equations and data readings. I soon learn that moving my head to take in this scene has messed up my readings. Apparently these prototypes still have some bugs to work out.

But the most interesting test, and certainly the one that excited Berent most, involved napping. He’s still obsessed with sleep, and his company has an ongoing study on it at Emory. “We’re really able to see clear changes between sleep stages,” says Dwyer, the medical director. If the earbuds can prove themselves as snooze detectors, patients who ordinarily get dispatched to a sleep clinic might be spared the trip, says Richa Gujarati, NextSense’s head of product and strategy. With earbuds, she says, “you can send patients home for a diagnosis.”

I, however, was to nap on a small couch in the office. Berent retreated to his Jeep to do the same. I scrunched myself into a semi-fetal position and willed myself into the Land of Nod. It felt like it took half my allotted 20 minutes to doze off, but when my watch alarm started to chirp, I had definitely been out. Berent popped back in the room and congratulated me on my dozing. After uploading the data, we sat in front of his computer and watched as several graphs popped up. I could see the splotchy color fields of my spectrogram darkening around minute five or six, as sleep set in. Berent had taken a similar trajectory. But as he is a polyphasic maestro of the daytime nap, the last few minutes of his slumber produced a waveform signature that was almost a solid block of burnt orange. “It looks like I’m dead here,” he says. For comparison, Berent uploaded data from the Oura device he wears, a sleep tracker worn as a ring. It hadn’t registered the nap.

Of course, gazing at a chart of vibrant blotches wasn’t going to help me fortify my winks. That’s part of what NextSense is promising to one day deliver. But being able to so casually see what my brain was up to felt like a revelation. Just as some of us obsessively monitor our pulses and oxygen levels, we might regularly check our brain waves just to see what they’re up to. If enough of us do it, we may even figure out what they mean.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

BACKCHANNEL

A Farmer’s Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge

Don Cameron went all in on a trickle-down survival tactic. It could help save America’s agricultural heartland—even if he doesn’t survive the new water war.

Susie Cagle  April 12, 2022 10:10 AM

Left: Spray from a hydroelectric plant on the Kings River in California. Right: Don Cameron walks some of the land he will flood in order to recharge dried-out aquifers.Photographs: Nicholas Albrecht

In the fields at Terranova Ranch, it was as if a disaster had arrived.

Don Cameron, clad in dark green waders, sloshed through the pond that had formed in his orchards and vineyards. More of his crops were underwater than at any time since he began farming in California’s San Joaquin Valley—a quarter of the almonds, a third of the grapes, half the pistachios, and all of the walnuts and olives. Most of his neighbors would have been racing to pump out their fields; accepted agricultural wisdom holds that too much water will suffocate the roots. About an hour’s drive southeast, farmers were so desperate to hold the flood back that they dropped sandbags from rented helicopters. At Terranova, Cameron took an entirely different tack. He measured the depth of the drink and inspected the new growth on his vines and trees. Then he ordered more water to come.

It was early 2017, and after five years of drought the valley was in the midst of its second-wettest year on record. A total of 53 gargantuan storms, known as atmospheric rivers, soaked the West Coast. There were landslides and blackouts. Dams crested, century-old giant sequoia trees toppled, and a stretch of the Central Coast was cut off from the rest of the state. Tens of thousands of people fled their homes, and at least five died. In the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the snowpack reached its highest level in years.

The flooding was unpredictable, but it was not unexpected. California’s weather lurches between wet and dry. To calculate the state’s average annual precipitation is to do a rather meaningless bit of arithmetic. This particular flood took a while to reach Cameron. From the mountains, it poured into the upper portion of the Kings River, then into Pine Flat Lake, a dammed reservoir 100 miles upstream of Terranova. By late February, the dam operators were releasing more than 400 acre-feet per hour into the lower river—enough water to flood 400 acres of grapes or almonds shin-deep. As the weather warmed, snowmelt brought a second flood. Water heaved down the Sierra slopes and roared through the canyons, pushing Pine Flat beyond capacity. At peak outflow, the reservoir was releasing nearly 1,200 acre-feet per hour.

Cameron had been dreaming of a deluge like this since 1983 and building for it since 2010, but he wasn’t ready when it came. His project was years behind schedule: The pumps weren’t installed; the canals weren’t fully dug. The best he had been able to do was rely on rented diesel pumps and an old pipeline to pull water out of the Kings as fast as he could. From winter through spring, he managed to keep the crops wet, siphoning more than 3,000 acre-feet off the river, lamenting that he couldn’t take more. One vineyard of robust Italian Barbera wine grapes that needed 2 acre-feet of water in a year got 13 acre-feet in a season. Ducks moved in as the branches flowered. Come summer harvest, the grapes were as sweet as ever.

The real success story, though, lay in the ground beneath Terranova. In a typical year, that’s where most of the farm’s water comes from. Cameron and his neighbors do not hold rights to any nearby river, or to the supplies piped in through government projects; they either buy from people who do or, more often, pump what they need out of the aquifers. A system of natural subterranean reservoirs stretches beneath the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, which together form the Central Valley. The region is pincushioned with more than 100,000 wells. People and businesses have pumped out so much water that whole towns sink into the hollows.

While Terranova stood firm, its aquifer was in trouble. Cameron and his neighbors had taxed the ground so heavily over the years that there was a 230-foot-deep dry zone, or “cone of depression,” in the water table beneath the ranch. But after the 2017 flood, after the last of the rain and snowmelt had trickled down into the aquifer, the water level rose 40 feet. Cameron swore that when the next flood came, he would be ready to gulp down even more.

Cameron didn’t come up with the idea of using floodwater to refill aquifers, but he did earn a reputation as the godfather of the practice. In a valley dotted with ponds and basins built for the sole purpose of holding extra water as it percolates down into the ground, he was the first farmer foolhardy enough to experiment on his own harvest. His work earned him state and county prizes for innovation. In 2018 he was appointed president of California’s agriculture board. He thought—hoped—that on-farm recharge might become one piece of the future-proofing necessary to save the country’s most productive agricultural region from near-certain death.

The stakes are high: California grows more than a third of the vegetables and two-thirds of the fruits and nuts eaten in the United States, dominating production of artichokes, avocados, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery, dates, grapes, garlic, olives, plums, peaches, walnuts, pistachios, lemons, sweet rice, and lettuce. The Central Valley is America’s agricultural heartland, crucially important to the state’s economy and the groceries of the nation. More wine grapes are grown there than in California’s wine country, more almonds than anywhere else on earth. There are more than a quarter of a million acres devoted to tomatoes, which when plucked, weighed, canned, and shipped add up to around a third of all the processed tomato stuff eaten worldwide. And that’s not to mention all the region’s livestock—chickens, pigs, cows.

Ever since the first crops were planted, though, people have used more water than nature could replace. In the past eight decades, more than 120 million acre-feet have been siphoned out of the aquifers. The deficit grows by an average of 1.8 million acre-feet each year. Meanwhile, climate change is poised to amp California’s mercurial weather cycles to new extremes. The droughts will be drier and longer, the floods higher and faster. Unless farming and water-management practices change, the region is facing an existential crisis. A report from the Public Policy Institute of California included a stark projection: To balance the water budget and protect the groundwater on which most Californians depend, as many as 780,000 acres of farmland would need to be fallowed.

Cameron’s project suggested the possibility of another path: What if you could capture one disaster and use it to mitigate the other? What if you could do what California’s climate couldn’t and average out the floods and droughts? The depleted aquifers beneath the Central Valley could hold an estimated 140 million acre-feet—three times more water than all the state’s reservoirs combined—and they could do it for a small fraction of the price of surface storage. Water kept underground isn’t lost to evaporation, which will only speed up with a hotter, drier climate. Best of all, from a farmer’s perspective, Cameron’s techniques wouldn’t necessarily require fallowing land before flooding it.

There would be risks, sure. But for Cameron, there is no viable alternative. “I have growers tell me that there’s no way in hell they’re going to flood their almonds,” he says. “They say, ‘If I get a wind, my trees are gonna blow down.’ And I say, ‘Well, that’s fine, you can worry about that or you can not do anything and you’ll only be farming half of those trees anyway.’”

So yes, outside the Kings River Basin, Cameron is a revered farmer and business leader, hailed as a visionary at the vanguard of climate adaptation. Inside the basin, though, things aren’t so simple. Here, according to his ally Matt Hurley, who runs the organization that oversees aquifer use in and around Terranova, Cameron is “probably one of the most hated people.”

The problem is the flood, the excess acre-footage that Cameron needs to make his plan work. It doesn’t belong to him. It might not belong to anyone. Because that water only flows every few years, it was always treated as a periodic inconvenience, if not a disaster. The flood “was something everybody wanted to get rid of,” Cameron says. Then, right as he “went crazy” drowning his acres at Terranova, it became something everybody wanted. A land developer with dealings all over the state and an outside water district made a claim on it, arguing that the Kings River surge was going to waste and should instead belong to them. The river’s existing rights holders were incensed; local residents were worried. Caught in the middle, Cameron’s

paradigm-shifting recharge project was at risk of running dry.

The outcome of the Kings River conflict will ramify throughout the Central Valley and the state. It is an early skirmish in the slow-building water war that may consume this region as the climate crisis wrings it dry. At its heart is a savage question: When drought is coming for everyone, who owns the flood?

The worst California deluge on record came early in the Golden State’s life. Between December 1861 and January 1862, there were weeks of continuous rain and snow. Governor-elect Leland Stanford took a rowboat to his inauguration. Thousands of cattle drowned; whole towns were swept away. The flood pooled in the low, fertile valleys where farms would one day grow their riches. The capital was temporarily moved to San Francisco while Sacramento dried out. The state went bankrupt. And then everyone forgot.

In the wake of that catastrophe, settlers in the Central Valley began building their agrarian paradise. Over time, they terraformed the land, changing it beyond recognition, ruthless in their management of water. Where there was too much, they dammed it dry. Where there was not enough, they brought it in. And when it didn’t come during growing season, they tapped it from below. By the turn of the last century, they had drained Tulare Lake, formerly the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. They spent the next decades corralling its tributaries. The largest of these was the Kings River.

The land along the westernmost section of the river was forever marshy. The groundwater here flows from the Sierra foothills in the northeast; if the mountains are at the shallow end of a big subterranean swimming pool, this is the deep end. Unable to farm this vibrant aquatic habitat, people drilled it full of wells. When the wetlands dried up, the land became arable. This was how, after decades, a riparian swamp became Terranova Ranch.

The land that Cameron farms is just outside the town of Helm, which boasts a post office, a gas station, an elementary school, and fewer than 10 paltry inches of rain per year. It is in the McMullin Area, the only groundwater district in the Kings subbasin not served by the actual river. The end of the North Fork of the Kings runs nearby, and it still floods every few years. Most of the time, though, it is desiccated and weed-filled, an expanse of beige and ocher interrupted by scrubby bursts of pale green and gray.

This is the case in the fall of 2021, when Cameron and I drive out to the edge of the ranch. “It looks like a desert,” he says. “It doesn’t look like a river. But when the water comes”—he pauses in wonderment—“everything comes alive.”

Standing in the dust, Cameron, 69, cuts a slim but sturdy figure. He has a medium build and a long gait, his face creased by sun and time. With his hands in his pockets and mud on his boots, he stands a few inches shy of 6 feet, the height of the four intake pipes that carry water from the river to Terranova. In a crisp long-sleeved oxford shirt and faded Levi’s, he is the only blue in the landscape.

Where so many of his peers define themselves by their lineage, Cameron is a first-generation farmer. He studied biology at the state college in Fresno, planning to work in wildlife management so he could spend his days in nature. When the local service wasn’t hiring, Cameron turned to the region’s dominant industry instead. Farming was work, and it was outside. Close enough. “And then it kind of got under my skin,” he says. “I love the challenge.”

Cameron began working at Terranova in 1981, and it has been nothing if not a challenge. The farm’s two dozen or so crops (conventional and organic, so many he can’t list them all off the top of his head—almonds, pistachios, bell peppers, carrots, onions, garlic, olives for oil, tomatoes for canning, grapes for wine) rely on some 55 wells. Since his first season, Cameron has seen the water table drop by a foot or more each year. But he has also seen the Kings roar with potential.

The winter of 1982–83 was the wettest ever recorded on the river. On his commute between the ranch and his home at the time in Fresno, Cameron watched with apprehension as overflow from the nearby San Joaquin River inundated a vineyard at the low point of the floodplain. But he was amazed to find that the plants weren’t smothered. Every day that spring and into the summer, the vines stretched, the leaves unfurled, and the grapes grew unharmed above the flood.

Those two years, he used more than 9,000 acre-feet of spare Kings floodwater. He did the same in subsequent wet years: 1984, 1986, 1987, 1995, 1996. In 1997, the Kings River Water Association, which manages rights and records inflows and outflows, agreed to allow Terranova to sip the extra flood-water for $2 per acre-foot. Otherwise it would at best flow out to the San Francisco Bay, at worst flood someone downstream.

Still, each year the water below Terranova’s fields receded deeper, further out of Cameron’s reach. By 2009, he had instituted every irrigation efficiency he could think of. He set his sights on something bigger, a flood-and-recharge project that would skim the peaks off the river and send them back underground—in other words, pay down the aquifer debt. A few hours’ drive to the north, in Yolo County, a lanky engineer named Philip Bachand was looking to try something similar. The two men teamed up, the match made by a mutual contact at the US Department of Agriculture, and by the end of 2010 they had a $75,000 grant from the agency. That was only enough for a shoestring budget, but how complicated could it be? “At the most basic level, it’s just throwing water on land, right?” Bachand tells me.

The night that “kicked this whole thing off,” Cameron recalls, was a cold evening in December 2010. He and Bachand were touring Terranova, looking for the best 1,100 acres to flood as the light was fading in the valley fog. They decided the lands that would grow the farm’s carrots, peppers, and tomatoes later in the year were top contenders. Bachand would make them look like rice fields, terraced and waterlogged. But the deluge offered more water than those acres could hold. Cameron thought of 1983 and the accidentally flooded fields along the San Joaquin. He pointed at a vineyard of Barbera. “We can blitz-flood all our grapes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Bachand was surprised, but Cameron insisted. He figured that the ad hoc hydroponic environment would hold enough oxygen that the grapes could still thrive. The team pumped in enough water to submerge the roots; when the soil absorbed it, they pumped in more. Cameron checked on the vines daily, looking for any sign of stress. When the new spring leaves began to develop a yellow tinge, he sent the flood somewhere else, and they darkened to cool viridian again.

By August, Bachand and Cameron had sent more than 1,000 acre-feet of water back into the aquifer. They had used twice that much just to water other crops on the ranch, preventing the groundwater debt from accruing further. By Bachand’s reckoning, the water cost about a third of what Terranova would have spent pulling the same amount from underground. Having proved their concept, they secured $5 million from the California Department of Water Resources to engineer the permanent infrastructure they’d need to move floodwater across all of Terranova’s 5,500 acres. They built and built for that next flood—and while they did, the state descended into another drought.

Agribusiness loves the message of on-farm recharge. After years as water villains, growers get to be part of the solution. The Almond Board of California, whose embattled nut swallows 13 percent of all agricultural water in the state, is an especially ardent booster. But Cameron’s technique is not a miracle that will deliver the San Joaquin Valley from all of its demons. Cash crops aren’t alone in relying on the groundwater here. Many thousands of people do too, and they have reason to be skeptical of solutions that privilege agricultural needs.

In times of drought, farmers effectively compete with neighboring communities for water. In the race to the bottom of the valley aquifers, growers can pump so much that thousands of residential wells sputter and die. While the almond trees stay green, families wash their dishes with bottled water. Efforts to recharge more and pump less are welcome—any drop in this beleaguered bucket—but some in the valley would rather see farmers fallow the fields along riverbanks, pull back the levees, and restore the old floodplain wetlands. Fish and other wildlife would likely agree. Before the rivers were contained for society’s purported benefit, flooding was a natural part of the riparian life cycle.

In the short term, groundwater recharge could worsen another of the valley’s woes. The entire region is polluted with fertilizer compounds, which leach into the soil, then into the aquifers, then into the drinking water, where they can be especially harmful to infants and small children. Residential areas across the San Joaquin Valley are also hot spots for the pesticide additive 1,2,3-Trichloropropane, which likely contributes to cancer. Throwing water on the land would flush these contaminants into the aquifers much faster than otherwise. In the longer term, though, the legacy contamination would be diluted with pristine Sierra snowmelt. Cameron works with Helen Dahlke, a hydrologist at UC Davis, to measure nutrients and chemicals in Terranova’s soil and water using sensors in the ground. Recent soil samples turned up residue from a handful of pesticides; more testing is needed to determine what’s ending up in the water. “I’d rather know,” Cameron says.

But even if on-farm recharge is proven safe, beneficial, and arguably necessary for the fish, the crops, the land, and the residents—even if all of that happens, the Terranova project could still wither on the vine. Cameron’s biggest hurdle has always been politics. In 2014, mid-drought, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The law charged locals with crafting and imposing their own groundwater sustainability plans. This involved self-organizing dozens of new agencies across 21 “critically overdrafted” basins, many of them in the San Joaquin Valley. These agencies, dominated by agricultural users, were left with two options: consume less water, or figure out where to get more.

Until that point, California law had been largely silent on the question of groundwater ownership. If the land was yours, you could drill as deep as you liked. Surface water, on the other hand, had been regulated since the Gold Rush. The rules said that if you were the first to claim the water—even if it wasn’t on your land—then you had a right to it. You kept that right as long as you didn’t let the water go to waste. In other words: Finders keepers, and use it or lose it. On the Kings River, the first rights permit dates back to 1916, and the water was declared “fully appropriated” in 1989. But the river still flooded, and some of the flood never made it onto the books. Was it truly all appropriated, or could there be something left over? The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act put every unaccounted-for drop in play.

Seemingly no one understood the opportunity this presented better than the land developer John Vidovich. The 66-year-old grew up on the peninsula south of San Francisco as the region was changing identity, transitioning from the fruit-farming “Valley of Heart’s Delight” to Silicon Valley. His father, one of the first to get wise, took the 20 acres of apricots and cherries the family farmed and turned them into a shopping center. The elder Vidovich built a regional real estate powerhouse, which the younger Vidovich grew into a statewide empire. His investment firm, Sandridge Partners, has amassed more than 100,000 acres of agricultural land in the San Joaquin Valley. Some of it is planted with almonds, but most of it Vidovich uses for its associated water rights, allocations, and access. That’s where the real money lies.

