THE ECONOMIST

TAKING
ON BIG TECH
+
THE CEO
REWRITING THE
RULES OF
BUSINESS

NETFLIX VS DISNEY
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NOV |DEC 2019
SPOTIFY VS APPLE
WIRED.CO.UK

THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT

TO BREAK THE RULES,
YOU MUST FIRST MASTER
THEM.
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p. 14 2 Fe at ure

BUSINESS AS USUAL
Joyce Lesereua co-founded SATUBO, a
Kenyan community scheme supported
by Jochen Zeitz, an entrepreneur
changing how companies do business
0 13 p. 0 20 St ar t
SPACE INVADER
The MEERkat telescope will let
us peer further into our universe
than ever – because it’s made
from 64 dishes working together
p. 0 53 Gea r
LUXURY SPECIAL
Our annual Gear of the Year guide
goes luxe – featuring the very best
in rides, accommodation, audio-
visual, timepieces and much more
p. 08 8 Fe at u re
THE GAME PL AN
The inside story of Google’s move
into the entertainment market:
Stadia – plus the state of play for
music, movies and video games
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRISTOFFER RUDQUIST
p. 102 Fe at ure
SINKING MEGACIT Y
Jakarta could be the first major
metropolis lost to rising sea levels
and climate change – but a bold
engineering project offers hope
p. 114 Fea t ure
THE MOONSHOT
Economist Mariana Mazzucato
believes the world’s biggest
challenges can be overcome by
treating them like “missions”
Below : taxis line up next to an
overflow canal in a suburb of
Jakarta. Designed to mitigate
storm surges, the canals
are almost always at capacity
p. 1 22 Fea ture
DISEASE DETECTIVES
For patients with rare conditions
that baffle conventional
medicine, their last hope is the
Undiagnosed Diseases Network
p. 1 3 2 Fe at ure
THE PRICE OF TECH
For decades, David Maisel has
aerially photographed landscapes
ravaged by the race for rare-earth
resources – from lithium to copper
Editor Greg Williams
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C R E AT I N G W I R E D 016

Pau li ne Bo ck
The fire at Notre Dame
cathedral stripped it
of nearly a millennia
of hand-crafted
architecture – but
Bock reports on how
digitisation will bring it
back to life. “Notre Dame
was laser scanned well
before the fire – this has
provided a roadmap for
restoration,” she says.
“It also means we can
still ‘visit’ the cathedral
as it was. There’s a
strong argument for
digitally protecting all
of the world’s major
heritage sites this way.”

T HE S IN K ING ME GA C I T Y

Christoffer Rudquist travels to Jakarta to photograph what may be the first megacity
lost to climate change: “Jakarta has as many facets as it has waterways, so it’s hard to
get the full picture – it’s the only place I’ve visited that I couldn’t wrap my head around.
You’ll find hand-built huts on stilts butting up to a luxury villa; on roads where kids sell
nick-knacks to motorists, you’ll have a gang of Ferrari owners speeding down the strait –
and it all runs along stretches of some of the most polluted water I’ve ever come across.
The people of Jakarta are wonderful – I hope for their sake, a solution can be found.”

F A M ILY MAT T E RS

Jeremy Lange photographed the Teems – a family Ric hard Be n son Stephen Armstrong
devastated by the loss of their son to an undiag- Jochen Zeitz is the Stepping into the world
nosed genetic condition: “the most valuable aspect German entrepreneur of Stadia, Google’s
of my job as a photographer is the privilege of who’s out-Branson- latest bid at global
entering someone’s home and being given access ing Richard Branson domination, Armstrong
to their life. David and Allyson Teem (below) were when it comes to reveals the thinking
so open to sharing their son with us to celebrate sustainability and behind this hotly
his life, while also being vulnerable and willing to ethical practices anticipated device.

P H O T O G R A P H Y: C H R I S T O F F E R R U D Q U I S T; J E R E M Y M L A N G E .
express their sorrow. Strength like that is what we in business. Writer “There’s no console,
all hope we could muster in a similar situation.” Richard Benson met just a controller –
him en route from his everything’s done in
Kenyan nature reserve. the cloud,” he says.
“Zeitz combines “Stadia is a latecomer
I L L U S T R AT I O N : M AT T H E W G R E E N

