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Tag: longreads

  • Inside the Contentious World of Luigi Mangione Supporters

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    Last February, Emily Whittemore stepped onto the stage at Los Angeles’ Jumbo’s Clown Room in a pair of eight-inch Pleaser heels, a black string bikini, and an extra-large T-shirt with the face of Luigi Mangione printed across it.

    She writhed and wiggled on the iconic strip bar’s floor to System of a Down’s “Prison Song” as onlookers cheered, and eventually lifted the shirt up to her head and wrapped Mangione’s mug shot around her face. “I was like, ‘Ya’ll don’t even need to look at me, just pretend I’m him,’” Whittemore recalls.

    Then she ripped the shirt off, threw it on the ground, and sat down, “pretending to ride” it, she says. The audience of mostly women went wild, chanting “free Luigi” while Whittemore scooped up wads of cash. Even after her performance, Whittemore kept the Mangione hype flowing: “I would go to every single person that I would see, any young group of girls at work who’d come in and be like, ‘Hey, have y’all seen the guy who shot the CEO? He’s so hot, right?’”

    Whittemore, of course, was referring to the 27-year-old data engineer accused of shooting and killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, outside a Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan last December. The crime sparked a nationwide manhunt, which led to Mangione’s arrest five days later at a McDonald’s in central Pennsylvania. He has since been charged with more than a dozen state and federal offenses, including second-degree murder and stalking, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

    Since his arrest, Mangione’s case has garnered worldwide attention and spawned a conglomerate of passionate supporters with opposing agendas. Some of these factions see Mangione’s alleged crime as a stand against corporate greed, corrupt health care systems, and one-percenters. Others find that stance offensive, believing Mangione is entirely innocent and spending their days clapping back at any insinuation of his guilt on the internet. Yet, the most widely recognized supporters in the public eye are the “thirsters,” as they are fittingly nicknamed.

    Once surveillance photos of Mangione’s fantasy novel looks—his dense black eyebrows, sculpted jaw, and ear-to-ear smile—emerged on the internet, he became an instant heartthrob for the digital age, with fan fiction detailing steamy bedroom scenes about him and his female friends, and T-shirts, hoodies, and even bikinis featuring pictures of Mangione springing up across Etsy and other online shops. (Etsy says it has since removed that merch.) In June, Luigi: The Musical, a satire in which the actor playing Mangione does a striptease, opened to a sold-out audience in San Francisco.

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    Melkorka Licea

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  • A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu

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    The day after I failed to secure a Labubu from Pop Mart’s original store, I decide to console myself with a visit to Pop Land, the company’s 10-acre theme park in central Beijing—and perhaps the clearest sign that it intends to come for Disney’s lunch. (“Our art toys are like Disney’s movies,” Wang says in A Company One of a Kind. “They use movies to reach consumers, cultivate fans, and build IP and fan communities. We do it through art toys.”)

    Pop Land is about 1 percent the size of Universal Studios in Beijing and Shanghai’s Disneyland, but unlike other theme parks, it sits right by the consulate district and a few subway stops away from Beijing’s most populous business areas. It’s in a city green space, which meant that Pop Mart wasn’t allowed to move even a single tree. Instead, the company renovated an abandoned building on the property and named it Molly’s Castle. A leafy area became Labubu Adventure Forest, though it looks much brighter and more kid-friendly than Lung’s original depiction. At one end of the forest, actors put on a “Warriors Training Camp” in full-size Labubu suits.

    I stop for lunch at the park’s restaurant, on the third floor of Molly’s Castle. The minute I’m seated at a table and inform the waitress I came alone, she puts a 23-inch-tall plush doll in the chair opposite me. My dining buddy is Zimomo, the male chief of the Labubu clan in the original children’s book and one of the rarest Pop Mart products sold. Throughout my lunch, other Pop Land visitors keep coming over to ask whether I bought the Zimomo doll myself and if they can take a picture of it. I feel like I’m dining with a celebrity.

    Dining with Zimomo, a chieftain from the original Story of Puca book.

    Video: Zeyi Yang

    At the table next to me is a mother with her young daughter. I ask what brought them here. The mom tells me that her daughter, who’s turning 4 in less than a month, found and fell in love with Labubu through watching videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. She thought about buying two Zimomo dolls for her daughter, but they cost $200 each on the resale market, so she’s still debating. Just the day before, she saw on social media that a friend’s daughter had a Labubu-themed birthday party, where the room was stuffed with dozens of rare Labubus. She shows me videos of the party on her phone. “Her mom paid a lot to get these,” she says.

    Since I began my own Labubu hunt, I’ve known the option exists to go to a reseller, often referred to in China by the slang term huangniu (literally “yellow ox”). I heard from Dong, a Pop Mart customer since 2018 in Shanghai, that many huangniu he knows use bots that monitor social media for restock announcements and grab new merchandise the millisecond it drops. Dong has paid a small amount to join group chats where huangniu release early information. He calls himself a fenniu now—between a fan and a huangniu. He has already collected most of the Labubu products ever released, so he’s only buying new ones to sell to other fans for a profit. (Which, to me, sounds like he is a huangniu.)

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    Zeyi Yang

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  • Tech Billionaires Already Captured the White House. They Still Want to Be Kings

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    During our conversation, Brown compared Praxis to Israel—minus a world war and a holocaust, of course. “There were these stateless people who were scattered,” he says, and they had “this idea of Judea and building a state and returning to the OG homeland.” (Srinivasan has been even more direct in the past, saying, “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism.”)

    Of course, the beauty of a network state is that it can embody “the West” without actually having to be there. In addition to the Vandenberg location, Praxis announced that its team would be traveling to Morocco, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, among other countries, to explore the possibility of establishing an SEZ. While Brown says he does not consider Morocco to be Western, Praxis is willing to work with countries that are willing to give it land. Like Ion, Brown promises an influx of companies and tech talent that “can radically benefit” those places, boosting property values and creating jobs for local residents. It is unclear if those Moroccan residents would be considered “citizens” in a Praxian SEZ. In the meantime, through an initiative called Praxis Development, the group plans to buy up residential properties where its members can live as a stepping stone toward “real territory, real assets, and real power.”