Some of Vidovich’s state-spanning water deals are more infamous than others. In one case, he sold a water agency near Los Angeles the rights to surface water tied to a piece of farmland, then pumped up groundwater from the same plot and sent at least some of it via clandestine pipeline to the juggernaut Wonderful Company, a major grower of mandarins, pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds.

In 2016, Vidovich signed another valley-spanning deal, this one even bigger: the Tulare Lake Storage and Floodwater Protection Project. It would route the Kings River floodwater not north toward Terranova but south, to a new reservoir that would be built on Sandridge land. Vidovich would sell the rights to use the land and build the reservoir to Semitropic, a water storage district on the southern side of the dry Tulare lake bed. Semitropic already ran a groundwater bank, a kind of underground reservoir that could stockpile as much as 1.65 million acre-feet for its account holders. It planned to pay for the new $600 million project with state funds.

Whether the idea was originally Vidovich’s brainstorm or Semitropic’s isn’t clear; neither party responded to multiple requests for comment. Nor is it clear when they thought it up—although in mid-2014, Semitropic began pouring money into lobbying the state legislature on water storage issues. Certainly it was a good deal for Vidovich. Semitropic would pay the water mogul $40 million for the easement on the land. He would also get priority rights to floodwater—not just from the Kings but also any other tributaries-—and access to the California Aqueduct, which carries water from the northern part of the state to the south. He would be able to transport groundwater across his growing empire or, some feared, sell it to someone even thirstier. (Vidovich told an interviewer in 2017, “Even if I were to move water and sell it, it would be to farming operations.”)

“There’s some land out there that’s better used as a parking lot than what they’re attempting to grow on it.”

Where the rights holders were riled by the Semitropic proposal—“sharpening our knives” for the “pirates at the door,” one told a local reporter—Steve Haugen didn’t flinch. Haugen bears the weighty title of “watermaster” for the Kings River Water Association, which protects the interests of the 28 member units of the river’s watered gentry, both upstream and downstream from Terranova. His nerves are cool after 30 years working on one of the largest rivers in the Sierra. “The history books are riddled with hundreds of unimplemented projects on the Kings alone,” he tells me. “So yeah, hydrauli-cally the concept works. Politically, financially, it’s hard to believe that would work.”

Middle-aged, with graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Haugen folds and refolds his hands and looks down as he speaks, measuring his statements with the same consideration he has shown in decades of measuring the river’s flow. The low-ceilinged conference room next-door to his office, where the members meet, is lined with black-and-white photos of Sierra peaks covered in a thick layer of snowpack. They’re lit with the reverence shown to gilded portraits of saints.

For all Haugen’s calm talk, Semitropic argues that it was his agency that left the door open to a challenge. It held two water licenses from the state that covered the flood on the Kings—but didn’t consistently report water use on either of them. On paper, the water went to waste, which meant that it could now be up for grabs. (See the second sacred tenet of California water law: Use it or lose it.) Semitropic had staked $40 million on what appeared to be a record-keeping gaffe.

In response, the Kings River Water Association claimed that it was all a misunderstanding. The accounting was correct; the organization had just put the numbers in the wrong places. A “simplified reporting method,” the attorneys called it. Sure, the river flooded sometimes, but those were rare events, outside of their control. And anyway, now member units and local groundwater agencies had their own ambitious recharge plans.

Haugen says that he and other Kings River representatives tried to negotiate with the would-be attackers. They met around half a dozen times between late 2016 and early 2017. Haugen says they could’ve given a little–they had, after all, been selling that floodwater in deals like the one with Terranova for decades. But, he says, Semitropic wanted a permanent right to the extra water, which the association wasn’t willing to give up for any price.

They ended up on the proverbial courthouse steps, in a battle over whether to crack open the book on the Kings for the first time in decades. In May 2017, three of the Kings River districts filed claims to a million acre-feet of water that they said they already owned—an amount equivalent to more than half the average annual run of the Kings. Sixteen days later, Semitropic filed a petition claiming that the river’s “fully appropriated” status should be revoked or revised, along with an application for rights to 1.6 million acre-feet.

This all sounded to me like very bad news for Don Cameron and his big empty pipes out by Helm—which would very likely stay empty if Semitropic were to win. But he and the rest of the board at the McMullin groundwater agency couldn’t join the coalition condemning Semitropic’s “water grab.” It would have required endorsing the claim that the river had no water to spare. And if that were true, Cameron wouldn’t be the Department of Water Resources’ golden godfather of recharge.

The river users were not happy that McMullin had failed to take their side. They responded with icy hostility. Haugen, the Kings’ watermaster, remains unimpressed by Cameron’s project. “We’ve been doing groundwater recharge in the service area for a century now,” he tells me. “I’ve got plans that can fully put that water to use.” If Terranova wants to help with flood control now and again, that’s fine, he says. “But there are no assurances that there’s ever water for a flood control project,” he continues, offering a grim smile. “Folks want to see our local area sustainable. And there are ways to do it cooperatively.”

But not, apparently, on the Kings. In 2020, Haugen’s association canceled all the river’s floodwater agreements, including the one it had maintained with Terranova for nearly 25 years. Cameron would have to find another way.

Cameron had an irrigation canal built to redirect the floodwaters from the North Fork of the Kings River.

Photograph: Nicholas Albrecht

On the first floor of a small office building, in the middle of Kerman, California—population about 16,000, one Walmart, one Starbucks—Matt Hurley is drowning in paperwork. He is the general manager of the McMullin Area Ground-water Sustainability Agency and its only full-time staff member. His reception area is cluttered with stacks of large paper maps and plans, and cardboard boxes in various stages of unpack. “I got a few demerits when I was young, and I still need to get a few brownie points to offset those, because I still may be taking the wrong elevator if I’m not careful,” he says. “Hopefully, I can do good on my time left on this planet before I check out.”

At 68 years old, Hurley is the personification of a strong handshake, tall and booming in a dark blue polo shirt, jeans, and black cowboy boots, with silvery white side-parted hair and a mustache that curls down around the corners. He talks fast and peppers his speech with the folksy self-deprecation of a local agriculturalist (“You’ll figure out I’m wacky as a wooden watch”), which he is not.

Hurley came to McMullin from a water district further south, where John Vidovich owns the majority of property. A 2017 article in The Bakersfield Californian reported that some considered him Vidovich’s “henchman,” obliged to do Sandridge’s bidding. Hurley denied that the relationship was anything more than water district manager and water-wealthy ag king. Now he says that Vidovich is a longtime close family friend and his daughter’s godfather, that Vidovich asked and he provided legal advice on the sale of the $40 million easement to Semitropic, and that, following other asks for other favors, they haven’t spoken since April 6, 2018. Vidovich wanted him to do things that were “gray at best,” Hurley tells me. “He just doesn’t quite get what the whole picture looks like anymore. He’s so driven by making Sandridge bigger and better.”

By the time Hurley got to McMullin, he knew there was extra floodwater on the Kings—and he knew the area’s depleted aquifer could in fact be a huge asset. Unlike other parts of the valley, the McMullin Area hasn’t sunk into the emptied space of its exploited aquifer, making it a natural subterranean water bank. It could store nearly 2 million-acre feet underground, roughly as much as two Pine Flat Lakes.

Hurley pitched himself to Cameron and the other district board members before the job even existed. During his interviews for the position, members expressed concern about his unsavory associations, his Vidovich baggage. But in a region with such apparently grim prospects, Cameron says, they needed “a bulldog.” McMullin is the only district in the basin whose landowners don’t have rights to surface water; being so aquifer-dependent, it is held responsible by its neighboring agencies for three-quarters of the area’s annual groundwater deficit. Without any new sources of water, or exceptional leaps in efficiency, that would mean fallowing around half the acreage in the district. And the McMullin Area farmers, some of them helming fourth-generation operations, were not content to dry up and blow away.

In his Kerman office, Hurley has a map of the McMullin Area pinned to the wall. He smiles and runs a finger around its borders. “I call this my little dragon,” he says. The San Joaquin River forms the top of its head, and its chest runs along the North Fork of the Kings, at Terranova. Its snout kisses the Mendota Pool, where the two waterways meet and mix. This is the future home of the Aquaterra Water Bank—a system of both recharge and underground storage, with the canals and pipelines necessary to bring water in and deliver it out to partners potentially hundreds of miles away. “It’s a complete flowering of that seed” that Cameron planted at Terranova a decade ago, Hurley tells me. Every water agency in California has to keep its stock somewhere, and using a preexisting natural vault is far cheaper than building a new reservoir.

To get Aquaterra running, McMullin would require funding from partner agencies around the state with rights to water but nowhere to store it. As part of their payment, these agencies would leave behind a portion of the water they bring in. Hurley tells me that he approached the rest of the Kings Basin first, naturally, but so far no one has signed on. He is working with a water agency that serves much of Silicon Valley (and currently banks some of its water with Semitropic) in hopes that it will be a founding partner. If that deal works out, water could begin flowing into the bank as early as late 2023.

Hurley points at a spot on the map marked in yellow, one of McMullin’s best recharge zones. “If you drive out there, you’d think you’re at the beach,” he says. “There’s a huge sand dune. We can get a foot and a half, two feet of infiltration a day”—several times more than the ground at Terranova.

The sandy wetland soils may allow for a fast drip, but it is far more expensive for McMullin to engineer this flood-catching project from scratch than it would be for the irrigation districts upstream, with their existing canals, to spread the water around the eastern part of the basin. Aquifer recharge in those areas would also immediately serve the nearby disadvantaged communities, which have seen their wells go dry drought after drought. Still, they wouldn’t be able to keep the recharged water from slowly flowing downhill to McMullin. Hurley axiom: “You can continue to put the hose in the shallow end of the swimming pool all you want, but the deep end will fill up before the shallow does.”

In 2019, when the McMullin district declined to side with the rest of the basin over the Semitropic plan, “you’d have thought we had killed somebody,” Hurley tells me, shaking his head. The upper river users, with their old claims, did not appreciate what the western end of the basin was working on, he says: “It was the good old boys not liking some upstart [agency] telling them what to do with their water. I believe if you put them under sodium pentothal, some of those guys would say that they own that water until it was out by the Farallones.”

By the time the conflict finally got its first official hearing before the state water board in 2021, there was a whole new office to handle disagreements about water rights. After mountains of paperwork and years of anticipation, the proceedings were held remotely last June and streamed daily on YouTube. Seven engineers and other consultants presented evidence for what water was available in the river and where it had all gone. The Kings River Water Association admitted and corrected its earlier reporting mistakes—but the accounting still showed a surplus in wet years. Attorneys for the association and its member units argued that the floods were outliers, essentially so extreme as to not be considered when calculating water availability, but also vital to the basin’s ability to survive onerous new sustainability regulations.

The presiding hearing officer wouldn’t allow potentially inflammatory evidence about John Vidovich’s water-dealing and how he stood to benefit from the Semitropic project, nor would she consider the recharge projects that the upper river districts hope to build or the communities with precarious wells. What might happen to the water in the future wasn’t yet material. All that mattered in these hearings was whether it existed and where it had gone.

When it came time for Cameron and Bachand to present the Terranova project, they told the story from the beginning, acre-foot by acre-foot and dollar by dollar, accounting for all the water they had taken in the past and their plans for the future, all the public and private investment poured into the project. They were clearly nervous. Bachand swiveled back and forth in his chair; Cameron spoke deliberately, glancing away from the camera. Attorneys for Semitropic did not object to their testimony, but attorneys for the Kings River Water Association and its member districts suddenly and passionately did, just as Bachand finished the presentation. They moved for all of it to be struck from the record. They protested to the hearing officer—how was this relevant? But they’d waited too long. “We’re doing this,” she told them.

On cross-examination, the attorneys seemed to turn their frustration on Cameron. Hadn’t his agreement to use the water been canceled? And wasn’t the overdraft all Terranova’s fault anyway? When one attorney sarcastically referred to him as the “godfather of groundwater recharge,” the other, unmuted, laughed loud enough for Zoom to push his screen to the front.

Every basin in the state could be adjudicated in the coming decades. No fleeting stream would flow unclaimed.

The idea of investing more and more of Terranova’s resources into a water project without water rights had made Cameron nervous from the start. But even after the Kings River Water Association canceled its agreement, he and the rest of the McMullin leadership held their course. With the Terranova phase completed in 2021, they aim to grow the recharge enterprise up to 30 times the size of the pilot, covering land on neighboring farms and installing the infrastructure necessary to take in as much as 1,000 acre-feet of water a day. A $10 million grant from the state will pay for it as a flood project, money from the USDA will pay for it as a recharge project, and Cameron has augmented public and private grant funds with the ranch’s own $8 million. When the ditches are dug and the four gleaming white 450-horsepower pumps at Terranova are running at full capacity—assuming the necessary water rights are in place—it will be able to scoop 20 percent of historic flood totals off the river. Last fall, the McMullin Area filed its first application to the state water board for those rights. In March, it was officially added as a party to the case, an equal alongside the Kings River Water Association and Semitropic.

When I ask Cameron about the conflict—wouldn’t Semitropic’s claim get in the way of Terranova’s project?—he leans back on the railing above the big pipes at the start of his main canal, the one Hurley calls the “concrete monolith,” crosses his arms, and smiles. “We’re hopeful that we’ll get a little piece of the pie,” he says. “Or more.”

Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicts the virtual demise of the Sierra snowpack in the next half century. Historically, it held nearly a third of California’s water (average: 16 million acre-feet). Daniel Swain, a climatologist at UCLA, forecasts that droughts on par with California’s worst will come around twice as often, and extreme wet years like 2017 will come two and a half times as often. “Severe” floods like those in 1862, meanwhile, will be five times as frequent by 2100. Swain calls this climate whiplash. Average annual precipitation will remain relatively unchanged, but more of it will fall as warmer rain and in disastrous bursts. The fast-subsiding San Joaquin Valley towns are at even greater risk of a deluge the further they sink. Still, given the repeating disastrous droughts, most Californians “pray for rain.”

Cameron used to shy away from talking about climate change. In his cohort, he told me, it would get him “laughed out of the room.” Now it’s hard to talk about anything else. Every year Terranova plants its tomatoes earlier and earlier, racing against the heat. The beating sun roasts the bell peppers right on the vine. When the wildfires rage in the Sierra, the smoke flows down to the valley and blots out the sky. “It looks like the middle of winter with a fog layer,” Cameron says. “The sunlight barely makes it through.” The plants grow lankier, reaching for light they’ll never find. Recently, two of the farm’s wells ran dry. “It’s been probably more stress on the system than I’ve ever seen,” he says.

Tomato plants ready for transplant at Terranova Ranch.

Photograph: Nicholas Albrecht

A farm worker prepares a hose for crop irrigation.

Photograph: Nicholas Albrecht

Cameron says farmers are pulling back on almonds, replacing them with less water-intensive pistachios. His friends are taking a cue from Vidovich and buying more farmland, not to grow more crops but to claim more water. McMullin is beginning to install pump meters to track and trace every cubic foot coming out of the aquifer.

Last December, ample rainfall reduced the region’s drought from “exceptional” to “extreme.” In some places, it even reached the relatively benign “severe.” Cameron was briefly hopeful—maybe they’d see a flood this year. Then, whiplash: one of the driest Januarys on California’s books. In February, the state launched a program to buy and fallow farmland, the end of the line for some of the valley’s small family legacies. Cameron is under no illusions about his own lineage in agriculture: His son went into water law.

Sixteen years ago, Cameron and his wife, Elisa, moved from Fresno to the ranch. Their house is raised to protect it from flooding, and the backyard looks like a little slip of the wetlands that once covered this entire region, a lush pond dotted with aquatic plants and a rotating cast of migratory wildlife otherwise rare to this part of the valley—geese, ducks, black-crowned herons, and great blue herons.

We drive past the sandy berms along the new canals, miles of which have been planted with new elderberry, sage, milkweed, and other native plants designed to draw pollinators and strengthen the levees with their roots. This is the most excited I’ve seen Cameron. “We’ve got hummingbirds in here all year round. It’s loaded with bees,” he says. “It changed the whole field from strictly farm to something nicer.”

Like most climate adaptation, the McMullin project is a smart, innovative, desperate thing to do. It alone won’t reverse more than a century of environmental transformation. It alone won’t prevent catastrophic damage from the kind of mega-flood that could fill the valley bowl like in 1862, submerging the land where millions more people live and work today.

The Department of Water Resources says there may be half a million acre-feet of extra flood and storm water available to recharge those aquifers each year, on average; the Public Policy Institute of California says it may be closer to a million. Yet even a thousand McMullin projects gulping the peaks off all the rivers would clear only about half the valley’s annual deficit. There is a fundamental mismatch between where the water falls (north) and where it could be stored (south). White papers on the potential for recharge posit that the floodwater at the top of those winter peaks should be transported across the state, a proposition that could launch a thousand (or more) state water board complaints.

The good news for California is that climate change is making it more like California, which has the tools to plan for floods and droughts, and the natural underground storage to hold the water it requires to survive. The bad news for California is that climate change is making it more like California, where the water problems have always been man-made. More resources are still dedicated to building gray infrastructure than green. Meanwhile, water attorneys quietly tell me that they think every basin in the state could be adjudicated in the coming decades—a long and painful process that would account for every drop above and below and create yet more opportunities for building water wealth. No fleeting stream would flow unclaimed. Where pumping and recharge are metered and tracked, groundwater won’t just be owned; it will be traded on new markets. McMullin is planning one.

Hurley says he has told farmers in McMullin that he’ll do everything he can to see that they don’t have to retire any acreage—though he hopes some will. “There’s some land out there that’s better used as a parking lot than what they’re attempting to grow on it,” he says. It’s a decision that more and more growers are already being forced to make. Taken together, the impact of all those empty fields will ripple across the region and the nation, shrinking the local economy and raising food prices for everyone.