modest affability with – its competitors, such

steely conviction,” says as Xbox, have been
Benson. “He’s shown in this space for 18
that his approach to years. That’s a lot of
business can work for expertise, but a slice
large brands – without of a £112 billion market
restricting growth.” is great motivation.”
ED I TOR ’S ESSAY
You might not have heard of the
Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), but
the non-profit research group based in
the Swedish Capital is responsible for
one of the most important concepts
of the modern age. In 2009, the SRC
convened a number of environmental
scientists and other academics to
identify the planetary life support
systems that are essential for human life
– and the impact of humans upon them.
They identified nine Earth system
processes so fundamental that, should
a threshold be crossed, it could affect
the planet’s ability to sustain life. These
are: ocean acidification; stratospheric
ozone depletion; biodiversity loss and
extinction; chemical pollution; climate
change; the global hydrological cycle
(the functioning and distribution of fresh
water); land system change (such as the
loss of forests to agriculture); nitrogen and
phosphorous flows to the biosphere and
oceans; and atmospheric aerosol loading.
Six years after the planetary boundary
framework was created, the journal
Science published a paper by 18 eminent
scientists, showing that four bound-
aries had been crossed: climate change;
loss of biosphere integrity; land system
change; and biogeochemical flows of
nitrogen and phosphorous.
One of the many tragedies of the Brexit
fiasco is that the UK government has
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Our planet is on
the threshold – but
businesses can pull
us from the brink
found itself consumed for over three
years with a single issue. Taken on one
level, three years doesn’t seem like a
great deal of time. Yet, that three years of
UK governmental gridlock, combined with
a corresponding lack of urgency from
other global leaders, is an indictment
of the political class when it comes to
the most pressing issue of our time.
The impact of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro
and a US President committed to rolling
back environmental regulations and
protections enacted by his predecessor,
does little to lift a darkening mood that
humankind is destined to one day
represent little more than a layer in a
rock formation for a geologist to discover.
However, the absence of political
leadership has left a vacuum into which
a series of academics, entrepreneurs,
business leaders – and, yes, some politi-
cians – have stepped to take on signif-
icant challenges. In this issue of WIRED
we profile two of them. The economist
Mariana Mazzucato has developed a
framework for government and the
private sector to pursue “moonshots” to
solve some of the planet’s most signif-
icant challenges, and has challenged the
idea of how we think about innovation.
Elsewhere, we look at the work of
Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma
and executive at the luxury goods
powerhouse Kering, who has proved
that a sustainable, ethical, long term
approach to business is compatible with
profitability. He has also walked the walk
when it comes to his beliefs – he has
rewilded 20,000 acres in Kenya working
in partnership with the local community.
018
The tech-for-good and B Corp sector
is booming, and even asset managers
– under pressure from investors – are
questioning the practices of extractive
businesses that describe pollution
and environmental destruction as an
“externality” to their business model.
And a new era of startups focused
on energy, foodtech, carbon capture,
recycling, mobility, social inclusion and
manufacturing could help the billions
of people who still do not have the
essentials of life as defined by the UN
Sustainable Development Goals.
History suggests that the switch to
new energy sources initiates eras of
prosperity – the move from burning
wood to coal, and from coal to oil and
electricity, all marked eras in which
innovation increased prosperity. As
ILLUSTRATION: GREGORI SAAVEDRA
economies switch from carbon-based
to renewable sources of energy, and
a growing movement of people come
together to act on sustainable devel-
opment that benefits humankind and the
planet, there is still much to be hopeful
about – while keeping an eye on the clock.
Greg Williams
Editor
 020