    “This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire,” says Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the independent newsletter The Nerd Reich. “It sounds like colonization 2.0. When you go to another person’s country and create your own country there, no matter your excuse, no matter your rationale.”

    Or, as the Praxis X account posted on September 1, “Cyberpunk East India Company.”

    The most evolved version of the SEZ strategy is Próspera, a charter community, backed by Pronomos Capital, on the island of Roatán in Honduras. It has an arbitration system, low taxes, and a code of rules. (Vitalia, Ion’s original project, considered setting up a permanent location within Próspera.)

    Próspera’s leaders say they do not consider it a network state, that their goal is “city-scale development that advances human progress and prosperity—within Honduran sovereignty and law.” The Honduran government, then led by Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, granted the city its charter in 2017. But Hernández was arrested in 2022 for drug trafficking (he has since been convicted), and the new government repealed Próspera’s SEZ status, alleging that these types of zones violated the country’s sovereignty. Próspera then filed an $11 billion lawsuit against the Honduran government, alleging that the government had failed to “honor its guarantees of legal stability.” The case is ongoing.

    Ion, for his part, says that he “would approach different things differently” in Viva City.

    Back at Viva Frontier Tower, after the morning rave and a full day of sessions on health and longevity, Ion, now dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, leads a few dozen attendees on a tour of his pop-up fiefdom. While the AI-generated images on the group’s website portray a semitropical seaside paradise that looks like a cross between Monaco and Atlantis, in real life, the WeWork turned “vertical village” turned temporary network state is in various states of repair.

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    Vittoria Elliott

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  • Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. Can Anyone Stop Him?

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    When the suit didn’t produce instant results, Musk went jingoistic. A few months earlier, in February 2014, Russia had invaded Ukraine, illegally annexing the Crimean Peninsula and triggering a global wave of condemnation against Moscow. Musk rode that wave in his successful push to get Congress and the Obama administration to wind down use of the United Launch Alliance’s signature rocket, the Atlas V, because it relied on Russian RD-180 engines. (The suit was eventually settled out of court.) The combination helped break ULA’s grip on government space launches.

    Another big leap came in 2017. SpaceX started reusing its rocket cores, which dramatically brought down the price of getting to orbit. (Eight years later, its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still the only rockets in their weight classes with reusable cores.) But nothing was more important than Mueller’s continued development of SpaceX’s Merlin engine. It became one of the most durable in aerospace history, even though, as a former employee told me, “performance-wise, it’s terrible.” Its power and efficiency are nothing special. “We didn’t have the resources to do a lot of design and analysis,” he adds. “And so we just tested the ever-loving shit out of the engine. We hot-fired it thousands of times. Now they have an engine that’s super robust.”

    Today, thanks in part to its nine reusable Merlin engines, a Falcon 9 can take a kilogram to low Earth orbit for one-third the previous cost; the Falcon Heavy, which uses 27 Merlins, drops the cost nearly in half again. Some 85 percent of Falcon 9 missions go to space with previously used first stages. In 2022, SpaceX jumped from doing around 30 launches per year to more than 60, and last year it hit 138. NASA’s space launch and human exploration efforts are now almost entirely controlled by Musk. A whole new space economy has grown up around him, one that relies on his cheap space access to get networks of small spacecraft into low Earth orbit. Take Planet Labs, the satellite imaging company. Hundreds of its spacecraft were carried by Falcon 9.

    Really, no one is even trying to catch up; they’re just trying to find niches in a Musk-dominated ecosystem. ULA is building rockets optimized to reach geostationary orbits, which are farther out, even as many of its customers follow Musk’s lead and keep their satellite constellations closer to Earth. Upstarts like Rocket Lab and Firefly are admired for their ingenuity. But their current operational rockets are tiny by comparison—capable of carrying, at most, a couple thousand pounds, versus 140,000 for the Falcon Heavy.

    “SpaceX is a cornerstone in the space industry. And then there’s other cornerstones, like Firefly. We’re very complementary to SpaceX,” says Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “It’s kind of like air, land, and sea. There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of transportation method.” (Kim’s not alone in this thinking; Firefly just went public at a valuation of $8.5 billion; Rocket Lab’s market cap is about $21 billion.)

    Jeff Bezos has the cash to compete with SpaceX. And he’s certainly been at it long enough—his rocket company, Blue Origin, started a quarter-century ago. But it has had, shall we say, competing priorities. It’s been hard at work on engines; its BE-4 engine is actually powering the first stage of ULA’s new rocket, confusingly enough. You may have seen that Blue Origin has a rocket for near-space tourism, the one that recently carried Bezos’ wife, Lauren Sánchez, and Katy Perry aloft. But the company’s big rocket, the one that’s supposed to compete with SpaceX, has flown exactly once. And when I ask Blue Origin’s rep what makes their rockets any better—or, at least, any different—from Musk’s, he tells me: “I don’t have a solid answer for you on that one.”

    China, which once seemed poised to dominate global launch, has had trouble keeping up with Musk’s rising totals, successfully launching between 64 and 68 rockets annually over the past three years. SpaceX is not only launching twice as often, it’s carrying more than 10 times the reported mass to orbit. Stoke Space, founded by Blue Origin engineers, has aerospace geeks in a frenzy, but it has yet to put a rocket on the pad. United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s OG competitor, has a powerful new rocket—more on that in a bit—but once again, Musk is ahead. He’s working on a truly massive launcher, arguably the biggest ever constructed. Both stages are supposed to be fully reusable (which means, of course, immense cost savings), while neither stage of ULA’s Vulcan will be fully reusable. And that, according to a new report from SpaceNews Intelligence, could relegate the one-time monopolist “to niche roles in government or regional and backup contracts, assuming they survive at all.”