The Kings River conflict could trickle two or 20 years into the future—no one really knows yet. Nearly 10 months after the first hearings, there has been no ruling. In the meantime, Bachand is running more field-flooding experiments with farmers across California, who don’t fear the flood like they did just a few years ago. Scientists have developed a tool to help them determine when and where to recharge the most water without contributing to a decline in quality. Taken far beyond the fields of Terranova, on-farm recharge could help perform a function rivers supplied before we bent them to our will, in a way that also works for 21st-century California. Along with it, piecemeal floodplain and wetland restoration could create habitat and recreational greenspace in one of the country’s most polluted regions.

Even if none of it were to go his way—if the Kings River management won’t renew Terranova’s floodwater agreement, if the state water board doesn’t approve McMullin’s permit or grants Semitropic every drop, if the big round pumps and motors stay silent and the pipes and canals stay dry and empty—Don Cameron’s innovation would still have flooded across California.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- Is Russia's largest tech company too big to fail?

- This is how the global energy crisis ends

- We explain Matter, the new smart home standard

- The future of NFTs lie with the courts

- Chernobyl was a wildlife haven. Then Russia invaded

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones

BACKCHANNEL

Inside the Bitcoin Bust That Took Down the Web’s Biggest Child Abuse Site

They thought their payments were untraceable. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The untold story of the case that shredded the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.

Andy Greenberg  April 07, 2022 10:10 AM

ILLUSTRATION: MIKE McQUADE

Content Warning: The story told here includes references to suicide and child abuse, though the abuse is not graphically described.

Early one fall morning in 2017, in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, Chris Janczewski stood alone inside the doorway of a home he had not been invited to enter.

Moments earlier, armed Homeland Security Investigations agents in ballistic vests had taken up positions around the tidy two-story brick house, banged on the front door, and when a member of the family living there opened it, swarmed inside. Janczewski, an Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator, followed quietly behind. Now he found himself in the entryway, in the eye of a storm of activity, watching the agents search the premises and seize electronic devices.

They separated the family, putting the father, an assistant principal at the local high school and the target of their investigation, in one room; his wife in another; the two kids into a third. An agent switched on a TV and put on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in an attempt to distract the children from the invasion of their home and the interrogation of their parents.

Janczewski had come along on this raid only as an observer, a visitor flown in from Washington, DC, to watch and advise the local Homeland Security team as it executed its warrant. But it had been Janczewski’s investigation that brought the agents here, to this average-looking house with its well-kept yard among all the average-looking houses they could have been searching, anywhere in America. He had led them there based on a strange, nascent form of evidence. Janczewski had followed the links of Bitcoin’s blockchain, pulling on that chain until it connected this ordinary home to an extraordinarily cruel place on the internet—and then connected that place to hundreds more men around the world. All complicit in the same massive network of unspeakable abuse. All now on Janczewski’s long list of targets.

Over the previous few years, Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics. That morning’s search in the suburb near Atlanta was the first moment when those stakes became real for Janczewski. It was, as he would later put it, “a proof of concept.”

From where Janczewski was positioned at the front of the house, he could hear the Homeland Security agents speaking to the father, who responded in a broken, resigned voice. In another room, he overheard the agents questioning the man’s wife; she was answering that, yes, she’d found certain images on her husband’s computer, but he’d told her he had downloaded them by accident when he was pirating music. And in the third room he could hear the two grade-school-age children—kids about as old as Janczewski’s own—watching TV. They asked for a snack, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy unfolding for their family.

Janczewski remembers the gravity of the moment hitting him: This was a high school administrator, a husband and a father of two. Whether he was guilty or innocent, the accusations this team of law enforcement agents were leveling against him—their mere presence in his home—would almost certainly ruin his life.

Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world. He hoped, not for the last time, that it hadn’t led him astray.

on a summer’s day in London a few months earlier, a UK-born South African tech entrepreneur named Jonathan Levin had walked into the unassuming brick headquarters of the UK’s National Crime Agency—Britain’s equivalent to the FBI—on the south bank of the Thames. A friendly agent led him to the building’s second floor and through the office kitchen, offering him a cup of tea. Levin accepted, as he always did on visits to the NCA, leaving the tea bag in.

The two men sat, cups in hand, at the agent’s desk in a collection of cubicles. Levin was there on a routine customer visit, to learn how the agent and his colleagues were using the software built by the company he’d cofounded. That company, Chainalysis, was the world’s first tech firm to focus solely on a task that a few years earlier might have sounded like an oxymoron: tracing cryptocurrency. The NCA was one of dozens of law enforcement agencies around the world that had learned to use Chainalysis’ software to turn the digital underworld’s preferred means of exchange into its Achilles’ heel.

When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses—long, unique strings of letters and numbers—without any identifying information about those coins’ owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that “participants can be anonymous” in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism. But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can’t be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight.

Within a few years of Bitcoin’s arrival, academic security researchers—and then companies like Chainalysis—began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users’ addresses and their real-world identities. They could follow bitcoins on the blockchain as they moved from address to address until they reached one that could be tied to a known identity. In some cases, an investigator could learn someone’s Bitcoin addresses by transacting with them, the way an undercover narcotics agent might conduct a buy-and-bust. In other cases, they could trace a target’s coins to an account at a cryptocurrency exchange where financial regulations required users to prove their identity. A quick subpoena to the exchange from one of Chainalysis’ customers in law enforcement was then enough to strip away any illusion of Bitcoin’s anonymity.

Chainalysis had combined these techniques for de-anonymizing Bitcoin users with methods that allowed it to “cluster” addresses, showing that anywhere from dozens to millions of addresses sometimes belonged to a single person or organization. When coins from two or more addresses were spent in a single transaction, for instance, it revealed that whoever created that “multi-input” transaction must have control of both spender addresses, allowing Chainalysis to lump them into a single identity. In other cases, Chainalysis and its users could follow a “peel chain”—a process analogous to tracking a single wad of cash as a user repeatedly pulled it out, peeled off a few bills, and put it back in a different pocket. In those peel chains, bitcoins would be moved out of one address as a fraction was paid to a recipient and then the remainder returned to the spender at a “change” address. Distinguishing those change addresses could allow an investigator to follow a sum of money as it hopped from one address to the next, charting its path through the noise of Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals. By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division (or IRS-CI) had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis.

The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum. Investigators had traced the transactions of two corrupt federal agents to show that, before the 2013 takedown of Silk Road, one had stolen bitcoins from that dark-web market and another had sold law enforcement intel to its creator, Ross Ulbricht. Next they tracked down half a billion dollars of bitcoins stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange and showed that the proceeds had been laundered by the Russian administrator of another crypto exchange, BTC-e, eventually locating the exchange’s servers in New Jersey. And finally, they followed bitcoin trails to nail down the identity of the founder of AlphaBay, a dark-web market that had grown to 10 times the size of Silk Road. (In fact, even as Levin was sitting in London talking to the NCA agent, a coalition of half a dozen law enforcement agencies was converging in Bangkok to arrest AlphaBay’s creator.)

Levin was, as always, on the lookout for Chainalysis’ next big investigation. After running through a few open cases with him, the NCA agent mentioned an ominous site on the dark web that had recently come onto the agency’s radar. It was called Welcome to Video.

He was taken aback by what he saw: An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him.

The NCA had stumbled across the site in the midst of a horrific case involving an offender named Matthew Falder. An academic based in Manchester, England, Falder would pose as a female artist and solicit nude photos from strangers on the internet, then threaten to share those images with family or friends unless the victims recorded themselves carrying out increasingly demeaning and depraved acts. Ultimately he’d force his victims to commit self-harm and even sexually abuse others on camera. By the time he was arrested, he had targeted 50 people, at least three of whom had attempted suicide.

On Falder’s computers, the NCA had found he was a registered user of Welcome to Video, a criminal enterprise that, by its sheer scale, put even Falder’s atrocities in the shade. This evidentiary lead had then wended its way from the NCA’s child exploitation investigations team to the computer crime team, including the cryptocurrency-focused agent at whose desk Levin now sat. Welcome to Video, it seemed, was among the rare sites that sold access to clips of child sexual abuse in exchange for bitcoin. It was clear at a glance that its library of images and videos was uncommonly large, and it was being accessed—and frequently refreshed with brand-new material—by a sprawling user base around the globe.

Sometimes known as “child pornography,” the class of imagery that was trafficked on Welcome to Video has increasingly come to be called “child sexual abuse material” by child advocates and law enforcement, so as to strip away any doubt that it involves acts of violence against kids. CSAM, as it is usually abbreviated, had for years represented a massive undercurrent of the dark web, the collection of thousands of websites protected by anonymity software like Tor and I2P. Those anonymity tools, used by millions of people around the world seeking to avoid online surveillance, had also come to serve as the shadow infrastructure for an abhorrent network of abuse, which very often foiled law enforcement’s attempts to identify CSAM sites’ visitors or administrators.

The NCA agent showed Levin a Bitcoin address that the agency had determined was part of Welcome to Video’s financial network. Levin suggested they load it in Chainalysis’ crypto-tracing software tool, known as Reactor. He set down his cup of tea, pulled his chair up to the agent’s laptop, and began charting out the site’s collection of addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing the wallets where Welcome to Video had received payments from thousands of customers.

He was taken aback by what he saw: Many of this child abuse site’s users—and, by all appearances, its administrators—had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails. An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him.

Over the years, Levin had watched as some dark-web operators wised up to certain of his firm’s crypto-tracing tricks. They would push their money through numerous intermediary addresses or “mixer” services designed to throw off investigators, or use the cryptocurrency Monero, designed to be far harder to track. But looking at the Welcome to Video cluster in the NCA office that day, Levin could immediately see that its users were far more naive. Many had simply purchased bitcoins from cryptocurrency exchanges and then sent them directly from their own wallets into Welcome to Video’s.

The contents of the website’s wallets, in turn, had been liquidated at just a few exchanges—Bithumb and Coinone in South Korea, Huobi in China—where they were converted back into traditional currency. Someone seemed to be continually using large, multi-input transactions to gather up the site’s funds and then cash them out. That made it easy work for Reactor to instantly and automatically cluster thousands of addresses, determining that they all belonged to a single service—which Levin could now label in the software as Welcome to Video. What’s more, Levin could see that the constellation of exchanges surrounding and connected to that cluster likely held the data necessary to identify a broad swath of the site’s anonymous users—not simply who was cashing out bitcoins from the site, but who was buying bitcoins to put into it. The blockchain links between Welcome to Video and its customers were some of the most clearly incriminating connections that Levin had ever witnessed.

These child sexual abuse consumers seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain. By the standards of the cat-and-mouse game Levin had played for years, Welcome to Video was like a hapless rodent that had never encountered a predator.

As he sat in front of the NCA agent’s laptop, it dawned on Levin, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that he was living in a “golden age” of cryptocurrency tracing—that blockchain investigators like those at Chainalysis had gained a significant lead over those they were targeting. “We’ve created something extremely powerful, and we’re a step ahead of these types of operators,” he remembers thinking. “You’ve got a heinous crime, a terrible thing happening in the world, and in an instant our technology has broken through and revealed in very clear logic who’s behind it.”

Seeing that someone was cashing out the majority of Welcome to Video’s revenues through the two exchanges in South Korea, Levin could already guess that the administrator was very likely located there. Many of the site’s users seemed to be paying the site directly from the addresses where they’d purchased the coins, on exchanges like Coinbase and Circle, based in the United States. Taking down this global child abuse network might only require getting another law enforcement agency in either the US or Korea involved, one that could demand identifying details from those exchanges. And Levin had just the agency in mind.

“I have some people who would be interested,” he told his NCA host.

But first, as he prepared to leave, Levin silently memorized the first five characters of the Welcome to Video address the agent had shown him. Chainalysis’ Reactor software included a feature that could autocomplete Bitcoin addresses based on their first few unique numbers or letters. Five would be enough—a single short password to unlock the living map of a global criminal conspiracy.

it was evening in Thailand when Levin spoke with Chris Janczewski and Tigran Gambaryan. That night in early July 2017, the two IRS Criminal Investigation special agents were sitting in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, stewing over the frustration of being sidelined from the biggest dark-web market takedown in history.

The IRS, by 2017, had come to possess some of the most adept cryptocurrency tracers in the US government. It was Gambaryan, in fact, who had traced the bitcoins of the two corrupt agents in the Silk Road investigations and then cracked the BTC-e money laundering case. Working with Levin, Gambaryan had even tracked down the AlphaBay server, locating it at a data center in Lithuania.

Yet when Gambaryan and Janczewski had come to Bangkok for the arrest of AlphaBay’s administrator, the French-Canadian Alexandre Cazes, they had been largely excluded from the inner circle of DEA and FBI agents who ran the operation. They hadn’t been invited to the scene of Cazes’ arrest, or even to the office where other agents and prosecutors watched a video livestream of the takedown.

For Gambaryan and Janczewski, the story was utterly typical. IRS-CI agents did shoe-leather detective work, carried guns, and made arrests, just like their FBI and DEA counterparts. But because of the IRS’s dowdy public image, they often found that fellow agents treated them like accountants. “Don’t audit me,” their peers from other law enforcement branches would joke when they were introduced in meetings. Most IRS-CI agents had heard the line enough times that it warranted an instant eye roll.

At loose ends in Bangkok, Gambaryan and Janczewski spent much of their time idly contemplating what their next case should be, browsing through Chainalysis’ blockchain-tracing software Reactor to brainstorm ideas. Dark-web markets like AlphaBay seemed to have been reduced to a shambles by the Thailand operation, and they’d take months or even years to recover. The agents considered taking on a dark-web gambling site. But illegal online casinos hardly seemed worth their attention.

On the day of their departure from Thailand, Gambaryan and Janczewski arrived at the airport only to find that their flight to DC was badly delayed. Stuck in the terminal with hours to kill, they sat half-awake and bored, literally staring at the wall. To pass the hours, Gambaryan decided to try calling Chainalysis’ Levin to discuss next cases. When Levin picked up the phone, he had news to share. He’d been looking into a website that didn’t fit among the IRS’s usual targets but that he hoped they’d be willing to check out: Welcome to Video.

Child sexual exploitation cases had traditionally been the focus of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, certainly not the IRS. In part, that was because child sexual abuse images and videos were most often shared without money changing hands, in what investigators described as a “baseball card trading” system—which put them outside the IRS’s domain. Welcome to Video was different. It had a money trail, and it seemed to be a very clear one.

Soon after they arrived back in DC, Gambaryan and Janczewski enlisted a technical analyst named Aaron Bice from a contract technology firm called Excygent, with whom they’d investigated the crypto exchange BTC-e. Together, they charted out Welcome to Video in Reactor and saw what Levin had recognized right away: how glaringly it presented itself as a target. Its entire financial anatomy was laid before them, thousands of clustered bitcoin addresses, many with barely concealed pay-ins and cash-outs at exchanges they knew they could squeeze for identifying information. It did indeed look, as Levin said, like “a slam dunk.” In short order, Janczewski brought the case to Zia Faruqui, a federal prosecutor, who was instantly sold on the idea of taking on Welcome to Video and formally opened an investigation.

Gambaryan, Janczewski, Bice, and Faruqui made an unlikely team to focus on busting a massive child exploitation network. Janczewski was a tall Midwestern agent with a square jaw, like a hybrid of Sam Rockwell and Chris Evans, who wore horn-rimmed glasses when looking at a computer screen. He’d been recruited to the DC computer crimes team from the IRS office in Indiana after proving his mettle in a grab bag of counterterrorism, drug trafficking, government corruption, and tax evasion cases. Bice was an expert in data analysis and was, as Janczewski described his computer skills, “part robot.” Faruqui was a seasoned assistant US attorney with a long history of national security and money laundering prosecutions. He had an almost manic focus and intensity, spoke in a comically rapid patter, and, it seemed to his colleagues, barely slept. And then there was Gambaryan, an agent with buzzed hair and a trim beard who by 2017 had made a name for himself as the IRS’s cryptocurrency whisperer and dark-web specialist. Faruqui called him “Bitcoin Jesus.”

The team began to realize that, as simple as this “slam dunk” case had seemed, it was actually overwhelming in its complexity.

Yet none of the four had ever worked a child sexual exploitation case. They had no training in handling images and videos of child abuse, whose mere possession, in the hands of normal Americans, represented a felony. They had never even seen these sorts of radioactively disturbing materials, and they had no emotional or psychological preparation for the graphic nature of what they were about to be exposed to.

Still, when the two agents showed Faruqui what they saw in the blockchain, the prosecutor was undeterred by their collective inexperience in the realm of child exploitation. As an attorney who focused on money-laundering cases, he saw no reason why, with the evidence of criminal payments Janczewski and Gambaryan had handed him, they couldn’t approach Welcome to Video as, fundamentally, a financial investigation.

“We’re going to treat this case like we would any other,” he said. “We are going to investigate this by following the money.”

Janczewski remembers the blank shock he felt at the parade of thumbnails alone, the way his brain almost refused to accept what it was seeing.

Illustration: Party of One Studio

when Janczewski and Gambaryan first copied the unwieldy web address, mt3plrzdiyqf6jim.onion, into their Tor browsers, they were greeted by a bare-bones site with only the words “Welcome to video” and a login prompt, a minimalism Janczewski compared to the Google homepage. They each registered a username and password and entered.

Past that first greeting page, the site displayed a vast, seemingly endless collection of video titles and thumbnails, arrayed in squares of four stills per video, apparently chosen automatically from the files’ frames. Those small images were a catalog of horrors: scene after scene of children being sexually abused and raped.

The agents had steeled themselves to see these images, but they were still unprepared for the reality. Janczewski remembers the blank shock he felt at the parade of thumbnails alone, the way his brain almost refused to accept what it was seeing. He found that the site had a search page with the misspelled words “Serach videos” written at the top of it. Below the search field, it listed popular keywords users had entered. The most popular was an abbreviation for “one-year-old.” The second most popular was an abbreviation for “two-year-old.”

Janczewski at first thought he must have misunderstood. He had expected to see recordings of the sexual abuse of young teenagers, or perhaps preteens. But as he scrolled, he found, with mounting revulsion and sadness, that the site was heavily populated with videos of abuse of toddlers and even infants.

“This is a thing, really? No,” Janczewski says, numbly recounting his reactions as he first browsed the site. “Oh, there’s this many videos on here? No. This can’t be real.”