Above: one of the 64 giant dishes in the remote Karoo desert that will form part of the world’s largest radio telescope
 The space
invader
E D I T E D B Y A M I T K AT W A L A A telescope in South Africa is
& GIAN VOLPICELLI unlocking our galaxy’s secrets
S TA RT Below: the clearest picture yet of the Milky Way, taken by MeerKat in June 2018. Radio waves glide right through the dust
The radio-quiet zone begins about
half an hour’s drive from this desolate
spot in the Karoo desert, in South
Africa’s Northern Cape. The use of
mobile phones and laptops is strictly
forbidden. A few trees and shrubs dot
the ochre landscape; occasionally, a tiny
scorpion scurries away. What holds your
eye, though, are the giant dishes.
This is MeerKAT– 64 radio dishes
spread across eight square kilometres,
each 13.5 metres in diameter and as
tall as a five-storey building on their
supports. Together they form a single
radio telescope. MeerKAT means “more
KAT” (the Karoo Array Telescope was
its seven-dish forerunner), and astron-
omers use it to study strange but
little-understood objects in distant
space. Because phones and other gadgets
also emit radio waves, they are strictly
S TA R R I N G
ROLE
How a MeerKAT
dish tracks radio
waves arriving
on Earth from
distant space
off-limits, to make sure these antennae
pick up only signals of cosmic origin.
MeerKAT is the precursor to what will
be the world’s largest radio telescope:
the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In the
next decade, SKA will add another 133
dishes, working in tandem with as many
as 133,000 smaller antennae in Australia.
The aim is to observe how the universe
works – how hydrogen gas is assembled
into galaxies and gives birth to new stars
– and to track the sources of radio waves
arriving on Earth. Many come from
pulsars – the ultra-dense leftover cores
of massive stars. Then there are myste-
rious Fast Radio Bursts – brief flashes
with the power of 500 million Suns.
One of MeerKAT’s first tasks when
it opened in June 2018 was to snap the
clearest-ever image of our Milky Way’s
galactic centre, home to the super-
_ Incoming
radio waves
_ Primary parabolic
reflector surface (dish)
_ Subreflector
_Feed Horn
_Cables carrying
the signal from the
MeerKAT antenna
to the control room
for processing
0 22
PHOTOGRAPHY PREVIOUS SPREAD: ENRICO SACCHETTI. THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF MEERKAT
‘Many waves come from pulsars.
Then there are mysterious Fast
Radio Bursts – brief flashes with
the power of 500 million Suns Õ
massive black hole Sagittarius A. Located some
25,000 light years away, it’s a region in space full of
interstellar gas and dust, so optical telescopes are
of little use – but radio waves glide right through.
MeerKAT’s picture (above) shows the black
hole like a volcanic eruption, but the red and
orange colours have nothing to do with heat –
they represent the brightness or intensity of the
radio waves picked up by the telescope. The visual-
isation could have been done in any colour, says
Fernando Camilo, the chief scientist at the South
African Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The round area just to the right of the
centre is the location of Sagittarius A.
Elsewhere, there are areas of star
formation (the bright spot to the right,
and the hourglass shape to the left),
and the remnants of supernovas – stars
that have exploded and died (far left).
The thin snaking lines, known as “fine
filamentary threads”, remain a mystery.
They have not been found anywhere else
in our galaxy, though, so may have some
connection to the black hole.
When the Square Kilometre Array is
fully operational (expected 2030) it will
be able to peer 14 billion years back to the
moments after the Big Bang, and provide
insights about supernovas, black holes
and the infant universe. Katia Moskvitch
 START 024

Beauty is in 3D artist Ines Alpha creates digital AR-filter make-up that rebels
against the ‘make yourself perfect’ contours of selfie dysmorphia

the app of
the beholder
Ines Alpha creates Insta-looks inspired by
sci-fi, drag queens – and soft-bodied molluscs
Ines Alpha turns Instagram and
Snapchat filters into pieces of fine art.
Iridescent flowers bloom out of people’s
heads, sequins glint over glossy skin,
faces are etched in delicate lines of
gold, and fins grow out of flesh.
The 34-year-old Parisian collabo-
rates with models, artists and fashion
directors to create what she calls the
“make-up of the future”. Her work plays
with augmented reality (AR), and often
enhances the make-up people wear in
real life – adding sequinned eyebrows
for an extra layer of glamour above bold
purple eyeshadow, for instance.
When Snapchat opened up its AR
software in December 2017, allowing
people to make their own filters, Alpha
become one of its official lens creators.
She also successfully applied for
access to Instagram’s Spark AR Studio
software, which allows other people on
the app to “try on” some of her filters.
Her work draws inspiration from science
fiction, cyborgs, drag queens and the
natural world. “I am obsessed with
sea creatures, especially nudibranchs
– soft-bodied molluscs that have
extraordinary, clashing colours.”
Critics of social media filters say they
can lead to “selfie dysmorphia”, where
people aspire to look like their enhanced
digital image, with flawless skin and
huge eyes. But Alpha says her filters
are about the opportunity to play with
different versions of beauty, rebelling
against the idea that everyone should
look a certain way. “Even if people think
you look weird, it’s so important for
people to feel like they can be different.”
She believes that people are getting
increasingly concerned with appearance
because of social media, but hopes her
work will help act as a counterpoint. “I’m
not into the contouring, make-yourself-
perfect thing,” Alpha says. “I want to
have fun with beauty and play with what
people are wearing on their face. It’s
about freedom and possibilities.”
In April 2019, Instagram joined
Snapchat and opened its filter creation
software to everyone. Alpha believes
that we will see an explosion in new
filters very soon, with artists, devel-
opers and brands creating their own for
people to try on. Exhibitions about filters
– Face-Up at London’s Tate Modern,
Mask Off in Berlin, and Homoinsta-
grammus in Paris – are springing up.
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEXANDRE HAEFELI