    II. SATELLITES

    At the end of May, at his factory in Starbase, Texas, Musk was in full Mars evangelist mode. “This is where we’re going to develop the technology necessary to take humanity,” he told his employees, “to another planet for the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of Earth.”

    But as he sketched out his soaring vision of this place cranking out 1,000 enormous Starships per year, Musk repeated a more mundane truth. No, not the part about the Starship’s uneven test record. The one about funding. “Starlink internet is what’s being used to pay for humanity getting to Mars.”

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    Noah Shachtman

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  • A Vigil for Charlie Kirk

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    Scenes From Charlie Kirk's Spontaneous Memorial in Utah

    Young people dominated the hospital crowd, which makes sense, since Kirk’s major accomplishment was to promote his brand of rightwing politics to a cohort that has historically been uninterested in it. Kirk was many things: charismatic, politically canny, polemical, ruthless. His organization, Turning Point USA—with its mission to “win America’s culture war”—was arguably the right’s most successful new political group. A talented demagogue, he attacked trans people, LGBTQ people, Black people, Muslims, and women, and his arguments were often misleading, ahistorical, or rankly hypocritical. But because his public appearances so often took the shape of a seemingly fair debate—two citizens squaring off at microphones—they could feel honest and democratic to his fans.

    Joshua Williams 18 and Bryce Harding 19.

    Joshua Williams, 18 and Bryce Harding, 19.

    “I really have to thank my Instagram algorithm for introducing me to him,” said Elder Joseph Trunnel, an 18-year-old donning the starched white-shirt and tie typical of the Latter-Day Saints. “Part of me wanted to be like him, because of how much of a genius he was.” Trunnel added that Kirk inspired him to go to trade school instead of college. “I got my barber license, and it’s been working out really good,” he told me. “It’s really made a difference in my life.” His friend and fellow LDS Elder Bryce Harding, 19, agreed: “He spoke the truth, he never tried to cause contention.”

    Ethan Mendenhall 20 and Emma Hasson 19 wave to cars near the hospital.

    Ethan Mendenhall, 20, and Emma Hasson, 19, wave to cars near the hospital.

    Scenes From Charlie Kirk's Spontaneous Memorial in Utah

    That, of course, is untrue. Kirk’s career was built on contention. He went toe-to-toe with college students in public debates, and also against older opponents, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and the sharp liberal commentator Sam Seder. On his podcast, he called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” and endorsed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. His social media clips helped Kirk dominate the political sphere, and positioned him as a crusader for far-right values—particularly among a rising conservative youth movement.

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    Jasper Craven, Sinna Nasseri

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  • The Superyacht, the Billionaire, and a Wildly Improbable Disaster at Sea

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    The court delivered a devastating judgment in January 2022. In a 1,700-page ruling, the judge found that Lynch had been “aware of improprieties in Autonomy’s accounting practices” and had been “dishonestly involved in manipulating the accounts.” The systematic accounting practices weren’t just aggressive. They were, the judge concluded, a deliberate scheme to mislead. American prosecutors, who had been waiting for the UK proceedings to conclude, now had the ammunition they needed. Extradition proceedings, already in motion, gained momentum.

    VI. Against All Odds

    Lynch’s forced travel to the United States in May 2023 marked the beginning of an extraordinary ordeal. Federal prosecutors in San Francisco charged him in a 16-count indictment that included conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy. If convicted on all counts, the 57-year-old faced up to 25 years in prison—effectively a life sentence.

    Despite US prosecutors promising the English court that Lynch wouldn’t be incarcerated pretrial, Judge Charles Breyer immediately sent him to jail upon arrival, his lead attorney Reid Weingarten recalled. “That was probably the lowest moment.” He ended up in jail for only one day, though, after posting a $100 million bond. The mathematics of his situation became Lynch’s obsession. “What are the odds?” he would constantly ask his friends and lawyers, especially Weingarten, who found it maddening. “It was the stupidest question ever,” he would later recall. “There’s just too many variables.” At the same time, he respected Lynch’s genuine curiosity—“there was nothing he didn’t know about or didn’t want to know about,” from astrophysics to politics, culture, music, even American baseball.

    The trial began in March 2024, with Lynch joined by his former VP of finance Stephen Chamberlain as codefendant. From the start, it was clear that Lynch’s team had it easier. Hussain’s conviction had taught them the playbook of US prosecutors, and they’d had years to ready a new defense. Each night, Lynch and his legal team would work out who the prosecution was going to bring the next day. They also hired a “shadow jury”—a barman and a clerk paid to sit through all 11 weeks of proceedings and register independent impressions.

    Most white-collar defendants stay silent; Lynch insisted on taking the stand. He presented himself as a down-to-earth British entrepreneur who had been victimized by American corporate incompetence. He walked the jury through his working-class background, his academic achievements. When prosecutors pressed him on specific transactions, he deflected skillfully—these were matters for the finance team, he was focused on technology and strategy.

    One of the most effective moments came when Lynch described the experience with HP. “I watched them take this beautiful company and just wreck it,” he told the jury, emotion creeping in. “And then they had the audacity to blame me for their incompetence.”

    The verdict came on June 6, 2024. As the jury foreman read “not guilty” to all remaining charges, Lynch cried. So did his wife. Chamberlain was also acquitted on all counts. Speaking to journalists later, Lynch reflected on what he’d endured: “It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life,” he said. “The question is, what do you want to do with it?”

    VII. The Celebration

    As part of his recovery process, Lynch planned a long summer aboard the Bayesian, full of friends and celebration. For one particular outing in August, he invited along everyone who stayed close to him during the darkest period of his life. Christopher Morvillo, the Clifford Chance partner who had helped quarterback the US legal strategy, was there with his wife, Neda. Jonathan Bloomer, the Morgan Stanley international executive who had served as a character witness, had accepted the invitation along with his wife, Judy.