The two agents knew that, at some point, they would have to actually watch at least some of the advertised videos. But, mercifully, on their first visits to the site they couldn’t access them; to do so, they’d have to pay bitcoins to an address the site provided to each registered user, where they could purchase “points” that could then be traded for downloads. And since they weren’t undercover agents, they didn’t have the authorization to buy those points—nor were they particularly eager to.

At the bottom of several pages of the site was a copyright date: March 13, 2015. Welcome to Video had already been online for more than two years. Even at a glance, it was clear that it had grown into one of the biggest repositories of child sexual abuse videos that law enforcement had ever encountered.

“You cannot let a child be raped while you go and try to take down a server in South Korea.” Simply pulling the site offline couldn’t be their first priority.

As Janczewski and Gambaryan analyzed the site’s mechanics, they saw that users could obtain points not just by purchasing them but also by uploading videos. The more those videos were subsequently downloaded by other users, the more points they would earn. “Do not upload adult porn,” the upload page instructed, the last two words highlighted in red for emphasis. The page also warned that uploaded videos would be checked for uniqueness; only new material would be accepted—a feature that, to the agents, seemed expressly designed to encourage more abuse of children.

The element of the site that Gambaryan found most unnerving of all, though, was a chat page, where users could post comments and reactions. It was filled with posts in all languages, offering a hint at the international reach of the site’s network. Much of the discussion struck Gambaryan as chillingly banal—the kind of casual commentary one might find on an ordinary YouTube channel.

Gambaryan had hunted criminals of all stripes for years now, from small-time fraudsters to corrupt federal law enforcement colleagues to cybercriminal kingpins. He usually felt he could fundamentally understand his targets. Sometimes, he’d even felt sympathy for them. “I’ve known drug dealers who are probably better human beings than some white-collar tax evaders,” he mused. “I could relate to some of these criminals. Their motivation is just greed.”

But now he’d entered a world where people were committing atrocities that he didn’t understand, driven by motivations that were entirely inaccessible to him. After a childhood in war-torn Armenia and post-Soviet Russia and a career delving into the criminal underworld, he considered himself to be familiar with the worst that people were capable of. Now he felt he had been naive: His first look at Welcome to Video exposed and destroyed a hidden remnant of his idealism about humanity. “It killed a little bit of me,” Gambaryan says.

as soon as they had seen firsthand what Welcome to Video truly represented, Gambaryan and Janczewski understood that the case warranted an urgency that went beyond that of even a normal dark-web investigation. Every day the site spent online, it enabled more child abuse.

Gambaryan and Janczewski knew their best leads still lay in the blockchain. Crucially, the site didn’t seem to have any mechanism for its customers to pull money out of their accounts. There was only an address to which they could pay for credits on the site; there didn’t even seem to be a moderator to ask for a refund. That meant that all the money they could see flowing out of the site—more than $300,000 worth of bitcoins at the time of the transactions—would almost certainly belong to the site’s administrators.

Gambaryan began reaching out to his contacts in the Bitcoin community, looking for staff at exchanges who might know executives at the two Korean exchanges, Bithumb and Coinone, into which most of Welcome to Video’s money had been cashed out, as well as one US exchange that had received a small fraction of the funds. He found that the mere mention of child exploitation seemed to evaporate the cryptocurrency industry’s usual resistance to government intervention. “As libertarian as you want to be,” Gambaryan says, “this is where everybody kind of drew the line.” Even before he sent a formal legal request or subpoena, staff at all three exchanges were ready to help. They promised to get him account details for the addresses he had pulled from Reactor as soon as they could.

Gambaryan couldn’t help it: Sitting in front of his computer screen in his DC cubicle, staring at the flaw he’d discovered, the agent started to laugh.

In the meantime, Gambaryan continued to investigate the Welcome to Video site itself. After registering an account on the site, he thought to try a certain basic check of its security—a long shot, he figured, but it wouldn’t cost anything. He right-clicked on the page and chose “View page source” from the resulting menu. This would give him a look at the site’s raw HTML before it was rendered by the Tor Browser into a graphical web page. Looking at a massive block of code, anyway, certainly beat staring at an infinite scroll of abject human depravity.

He spotted what he was looking for almost instantly: an IP address. In fact, to Gambaryan’s surprise, every thumbnail image on the site seemed to display, within the site’s HTML, the IP address of the server where it was physically hosted: 121.185.153.64. He copied those 11 digits into his computer’s command line and ran a basic traceroute function, following its path across the internet back to the location of that server.

Incredibly, the results showed that this computer wasn’t obscured by Tor’s anonymizing network at all; Gambaryan was looking at the actual, unprotected address of a Welcome to Video server. Confirming Levin’s initial hunch, the site was hosted on a residential connection of an internet service provider in South Korea, outside of Seoul.

Welcome to Video’s administrator seemed to have made a rookie mistake. The site itself was hosted on Tor, but the thumbnail images it assembled on its home-page appeared to be pulled from the same computer without routing the connection through Tor, perhaps in a misguided attempt to make the page load faster.

Gambaryan couldn’t help it: Sitting in front of his computer screen in his DC cubicle, staring at the revealed location of a website administrator whose arrest he could feel drawing closer, the agent started to laugh.

Janczewski was at a firing range in Maryland, waiting his turn in a marksmanship exercise, when he got an email from the American cryptocurrency exchange his team had subpoenaed. It contained identifying information on the suspected Welcome to Video administrator who had cashed out the site’s earnings there.

The email’s attachments showed a middle-aged Korean man with an address outside of Seoul—exactly corroborating the IP address Gambaryan had found. The documents even included a photo of the man holding up his ID, apparently to prove his identity to the American exchange.

For a moment, Janczewski felt as though he were looking at Welcome to Video’s administrator face-to-face. But he remembers thinking that something was off: The man in the picture had noticeably dirty hands, with soil under his fingernails. He looked more like a farm worker than the hands-on-keyboard type he’d expected to be running a site on the dark web.

Over the next days, as the other exchanges fulfilled their subpoenas, the answer began to come into focus. One Korean exchange and then the other sent Gambaryan documents on the men who controlled Welcome to Video’s cash-out addresses. They named not just that one middle-aged man but also a much younger male, 21 years old, named Son Jong-woo. The two men listed the same address and shared the same family name. Were they father and son?

The agents believed they were closing in on the site’s administrators. But they had come to understand that merely taking down the site or arresting its admins would hardly serve the interests of justice. The constellation of Bitcoin addresses that Welcome to Video had generated on the blockchain laid out a vast, bustling nexus of both consumers and—far more importantly—producers of child sexual abuse materials.

By this point, Faruqui had brought on a team of other prosecutors to help, including Lindsay Suttenberg, an assistant US attorney with expertise in child exploitation cases. She pointed out that even taking the site offline shouldn’t necessarily be their first priority. “You cannot let a child be raped while you go and try to take down a server in South Korea,” as Faruqui summed up her argument.

The team began to realize that, as simple as this “slam dunk” case had seemed at first, after the easy identification of the site’s admins, it was actually overwhelming in its complexity. They would need to follow the money not to just one or two web administrators in Korea, but also from that central point to hundreds of potential suspects—both active abusers and their complicit audience of enablers—around the entire globe.

Gambaryan’s right-click discovery of the site’s IP address and the quick cooperation from crypto exchanges had been lucky breaks. The real work still lay ahead.

just two weeks after Levin passed along his tip, the team of IRS-CI agents and prosecutors knew almost exactly where Welcome to Video was hosted. But they also knew they’d need help to go further. They had neither connections to the Korean National Police Agency—which had a reputation for formality and impenetrable bureaucracy—nor the resources to arrest what could be hundreds of the site’s users, an operation that would require far more personnel than the IRS could muster.

Faruqui suggested they bring Homeland Security Investigations in on the case, partnering with a certain field office across the country, in Colorado Springs. He’d chosen that agency and its far-flung outpost because of a specific agent there whom he’d worked with in the past, an investigator named Thomas Tamsi. Faruqui and Tamsi had together unraveled a North Korean arms trading operation a year earlier, one that had sought to smuggle weapon components through South Korea and China. In the course of that investigation, they’d flown to Seoul to meet with the Korean National Police, where, after some introductions by an HSI liaison there, they spent an evening with Korean officers drinking and singing karaoke.

Others on the team couldn’t stand to hear Suttenberg describe the videos. “They would ask me to stop talking, to put it in writing,” she remembers, “and then they’d tell me that was even worse.”

At a particularly memorable point in the night, the Korean agents had been ribbing the US team for their alleged hot-dog-and-hamburger diets. One agent mentioned sannakji, a kind of small octopus that some Koreans eat not merely raw but alive and writhing. Tamsi had gamely responded that he’d try it.

A few minutes later, a couple of the Korean agents had brought to the table a fist-sized, living octopus wrapped around a chopstick. Tamsi put the entire squirming cephalopod in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, even as its tentacles wriggled between his lips and black ink dripped from his face onto the table. “It was absolutely horrible,” Tamsi says.

The Koreans found this hilarious. Tamsi gained near-legendary status within certain circles of the Korean National Police, where he was thereafter referred to as “Octopus Guy.”

Like most of their group, Tamsi had no experience in child exploitation cases. He had never even worked on a cryptocurrency investigation. But Faruqui insisted that to make inroads in Korea, they needed Octopus Guy.

not long afterward, Tamsi and a fellow HSI agent authorized for undercover operations flew to Washington, DC. They rented a conference room in a hotel, and as Janczewski watched, the undercover agent logged on to Welcome to Video, paid a sum of bitcoins, and began downloading gigabytes of videos.

The strange choice of location—a hotel rather than a government office—was designed to better mask the agent’s identity, in case Welcome to Video could somehow track its users despite Tor’s protection, and also so that, when it came time to prosecute, the DC attorney’s office would be given jurisdiction. (The HSI agent did, at least, use a Wi-Fi hot spot for his downloading, to avoid siphoning the web’s most toxic content over the hotel’s network.)

As soon as the undercover agent’s work was complete, they shared the files with Janczewski, who, along with Lindsay Suttenberg, would spend the following weeks watching the videos, cataloging any clues they could find to the identities of the people involved while also saturating their minds with enough images of child abuse to fill anyone’s nightmares for the rest of their lives.

Suttenberg’s years as a child exploitation prosecutor had left her somewhat desensitized; she would find that other attorneys on the team couldn’t stand to even hear her describe the contents of the videos, much less watch them. “They would ask me to stop talking, to put it in writing,” she remembers, “and then they’d tell me that was even worse.”

Janczewski, as lead agent on the case, was tasked with putting together an affidavit that would be used in whatever charging document they might eventually bring to court. That meant watching dozens of videos, looking for ones that would represent the most egregious material on the site, and then writing technical descriptions of them for a jury or judge. He compares the experience to a scene from A Clockwork Orange: an unending montage from which he constantly wanted to avert his gaze but was required not to.

He says watching those videos altered him, though in ways he could only describe in the abstract—ways even he’s not sure he fully understands. “There’s no going back,” Janczewski says, vaguely. “Once you know what you know, you can’t unknow it. And everything that you see in the future comes in through that prism of what you now know.”

in the first weeks of fall 2017, the team investigating the Welcome to Video network began the painstaking process of tracing every possible user of the site on the blockchain and sending out hundreds of legal requests to exchanges around the world. To help analyze every tendril of Welcome to Video’s cluster of Bitcoin addresses in Reactor, they brought on a Chainalysis staffer named Aron Akbiyikian, an Armenian-American former police officer from Fresno whom Gambaryan knew from childhood and had recommended to Levin.

Akbiyikian’s job was to perform what he called a “cluster audit”—squeezing every possible investigative clue out of the site’s cryptocurrency trails. That meant manually tracing payments back from one prior address to another, until he found the exchange where a Welcome to Video customer had bought their bitcoins—and the identifying information that the exchange likely possessed. Plenty of Welcome to Video’s users had made his job easy. “It was a beautiful clustering in Reactor,” Akbiyikian says. “It was just so clear.” In some cases, he would trace back chains of payments through several hops before the money arrived at an exchange. But for hundreds of users, he says, he could see wallet addresses receive money from exchanges and then put the funds directly into Welcome to Video’s cluster, transactions that had created, as Akbiyikian put it, “leads as clean as you could want.”

As responses from exchanges with those users’ identity information began to pour in, the team started the process of assembling more complete profiles of their targets. They began to collect the names, faces, and photos of hundreds of men—they were almost all men—from all walks of life, everywhere in the world. Their descriptions crossed boundaries of race, age, class, and nationality. All these individuals seemed to have in common was their gender and their financial connection to a worldwide, hidden haven of child abuse.

By this time, the team felt they’d pinned down the site’s Korean administrator with confidence. They’d gotten a search warrant for Son Jong-woo’s Gmail accounts and many of his exchange records, and they could see that he alone seemed to be receiving the cashed-out proceeds from the site—not his father, who increasingly seemed to the investigators like an unwitting participant, a man whose son had hijacked his identity to create crypto-currency accounts. In Son Jong-woo’s emails, they found photos of the younger man for the first time—selfies he’d taken to show friends where he’d chipped a tooth in a car accident, for instance. He was a thin, unremarkable-looking young Korean man with wide-set eyes and a Beatles-esque mop-top of black hair.

But as their portrait of this administrator took shape, so too did the profiles of the hundreds of other men who had used the site.* A few immediately stuck out to the investigative team: One suspect, to the dismay of Thomas Tamsi and his Homeland Security colleagues, was an HSI agent in Texas. Another, they saw with a different sort of dread, was the assistant principal of a high school in Georgia. The school administrator had posted videos of himself on social media singing duets, karaoke-style, with teenage girls from his school. The videos might otherwise have been seen as innocent. But given what they knew about the man’s Bitcoin payments, agents who had more experience with child exploitation warned Janczewski that they might reflect a form of grooming.

These were men in privileged positions of power, with potential access to victims. The investigators could immediately see that, as they suspected, they would need to arrest some of Welcome to Video’s users as quickly as possible, even before they could arrange the takedown of the site. Child exploitation experts had cautioned them that some offenders had systems in place to warn others if law enforcement had arrested or compromised them—code words or dead man’s switches that sent out alerts if they were absent from their computer for a certain period of time. Still, the Welcome to Video investigation team felt they had little choice but to move quickly and take that risk.

Another suspect, around the same time, came onto their radar for a different reason: He lived in Washington, DC. The man’s home, in fact, was just down the street from the US attorneys’ office, near the capital’s Gallery Place neighborhood. He happened to live in the very same apartment building that one of the prosecutors had only recently moved out of.

That location, they realized, might be useful to them. Janczewski and Gambaryan could easily search the man’s home and his computers as a test case. If that proved the man was a Welcome to Video customer, they would be able to charge the entire case in DC’s judicial district, overcoming a key legal hurdle.

As they dug deeper, though, they found that the man was a former congressional staffer and held a high-level job at a prestigious environmental organization. Would arresting or searching the home of a target with that sort of profile cause him to make a public outcry, sinking their case?

Just as they trained their sights on this suspect in their midst, however, they found that he had gone strangely quiet on social media. Someone on the team had the idea to pull his travel records. They found that he had flown to the Philippines and was about to fly back to DC via Detroit.

There were suitcases still not fully unpacked from the trip. The man had ordered a pizza the night before, and part of it remained uneaten on the table.

This discovery led the agents and prosecutors to two thoughts: First, the Philippines was a notorious destination for sex tourism, often of the kind that preyed on children—the HSI office in Manila constantly had its hands full with child exploitation cases. Second, when the man flew back to the US, Customs and Border Protection could legally detain him and demand access to his devices to search for evidence—a bizarre and controversial carve-out in Americans’ constitutional protections that, in this case, might come in handy.

Would their DC-based suspect sound the alarm and tear the lid off their investigation, just as it was getting started?

“Yes, this all had the potential to blow up our case,” Janczewski says. “But we had to act.”

in late October, Customs and Border Protection at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport stopped a man disembarking from a plane from the Philippines on his way back to Washington, DC, asking him to step aside and taking him into a secondary screening room. Despite his vehement protests, the border agents insisted on taking his computer and phone before allowing him to leave.

A few days later, on October 25, the prosecutor who had lived in the same DC apartment block as the suspect saw an email from her old building’s management; she’d remained on the distribution list despite having moved out. The email noted that the parking garage ramp in an alley at the back of the tower would be closed that morning. An unnamed resident, it explained, had landed there after jumping to their death from the balcony of their apartment.

The prosecutor put two and two together. The jumper was their Welcome to Video “test case.” Janczewski and Gambaryan immediately drove to the apartment tower and confirmed with management: The very first target of their investigation had just killed himself.

Later that day the two IRS-CI agents returned to the scene of the man’s death with a search warrant. They rode the elevator up to the 11th floor with the building’s manager, who was deeply puzzled as to why the IRS was involved, but wordlessly unlocked the door for them. Inside they found an upscale, moderately messy apartment with high ceilings. There were suitcases still not fully unpacked from a trip. The man had ordered a pizza the night before, and part of it remained uneaten on the table.

Janczewski remembers feeling the somber stillness of the man’s empty home as he imagined the desperate choice he had faced the night before. Looking down 11 floors from the balcony, the agent could see the spot in the alleyway below where the pavement had recently been hosed off.

DC’s metropolitan police offered to show the agents a security cam video of the man falling to his death. They politely declined. The Customs and Border Protection office in Detroit, meanwhile, confirmed that they had searched the computer seized from the man at the airport—some of its storage was encrypted, but other parts were not—and found child exploitation videos, along with surreptitiously recorded videos of adult sex. Their decision to target the man had served its purpose: Their test case had come back positive.

The prosecutors in DC paused their work briefly to meet and acknowledge the surreal shock of the man’s death—their investigation of a site hosted halfway around the world had already led someone to kill themselves, just blocks away. “It was just a reminder of how serious what we were investigating was,” Faruqui says. Still, the group agreed: They couldn’t let the suicide distract them from their work.

“We’ve got to focus on the victims here,” Faruqui remembers them telling each other. “That provides clarity.”

Janczewski says he would have much preferred that the man be arrested and charged. But he had, by this point, been forced to watch hour after hour of child sexual abuse videos. He had put aside his emotions early on in the case, and he had few sympathies to spare for an apparent customer of those materials.

If he felt anything, he admits, it was relief, given the time that the suicide had saved him: They still had hundreds more Welcome to Video customers to pursue.