She says she would wear her filters

in real life if she could. “As people
are spending more time with their
digital second self, augmented reality
make-up seems as real and serious as
the internet. One day, we will be able to
see everything in AR.” Anna Behrmann
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STAR T
The prisoners
liberated by AI
For inmates in Finland, artificial intelligence may be
an escape route into digital-first employment
A prison in Finland has become a testing ground
for a new smart-prison project. Laptops and
tablets are appearing in cells and libraries, allowing
prisoners to read the news, practise arithmetic –
and take a course in artificial intelligence.
The module was originally designed at the
University of Helsinki as a more accessible version
of an Introduction to AI curriculum for computer
science students. The initial aim of the project,
backed by the Finnish government, was to get
at least one per cent of the country’s population
informed about the basics of AI.
After taking the course, Pia Puolakka, a project
manager at the Criminal Sanctions Agency – the
department in charge of Finland’s prison system
– wondered if it could be rolled out in correctional
026
facilities. Puolakka wrote a proposal and, in May
2019, the course was added to an approved list of
websites accessible by inmates in Turku, a city in
the south of the country. “I was good at maths in
school, and it’s something that interests me,” says
one of ten inmates taking the course in the Turku
prison’s pilot ward. “But this is totally different
from the stuff I’ve studied before.”
There were a few initial hiccups. “There were
problems around the firewall on their internet
access. The links that prisoners used to do assign-
ments were separate from the whitelisted address,
and we had to generate email addresses for the
prisoners to use,” says Puolakka. As this is techni-
cally a university course, Reaktor, the tech consul-
tancy that helps distribute the course, is working
on a system that would enable prisoners to receive
university credits, and to take other courses.
Finland’s government has embraced the scheme
as a way of supporting inmates integrating into a
digital-first employment market. “Often, prisoners
are left outside of the development of these fields,
and the economy is changing so rapidly that when
people leave prison, they come out into a totally
new work environment,” says Megan Schaible,
director of the programme at Reaktor. “This course
is equally available to everyone.”
The scheme was due to be rolled out in three
more wards in prisons across Finland from autumn
2019, and Schaible hopes that the university and
Reaktor will be able to use data – such as retention
rates, or how quickly exercises were completed –
to assess what aspects could be improved in the
ILLUSTRATION: GUY SHIELD
future. “You don’t want to leave these skills in the
hands of a few elite coders,” explains Schaible.
“You want to take the same premise and give
people knowledge around issues that impact
them.” Sanjana Varghese elementsofai.com
Breaking out: Laptops are appearing in cells because “you don’t want
to leave these skills in the hands of a few elite coders”
WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Tardigrades Jade Rabbit Human
Londonpendence Calexit Seasteading
Flying sucks BA sucks Ryanair sucks
Ivy Yves Ive
New horizons
for high tech

HEIGHT CLUB

highest indoor
The 42nd floor
fitness centre

climbing wall
boasts the

in the UK
Designing 22 Bishopsgate – at 278 metres,
the UK’s second tallest skyscraper – required
some blue-sky thinking from the architects

London’s new skyscraper

may only be the second
tallest in the UK (after The
Shard), but its 278 metres
are the height of technology.
The 62 storeys of 22
Bishopsgate, due to open in
autumn 2019, build in a host
of innovations, including a
bespoke app for the 12,000
workers. “We want it to be a
portal into the building, and
a technological environment
to interact with the building,”
says Danny Hall, of Lipton
Rogers Developments.
Adding a tower to a complex
skyline can cause the air to
move in mysterious ways,
so PLP Architecture – which
designed the building –
worked with engineers from
Formula 1 to create large-
scale canopies, similar to
those on the back of a car, to
tamp down wind flow.
The delivery management
system was designed by an
ex-army engineer to reduce
traffic. “Instead of going to
the building, all goods go to a
dispatch centre outside the
PHOTOGRAPHY: MARTIN RICHARDSON

City. They are stored until

the tenant requires them,”
explains PLP’s Karen Cook.
Chris Stokel-Walker
DRAFT DODGE
Formula 1
engineers
developed an
aerodynamic
facade to reduce
downdrafts

ENTRY LEVEL
A biometric
security system,
using facial
recognition, can
regulate access
to the building
 029