    The yacht itself was a 56-meter sailing vessel with a dark blue hull and a minimalist ­Japanese-style interior, later referred to by The Times of London as a “masterpiece of engineering and opulence.” The yacht’s original name was Salute; Lynch rechristened it the Bayesian. The vessel was magnificent but also an anomaly: It had a single, towering aluminum mast.

    The following account is drawn from official investigation reports, videos, photos, and people familiar with the accounts of the crew and survivors. The August sailing was planned as a leisurely tour of Sicily’s northern coast and Aeolian Islands. The group started in Milazzo, then spent four days exploring the volcanic archipelago. They anchored off Isola di Vulcano one day for a few hours to watch the active crater glow against the sky, visited Panarea, and enjoyed the crystal clear waters around Dattilo. It was exactly the kind of relaxed, intimate celebration Lynch had envisioned. It was also a sendoff for Hannah, an aspiring poet. The two loved to spar over meals, arguing about politics and world events, with Lynch playing the contrarian.

    That weekend, Lynch received two devastating calls from Andy Kanter about Stephen Chamberlain, his Autonomy codefen­dant. The first call, on Saturday, Lynch answered with a happy hello—laughter and cheer audible in the background—before Kanter delivered what he called “the gravest news”: Chamberlain, a middle-aged soccer fan and avid runner, had been struck by a car while jogging and suffered a traumatic head injury. By Sunday’s call, the news was worse: The hospital was turning off life support. The group aboard the Bayesian lit a candle for Chamberlain in the church at Cefalù.

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    Bradley Hope

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  • The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?

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    Bi understood how far-fetched her allegations sounded. “If it were not for all the hard evidence, it’s too shocking to believe [Rebecca Smith] did what she did to kill my son,” Bi wrote on Facebook, using Smith’s real name. Perhaps a kind friend could have suggested to Bi that there were other explanations. Instead, Bi had a set of legal adversaries and a supportive echo chamber. On Facebook, GCs and IPs alike expressed sympathy for Bi’s tragic posts: Everyone knew bad surrogates existed, and based on Bi’s claims, it sounded like Smith was one. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a Bay Area fertility doctor and influencer, called Smith “a criminal” and “a psycho.” Bi’s $1,275-an-hour lawyer, Elizabeth Sperling, wondered whether digging through social media posts might show Smith engaging in “strenuous activity” that could explain the death.

    Bi’s husband focused on stabilizing the family, a move he credits with saving their marriage. He blamed the hospital, not Smith, but told me that the litigation is “her grieving process.” He tried to stay out of the legal stuff so that Bi couldn’t blame him too.

    Smith had planned to go back to work shortly after giving birth. Instead, she couldn’t stop bleeding. Even though SAI had determined she hadn’t breached the contract, the escrow stopped paying, leaving Smith reliant on disability benefits as she faced an increasing pile of terrifying bills.

    When Smith was finally cleared to return to work, a month after Leon died, Bi emailed Smith’s HR department to ask about her health plan. Bi also reported Smith to a federal agency, claiming that Smith was committing fraud. The stress on Smith was already high: Her supervisor at work had found her crying on and off for a day.

    Smith hadn’t heard from Bi since her terse reply to the condolence email. Then, Bi texted her a screenshot of a Facebook post about another GC who’d had an abruption at almost 32 weeks—but that GC had called 911 and the baby had lived.

    Next, Bi iMessaged a photo of Leon’s corpse to Smith’s 7-year-old son’s iPad.

    In the months after Leon died, Bi:

    Called the FBI 12 times. Reported Smith, SAI, the hospital, and Clarity escrow to more than a dozen state and federal regulators and numerous professional organizations. Launched a new round of her $30 million venture fund, backed by Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, President Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” on Leon’s due date. Posted Leon’s ChatGPT-written endorsement from heaven, offering his “eternal blessings” for her work. Created TikToks, Instagram Reels, Facebook posts, X threads, LinkedIn Updates, and a website for her advocacy. Posted links disclosing Smith’s full name, photo, address, employer, mortgage license number, and son’s first name to her website. Asked her husband, again and again, how it was possible that Smith had carried her son but felt “nothing” about his death.

    Baby Leon’s empty crib.

    Courtesy of Cindy Bi

    Bi has abandonment issues that she traces back to her twenties, when her father divorced her mom for the mistress who’d conceived his long-awaited son. She got on lithium for her bipolar disorder in early 2021 and began looking for surrogates as soon as she stopped feeling “sedated.” I spoke to the therapist Bi hired to consult with her and Valdeiglesias. She told me that, of the 792 intended parents she has evaluated for surrogacy or gamete donation in the last decade, she has declined to recommend only about a dozen. “I’m not gatekeeping,” she said. When it comes to serious mental illness, she added, it’s up to them to disclose. One of Bi’s fertility doctors, meanwhile, told me it’s not his place to scrutinize intended parents. He defers to the recommendation of the psychological interviewer.

    If an intended parent gets turned down, they can usually find another therapist, another clinic, another agency. But without anyone questioning her plans, Bi seemed betrayed by the challenges of third-party reproduction. “Surrogacy is supposed to be the safest route,” she wrote on Instagram. It wasn’t just Leon’s death that pushed Bi into her spiral of legal action and social media posts. It was the apparent lack of control of having her child inside another woman’s body—the most basic fact of surrogacy.

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    Emi Nietfeld

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  • Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them—and Why Did I Love It?

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    Sitting a few feet away was Simon Last, one of Notion’s three cofounders. He is gangly and shy, an engineer who has relinquished management responsibilities to focus on being a “super IC”—an individual contributor. He stood to shake my hand, and I awkwardly thanked him for letting me vibe-code. Simon returned to his laptop, where he was monitoring an AI as it coded for him. Later, he would tell me that using AI coding apps was like managing a bunch of interns.