Janczewski spotted something that gave him a jolt: At one point in the recording, the girl in the video had a red flannel shirt tied around her waist.

Photograph: Tabitha Soren

Next on their list was the high school assistant principal. Just days later, Janczewski flew down to Georgia and joined a tactical team of HSI agents as they carried out their search. For the first time, he came face-to-face with an alleged Welcome to Video client in his own home.

In spite of his stoicism, this second test case affected Janczewski more than the DC target had. The tidy, well-kept brick two-story house. The parents questioned in separate rooms. The kids the same age as Janczewski’s own, watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. As he stood in the entryway of that house outside of Atlanta, the full toll of the investigation hit him—the fact that every name on their list was a person with human connections and, in many cases, a family. That even accusing suspects of such an unforgivable crime had an irreversible impact on their lives—that it was “a scarlet letter for someone that just cannot be undone,” as he put it.

Janczewski and the HSI agents stayed at the home long enough to search it, to question the man, and to seize his devices for analysis. In addition to the evidence of the man’s payments for material on Welcome to Video, Faruqui says that the man also admitted to “inappropriately touching” students at his school. The man would later be charged with sexual assault of minors—though he would plead not guilty.

For Janczewski, at least, any last doubts he had felt after his first confrontation with a suspect based on cryptocurrency tracing alone were dispelled in a matter of hours. “At the end of the day, I felt more confident,” he says. “We were correct.” The blockchain had not lied.

the team was steadily working their way through their short list of high-priority Welcome to Video targets and test cases. But in December 2017, they came upon a different sort of lead—one that would scramble their priorities yet again.

As they followed Welcome to Video’s financial trails, investigators had been careful to record the full contents of the site’s chat page, where users were still posting a steady stream of comments against a backdrop of spam and trolling typical of any anonymous web forum. The site seemed to be entirely unmoderated: There was not so much as an admin email or help contact visible anywhere. But Janczewski began to notice repeated messages from one account that seemed to offer the closest thing the site had to that missing help-desk contact: “Contact the admins,” the messages read, “if you want assistance in fixing error.” It included an address on Torbox, a privacy-focused Tor-based email service.

Was this an actual moderator on the site? Or even the administrator himself—the owner of the site, who they now believed to be Son Jong-woo?

As Janczewski tried to decipher who was behind those messages, he checked the username before the “@” in the Torbox address, a unique-looking string of six characters, to see if it matched a user on Welcome to Video. Sure enough, he found that someone with that same handle had uploaded more than a hundred videos.

On the wall, Janczewski noticed a poster he’d seen in the videos. He momentarily felt as though he’d fallen through his own computer screen into the set of a horror film.

Excygent’s Aaron Bice had the idea to run this Torbox email address against a database seized from BTC-e during IRS-CI’s probe of the crypto exchange, to search for clues in its treasure trove of criminal underworld user data. Bice found a match: One account on BTC-e had been registered with an email address that included that same unique string of six characters. It wasn’t the Torbox email address, but one from a different privacy-focused email service called Sigaint.

Janczewski knew that Torbox and Sigaint, both dark-web services themselves, wouldn’t respond to legal requests for their users’ information. But the BTC-e data included IP addresses for 10 past logins on the exchange by the same user. In nine out of 10, the IP address was obscured with a VPN or Tor. But in one single visit to BTC-e, the user had slipped up: They had left their actual home IP address exposed. “That opened the whole door,” says Janczewski.

A traceroute showed that the IP address led to a residential internet connection—not in Korea this time, but in Texas. Was there a second Welcome to Video admin, this one based in the US? Janczewski and Bice continued pulling the thread with increasing urgency, subpoenaing the user’s account information from their internet service provider.

It was a Friday morning in early December, and Janczewski was drinking coffee at his desk in the IRS-CI office when he got back the results of that subpoena. He opened the email to find a name and a home address. The man was an American in his thirties who lived in a town outside of San Antonio—an unlikely collaborator for a 21-year-old Korean managing a child exploitation site from 15 time zones away. But the man’s employment, when Janczewski looked it up, was even more jarring: He was another Department of Homeland Security staffer—this time a Border Patrol agent.

Janczewski quickly began to assemble public information about the agent from his social media accounts. He first found a Facebook page for the man’s wife, and later an account for the man himself, with his name written backwards to obscure it. Bice dug up his Amazon page, too, where he seemed to have left reviews on hundreds of products and put others on a “wish list”—including external storage devices that could hold terabytes of videos, hidden cameras, and other cameras designed to be snaked through small spaces, like holes drilled in a wall.

Finally, with a creeping sense of dread, Janczewski saw that the Border Patrol agent’s wife had a young daughter—and that he had created a crowdfunding page on GoFundMe to raise money to legally adopt the girl as his stepdaughter. “Fuck,” Janczewski thought to himself. “Did he upload videos of the daughter?”

Janczewski looked back at Welcome to Video and saw that some of the thumbnails of the videos uploaded by the person with this username showed the sexual assault of a young girl about the daughter’s age. He realized he now had a duty to separate this Border Patrol agent from his victim as swiftly as possible.

For the next 10 days, Janczewski barely left his desk. He’d drive home, eat dinner quickly with his family in their small Arlington, Virginia, townhouse, then drive back to the office to work late, often calling Bice and Faruqui well into the night.

“You are rarely in a situation where your time is zero-sum,” Faruqui says. “Every moment we were not working on that case, a little girl could be getting raped.”

Janczewski asked their undercover HSI agent to download the videos that had been uploaded by the Texas agent, and he began the grueling process of watching them one by one. A few videos in, he spotted something that jolted the pattern-matching subroutines of his brain: At one point in the recording, the girl in the video had a red flannel shirt tied around her waist. He looked back at a photo of the girl posted to the GoFundMe page and saw it: She was wearing the same red flannel.

Was this Border Patrol agent an admin on Welcome to Video? A moderator? It hardly mattered. Janczewski now believed he had found the identity of an active child rapist who lived with his victim and had been recording and sharing his crimes with thousands of other users. The Texas man had earned a place at the very top of their target list.

two weeks before Christmas, on the 10th day after he’d identified the Border Patrol agent, Janczewski flew to southern Texas, along with HSI’s Thomas Tamsi and his team’s child-exploitation-focused prosecutor, Lindsay Suttenberg. On a cool, dry evening about a hundred miles from the Mexican border, Tamsi and a group of Texas State Police officers tailed their target as he drove home from work and pulled him over. Together with a group of FBI agents, they took the man to a nearby hotel for questioning.

The team’s initial list of high-priority suspects was finally checked off. They could move on to their primary target: Son Jong-woo.

Meanwhile Janczewski and a group of local Homeland Security investigators entered the man’s house and began to search for evidence. The two-story home was run-down and messy, Janczewski remembers—with the exception of the man’s well-organized home office on the second floor, where they found his computer. Down the hall from that office he came to the girl’s bedroom and immediately recognized it as the scene where the videos uploaded by the man had been filmed. On the wall he noticed a poster he’d seen in the recordings and momentarily felt as though he’d fallen through the screen of his own computer into the set of a horror film.

The IRS agent and prosecutor had brought with them an FBI interviewer with child exploitation experience, who separated the girl from the agents searching her home and took her to a safer location. The girl eventually detailed to the interviewer the abuse she’d endured.

Shortly after the search of the Border Patrol agent’s home, Janczewski arrived at the hotel room where other agents were questioning their suspect. He saw, for the first time, the target of his last week-and-a-half’s obsession. The man was tall and burly, still in his uniform, with thinning hair. He initially refused to talk about any physical abuse he might have committed, Janczewski says, but he eventually confessed to possessing, sharing, and—finally—making child sexual abuse videos.

Janczewski was struck by the dispassionate, almost clinical way the man described his actions. He gave his interrogators the password to his home computer, and an agent still at the house began pulling evidence from the machine and sending it to Janczewski. It included detailed spreadsheets of every child sexual exploitation video the man had both amassed on his hard drives and, by all appearances, filmed in his own home.

Another spreadsheet from the man’s computer contained a long list of other Welcome to Video users’ login credentials. Under questioning, the man explained his scheme: He would pose as an administrator in messages he posted to the site’s chat page, then ask users who took the bait to send him their usernames and passwords, which he’d use to log in to their accounts and access their videos.

The Border Patrol agent had never been a Welcome to Video administrator or moderator at all, only a particularly devious visitor to the site, willing to scam his fellow users to support his own appetites.

After an intense 10 days, they’d identified and arrested another alleged child abuser, even rescued his victim. But as he flew back to DC, Janczewski knew that Welcome to Video’s vastly larger network of abuse remained very much intact. And until they took the site itself down, it would continue to serve its videos—including the very ones the Border Patrol agent had uploaded from his Texas home office—to an anonymous throng of consumers just like him.

In early January of 2018, the DC investigators got word from Thomas Tamsi that he and the team had arrested the other federal law enforcement customer of Welcome to Video, the HSI agent who’d shown up early in their blockchain tracing and subpoenas. Though seemingly unconnected to the Border Patrol agent case, this second agent had been based in Texas, too, less than an hour away from the home of the man they had just raided.

Aside from that grim coincidence, the news of the HSI agent’s arrest also meant that the DC team’s initial list of high-priority suspects was finally checked off. They could move on to their primary target, Son Jong-woo—and the Welcome to Video server under his control.

By February, that Korea-focused operation was coming together. Before the Texas arrests, Janczewski, Gambaryan, Faruqui, and Tamsi had flown to Seoul to meet the Korean National Police Agency. At a dinner set up by the local HSI attaché, the director of the KNPA himself told Tamsi—whose octopus-eating reputation preceded him—that the Americans would have the help of his “best team.” Soon they had Son Jong-woo under constant surveillance as he came and went from his home, an apartment two and a half hours south of Seoul in the province of South Chungcheong.

Now, in the depths of winter on the Korean peninsula, just a week after Korea had hosted the Olympics in Pyeongchang, the American agents arrived in Seoul again. Gambaryan had to stay behind for a badly timed conference where the agency’s director had volunteered him to speak. But Janczewski and Faruqui brought with them Aaron Bice and Youli Lee, a Korean-American computer crime prosecutor on their team. By this point, too, a growing international force had assembled around the case. The UK’s National Crime Agency, which had launched its own investigation into Welcome to Video just after Levin’s London visit, sent two agents to Seoul, and the German Federal Police also joined the coalition. It turned out the Germans had been pursuing the site’s administrators independently, even before they’d learned about the IRS’s investigation, but they’d never been able to secure the cooperation of the Korean National Police.

At one point Faruqui remembers a German official asking him, as they stood in the cold outside the Seoul hotel where they were staying, how the Americans had gotten the Koreans on board so quickly. “Oh, Octopus Guy,” Faruqui had explained. “You don’t have Octopus Guy. We have Octopus Guy.”

for their first days in Seoul, the takedown team met repeatedly in the Korean National Police offices to talk through their plans. Their tracing of the IP address, based on Gambaryan’s fortuitous right-click, seemed to show that the site’s server was located, bizarrely, not in any web-hosting firm’s data center but in Son Jong-woo’s own apartment—the evidentiary hub of a massive child sexual abuse video network, sitting right in his home. That made things simple: They would arrest him, tear his site offline, and use that evidence to convict him. The team made a plan to grab him in his apartment early on a Monday morning.

Then, on the Friday before, Janczewski got a cold. He spent much of the weekend with prosecutor Youli Lee, dazedly wandering between markets and stores in Seoul trying to pronounce gaseubgi, the Korean word for humidifier. On Sunday evening, he took a dose of what he hoped was a Korean equivalent of Nyquil—he couldn’t read the label—with the intention of getting some sleep and recovering in time to be at full strength for the arrest.

That’s when the KNPA alerted the team that the plan had changed: Son had unexpectedly driven into Seoul for the weekend. Now the team following his whereabouts believed he had begun a late-night drive back to his home south of the city.

If the police could drive down to Son’s home that night and stake it out, perhaps they could be there when he returned, ready to arrest him at his door. That way he couldn’t destroy evidence or—another looming concern after the death of their Washington, DC, target—commit suicide. “We had to scramble,” Janczewski says.

That evening, Faruqui insisted the group put their hands in for a “Go team!” cheer in their hotel lobby. Then he and Lee went up to their rooms to go to bed. Janczewski—sick, half asleep from cold medication, and clutching a pillow from his hotel room—walked out into the pouring rain and got in a car with the HSI liaison to start the long night-drive south. The HSI agent had begged Janczewski to take the wheel of another car in the caravan, instead of an elderly Korean man on his team who was, the agent said, a notoriously bad driver. But Janczewski insisted he was far too medicated to navigate the dark, wet highways of a country 7,000 miles from his home.

A few hours later, the team arrived in the parking lot of Son’s apartment—a 10-story tower with a few small buildings on one side and a vast, empty rural landscape on the other—to begin their long stakeout in the rain. It was well past midnight when they saw Son’s car finally pull into the parking garage of the complex.

A group of Korean agents had been waiting there for him. One particularly imposing officer, whom the HSI agents referred to as “Smiley”—because he never smiled—led a team of plainclothes police, sidling into the elevator next to Son as he got inside. The agents silently rode the elevator up to Son’s floor with him and stepped out when he did. They arrested him, without resistance, just as he reached his front door.

There were more than 250,000 videos on the server—more content by volume than in any child sexual abuse materials case in history.

Throughout that arrest and the hours-long search of Son’s apartment that followed, Janczewski and the other foreigners remained stuck in their cars in the rain-drenched parking lot. Only the National Police had authorization to lay hands on Son or enter his home. When the Korean officers had the young Welcome to Video admin handcuffed, they asked him if he’d consent to letting Janczewski or any of the Americans come in as well. Son, unsurprisingly, said no. So Janczewski was limited to a tour via FaceTime of the small and unremarkable apartment that Son shared with his divorced father, the man with the soiled hands in the first photo they’d examined, as the Korean agents scoured it for evidence and seized his devices.

The Korean agent showing Janczewski around eventually pointed the phone’s camera at a desktop computer on the floor of Son’s bedroom, a cheap-looking tower-style PC with its case open on one side. The computer’s guts revealed the hard drives that Son seemed to have added, one by one, as each drive had filled up with terabytes of child exploitation videos.

This was the Welcome to Video server.

“I was expecting some kind of glowing, ominous thing,” Janczewski remembers, “and it was just this dumpy computer. It was just so strange. This dumpy computer, that had caused so much havoc around the world, was sitting on this kid’s floor.”

It was well past midnight when they saw Son’s car finally pull into the parking garage of the complex.

ILLUSTRATION: Hokyoung Kim

on the return trip, Janczewski learned exactly why the HSI liaison had wanted him to drive the other car. The elderly HSI staffer behind the wheel of the other vehicle in their caravan was somehow so disoriented after a sleepless night that he turned the wrong way down a highway exit ramp, narrowly avoiding a high-speed collision and terrifying his passenger, Aaron Bice.

After barely averting that disaster, as the sun began to rise and the rain let up, the group pulled over at a truck stop along the highway to have a breakfast of gas-station instant ramen. Janczewski, still sick and utterly exhausted, was struck by how anticlimactic it all seemed. His team had located and extricated both the administrator and the machine at the epicenter of the malevolent global network they were investigating. He had been anticipating this moment for more than six months. But he felt no elation.

There were no high fives, no celebrations. The agents got back in their cars to continue the long drive back to Seoul.

the next day, after finally getting some sleep, Janczewski began to see past the dreariness of the previous night’s operation to understand just how lucky they had been. He learned from the forensic analysts who had examined Son Jong-woo’s computers that Son hadn’t encrypted his server. Everything was there: all of Welcome to Video’s content, its user database, and the wallets that had handled all of its Bitcoin transactions.

The scale of the video collection, now that they could see it in its entirety, was staggering. There were more than 250,000 videos on the server, more content by volume than in any child sexual abuse materials case in history. When they later shared the collection with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which helps to catalog, identify, and take down CSAM materials across the internet, NCMEC found that it had never seen 45 percent of the videos before. Welcome to Video’s uniqueness check and incentive system for fresh content appeared to have served its purpose, motivating countless new cases of recorded child abuse.

The real prize for the investigators, however, was the site’s user information. The Korean National Police gave the US team a copy of Welcome to Video’s databases, and they got to work in a US Embassy building in Seoul, reconstructing those data collections on their own machine. Meanwhile, to avoid tipping off the site’s users to the takedown, they quickly set up a look-alike Welcome to Video homepage on their own server, using the private key pulled from the real server to take over its dark-web address. When users visited the site, it now displayed only a message that it was under construction and would be back soon with “upgrades,” complete with typos to mimic Son’s shoddy English spelling.

Bice spent two days with his head down, rebuilding the site’s user data in a form they could easily query—with Janczewski and Faruqui standing behind him, pestering him to see if the system was ready yet. When Bice was finished, the US team had a full directory of the site’s pseudonymous users, listed by their Welcome to Video usernames. They could now link every Bitcoin payment they had initially mapped out on the blockchain with those usernames and look up exactly what content each of those users had uploaded or downloaded.

By the time the Americans were ready to go home at the end of February, they had integrated the de-anonymized identities from their cryptocurrency exchange subpoenas into a searchable database. It mapped out the entire Welcome to Video network, complete with users’ real-world names, photos, and—for those who had paid into the site—the record of those payments and the exact child abuse videos those customers had bought access to. “You could see the whole picture,” Janczewski says. “It was like a dictionary, thesaurus, and Wikipedia all put together.”

They had, arrayed before them, the fully revealed structure of Welcome to Video’s global child exploitation ring—hundreds of exquisitely detailed profiles of consumers, collectors, sharers, producers, and hands-on abusers alike. Now the final phase of the case could begin.

over the weeks that followed, Thomas Tamsi’s team in Colorado began sending their Welcome to Video dossiers to HSI agents, local police, and foreign police agencies around the world. These “targeting packages” included descriptions of the suspects, the record of their transactions, any other evidence they’d assembled about them, and—given that they were being sent out to law enforcement agents who had in some cases never been involved in a cryptocurrency-related investigation—short primers on how Bitcoin and its blockchain worked.