LIGHT SHOW IN TUNE

The tower’s low- Eight mobile
iron glass lets in phone beacons
more light – up on each floor of
from the usual office space are
34 per cent to all tuneable to
55 per cent improve signals

LIFT OFF
Unusually,
the lifts were
installed during
construction –
to move 1,200
building workers
Below: The 62 storeys of 22 Bishopsgate
soar over the City. Only The Shard is taller

IN CHARGE
Workers can set
temperature and
light levels at
their desk from
the building’s
bespoke app

BASE JUMP
Deliveries will
be sorted and
stored off-site
– halving the
vehicle journeys
S TA R T

to the building
S TART 0 30

In Philip Pullman’s books,

every character has a Animating an Talking and thinking
The team used facial rig

inner animal
“daemon”, a sentient software to make sure the
creature who represents daemons spoke convincingly
their conscience. For – but the real test was
the 2007 adaptation The silence. “You should be able
Golden Compass, actors How do you give a talking CGI animal a soul? That to turn the sound off, and see
had to pretend inanimate was the big challenge facing the upcoming TV their thought processes,”
objects were walking talking serialisation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials says Dodgson. Stephen Kelly
co-stars. But the new
BBC-HBO production uses
elaborate puppetry to bring
the daemons to life. WIRED
talks to team members
about transporting fantasy
from page to screen.

Daemon design
Both production designer
Joel Collins and visual effects
supervisor Russell Dodgson
had deep conversations on
the nature of the daemons:
“Do they eat? Do they sleep?”
says Dodgson. “Where do
they sit on the spectrum
between animal and human?”

Puppet practicalities
For scenes where daemons
were held, they turned to
dynamic reference puppetry:
an upgrade on the tennis ball
on a stick usually used as
a CGI reference point. “We
needed to give our actors
something to converse and
emote with,” says Dodgson.

Body bonds
Each daemon puppet was
designed with a simple and
elegant “slinky body”. The aim,
says puppetry artist Brian
Fisher (arms pictured above
right), was to give the actors
something to bond with,
and allow them to “bounce
ideas off the puppeteer.”

Fur and feathers

After filming, Dodgson
began the time-consuming
post-vis process of grooming
digital fur and skin. Birds, he
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY

explains, were the biggest

challenge. “They have this
incredible ability for two
layers of feathers to co-exist
almost in the same space. Try
and tell a computer that…”
S TART video content by scanning items of 0 32
clothing or interacting with objects in
the store. The project drew attention
– and investment – from Kanye West,
Beyoncé and the designer Virgil Abloh.
But on March 31, 2019, Hussle was shot
dead in the carpark of the store.
The path from Compton to Cupertino
– where Apple has its Silicon Valley
headquarters – is not an easy one.
Sandu declined a place at MIT in order
to focus on improving outreach from
the technology industry to people from

Iddris Sandu: a similar background to his own. He has

worked with the Obama White House and
local politicians to launch STEM educa-

going straight tional programmes and foster technology

development and coding skills within
under-resourced areas of LA.

back to Compton Over the past couple of years, Sandu

has offered mentoring and training to
students from economically disadvan-
taged areas in LA, and founded a new
A chance meeting in an LA library took this young school in Ghana to increase technology
technologist from South Central to Silicon Valley. Now literacy. He says schools have not changed
he wants to give inner-city kids the tools to succeed to meet the needs of the first digitally
native generation: “Technology has a
lifecycle of about a month. But education
and the curriculum remain the same.”
For Sandu, the key objective is
exposing young people in challenged
At 22, Ghana-born Iddris Sandu has areas to new ideas. “Inner-city kids are
worked for some of the world’s biggest not exposed to what other students are
technology companies and collaborated exposed to,” he says. “This is even more
with Kanye West. But the entrepreneur evident in the field of technology.”
owes his big break to Steve Jobs – and a and Snapchat, developed algorithms He’s trying to redress the balance.
chance meeting at a public library. for geolocation search features for Sandu posts reading lists on social
As a child growing up in South Central Instagram, and created a collision media, and works on projects that bring
Los Angeles, Sandu was always inter- detection interface for the autonomous together technology and music – he is
ested in technology. “I remember my vehicle programme at Uber. a design and tech consultant at Kanye
mum getting mad because I would In 2017, he opened the world’s first West’s Yeezy clothing, for instance.
always break remote controls up, and “smart store” – The Marathon Clothing, In July 2019, he received a $100,000
rewire them to make other things that in the Los Angeles district of Crenshaw fellowship from Paypal founder Peter

PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBB KLASSEN

I could play with,” he says. Then, when – in collaboration with the rapper Thiel’s foundation to take ideas about
he was 11, the first iPhone was released, Nipsey Hussle, after another chance sustainable design and technology to
and the youngster was captivated from meeting at a local Starbucks. Sandu Africa’s youth. His aim, he says, is “to
the moment Jobs walked out on stage developed an iOS app that allowed provide everybody with equal access
wielding the era-defining smartphone. visitors to unlock augmented reality to information” so that they can choose
After that, Sandu spent his summers experiences and exclusive music and what to do with it. Catarina Ramalho
at the Torrance Public Library near
Compton, where he taught himself how
to code in C#, JavaScript and Python, and
studied the work of German industrial
designer Dieter Rams. In 2011, a Google
designer spotted the youngster checking
out books at the library and offered him
an internship with the search giant.
There he worked on the development
of the social network Google+, and later
created a mobile app that provided a
turn-by-turn navigation system for
his high school grounds. Throughout
his teens, he consulted for Twitter

Above : Iddris Sandu counts Kanye West as a business collaborator

0 35
Libra’s true cost:
democratic rule
will pay the price
Facebook’s virtual currency has the potential to
dominate the financial markets – and give the
tech giant the power to dictate to governments
A sign that a sector of the economy
is becoming too big is that it attempts
to dictate government policy. In the
financial sector, for instance, markets
“discipline” governments by threat-
ening to dump their currencies and
bonds if they act in ways investors
don’t approve of. In manufacturing
and retail, corporations lobby for
changes to employment law and tax
breaks. And oil companies have histori-
ILLUSTRATION: MIKE MCQUADE
cally held sway over their governments’
foreign policy calculations.
But when a sector becomes really
gargantuan, it doesn’t just dictate to
governments – it aims to replace them.
Silicon Valley tech giants have been
uneasy collaborators with governments,
as they are obliged to use legal tender
to monetise their businesses. When
a company uses government-issued
currencies, that gives governments
the right to regulate and control the
company’s activities. And while govern-
ments have been weak regulators of
Big Tech, that is starting to change.
Silicon Valley giants are facing fines
STA R T
and regulatory action for tax evasion,
opaque practices, and dominant market
positions; second-wave giants such as
Uber and Deliveroo are also under fire as
a result of their employment practices
and flouting of regulations.
Enter Libra, a new virtual currency
Facebook announced in June 2019.
Libra is the creation of the Libra
Association, an organisation based in
Switzerland. Facebook initiated it and
brought in 27 other members – mostly
Silicon Valley tech firms and payments
companies which have goals tightly
aligned with those of Facebook.
Those wishing to use Libra for
transactions on Facebook’s platforms
would purchase Libra “coins” using
fiat currencies. That money would go
into Libra’s reserve, to be invested in
assets denominated in a “basket” of
currencies. The assets in the reserve
would be actively managed to keep
the value of Libra stable vis-a-vis the
currency basket as a whole, though it
might not be stable against individual
currencies. We don’t know exactly
what the Libra reserve’s asset portfolio
would comprise, but Libra’s technical
manifesto suggests that it would include
a substantial proportion of “safe” assets
such as government debt and cash.
The project could potentially have
an enormous impact. Currently,
an e s t imated 2.7 bil li on p eop le
use Facebook and its subsidiaries
WhatsApp and Instagram. If all these
people adopted Libra as their primary
medium of exchange, then Libra would
be used by approximately a third of the
world’s population. Admittedly, more
people currently use the US dollar,
<
Frances Coppola is a
finance and economics
writer, and the author
of The Case for
People’s Quantitative
Easing (Polity Press)
START
but consumers might start exchanging
their dollars for Libra in order to pay
for goods and services provided by
Facebook and its partners – which
include e-commerce site eBay and
music streaming service Spotify. If a
third of the world’s population did this,
Facebook and its partners would have
in effect established its own financial
system, run according to rules it deter-
mines and subject to no government.
Of course, Libra would still depend on
government currencies to remain stable.
But that doesn’t mean governments
could control it. Quite the contrary.
The Libra reserve would be the largest
investment fund on Earth, dwarfing even
the sovereign wealth funds of oil-pro-
ducing nations. Buying and selling assets
to keep Libra’s value stable would move
currency and government bond markets.
And since it would out-gun central banks
– even the mighty US Federal Reserve –
there would be little governments
could do to protect their economies.
‘Libra could grow
so large, central
banks would be
forced to bail it out’
The Libra reserve could also influence
government policy. It could ditch assets
in currencies issued by governments
whose policies the Libra Association
disapproves of. Attempts to control
Libra could result in a collapsing
currency and rising borrowing costs.
Again, this is nothing new: big banks
and their representatives have been
trying to influence government policy
for years. But the Libra reserve would
have greater market-moving power
than any bank, past or present. Some
academics have expressed concern
that Libra could grow so large that
central banks would be forced to bail
it out if there were a run on its reserve.
My concern, however, is not so much
what central banks might do in the
event of a run on Libra, but what govern-
ments might have to do to prevent one.
Back in 2012, the Bank for Interna-
tional Settlements proposed that major
governments should both produce