    Since 2022, the Notion app has had an AI assistant to help users draft their notes. Now the company is refashioning this as an “agent,” a type of AI that will work autonomously in the background on your behalf while you tackle other tasks. To pull this off, human engineers need to write lots of code.

    They open up Cursor and select which of several AI models they’d like to tap into. Most engineers I chatted with during my visit preferred Claude, or they used the Claude Code app directly. After choosing their fighter, the engineers ask their AI to draft code to build a new thing or fix a feature. The human programmer then debugs and tests the output as needed—though the AIs help with this too—before moving the code to production.

    At its foundational core, generative AI is enormously expensive. The theoretical savings come in the currency of time, which is to say, if AI helped Notion’s cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao finish his tasks earlier than expected, he could mosey down to the jazz club on the ground floor of his Market Street office building and bliss out for a while. Ivan likes jazz music. In reality, he fills the time by working more. The fantasy of the four-day workweek will remain just that.

    My workweek at Notion was just two days, the ultimate code sprint. (In exchange for full access to their lair, I agreed to identify rank-and-file engineers by first name only.) My first assignment was to fix the way a chart called a mermaid diagram appears in the Notion app. Two engineers, Quinn and Modi, told me that these diagrams exist as SVG files in Notion and, despite being called scalable vector graphics, can’t be scaled up or zoomed into like a JPEG file. As a result, the text within mermaid diagrams on Notion is often unreadable.

    Quinn slid his laptop toward me. He had the Cursor app open and at the ready, running Claude. For funsies, he scrolled through part of Notion’s code base. “So, the Notion code base? Has a lot of files. You probably, even as an engineer, wouldn’t even know where to go,” he said, politely referring to me as an engineer. “But we’re going to ignore all that. We’re just going to ask the AI on the sidebar to do that.”

    His vibe-coding strategy, Quinn explained, was often to ask the AI: Hey, why is this thing the way it is? The question forces the AI to do a bit of its own research first, and the answer helps inform the prompt that we, the human engineers, would write. After “thinking,” Cursor informed us, via streaming lines of text, that Notion’s mermaid diagrams are static images that, among other things, lack click handlers and aren’t integrated with a full-screen infrastructure. Sure.

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    Lauren Goode

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  • ‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website

    ‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website

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    Kevin: When we went to do the IPO, it was very, very clear that the digital side was far more valuable than the magazine side. That was the beginning of the craziness. Here’s a magazine that has a lot of revenue, respectability, great enthusiasm, and support from the readership. And here’s this really weird digital side that’s worth 10 times the magazine.

    Jane: When Condé Nast bought WIRED and Lycos bought HotWired, the company combined was worth less than the company separated. To this day, we liken it to Nike deciding to sell their footwear to Puma and their apparel to Adidas. Why would you do that? Why would you take the premier brand that had both the technical credibility as well as the upside of the lifestyle and culture stuff and pull it apart?

    Jeff: It was a very traditional and typical tech acquisition where the startup gets acquired and comes into the bigger corporate culture. It just doesn’t work very well.

    Jane: Louis and I were so crestfallen, heartbroken, and devastated, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, but everyone got rich.” That was not the point. It was a very, very difficult time.

    June: Almost all of us started to feel a pretty profound sense of loss and grief that the culture we knew, the values we believed in as innovators and creators, had been lost. That the industry was no longer about innovation, invention, creativity, and certainly not about democratization. That everything was about money.

    Well, maybe. There are 5.45 billion internet users on planet Earth, and sure, some of them are bad actors—no argument from WIRED. But most of us are still raving around the internet, hanging with pals, cruising for jobs and mates, catching up on gossip and news, buying and selling stuff, and finding fellow travelers who share our woes and our passions. And, yes, a slice of us are into fraud, abuse, and bad ideology. Did HotWired not anticipate that humans would be human?

    A day at the HotWired office

    Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Chiron; TREATMENT: JAMES MARSHALL

    Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

    Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

    Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

    John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

    Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

    Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

    John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

    Condé Nast eventually bought WIRED’s website too—in 2006.

    Animation: James Marshall

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

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    Virginia Heffernan

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  • ‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

    ‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

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    But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.

    The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.

    On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”

    (No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)

    Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.

    She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”

    Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”

    This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.

    Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.

    He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.

    “All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”

    Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?

    Excerpted from Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.

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    Jeff VanderMeer

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  • Bobbi Althoff on Exactly How She Got Rich—and How Rich, Exactly

    Bobbi Althoff on Exactly How She Got Rich—and How Rich, Exactly

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    Well actually WIRED shares a parent company with Reddit.

    Good. Get rid of it.

    What’s the part of all of it that feels the weirdest to you still? Is it weird to have something happen in your life and have to issue a statement about it on Instagram?

    It’s weird that if I say anything, it’s going to get press. And sometimes I don’t think about that. So when I decided to post an Instagram Story two weeks ago and be like, “I have never slept with someone I interviewed,” I did not expect to wake up to an email from my PR team being like, “Here’s all the news, the press you got from this.” Or when I got a divorce, having paparazzi show up at my house, I was like: “A. How did they figure out where I live? B. Why do they need to take photos of me walking without a wedding ring on?”

    It is kind of crazy. Are you in a good place in all of that personal stuff?

    A lot of people still really give me a hard time because I’m no longer with my children’s father. I was 22 when I got married.

    I didn’t know if we were going to talk about this. But I got married when I was 21.

    Did you?

    And I got divorced. I was going to offer to tell you about my divorce if it would help you talk about yours. Because I married an abolitionist vegan in college. Special. And I was also vegan and then was seeing a doctor. I was vegan because I was starving myself.

    Oh my god.

    I went to see a doctor and the doctor was like, “You have to start eating dairy. Katie, you have to start eating some sort of animal product. You have to gain weight.” So I started eating yogurt, and I called my husband, because we were living in different cities at the time, and I said, “There are two things I need to tell you. One is that I started smoking.” And he was like, “That’s hilarious. I never would’ve pictured you as a smoker.” And I said, “And the other thing is that I started eating yogurt.” And he was like, “I’m done.”