There would be no coordinated, global takedown, no attempt to create shock and awe with simultaneous arrests. The case’s defendants were far too distributed and international for that kind of synchronized operation. Instead, searches, arrests, and interviews began to roll out across the globe—prioritized by those they’d learned might be active abusers, then uploaders, and finally downloaders. Slowly, as Welcome to Video’s users were confronted, one by one, the DC team began to hear back about the results of their work—with harrowing, sometimes gratifying, often tragic outcomes.

If not for cryptocurrency, and the years-long trap set by its purported untraceability, most of the 337 pedophiles arrested in the case—and their rescued victims—likely never would have been found.

A Kansas IT worker—whose arrest they’d prioritized when they found that his wife ran an at-home daycare for infants and toddlers—had deleted all of his child abuse videos from his computer before the agents arrived. Prosecutors say he later confessed when remnants of the files in the computer’s storage matched their records from the Welcome to Video server.

When the agents came for a twentysomething man in New York, his father blocked the door of their apartment, thinking at first that it was a break-in. But when agents explained what their warrant was for, he turned on his son and let them in. The son, it later turned out, had sexually assaulted the daughter of a family friend and surreptitiously recorded another young girl through her webcam, according to prosecutors.

A repeat offender in Washington, DC, tried to commit suicide when the HSI team entered his home; he hid in his bathroom and slit his own throat. One of the arresting agents happened to have training as an Army medic. He managed to slow the bleeding and keep the man alive. They later found 450,000 hours of child abuse videos on his computers—including recordings of the girl in Texas that had been uploaded by the Border Patrol agent.

As months passed, the stories continued to pile up, a mix of the sordid, sad, and appalling. An elderly man in his seventies who had uploaded more than 80 child abuse videos. A man in his early twenties with traumatic brain damage, whose medication had heightened his sexual appetites and reduced his impulse control, and who was deemed to have the same level of cognitive development as the preteens whose abuse he’d watched. A New Jersey man whose communications, when they were revealed through a search warrant, seemed to show his negotiations to purchase a child for his own sexual exploitation.

Thomas Tamsi, as the lead HSI agent on the case, coordinated more Welcome to Video arrests than anyone else—more than 50, by his count—and was present for enough of them that they became a blur in which only the most jarring moments remain distinct in his mind. The mostly nude defendant he found in a basement. The suspect who told him he had been involved in the Boy Scouts and that “children had always been attracted” to him. Parents of victims who vehemently denied that a family friend could have done the things Tamsi described, and whose faces then went white as he slid printouts of redacted screenshots across the table.

The cases spanned the globe, well beyond the US. Dozens of Welcome to Video users were arrested in the Czech Republic, Spain, Brazil, Ireland, France, and Canada. In England, where the entire case had started with an agent’s tip to Levin, the country’s National Crime Agency arrested one 26-year-old who had allegedly abused two children—one of whom they found naked on a bed in his home—and uploaded more than 6,000 files to the site. In another international case, a Hungarian ambassador to Peru who downloaded content from Welcome to Video was found to have more than 19,000 CSAM images on his computer. He was quietly removed from his South American post, taken to Hungary, and charged; he pleaded guilty.

For the DC team, many of the international cases fell into a kind of black hole: One Saudi Arabian Welcome to Video user returned to his home country and was captured by that country’s own law enforcement. Faruqui and Janzewski say they never heard what happened to the man; he was left to the Saudis’ own justice system, which sentences some sex criminals to the Sharia-based punishments of whipping or even beheading. When agents searched the car of a Chinese national living near Seattle with a job at Amazon, they found a teddy bear, along with a map of playgrounds in the area, despite the man having no children of his own. The man subsequently fled to China and, as far as prosecutors know, was never located again.

In each of the hundreds of intelligence packets that the team sent out, Chris Janczewski’s contact was listed as the number to call with any questions. Janczewski found himself explaining the blockchain and its central role in the case again and again, to HSI agents and local police officers around the US and the world, many of whom had never even heard of Bitcoin or the dark web. “You get this lead sent to you that says, ‘Here’s this website and this funny internet money,’” Janczewski says, imagining how those on the receiving end of the intelligence packets must have seen it, “and now you need to go arrest this guy because some nerd accountant says so.”

In total, Janczewski traveled to six countries and spoke to more than 50 different people to help explain the case, often multiple times each—including one US prosecutor and agent team with whom he had more than 20 conversations. (“Some were a little more high maintenance, respectfully, than others,” he says.) Bice, who oversaw the reconstructed server data, says he spoke to even more agents and officers—well over a hundred, by his count.

Ultimately, from the beginning of the case through the year and a half that followed the server seizure, global law enforcement would arrest no fewer than 337 people for their involvement with Welcome to Video. They also removed 23 children from sexually exploitative situations.

Those 337 arrests still represented only a small fraction of Welcome to Video’s total registered users. When the US team examined their copy of the server data in Korea, they had found thousands of accounts on the site. But the vast majority of them had never paid any bitcoins into the site’s wallets. With no money to follow, the investigators’ trail usually went cold.

If not for cryptocurrency, in other words, and the years-long trap set by its purported untraceability, the majority of the 337 pedophiles arrested in the Welcome to Video case—and their rescued victims—likely never would have been found.

The IRS and the US attorneys’ office in DC had taken an unprecedented approach, treating a massive child sexual abuse materials case as a financial investigation, and it had succeeded. Amidst all their detective work, it had been Bitcoin’s blockchain that served as their true lodestar, leading them through a landmark case. Without crypto tracing, Faruqui argues, they would never have managed to map out and identify so many of the site’s users.

“That was the only path through this darkness,” he says. “The darker the darknet gets, the way that you shine the light is following the money.”

Throwing money-laundering investigators into the deep end of the internet’s CSAM cesspool, however, had taken its toll. Almost every member of the team had children of their own, and almost all of them say they became far more protective of those children as a result of their work, to the degree that their trust in the people around their family has been significantly damaged.

Janczewski, who after the case moved from DC to Grand Rapids, Michigan, won’t let his children ride their bikes to school on their own, as he himself did as a child. Even seemingly innocent interactions—like another friendly parent who offers to watch his kids at the other end of a swimming pool—now trigger red alerts in his mind. Youli Lee says she won’t allow her 9- and 12-year-old children to go into public bathrooms by themselves. Nor will she allow them to play at a friend’s house unless the friend’s parents have top-secret security clearances—an admittedly arbitrary rule, but one she says ensures the parents have at least had a background check.

Faruqui says the 15 or so videos he watched as part of the investigation remain “indelibly seared” into his brain and have permanently heightened his sense of the dangers the world presents to his children. He and his wife argue, he says, about his overprotective tendencies. “You always see the worst of humanity, and so you’ve lost perspective,” he quotes his wife telling him. “And I say, ‘You lack perspective, because you don’t know what’s out there.’”

Gambaryan’s wife Yuki says the Welcome to Video case was the only time her hard-shelled, Soviet-born husband ever discussed a case with her and confessed that it had gotten to him—that he was struggling with it emotionally. Gambaryan says that it was, in particular, the sheer breadth of the cross-section of society that participated in the site’s abuse that still haunts him.

“I saw that everybody’s capable of this: doctors, principals, law enforcement,” he reflected. “Whatever you want to call it, evil, or whatever it is: It’s in everybody—or it can be in anybody.”

in early July of 2020, Son Jong-woo walked out of a Seoul penitentiary wearing a black long-sleeve T-shirt and carrying a green plastic bag of his belongings. He had spent, due to Korea’s lenient laws on child sexual abuse, just 18 months in prison.

US prosecutors, including Faruqui, had argued that he should be extradited to the United States to face charges in the American justice system, but Korea had denied their request. Welcome to Video’s convicted creator and administrator was free.

The DC-based team that worked the Welcome to Video case remains deeply dissatisfied with Son’s mystifyingly light sentence for running, by some measures, the biggest child sexual abuse materials website in history. But Janczewski says he’s comforted by the outcry in Korean society over the case. The country’s social media exploded in anger over Son’s quick release. More than 400,000 people signed a petition to prevent the judge in the case from being considered for a seat on the country’s supreme court. One Korean lawmaker put forward a bill to allow appeals to extradition judgments, and the country’s National Assembly introduced new legislation to strengthen punishments for sexual abuse online and downloading child sexual abuse materials.

In the US, meanwhile, the ripple effects of the case continued for years. Janczewski, Bice, and Suttenberg say that they still get calls from law enforcement officials following the leads they assembled. On the computer of the DC investigators’ very first test case—the former congressional staffer who committed suicide—they found evidence in a cryptocurrency exchange account that he’d also paid into a different source of dark-web sexual materials. They followed those payments to a site called Dark Scandals, which turned out to be a smaller but equally disturbing dark-web repository of sexual abuse recordings.

Janczewski, Gambaryan, and the same group of prosecutors pursued that Dark Scandals case in parallel with the tail end of the Welcome to Video investigation,

similarly following blockchain leads to trace the site’s cash-outs. With the help of the Dutch national police, they arrested the site’s alleged administrator in the Netherlands, a man named Michael Rahim Mohammad, who went by the online handle “Mr. Dark.” He faces criminal charges in the US, and his case is ongoing.

From the perspective of Welcome to Video’s money-laundering-focused agents and prosecutors, perhaps the most interesting of the ripple effects of the case stemmed from the fate of the HSI agent they had arrested in Texas, just before their trip to carry out the site takedown in Korea. The Texan man had taken a rare approach to his legal defense: He’d pleaded guilty to possession of child sexual abuse materials, but he also appealed his conviction. He argued that his case should be thrown out because IRS agents had identified him by tracking his Bitcoin payments—without a warrant—which he claimed violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy and represented an unconstitutional “search.”

A panel of appellate judges considered the argument—and rejected it. In a nine-page opinion, they explained their ruling, setting down a precedent that spelled out in glaring terms exactly how far from private they determined Bitcoin’s transactions to be.

“Every Bitcoin user has access to the public Bitcoin blockchain and can see every Bitcoin address and its respective transfers. Due to this publicity, it is possible to determine the identities of Bitcoin address owners by analyzing the blockchain,” the ruling read. “There is no intrusion into a constitutionally protected area because there is no constitutional privacy interest in the information on the blockchain.”

A search only requires a warrant, the American judicial system has long held, if that search enters into a domain where the defendant has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The judges’ ruling argued that no such expectation should have existed here: The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.

Levin thought again of the blockchain’s bounty of evidence: the countless cases left to crack, the millions of cryptocurrency transactions eternally preserved in amber, and the golden age of criminal forensics it presented to any investigator ready to excavate them.

Photograph: Jooeun Bae

chris Janczewski says the full impact of the Welcome to Video case didn’t hit him until the day in October 2019 when it was finally announced in public and a seizure notice was posted to the site’s home-page. That morning, Janczewski received an unexpected call from the IRS commissioner himself, Charles Rettig.

Rettig told Janczewski that the case was “this generation’s Al Capone”—perhaps the highest compliment that can be bestowed within IRS-CI, where the story of Capone’s takedown for tax evasion holds almost mythical status.

That same day, the Justice Department held a press conference to announce the investigation’s results. US attorney Jessie Liu gave a speech to a crowd of reporters about what the case represented—how following the money had allowed agents to score a victory against “one of the worst forms of evil imaginable.”

Chainalysis’ Jonathan Levin sat in the audience. Afterward, an IRS official named Greg Monahan, who had supervised Gambaryan and Janczewski, came over to thank Levin for his role in the case. It had all started, after all, with Levin’s tip to two bored IRS agents in the Bangkok airport. Monahan told Levin that it was the most important investigation of his career, that he could now retire knowing he had worked on something truly worthwhile.

Levin shook the IRS-CI supervisor’s hand. Neither he nor Monahan could know, at that time, of the cases still to come: that IRS-CI and Chainalysis would together go on to disrupt North Korean hackers, terrorism financing campaigns, and two of the largest bitcoin-laundering services in the world. Or that they would track down close to 70,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road and another 120,000 stolen from the exchange Bitfinex, totaling to a value of more than $7.5 billion at today’s exchange rates, the largest financial seizures—crypto or otherwise—in the Department of Justice’s history.

But as he answered Monahan, Levin thought again of the blockchain’s bounty of evidence: the countless cases left to crack, the millions of cryptocurrency transactions eternally preserved in amber, and the golden age of criminal forensics it presented to any investigator ready to excavate them.

“There’s so much more to do,” Levin said. “We’re just getting started.”

Updated 4/12/2022 4:00 pm PT: This story has been updated to correct that Jonathan Levin was born in the UK, not in South Africa.

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for free, 24-hour support from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for crisis centers around the world.

This story is excerpted from the book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, available November 15, 2022, from Doubleday.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The infinite reach of Facebook's man in Washington

- Of course we're living in a simulation

- A big bet to kill the password for good

- How to block spam calls and text messages

- The end of infinite data storage can set you free

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- ✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers

BACKCHANNEL

A Million Little Pieces: The Race to Rebuild the World’s Coral Reefs

Nearly half of these ocean ecosystems have been wiped out since 1950. One man is on a mission to reverse that—by speed-growing coral in hyperefficient nurseries.

Rowan Moore Gerety  April 05, 2022 10:10 AM

Great star coral polyps cut using micro-fragmentation.Photograph: Alfonso Duran

Lisa Carne was swimming through a bed of seagrass in northern Belize when she saw a hunk of elkhorn coral lying loose on the sandy bottom. She paused to look at it. With its rich amber color and antler-like branches, the fragment seemed alive despite having broken off from its mother colony. A professional diver, Carne was struck with an idea: What if she picked this up and moved it to a patch of dead reef? What if she did it over and over again? Could she help the reef recover more quickly?

Carne kept thinking about the fragment as she finished up her dive. The reefs close to her home, near Laughing Bird Caye National Park, in southern Belize, had recently been decimated by a hurricane. When she returned home, she sat down at her computer and started searching online for anything she could find on reef restoration.

A few years later, she began to fashion an underwater nursery near Laughing Bird Caye. Borrowing techniques from academic research, she used rebar and steel mesh to make a pair of underwater tables. She would swim around the reefs she had identified as resilient with a pair of pruning shears, cutting small chunks from healthy colonies. She brought each one to the shallows long enough to glue it to a concrete disk, then “planted” the fragments underwater on her metal tables. Slowly, they grew. Then she started transplanting her corals directly onto the reef.

Today, Carne’s nonprofit, Fragments of Hope, works with local fishers to identify promising spots and track the fate of every piece of coral they place on the reef. And it ranks among the most successful and longest-running coral restoration programs in the world. When I spoke to Carne on Zoom last fall, she had set her virtual background to show the fate of her first plantings on the dull gray rubble of dead reef. Branching corals the color of mustard filled the frame. “You can’t count that!” she said proudly, gesturing at the dense thicket behind her.

Yet for all of its success, Fragments of Hope’s program is still incredibly small. It has taken Carne and her team more than a decade to plant 160,000 coral fragments on less than 9 acres of reef. Worldwide, reefs cover an area millions of times that size. As Greg Asner, a researcher at Arizona State University who directs a global coral mapping program, put it, “No coral restoration projects of any kind or anywhere have been done at a scale that would really save a reef. Coral restoration has not summed up to even 1/100,000th of the area of shallow coral reefs worldwide.”

Coral reefs anchor some of the most vibrant ecosystems on the planet, home to a quarter of the oceans’ biodiversity in a tiny fraction of their total area. Half a billion people worldwide depend directly on reefs to protect their coastlines, support local fish populations, and attract tourists. But in the past 70 years, pollution, overfishing, and climate change have killed off half of the world’s reefs. By the end of this century, we may be speaking about healthy coral reefs in the past tense.

For years, Carne and others in the coral restoration field struggled to attract major funding for their efforts. That appears to be changing. In 2020, the insurance company Swiss Re crafted a policy to pay out nearly $1 million to send teams of divers to stabilize and replant corals that had been ripped out by a hurricane along the shoreline near Cancún, Mexico. Last year, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued a request for multimillion-dollar proposals for reef-building projects to protect US military installations.

Half a billion people worldwide depend directly on reefs to protect their coastlines, support local fish populations, and attract tourists.

Scientists, too, are coming around to the idea of large-scale experiments that might improve reefs’ resilience. For a long time, the sheer scale of reef systems made many people reluctant to contemplate regrowing corals. “It seemed like it was poking around the edges of the problem,” says Joanie Kleypas, who studies reefs and climate change at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Emboldened, scientists have been crossbreeding wild specimens taken from hundreds of miles apart to try to create hardier, heat-resistant variants. They have been freezing key samples of genetic material so that the scientists of the future can try to bring back some of the genetic diversity lost due to climate change. Ruth Gates, the late coral biologist and director of the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, told the The New Yorker in 2016 that she couldn’t bear the idea that future generations may not experience coral reefs: “We’re at this point where we need to throw caution to the wind and just try.’’ To rebuild reefs at scale takes a different kind of effort—and, perhaps, a different kind of person.

Summerland Key, Florida, is home to the nonprofit Plant a Million Corals.

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

It was a balmy December evening at the Florida Sea Base, a STEM-themed retreat built in the Florida Keys in the 1990s that belongs to the Boy Scouts of America. Pastel-colored boys’ and girls’ dormitories overlooked a canal leading to the Atlantic. I was there to attend a workshop with 19 fledgling “coral gardeners,” who were seated at a row of long picnic tables, shaking off that first-night-of-summer-camp awkwardness with pizza and alcohol. Along with a team from Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles offshore from Key West, our group mostly consisted of emissaries of tiny NGOs from beautiful places reliant in some way on the people who could afford to visit. They were listening, rapt, to a small man with a Santa Claus beard. This was David Vaughan, the man we had all come to learn from. As the founder of the Plant a Million Corals Foundation, he is the closest person the field has to an industrialist-in-waiting.

Vaughan, who is 68, is slight and wiry, with intense blue eyes and sun-bleached shoulder-length hair swept back over a large bald spot. While many coral scientists are ecologists and geneticists whose field work is a balance of lab and reef study, Vaughan likes to say he spent his career as an aquaculture scientist “diving in 5 feet of muddy water,” honing techniques to grow shellfish bigger, faster, and cheaper. Between sips from a mug of red wine, he blitzed through his 40-year career as a businessman learning how to cultivate oysters, shrimp, and fish and turn a profit. His goal today is still, simply, scale; only this time he wants to bring the principles of industrial production to coral restoration.