enough debt to keep financial markets
functioning, and preserve the value
of that debt through cuts to public
spending and austerity measures. The
Libra Association could similarly insist
that governments not only produce
enough “safe assets” to maintain
Libra’s peg, but prioritise maintaining
the value of those assets over the
wellbeing of their populations. And if
the Libra reserve achieved dominance
in financial markets, governments
might have no choice but to comply.
If Libra became the world’s transaction
currency, and its reserve became the
dominant player in financial markets,
the Libra Association would
have the power to allow or
deny people the right to
transact – something that
is currently a government
p re ro ga t i ve l i m i te d b y
democratic safeguards. It
could exert that power not
only over individuals, but
other companies and even
governments. The Libra
Association could break a
company that refused to use
Libra, or punish a recalcitrant
government by denying its
citizens access to the transaction services
enjoyed by a third of the world’s people.
Many have dreamed of a single global
currency that would enable people to
transact with each other seamlessly and
instantaneously. But if the only way of
achieving this is for an unaccountable
corporate elite to replace democrati-
cally elected governments, surely that’s
too high a price. Frances Coppola
03 6
T H E N E W TA S T E O F
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y :
MAKING BUG PROTEIN
DELICIOUS FOR FISHES
armed salmon are
F surprisingly picky
eaters. Feed made
from protein-
rich milled black soldier fly
larvae (fed on supermarket
food waste) is better for
the environment than the
estimated 215,385 tonnes of
fishmeal consumed annually
by Scottish salmon – but the
fish find the carcass remains
hard to digest, says Fotis
Fotiadis, co-founder and
CTO of Cambridge-based
startup Entomics. He claims
the current process is also
wasteful – like cooking and
drying an entire cow to make
a single protein shake.
To break down the nutrients
and produce a more digestible
feed, Entomics has patented
a post-processing technique
using microbial fermentation,
dubbed Metamorphosis.
The boiled larvae are
processed automatically: first,
separators winnow out chitin,
a fibrous substance making up
the insects’ body wall; another
machine isolates the proteins
and fats for fermentation;
finally, the fermenting mix
is stirred in with bacteria and
yeast, which break proteins
down into amino acids that can
be converted into a dry powder.
The four founders of
Entomics, all graduates from
the University of Cambridge,
came up with the idea when
they entered a competition
to find a way to reuse food
waste. They won, and launched
Entomics to realise their
university project, which is
now ready for deployment at
insect farms. Tuck in, fishies…
Sabrina Weiss entomics.com
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALAMY
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039
T
erah Lyons’s job is making sure
that AI works for everyone. In October
2017, Lyons, a former White House
advisor on technology and machine
intelligence, started her tenure as an
executive director at The Partnership
on AI. Launched the previous year
by a group of tech titans – Amazon,
Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft
and IBM – by 2017 the organisation
had already grown to include about
50 members, including non-profits,
charities and universities. (As of
September 2019, the partnership had
grown to encompass 89 stakeholders
from 13 countries.) The partnership’s
main aim was to develop a rulebook for
the conscientious use of artificial intel-
ligence, and Lyons had taken the helm
exactly at the time when a vast chunk
of the public had become convinced
that thrashing out some rules to rein
in Big Tech was more urgent than ever.
“The partnership was born into a world
Meet AI’s
conscience
Terah Lyons is working to ensure
artificial intelligence doesn’t
forget to keep humans at its heart
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI
in which AI was at the height of the
public narrative. And the scrutiny of
the technology industry that comes
alongside that is a necessary part of a
public movement to understand how
technology is shaping our lives,” Lyons
says. “It was really productive to have
a forcing function for that discussion.”
Since Lyons stepped in, the organ-
isation has produced several studies,
reports and recommendations on
hot-button topics such as algorithmic
decisions in the criminal justice system
– about which the partnership proposed
a set of standards that, while not legally
enforceable, might help companies
developing predictive policing tools
ask themselves the right questions.
And Lyons thinks there is some
intrinsic value in bringing together
entities from disparate corners of
the globe to make AI safe, fair and
conducive to the social good. The model
is reminiscent of what has historically
occurred in other critical technological
fields. “This happened, for instance,
STA RT
with nuclear energy – with coalitions
of competing organisations banding
together,” Lyons says. That can help
build bridges across geopolitical
divides – as evidenced by the presence
of several Chinese companies among
the partners. “But what’s really different
about The Partnership on AI is that we
really are a multi-stakeholder entity,”
Lyons explains. “It’s not just about the
tech behemoths working hand-in-hand,
but also about the voices of advocates
and institutions that are pushing
back to protect the public interest.”
Gian Volpicelli partnershiponai.org
Notre Dame rises again
with 50 billion data
points as the blueprint
for reconstruction
On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame de Paris,
the cathedral in the heart of the French
capital, lost its 800-year-old roof to
a fire. A digital memory of the roof’s
latticework “forest” lives on, however.
On YouTube, a video walks you through a
3D model of the structure, where clerics
walked long before Victor Hugo wrote
about lovelorn bell-ringer Quasimodo.
That’s thanks to Art Graphique et
Patrimoine (AGP), a French company >>
041 S TA R T