    No way. Your husband.

    My husband. And we got divorced because I ate—

    Yogurt.

    A Fage 0 percent plain.

    It’s so easy to look at the future and be like, you get married and you stay married forever. We had kids immediately. I got pregnant 10 months after knowing him, maybe 11 months. And then at a year marker we’re getting married. We got married in the courthouse.

    As a kid, I saw my parents being horrible together. Horrible. Truly, truly, truly. The worst possible couple that could be together.

    Are they still married?

    No. And I remember the day that my mom told us they were getting divorced was the best day of my life.

    I read online that the best time to get a divorce and for it to have the least impact on your kids is before they turn 3. When my daughter was 3 I remember it was just, if we are going to do this, it needs to be now, because our kids won’t know. It wasn’t like my parents, but we weren’t in love.

    And by then you must’ve had some financial independence.

    The timing lined up perfectly with me getting a lot of money. Once I knew my career was going to take off, I was OK. And we had the conversation and it was a joint conversation of, “this isn’t good anyway.”

    Do you want to get married again?

    I would love to get married and have all of the things that I never got. I want to meet someone, date them for a while, have them surprise me with an engagement ring, and then get married and have a big wedding and lots of family and friends there. I want to be disgustingly in love one day.

    Well, I’m sure all your fans on Reddit will read this interview and take notes.

    Oh, they will.

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

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    Katie Drummond

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  • The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

    The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

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    Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.

    Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”

    “Call your supervisor!” she told him.

    Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable.

    “We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leave for duty.”

    In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

    The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

    A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”

    As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.

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    Vince Beiser

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  • She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax

    She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax

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    By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

    Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

    Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press. “The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

    Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

    That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism. Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

    As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

    After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.

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

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    Morgan Meaker

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  • The New Gods of Weather Can Make Rain on Demand—or So They Want You to Believe

    The New Gods of Weather Can Make Rain on Demand—or So They Want You to Believe

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    It was questionable how much credit they could take. They had arrived in Texas right at the start of the rainy season, and the precipitation that fell before the experiment had been forecast by the US Weather Bureau. As for Powers’ notion that rain came after battles—well, battles tended to start in dry weather, so it was only the natural cycle of things that wet weather often followed.

    Despite skepticism from serious scientists and ridicule in parts of the press, the Midland experiments lit the fuse on half a century of rainmaking pseudoscience. The Weather Bureau soon found itself in a running media battle to debunk the efforts of the self-styled rainmakers who started operating across the country.

    The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield, nicknamed either the Moisture Accelerator or the Ponzi of the Skies, depending on whom you asked. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather guru and struck dozens of deals with desperate towns. When he arrived in a new place, he’d build a series of wooden towers, mix up a secret blend of 23 cask-aged chemicals, and pour it into vats on top of the towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield’s methods had the air of witchcraft, but he had a knack for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, when historical rainfall records suggested a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.

    While these showmen and charlatans were filling their pocketbooks, scientists were slowly figuring out what actually made it rain—something called cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the skies are packed with particles, some no bigger than a grain of pollen or a viral strand. “Every cloud droplet in Earth’s atmosphere formed on a preexisting aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The types of particles vary by place. In the UAE, they include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from the desert of the Empty Quarter, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries that dot the region, and organic materials from as far afield as India. Without them there would be no clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail.

    A lot of raindrops start as airborne ice crystals, which melt as they fall to earth. But without cloud condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won’t form until the temperature dips below –40 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

    In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested that seeding these areas of frigid water with artificial cloud condensation nuclei might encourage the formation of ice crystals, which would quickly grow large enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then as rain. After the Second World War, American scientists at General Electric seized on the idea. One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, found that solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, would do the trick. When Schaefer dropped grains of dry ice into the home freezer he’d been using as a makeshift cloud chamber, he discovered that water readily freezes around the particles’ crystalline structure. When he witnessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” Within a few months, they were dropping dry-ice pellets from planes over Mount Greylock in Western Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long streak of ice and snow.

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    Amit Katwala

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  • China Miéville Writes a Secret Novel With the Internet’s Boyfriend (It’s Keanu Reeves)

    China Miéville Writes a Secret Novel With the Internet’s Boyfriend (It’s Keanu Reeves)

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    **SPOILERS AHEAD**!!!!!!

    As the fictional Freud writes of his own approaching death, he foresees the death of his sister Dolfi (who will die three years later in historical time, on the way to the camps). To put it mildly, death is everywhere. “Pain will be with me until I take my final leave,” Freud/Miéville/Reeves writes. He is ready to take it, to be clear. Freud then offers us a case study of a patient he met only three times, the last time when the world was at war. This patient offers Freud a riddle, not unlike the one the Sphinx offers Oedipus, and from which psychoanalysis in part sprang:

    “I kill and kill and kill again,” he said. “And the truth is, I would like to rest … And sometimes, not frequently but many times over the course of my life, I die. And it hurts.

    And then I come back.

    I return, and I kill and kill and kill again, and eventually I die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please—​Herr Doktor … What sort of man am I?”

    This is, of course, B., the immortal warrior hero. He wants to be able to die, to become mortal, but can’t quite, for he cannot die his own death. Freud seeks to redescribe this in psychic terms for B. And that is the nature of their analytic work together. It is possible to read much of the intervening book, which opens and closes in Freud’s voice, as a lost case study. Freud declares to B.: “You’ve told me you don’t wish to be a metaphor. But you don’t get to choose.” What kills us and dies and is reborn? B., like it or not, is a metaphor for the death drive.