In 2003, Vaughan became the director of the Keys outpost of the Mote Marine Lab, an independent research and education nonprofit headquartered in Sarasota. At first, the lab grew racks of coral the way aquarium hobbyists often did: Start with a piece the size of a golf ball, cut it in two and mount the halves on small ceramic discs, and wait months or even years for the pieces to grow back.

One day, Vaughan was cleaning an aquarium tank when he noticed a stray piece of coral the size of a silver dollar toward the back. He yanked it and heard a crack. A fragment came free in his hand, and a dozen polyps were left behind where the coral had fused to the glass. “Cracked into pieces, waving their tentacles at me,” Vaughan said. He figured the polyps were goners. He placed the fragment he’d broken off in another tank, where he thought it was large enough to perhaps survive and regrow. A few weeks later, he checked on it. Instead of seeing the ragged edge of bare, white coral skeleton, he found that new coral had completely grown over the damage—far faster than he’d imagined possible. He ran through the lab to see the old tank; each of those single polyps had multiplied, and the colony had grown to the size of a dime in weeks instead of years. “Like any good scientist,” he says, “I grabbed a scalpel, and I did it again.”

Vaughan called this technique “micro-fragmenting,” and he quickly sought to reproduce the results with as many species of coral as possible. It turned out that researchers at other labs had noticed a similar pattern—cutting coral into smaller pieces could boost its growth rate. Still, it took years for the significance of these early experiments to sink in. When Vaughan and colleagues at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology published a joint paper in 2015, they found that micro-fragmenting could make some corals grow as much as 40 times faster than they otherwise would.

One morning, Vaughan led the group outside, past the boys’ and girls’ showers to the edge of the mangroves lining the canal. Gravel crunched underfoot as we approached three rows of rectangular, blue plastic tanks resembling elevated kiddie pools. Vaughan explained that this was the “coral nursery” he’d built for the Sea Base. Peering down through a few inches of gently burbling saltwater, I saw what looked like trays of miniature hors d’oeuvres on porcelain plates—thousands of pieces of brown and purple coral, each the size of a large nailhead, their tiny barbed tentacles reaching toward the surface.

As we squinted to make out individual polyps, Vaughan marveled out loud about the quirks of coral biology. “A coral is a plant, an animal, and a microbe all mixed into one,” he explained, oversimplifying a bit—the algae in corals are not technically plants. Coral colonies are made up of genetically identical polyps, with tentacles to grab nutrients suspended in the water and digestive systems that secrete a skeleton beneath them as they grow. Corals provide a safe, well-lit habitat for symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae that use photosynthesis to produce essential nutrients and sugars for their hosts, and thousands of types of microbes. Moving water, Vaughan said, keeps the whole ballet going, providing the energy to push nutrients and gases across the mucous membranes of every coral cell.

Vaughan has been refining his microfragmenting process for 15 years, chasing both speed and savings, but he ran into issues with the basic supplies for the trade. For starters, the tanks were all wrong. “A farmer wants to see his crops all the time,” he complained; his tanks were made of opaque blue plastic. Since corals are factories for photosynthesis, the tanks should be clear, shaped in a way that allows you to mimic the ebb and flow of the surf.

While Sea Base staffers explained how to monitor and clean the tanks, Vaughan hovered around the edges, talking a novice through the proper technique to siphon debris out with a hose. (“Outside, now go low? Yeah, that’s it.”) He slid around a picnic table to peer through a microscope at the mucus on a newly cut micro-fragment. (“Let me see how that coral’s doing.”) He wore black Crocs sandals, synthetic khakis with zip-off lower legs, and a nylon safari shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest and embroidered with the logo of Plant a Million Corals.

Nothing got Vaughan so excited as recounting the hacks he’d developed to make things cheaper. At first he’d used ceramic plugs that aquarium suppliers sold for 25 cents apiece, until he took stock of the implications: “To plant a million corals, I’d have to raise a quarter of a million dollars!” he said with alarm. He decided to make his own plugs, but he needed the right mold.

One day, Vaughan was stewing on that challenge, bored while some students and interns were cutting corals, when he looked down at the perforated black rubber floor mat underfoot, like the ones you see in restaurant kitchens. “I go, ‘There it is!’ So I picked up the mat, and we poured the little holes, popped ’em out, then the next day we poured the big holes, put the stems we had back in, and we were making coral plugs at one quarter of a cent each”—a hundredth of the cost. Now he’s trying to shrink the size of the ceramic plugs so he can fit more of them into each tank and cut down on the operation’s biggest costs—the tanks themselves and the labor to keep them running.

David Vaughan often uses unconventional materials to fabricate his coral nursery. He uses salad bowls to make cement mounts for coral plugs.

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

Vaughan fits a coral stem into a cement mount.

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

With 12 trays per tank, that meant close to 4,000 corals in each one. The numbers matter, because Vaughan wants to make these nurseries fully modular—an affordable, off-the-shelf kit for coral farming. By packing all the necessary tanks, plumbing, and solar power to run the equipment into a shipping container, he hopes to make it possible to start cutting and growing corals anywhere with a water supply in a matter of days. Early prototypes of his Coral Restoration Units cost upwards of $200,000; he wants to cut the costs in half.

One afternoon, Vaughan played crossing guard as he jogged us across US Route 1 into an open field that had once been the site of a large shrimp hatchery where he hoped to build a roadside demonstration farm. The Keys’ landmass is made of ancient, fossilized reef, and some of its polyps and striations were visible through the grass. Near a stand of Australian pines were three half-packed shipping containers holding the guts of three future Restoration Units.

Micro-fragmenting could make some corals grow as much as 40 times faster than they otherwise would.

One of Vaughan’s first customers, Marissa Myer, had come to the workshop to see how her planned nursery, destined for Puerto Rico, was coming together. Vaughan enlisted volunteers to set up the tanks so he could visualize the plumbing he’d need. On her phone, Myer showed the group a digital rendering of the nursery she’d used to try to persuade the homeowner’s association of an upscale housing development to lease coastal land to her. In the image, string lights twinkled over an array of tanks perched on white sand and flanked by potted plants.

Most of the rest of the group was still figuring out how to pay for a Restoration Unit, or determining if it made sense to try a land-based nursery at all. There were the two Canadian marine biologists who’d landed in Antigua and started a field nursery with money they’d raised from patrons at an exclusive country club. An artist was building an electrified underwater coral sculpture as a memorial for her patron’s late daughter.

The person whose project came closest to marrying Vaughan’s methods with the money to pull it off was marine biologist Andrea Caicedo Gonzalez, who was preparing for “A Million Corals for Colombia,” an initiative of Colombia’s president, Iván Duque, and its Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. The nonprofit where she works, Corales de Paz, had 16 months to go from an underwater nursery that produced 25,000 corals a year to building a network of trainees doing micro-fragmentation across a dozen sites. Caicedo Gonzalez couldn’t help but notice that the project didn’t budget yet for “outplanting” the corals they grew in nurseries back onto reefs. She was debating the ethics of taking money from oil and cement companies, but she hoped to line up another grant from Chevron to finish the work.

The landscape of coral restoration funding has a take-what-you-can-get quality. Vaughan has discussed a dive and documentary with Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Branson. And he’s consulted for Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is now at work on a project set to add 2 million coral pieces to nearly 300 acres of reef. If only the process were cheaper, the money might be easier to find—and easier to say yes to.

1 / 3

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

In micro-fragmentation, corals are cut using a diamond band saw.

David Vaughan grew up in suburban New Jersey and spent as much of each summer as he could with his head in the Atlantic Ocean, near his family’s house in Cape May. Vaughan’s father worked in fundraising for Fairleigh Dickinson University, and when Vaughan was 13, he tagged along with a group of scientists on a research trip to the US Virgin Islands. “We started going around Saint Croix, looking for new species and knocking pieces off with a prospector’s hammer,” Vaughan said. (Most major laws that protect marine species were not passed until the 1970s.) He came home mesmerized by coral.

Vaughan earned his PhD in botany at Rutgers, studying algae and seagrass. He soon discovered that his work on micro-algae was directly relevant to the nascent industry of farm-grown clams, which feed on the tiny organisms. Vaughan began drafting plans to build a hatchery. When his efforts to create a million-dollar facility ran into roadblocks, he decided to try rigging together a temporary clam farm inside three shipping containers. To his surprise, his DIY operation produced three times as many juvenile clams as the hatchery’s business plan had called for. Vaughan scrapped his original vision and stuck with shipping containers. “It became one of the first ways I was able to say, ‘We can do this cheaper,’” Vaughan told me.

Vaughan, founder of Plant a Million Corals, has a plan to grow coral cheaper and faster, making it more accessible for nonprofits and for-profit businesses to build new reefs.

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

He spent most of the first half of his career at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, a marine research center with a small business incubator he started on Florida’s Treasure Coast. He developed a reputation there for being pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and a bit quirky; during one field project, he and his wife and young daughter spent the season living out of an Airstream van and sleeping in a loft on the back.

At Harbor Branch, he oversaw construction of a new 30-acre aquaculture campus, with hatcheries for oysters, clams, and shrimp. As Florida’s clam industry ballooned, Harbor Branch became its largest hatchery.

One day, someone left a freshwater hose running overnight in a saltwater shrimp tank. When Vaughan discovered the hose in the morning, he expected the shrimp to be dead. Instead, they were doing fine. Shrimp have been known to tolerate low-salinity water during the rainy season, though it hampers their growth and makes them more susceptible to infections. “Dave looked at it differently,” said John Scarpa, a shellfish biologist who worked at Harbor Branch. Vaughan didn’t need the shrimp to lead long, full lives—he simply needed them to reproduce. Using freshwater or low-salinity water meant he could start growing shrimp not just on expensive coastal land but in the middle of Florida.

In the late 1990s, Vaughan learned that Aqua Life, an ornamental-fish-breeding operation on a small island in the Bahamas, was shutting down. Harbor Branch made a bid to buy what was left, and a month later, 22,000 orange and white clown fish in different stages of development arrived in Florida by plane, while 380 tanks made their way over on a chartered barge. Vaughan decided to sell the aquarium fish directly to pet stores. When Finding Nemo caused a spike in demand for clown fish in 2003, Vaughan’s company ended up selling 25,000 of them a month. It also got into the coral business.

One day, Vaughan gave a tour of his aquaculture operation to the conservationist and filmmaker Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of Jacques, the famous French ocean explorer. When Cousteau got to the coral tanks, he was struck to see rows and rows of hand-sized fragments destined for pet stores, when most of the corals in the nearby Florida Keys were dead. As Vaughan recalled, Cousteau said, “Dude, you don’t get it. You need to be doing this for the reef.”

Vaughan began to realize how much coral research could benefit from advances in aquaculture. The industry had spent decades refining dozens of small tasks and processes to raise marine life efficiently. “There’s no reason we can’t use the same model for clams or oysters or fish and apply it to coral,” he told me.

He’s been amazed to observe his coral fragments repair themselves and grow. Vaughan’s hypothesis is that this healing mechanism originated in the intense competition between life forms on a reef. Parrot-fish, which can graze on algae that grow on the surface of polyps, sometimes bite off a chunk of the coral itself; perhaps corals evolved a way to repair the damage as quickly as possible, so that sponges and algae couldn’t gain a foothold in the center of a colony.

But for all of Vaughan’s success in growing coral quickly, cheaply, and effectively in plastic tanks, coral fragments still need to survive once you put them back in the sea.

Vaughan discovered that if he planted many micro-fragments of the same genotype next to one another, they’d eventually fuse together. In 2013, he got permission to try this technique on bleached stony corals off the coast of Big Pine Key and led a team that planted 1,300 micro-fragments in clusters. More than 80 percent survived an outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease, a mysterious pathogen that has affected populations of more than 30 species across the Caribbean. Over the years the clusters completely fused together, and in August of 2020 they spawned, unleashing a wave of tiny pink coral gametes under a full moon. Vaughan marveled at the achievement. “They’re the age of a kindergartner, but somehow they got together and circulated the message to start making genetic material.”

David Vaughan wants to make his Coral Restoration Units fully modular—an affordable, off-the-shelf kit for coral farming.

But the odds of survival are not in coral’s favor. Even where the threats of disease or bleaching aren’t as urgent, the mechanisms underlying successful coral restoration can be hard to pinpoint. In Indonesia, where many coral restoration projects have been undertaken since the 1990s, the marine biologist Tries Razak says most amounted to “just putting concrete on the sea bottom.” Razak is in the middle of a three-year survey visiting sites all over the country. In some cases, the reasons for failure are obvious: Corals were planted on piles of unstable rubble left behind by dynamite fishing or massive storms and were quickly buried in sediment.

Others are more mysterious. Razak showed me a triptych of photos from a research study that included sites in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, all taken five years after divers had assembled rock piles on the sea floor to create new reef habitat. In one, the underlying structure was scarcely visible, with huge plate corals and branching corals covering its surface in resplendent pinks and yellows. At another site, it was as though the rocks had been piled up the day before, covered only in a thin layer of algae. The third was completely buried in sediment.

These brain coral polyps took six months to fuse into a mass the size of a large grapefruit. In the wild, coral this size would be 15 to 20 years old.

Photograph: Alfonso Duran

Lisa Carne has brought Vaughan down to Belize three times to lead trainings on coral restoration and aquaculture. But where he focuses on trying to “plant a million corals,” she says, “we’re looking backwards at our data and talking about the opposite: If you pick the right site and the right corals, and everything else lines up, you shouldn’t have to keep adding in one spot.” In other words, what’s the minimum amount of coral you can outplant on a given reef to help nature take its course?

Vaughan, Carne, and others are all trying to find ways to improve corals’ odds of survival, tracking the performance of different genotypes, or the influence of current, depth, temperature, and the presence of fish and other aquatic species on the fragments they outplant. Depending on your point of view, coral restoration is either a profoundly pessimistic or optimistic undertaking. To some it suggests we’re past hoping humans will act forcefully enough to curb water pollution, designate new marine protected areas, or, above all, slash emissions to help natural reef systems withstand global warming. To others, restoration serves as penance for the damage we’ve already done, and a way to maximize our chances of shepherding corals through the Anthropocene.

In the grand scheme of things, corals will survive. Reefs are as old as almost any life in the sea, going back to the very first photosynthetic organisms on the planet—cyanobacteria that began secreting calcium carbonate more than 2 billion years ago. The photosynthesis on these early reefs drove the creation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would sustain advanced life. Corals have undergone mass diebacks before, and in geologic time, they rebound quickly. But quickly is measured in millions of years.

Vaughan sees his tinkering with coral as being in the service of a world where humans are willing to address the root causes of its distress. When he imagines people visiting his future roadside attraction, it isn’t to make them see the wonders of micro-fragmenting but rather to understand the bigger picture. “You want to know that when they go home they’re going to vote correctly, or recycle better, or lower their thermostat, or eat down the food chain,” he says. Like polar bears or any species in peril, corals are simply an indicator, Vaughan says. “And what that’s saying is, ‘You’re next.’”

This article appears in the May 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The aftermath of a self-driving tragedy

- How people actually make money from crypto

- The best binoculars to zoom in on real life

- Facebook has a child predation problem

- Mercury could be littered with diamonds

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones

IDEAS

If Someone Is Typing, Then Stops … Can I Ask Why?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on textual etiquette, self-expression, and information overload.

Meghan O'Gieblyn  April 04, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: TREVOR DAVIS

I'm kind of an anxious, obsessive texter. I never quite know what to say, but the worst is when I see someone typing—in iMessage, in Slack, whatever—and then they stop typing. And ultimately send nothing! What were they going to say? Am I allowed to ask? Surely I'm allowed to ask.

—Nervous Energy

Dear Nervous,

You're certainly not alone in dreading this quirk of digital communication. The ellipsis, one of the most common indicators that someone is typing, is meant to create a sense of anticipation, recalling the pauses in fictional dialog or the ominous cliffhanger (to be continued …) that begs us to follow the dots, like a breadcrumb trail, to the narrative's conclusion. To watch the symbol disappear without the expected message is to experience the sinking disappointment we associate with paywalled articles and unresolved television seasons—stories without ends—and the absence of resolution can breed paranoia. Perhaps your conversational partner got abruptly distracted in the middle of her text. Perhaps she is obsessively rereading what she just wrote, weighing whether or not to press Send. Perhaps she was about to tell you, finally, what she really thinks of you, but at the last moment reconsidered. The ellipsis is also used in print to signal an omission, and it's this latter usage that comes to mind when the typing stops and no message arrives, leaving you with nothing more than the knowledge that the words signified by those three dots were deemed unworthy of your attention—or worse, you were deemed unworthy of them.

In-person conversations contain a rough analogue: Your conversational partner opens, then closes their mouth without uttering the intended thought. Most people will tell you it's entirely appropriate in such moments to ask, “What were you going to say?” Perhaps the person even stopped themselves in the hope that they'd be prodded to continue. It's a mistake to think of reticence as the absence of communication. Silence can express volumes, and in our age of endless chatter, the refusal to speak sends a powerful message. The aborted text is more runic, of course, given that you have no visual cues—facial expression, body language—to guide you. And I suppose it's also more upsetting than its real-life parallel because the words have, in a way, already been uttered. The person who stops themselves before speaking may be dismissing an inchoate thought, but with the undispatched text, at least part of the idea has been articulated and exists (or did exist) in the real world. When you're unable to access those words, you feel cheated.

It seems to me that your query, far from being a simple matter of digital etiquette, raises a much larger question about whether it's appropriate for a person, in all cases, to say what's on their mind—and also whether we have an unqualified right to know what others are thinking and feeling. Your impulse to ask what your interlocutor was about to say reflects, in part, the legacy of psychoanalysis and modern therapeutic culture, which has conditioned us to see reticence as evidence of repression, or self-censorship. Freud believed that hesitation was a form of resistance—an attempt by the unconscious to protect itself—and it's still largely an unquestioned belief that expression, whatever its content, is a salubrious form of release. We are only as sick as our secrets, as the saying goes. What remains unspoken will fester in darkness.

This burden to express oneself is intensified by digital platforms, which depend on user engagement and frequently enjoin us, like well-meaning friends, to tell the world what we're thinking. In fact, it's difficult to spend any amount of time online without being asked to divulge the contents of your interior life: what you are reading, watching, and listening to; your thoughts about the advice column you just read; your feedback on the most tedious consumer experiences. That anyone is free to ignore this coaxing is a mere technicality. You can only remain silent for so long before you begin to see yourself as a standoffish boor or a hopeless elitist, hoarding imaginary pearls from the masses of swine.