    The death drive is not some science fiction weapon or engine, exactly, but a theory introduced by (the real) Freud as a corrective to his idea of the pleasure principle—the idea that we all try to minimize pain and strive for pleasure all the time. War-torn Europe had shown him there was something else to account for—that we don’t just go for what’s good, but also for what’s bad, for “unpleasure.” Thus he conceived of the death drive at the end of World War I and during the Spanish flu, wherein his beloved daughter Sophie died suddenly. Freud would deny until he died that Sophie was the inspiration for it, and here, Miéville grants Freud’s wish. B., in Miéville’s hands, embodies the death drive—and he has come to Freud, like many have gone to their analysts, seeking cure. Freud then does what analysts do best—extrapolate from one patient toward a universal theory. The immortal B., in this alternate universe, showed Freud what sort of men we all are. When I asked Miéville about it, he said, “I think you could argue that that’s B. saying, ‘I want to be a human, I want to be a real boy.’ I mean, it’s a Pinocchio story.”

    Even though it was actually Reeves who introduced Freud to the original BRZRKR comic, it’s easy to see why Miéville latched onto it. All of this was written while China was reckoning, deeply, with whether or not he could imagine going on. “Depression, for me, was the realization of what has been the case rather than something happening,” he told me. “These books”—he means not just The Book of Elsewhere but also his upcoming magnum opus/white whale/albatross, which I’m still not allowed to talk about except to say it’s just been shipped off to the publisher—“are being brought to a close in what I tentatively and hopefully believe is out the other side of the worst of that.”

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    Hannah Zeavin

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  • How Advertising Broke the World

    How Advertising Broke the World

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    Disclosure: Longtime journalist Steven Brill is the founder or cofounder of a number of publications and companies, including NewsGuard, where he is the co-CEO and coeditor in chief. Among other services, NewsGuard offers advertisers brand-safety services aimed at countering the pitfalls of unvetted programmatic advertising. This story is excerpted from his new book, The Death of Truth.

    In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. It wasn’t that the legendary champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network. It was because Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News’ global website network.

    Nor was it because a marketing executive at Geico had decided that advertising on the Russian disinformation outlet was a good idea. That would have been especially unlikely, not only because of the Buffett connection, but also because Geico stands for Government Employees Insurance Company and has its roots dating to the 1930s, providing insurance to civilians and members of the military who worked for the American government, not its Russian adversary.

    In fact, no one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?

    Geico’s ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts. The numbers involved are mind-boggling. If Geico’s advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.

    Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company’s ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News’ sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others.

    Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.” What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage.

    A Keyboard Replaced Mad Men

    Let’s call our archetype specialist Trevor, and assume that he works in the programmatic advertising unit of one of the five major global advertising agency holding companies. He probably has a salary of $60,000 to $80,000 a year. Trevor will be logged in to what is known as a demand-side platform. Think of it as a kind of stock exchange for buying advertising instead of shares of a company. The demand-side platform is where all of the available advertising space on every page of every website in the world that the platform has assembled as its inventory is made available to a buyer like Trevor.

    In proximity, or in close touch if working remotely, will be another junior staffer with a title of “media buyer,” “planner,” or “campaign manager,” whose job is to make sure that the advertising effort, or “campaign,” that has been planned by higher-ups on the creative and planning teams is communicated to Trevor. This includes loading the actual ad for the product onto the demand-side platform for deployment, and also giving Trevor, sitting in front of the demand-side platform’s dashboard, the all-important targeting decisions that the planners have made: Who should be reached with what message? Yes, humans are still involved in picking the sales strategy and creating the message (although generative AI may change that, too). However, humans do not decide which publisher—the local newspaper website, or a website posing as a local news site but publishing Russian propaganda—gets the ad.

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    Steven Brill

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  • They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

    They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

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    The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the Nazis had tunneled into the land, placed explosives, or built machine gun nests. None of their ships or boats could get close enough to the shore without being detected, so the Allies needed miniature submarines—and divers. And they needed science to make those things happen.

    By this point, Haldane, Spurway, and the other scientists had already given themselves eight seizures and broken several vertebrae for the cause. That’s because, shortly before the disaster at Dieppe, but not in time to stop it, Haldane and his crew had been asked by the Admiralty to pivot and focus on a new, more specific goal. To help their countrymen and the Allies defeat Hitler, to help end the war, the Allies needed the scientists to use this same work to prepare for missions to scout beaches.

    Five days after Dieppe, not yet knowing of its horror, Haldane and Spurway were working on the next amphibious assault plan. There would be another beach landing, this time in Normandy—and it could not fail.

    Haldane was born in 1892 into the sort of Scottish family whose summer homes have turrets. Stately portraits of ancestors with carefully trimmed facial hair and dresses with miles of pleated fabric looked down from the high walls of their multiple estates. John, called “Jack” in his youth and later “JBS,” had no patience for such pomp. He insisted on keeping an old bathtub full of tadpoles beneath the branches of one majestic apple tree. He was determined to breed water spiders.

    Jack and his sister Naomi were bred into science the way some are bred into royalty.

    Their parents, Louisa and John Scott, seem to have gravitated toward each other because of the same fiercely independent, socially irreverent genius they would pass on to their children. She was a brilliant young woman with golden hair, classical beauty, an affinity for small dogs, and an outspoken confidence that, along with her propensity for the occasional cigarette, marked her as a rebel within the prim upper crust of 1800s Britain.

    He was a researcher, physician, and reader of physiology at Oxford University, and infamously eccentric. He converted the basement and attic of the couple’s house into makeshift laboratories so he could play with fire and air currents and gas mixtures. So could his children.

    By age 3, golden-­haired, chubby-­cheeked toddler Jack was a blood donor for his dad’s research. By age 4, he was riding along with his father in the London Underground while John Scott dangled a jar out the window of the train to collect air samples. The duo found levels of carbon monoxide so alarmingly high, the city decided to electrify the rail lines. The young Haldane was learning how to keep people alive and breathing in worlds where they should not survive.