Self-expression has not always been deemed an absolute virtue. The duty to speak the truth does not mean (to paraphrase Voltaire) that every truth should be uttered, and it's possible, even, that there's an inverse relationship between maundering and meaning. “Words are like leaves and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found,” Alexander Pope wrote in his 1709 “Essay on Criticism.” Reticence—the capacity to weigh one's words and dispatch them sparingly—is a virtue lauded in the Koran, the Torah, the Dhammapada, and other religious literature. Many of these texts describe words as powerful instruments, likening them to swords, or arrows. The author of the Book of James compares the tongue to the bit that steers the horse or the rudder that guides a ship. These technological metaphors are meant to emphasize that the words we utter, like the tools we create, have the power to amplify our virtues and our vices, and must therefore be regarded with caution. (It's telling that more recent technological metaphors describe not speech itself but the person who speaks too much—the chatterbox, the motormouth—suggesting, perhaps, that babbling mechanically risks turning us into machines.)

I'm not going to tell you that you should never ask what someone was about to say. The contexts are too multiple for uniform advice, and part of the work of social life involves identifying the communication styles of others, considering their motives, and diligently reading between the lines—skills that were once known, simply, as listening. I will, however, ask you to consider that the unsent text might be a blessing. No relationship, no matter how robust, can survive the glare of unmitigated frankness, and we should all be grateful for the friend who is willing to pause and reconsider the prudence of their words. In other cases, the dissolving ellipsis may signal a more subtle act of kindness, sparing you the exertion of having to read and respond to yet another half-baked take. Divulging every thought, dispatching every piece of helpful content, is not a moral good at a moment when the demands on our mental engagement are everywhere and unceasing. “Sharing,” once considered a form of generosity, can easily become an expression of greed in information economies, where the scarcest resources are attention and time.

At the risk of veering into the abstract, I'll conclude by reminding you that information, in its truest and most technical sense, depends on a process of elimination. Each time we speak, or type a sentence into our messaging app, we are not only choosing specific words but, more importantly, excluding all the words we could have chosen. This was the crucial insight that led Claude Shannon to create information theory, the framework that is responsible for the entirety of the digital age. Shannon described information as the act of selecting one message “from a set of possible messages.” This is how we create meaning: through acts of omission. We live in a universe of chaos and disorder, a world in which entropy is forever threatening to drown the signal in noise. The paradox of modern communication is that intelligible discourse relies on deliberately choosing our words. The willingness to omit what is unnecessary is crucial to making our voices heard.

Faithfully,

Cloud

Be advised that CLOUD SUPPORT is experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- It’s like GPT-3 but for code—fun, fast, and full of flaws

- You (and the planet) really need a heat pump

- Can an online course help Big Tech find its soul?

- iPod modders give the music player new life

- NFTs don’t work the way you might think they do

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones

IDEAS

I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For?

Breakfast, it turns out. The answer is breakfast.

Paul Ford  April 01, 2022 11:11 AM

Illustration: Elena Lacey

Like many nerds before me, I spent a goodly portion of my life searching for the perfect computing system. I wanted a single tool that would let me write prose or programs, that could search every email, tweet, or document in a few keystrokes, and that would work across all my devices. I yearned to summit the mythic Mt. Augment, to achieve the enlightenment of a properly orchestrated personal computer. Where the software industry offered notifications, little clicks and dings, messages jumping up and down on my screen like a dog begging for a treat, I wanted calm textuality. Seeking it, I tweaked. I configured.

The purpose of configuration is to make a thing work with some other thing—to make the to-do list work with the email client, say, or the calendar work with the other calendar. It's an interdisciplinary study. Configuration can be as complex as programming or as simple as checking a box. Everyone talks about it, but it's not taken that seriously, because there's not much profit in it. And unfortunately, configuration is indistinguishable from procrastination. A little is fine but too much is embarrassing.

I spent almost three decades configuring my text editor, amassing 20 or so dotfiles that would make one acronym or nonsense word concordant with another. (For me: i3wm + emacs + org-mode + notmuch + tmux, bound together with ssh + git + Syncthing + Tailscale.) I'd start down a path, but then there'd be some blocker—some bug I didn't understand, some page of errors I didn't have time to deal with—and I'd give up.

A big problem I had was where to put my stuff. I tried different databases, folder structures, private websites, cloud drives, and desktop search tools. The key, finally, was to turn nearly everything in my life into emails. All my calendar entries, essay drafts, tweets—I wrote programs that turned them into gigs and gigs of emails. Emails are horrible, messy, swollen, decrepit forms of data, but they are understood by everything everywhere. You can lard them with attachments. You can tag them. You can add any amount of metadata to them and synchronize them with servers. They suck, but they work. No higher praise.

It took years to get all these emails into place, tag them, filter them just so. Little by little I could see more of the shape of my own data. And as I did this, software got better and computers got faster. Not only that, other people started sharing their config files on GitHub.

Then, one cold day—January 31, 2022—something bizarre happened. I was at home, writing a little glue function to make my emails searchable from anywhere inside my text editor. I evaluated that tiny program and ran it. It worked. Somewhere in my brain, I felt a distinct click. I was done. No longer configuring, but configured. The world had conspired to give me what I wanted. I stood up from the computer, suffused with a sort of European-classical-composer level of emotion, and went for a walk. Was this happiness? Freedom? Or would I find myself back tomorrow, with a whole new set of requirements?

The more “professional” a piece of software is intended to be, the more likely it is to be scriptable. CAD tools or 3D programs will provide whole languages just for configuration. But the huge consumer products, the operating systems themselves, are more and more locked down. The reasons are multiple—money, security, simplicity. A lot of our computing is done on someone else's terms. We describe it with carceral words. To assert control over your device, you “jailbreak” out.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons people get into crypto—they dream of a new world that can be customized like software. Programmable money, self-executing contracts, little scripts that rearrange reality. In DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), people use code to make social rules, then buy or do things with their consolidated digital might.

A lot of my friends hate all this stuff (perhaps NFTs more than DAOs) with great passion; they see it as a closing off, a betrayal of the open, trust-driven nature of the early web. Others love it, seeing it as a continuation of the community-building, empowering nature of the early web. What I see is a generation of configurers coming into their own. Older web folks expected to create the new digital economy; these younger ones are trying to create the new economy economy. Their dream is a more perfect union where humans will, because of computers, stop acting in the ways we've been acting since we came out of the trees. Then again, $200 million in NFTs were stolen the day I drafted this column.

When in history have we been able to schedule folly? Sometimes the only way to end the vacation is to drive the RV off a cliff.

Perhaps by the time you read this the NFTs will have been returned. That would be a good reconfiguration. But the likely outcome of the boom is that some people will cash out at the right time and become convinced that they hold the keys to the universe and will lecture us for the rest of our lives, and most people (like those who had their NFTs stolen) will be humbled, or at best break even. When in history have we been able to schedule folly? Sometimes the only way to end the vacation is to drive the RV off a cliff.

While the youth reconfigure society, I'm done configuring. A month has gone by since the click, and the urge to tweak is gone. My system looks like something from the '80s (a lot of it is from the '80s), but I finally got my room just the way I like it.

Here's what I mean. Say I search for the word “database”; 7,222 emails pop up. Most are from marketers and industry mailing lists proclaiming some technological triumph, but nestled among them are messages from me, or to me, about learning to use databases—XML databases, SQL databases, and so forth. When I read these old messages, I am always surprised at how little I've changed, how consistent my obsessions are. There's something valuable to me in just seeing that, in seeing how the world keeps trumpeting the new while the self stays the same. You'd think there'd be at least five new me's by now, given how often I've vowed to become better. But no. I've been writing about configuring my text editor since 1996. I've been running my mouth about databases at least that long. They say you can't dip your hand in the same river twice, but they rarely mention that it's the same hand doing the dipping.

Since the emails are, well, just emails, sometimes I hit Reply (by typing “r”). On a thread that went dormant a decade ago. I don't always offer context. Sometimes I just write, “Curious … how did this turn out?” I used to feel I was intruding, to just drop in like that. But what the hell. It's been a long pandemic. No one has to write back.

Out go the emails. Most get no reply; some get a bounce-back. But often enough, people respond at length. Some left the city and came back. Some are up for coffee. A surprising number are now cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids). Some are rich, some are broke, some are divorced. One is considering being frozen after death, some are considering getting into crypto, and one has moved to Miami. None of us understand our children.

I'm thinking of starting a Sunday morning waffle breakfast for vaccinated people to come stare at each other. It's one thing to email after 10 years, but everyone appreciates an invitation to breakfast. Maybe I'll set up some sort of internet-connected LED scrolly screen, like they put on food carts, so out-of-towners can leave messages. I gotta have something to configure.

If you'd asked me, back when I was still configuring, not yet configured, exactly why I was nurturing these dozens of dotfiles, I'd have had a hard time telling you. I would have said: I want a pure and sleek experience. I want the computer working for me, augmenting my dumb brain with its immense arithmetical speed. I want access to my whole digital self. So I am very surprised that the terminal result of my efforts is not some sort of ecstatic communion with the internet, or even with my own computer. The function of my whole big orchestrated, tagged, integrated system was merely to rekindle old ties. What was all that configuration for? It was, in all sincerity, for waffles.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- Jacques Vallée still doesn’t know what UFOs are

- When should you test yourself for Covid-19?

- How to leave your photos to someone when you die

- TV struggles to put Silicon Valley on the screen

- YouTube's captions insert explicit language in kids' videos

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones, soundbars, and Bluetooth speakers

IDEAS

The Enduring Legacy of Clubhouse’s Chatty Revolution

The app’s buzz may have quieted down, but its spirit still animates the social internet.

Virginia Heffernan  March 31, 2022 12:12 PM

Illustration: JINHWA JANG

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. This was the signature insight of Walter Ong, the tech philosopher who considered spoken language superior to written language and a greater stimulus to intimacy and imagination. A proud phonocentrist, Ong further believed that heroism lives almost exclusively in speech. This rings true. There are many heroic calls to arms—think of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky defying the Russian invasion—but heroic emails are few.

Social media has long pitched its tent in the domain of logos—the word. Twitter and Facebook may seem rambunctious, but they're mostly made of silent symbols. Such written language, in Ong's analysis, will always engender the arrogance of “the last word”; distraction; disengagement from the shared human struggle to make meaning; and neurotic repetitiveness—backing and filling, skimming, rereading, parsing, sharing, screenshotting.

By contrast, Clubhouse is an online joint that Ong, who died in 2003, might have appreciated. Along with its copycats in “social audio,” Clubhouse has managed to bring the immediacy of spoken exchanges to the internet. These days, the app is widely disparaged as a vibe-shift victim, but I'm not so sure. Even as the hype has faded and celebs have decamped, Clubhouse continues to convene dialogs that are everything Twitter exchanges are not: both substantial and tender, trusting and challenging, candid and incorporative. In the right rooms, you might even hear conversations worthy of being called “civil discourse.”

Clubhouse launched in the spring of 2020, the thick of the pandemic, with a white-nationalist insurgency in the offing. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. With great fanfare and even greater capital, Paul Davison (Stanford, Google) and Rohan Seth (Stanford, Google) opened the app's doors on March 17. Having hoped to create a platform that would let people listen to podcasts in groups, Davison and Seth were suddenly sure that locked-down people were suffering a new kind of loneliness, one not addressed by existing forms of social media. As a remedy, they proposed a revival of the old telephonic party lines, channels where you forfeit privacy for conviviality—or bickering. To mark the ribbon-cutting, investor Marc Andreessen called Clubhouse “the Athenian agora come to life.” (An agora for the agoraphobic, maybe.)

But were we in that first Covid year underserved by social media, or feeling alone in some new way? It seemed self-evident at the time, but it's been hard to verify in all the rushed sociology spun up to define the plague years. It seems more likely that Clubhouse responded to a desire that predated the pandemic—a longing for spoken human conversation, the kind that comes with flights of eloquence, slips of the tongue, audible emotion, and overlapping voices of support or dissent.

After all, by 2020, the extraordinary proliferation of podcasts had already showcased the pleasures of speech: regional accents, idiosyncratic cadences, improvised exchanges. On Clubhouse, a spatial audio effect now simulates the acoustics of a concert hall. Even when no one is talking, this soundscape evokes the living presence of others. Several rooms take advantage of the effect, including the talk-free meditation rooms. One I like is a writing room that prohibits talking for 50 minutes per hour, and holds a discussion for the balance. You write together, in companionable silence.

Clubhouse at the start was not just invite-only; it was iOS-only. Chic voices would touch chic brains via AirPods Pro. In issuing invitations, the hope was that Clubhouse would skim the creamiest cream off the social milk—Drake, Oprah—and gain a reputation for being 100 percent rabble-free.

To this end, the interface faintly conjures a nightclub, with gestures at velvet ropes, bouncers, hallways, and corner banquettes. In each chat room, circle-shaped headshots come up like tokens on a game board. When one of the circles speaks, it gets a kind of halo that flashes while they hold the floor—and those who interrupt with amens or points of order borrow the flashing. The sound of the voices is rich, pure, and immediate.

Sarah Szalavitz, the extraordinarily well-connected technologist, brought me to Clubhouse and gave me a backstage tour and guidance for avoiding the right-wing bores of the Intellectual Dark Web, with their never-ending jeremiads against pronouns and wokeness. Sarah also gave me stern advice: I'd have to quickly unfriend most of the 52 people I'd be forced to follow on signing up. Many of the forced follows, the dread Suggested User List, were notorious shit-stirrers for whom the deck of influence on the app was apparently stacked. Of those on the Suggested User List, only two in that summer of 2020 seemed to have come by their followers honestly: Meek Mill and 21 Savage. I still follow them.

For a time, Clubhouse caught on, and throughout the summer there were ambitious and fruitful conferences by Black Lives Matter writers and activists. There was also a lot of blather about that season's philosophical earworms, from cancel culture to gender essentialism. In September, the US attorney general labeled Portland, Seattle, and New York City “anarchist jurisdictions,” and the Clubhouse rooms refracted the apocalyptic hyperrealism of the wider world. In May 2021 the app opened to Android users, and a few months later users stopped having to be invited. The big weekly parties shrank and turned uncool. Debates turned into so-called drama rooms—shouting matches on catnip subjects like vaccines. Many precincts of the app turned monotonous.

Along the way, imitations thundered in: Discord Stage Channels, Slack Huddles, Twitter Spaces, Reddit Talk, Facebook Live Audio Rooms, Spotify Greenroom, and Telegram Voice Chats. The valuation of Clubhouse fell, and many prominent hosts took their shows to Spaces, which integrated well with Twitter. Other social media apps serve specific groups. Coworkers use Huddles, and Discord serves gamers and teens.

Though blockbuster social media remains logocentric, social audio hums along, and Clubhouse, in particular, seems unbothered not to be the belle of anyone's VC ball anymore. It still lives on 28 million devices, and its regular users, many of them international, remain loyal. They speak in a wide range of accents and dialects, and many join groups just to practice new languages. For weeks, rooms have proliferated in which people inside and outside Ukraine trade urgent information about the Russian attacks. These conversations take place alternately in Ukrainian, Russian, English, and several other languages.

Current Clubhouse users now get sentimental when they talk about the app. In a recent room called What's Your Favorite Clubhouse Story? one user described the time Snoop Dogg entered his room to whoops of “Snoop,” and a second spoke of hearing the ancient groans of a friend who gave birth on the app. (That really happened.) As these two spoke, those present made deeply human murmurs of surprise, squeamishness, and wonder. Then a third piped up. He said simply, and quietly, that Clubhouse had taught him to listen.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories

- 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!

- The aftermath of a self-driving tragedy

- How people actually make money from crypto

- The best binoculars to zoom in on real life

- Facebook has a child predation problem

- Mercury could be littered with diamonds

- 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database

- 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones

Table of Contents

Wired Magazine: 13 Oct, 2022

All articles

The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer

The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote Machine

Would You Ditch All This Chaos for a Country in the Cloud?

My 4 Days in Fake Gay-Conversion Therapy

Inside the Shadow Evacuation of Kabul

Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You

What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software

The Vast Wasteland of Internet Television

Am I Wrong to Judge People for Talking to Me in Emoji?

Sayaka Murata Inhabits a Planet of Her Own

What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?

The Family That Mined the Pentagon's Data for Profit

The Secret to Being Lucky

Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability

After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance

The Big Business of Burying Carbon

Am I an Idiot for Wanting a Dumber Phone?

The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs

How the Secret ‘Project Galileo’ Gave Rise to the MoonSwatch

Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans

The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach

Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization

This Designer Guitar Is Made From a Bent Sheet of Steel

A Photographer Captures Earth as a Strange New World

After Layoffs, Crypto Startups Face a ‘Crucible Moment’

When Covid Came for Provincetown

The Genre-Transcending Mastery of The Staircase

Life Is Great in the Age of No Secrets

Prediction Engines Are Like Karma: You Get What You Stream

The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

Volodymyr Zelensky on War, Technology, and the Future of Ukraine

It's Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message

The Multifarious Multiplexity of Taika Waititi

The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake?

‘How Are They Weapons? That’s Only a Flashlight!’

Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story

The US Military Is Building Its Own Metaverse

Bill Gates Is So Over This Pandemic

Can Social Media Be Redeemed?

Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise

With the Clock Running Out, Humans Need to Rethink Time Itself

Broken Charging Stations Could Be Stalling the EV Movement

Welcome to Janelle Monáe’s Dreamworld

Do I Really Need to Back Up All My Data?

The Intoxicating Pleasure of Conspiratorial Thinking

Extreme Heat Is a Disease for Cities. Treat It That Way

The End of Alcohol

Time Got So Much Weirder. The World Needs a New Lexicon

This Startup Wants to Get in Your Ears and Watch Your Brain

A Farmer’s Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge

The Bitcoin Bust That Took Down the Web’s Biggest Child Abuse Site

A Million Little Pieces: The Race to Rebuild the World’s Reefs

If Someone Is Typing, Then Stops … Can I Ask Why?

I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For?

The Enduring Legacy of Clubhouse’s Chatty Revolution