    By the late 1800s, frequent explosions and gas leaks made mining one of the most lethal jobs in the world, and John Scott Haldane became known among the miners of the country for his willingness to clamber into the narrow, dark, coal-­filled passageways on his mission to make the air supplies safer. At 4 years old, Jack was also exploring coal mines with his father to figure out how people breathed in those cramped, dangerous spaces. That common expression “canary in the coal mine”—still used to describe early detection of any threatening situation—is in existence today because it was Haldane’s idea to use the small, chipper birds to detect gas leaks.

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    Rachel Lance

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  • 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story

    8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story

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    The last two weeks before the deadline were frantic. Though officially some of the team still had desks in Building 1945, they mostly worked in 1965 because it had a better espresso machine in the micro-kitchen. “People weren’t sleeping,” says Gomez, who, as the intern, lived in a constant debugging frenzy and also produced the visualizations and diagrams for the paper. It’s common in such projects to do ablations—taking things out to see whether what remains is enough to get the job done.

    “There was every possible combination of tricks and modules—which one helps, which doesn’t help. Let’s rip it out. Let’s replace it with this,” Gomez says. “Why is the model behaving in this counterintuitive way? Oh, it’s because we didn’t remember to do the masking properly. Does it work yet? OK, move on to the next. All of these components of what we now call the transformer were the output of this extremely high-paced, iterative trial and error.” The ablations, aided by Shazeer’s implementations, produced “something minimalistic,” Jones says. “Noam is a wizard.”

    Vaswani recalls crashing on an office couch one night while the team was writing the paper. As he stared at the curtains that separated the couch from the rest of the room, he was struck by the pattern on the fabric, which looked to him like synapses and neurons. Gomez was there, and Vaswani told him that what they were working on would transcend machine translation. “Ultimately, like with the human brain, you need to unite all these modalities—speech, audio, vision—under a single architecture,” he says. “I had a strong hunch we were onto something more general.”

    In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit. “And it caused us to actually obsess over one of the sentences in the paper toward the end, where we comment on future work.”

    That sentence anticipated what might come next—the application of transformer models to basically all forms of human expression. “We are excited about the future of attention-based models,” they wrote. “We plan to extend the transformer to problems involving input and output modalities other than text” and to investigate “images, audio and video.”

    A couple of nights before the deadline, Uszkoreit realized they needed a title. Jones noted that the team had landed on a radical rejection of the accepted best practices, most notably LSTMs, for one technique: attention. The Beatles, Jones recalled, had named a song “All You Need Is Love.” Why not call the paper “Attention Is All You Need”?

    The Beatles?

    “I’m British,” says Jones. “It literally took five seconds of thought. I didn’t think they would use it.”

    They continued collecting results from their experiments right up until the deadline. “The English-French numbers came, like, five minutes before we submitted the paper,” says Parmar. “I was sitting in the micro-kitchen in 1965, getting that last number in.” With barely two minutes to spare, they sent off the paper.

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    Steven Levy

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  • Google Used a Black, Deaf Worker to Tout Its Diversity. Now She’s Suing for Discrimination

    Google Used a Black, Deaf Worker to Tout Its Diversity. Now She’s Suing for Discrimination

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    Hall says when she has access to an interpreter, they are rotated throughout the week, forcing her to repeatedly explain some technical concepts. “Google is going the cheap route,” Hall claims, saying her interpreters in university were more literate in tech jargon.

    Kathy Kaufman, director of coordinating services at DSPA, says it pays above market rates, dedicates a small pool to each company so the vocabulary becomes familiar, hires tech specialists, and trains those who are not. Kaufman also declined to confirm that Google is a client or comment on its policies.

    Google’s Hawkins says that the company is trying to make improvements. Google’s accommodations team is currently seeking employees to join a new working group to smooth over policies and procedures related to disabilities.

    Beside Hall’s concerns, Deaf workers over the past two years have complained about Google’s plans—shelved, for now—to switch away from DSPA without providing assurances that a new interpreter provider would be better, according to a former Google employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their job prospects. Blind employees have had the human guides they rely on excluded from internal systems due to confidentiality concerns in recent years, and they have long complained that key internal tools, like a widely used assignment tracker, are incompatible with screen readers, according to a second former employee.

    Advocates for disabled workers try to hold out hope but are discouraged. “The premise that everyone deserves a shot at every role rests on the company doing whatever it takes to provide accommodations,” says Stephanie Parker, a former senior strategist at YouTube who helped Hall navigate the Google bureaucracy. “From my experience with Google, there is a pretty glaring lack of commitment to accessibility.”

    Not Recorded

    Hall has been left to watch as colleagues hired alongside her as content moderators got promoted. More than three years after joining Google, she remains a level 2 employee on its internal ranking, defined as someone who receives significant oversight from a manager, making her ineligible for Google peer support and retention programs. Internal data shows that most L2 employees reach L3 within three years.

    Last August, Hall started her own community, the Black Googler Network Deaf Alliance, teaching its members sign language and sharing videos and articles about the Black Deaf community. “This is still a hearing world, and the Deaf and hearing have to come together,” she says.

    On the responsible AI team, Hall has been compiling research that would help people at Google working on AI services such as virtual assistants understand how to make them accessible to the Black Deaf community. She personally recruited 20 Black Deaf users to discuss their views on the future of technology for about 90 minutes in exchange for up to $100 each; Google, which reported nearly $74 billion in profit last year, would only pay for 13. The project was further derailed by an unexpected flaw in Google Meet, the company’s video chat service.

    Hall’s first interview was with someone who is Deaf and Blind. The 90-minute call, which included two interpreters to help her and the subject converse, went well. But when Hall pulled up the recording to begin putting together her report, it was almost entirely blank. Only when Hall’s interpreter spoke did the video include any visuals. The signing between everyone on the call was missing, preventing her from fully transcribing the interview. It turned out that Google Meet doesn’t record video of people who aren’t vocalizing, even when their microphones are unmuted.

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    Paresh Dave

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  • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

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    Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.

    It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.

    Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

    Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.

    Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?

    Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.

    And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?

    Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.

    But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.

    As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.

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