Zooming in on Notre Dame’s 3D modelling

parts of the wooden roof was done using
cathedral in an was completely drones and
upcoming “smart destroyed by helicopters to
database” will fire, but lives on scan buildings
display data in the nearly five from multiple
on materials billion data points angles.
used, dates of of this 3D model Lasergrammetry
construction, adds precision
and style
S TA RT
START 0 42

specialising in 3D modelling of cultural
monuments, which scanned the
entire structure between 2010 and
2016. The day after the fire, the French
government asked AGP to build a digital
version of Notre Dame as it had been.
To scan a site, AGP uses helicopters,
drones and terrestrial scanners. Laser-
grammetry and photogrammetry then
create “scatter plot” models – 3D recre-
ations made of billions of dots. Digital
recreation from the archives took AGP
two months, six “super calculators”, and
the 21-strong team’s full-time attention.
“Our data covered most of the
building, including all of the exterior,
Right: a FARO laser
scanner in the
nave of Notre Dame.
Its 3D map of
the fire damage will
be compared to
AGP’s earlier scans
of the undamaged
cathedral
the two bell towers, the organ, and the
entirety of the forest,” says Gaël Hamon,
a stonemason and the CEO of AGP. This
amounted to 50 billion 3D points, or one
to two per square millimetre. The model
for the forest alone counts three to five
billion points, captured in 150 different
scans. But that’s just the start: now that
the pre-fire cathedral lives on digitally,
AGP is working on an extremely detailed
3D “smart database” of the building as
it is now, with integrated information for
each element. Zooming in on a stained-
glass window, for instance, would list its
materials, date of construction, style
and any other relevant information.
The technique, called BIM – Building
Information Modelling – will 3D-map the
damage and allow for reconstruction
simulations, although no restoration
work is expected to start before BIM
completion in early 2020.
“We are treating Notre Dame the way
a greatly traumatised patient would
be treated in hospital,” Hamon says.
“With the BIM, it’s getting everything:
MRI and medical scans, blood tests, a
full check-up. We can’t heal it without a
proper diagnostic.” Not only will the old
Notre Dame live on digitally: it will be the
essential blueprint for the restoration.
The Notre Dame fire was a tragedy,
but it did act as an advocate for the
pioneering techniques Hamon has been
working on for 25 years. In 1994, when
he founded AGP, scanning monuments
involved analogue photos. “We had to
enter all data, all the measurements,
by hand,” Hamon recalls. “Now we
have digital photos, we put everything
in the algorithm – it’s automatic.”
Since then, AGP has worked on more
than two thousand monuments in 18
countries, including the Royal Albert
Hall in London, the Palmyra ruins in
Syria, and the Louvre museum in Paris.
Soon, the company hopes to open
a cultural space offering virtual reality
visits of heritage monuments. But
right now, it’s all about Notre Dame.
“Our measures will give architects the
necessary tools to make a ‘before/
after’ diagnostic for the restoration,”
Hamon says. Healing a cathedral that
took more than a century to build cannot
be rushed. Pauline Bock artgp.fr

E A R LY A D O P T E R S WIRED asks three entrepreneurs about their newest podcast discoveries

PHOTOGRAPHY: ART GRAPHIQUE PATRIMOINE. ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW GREEN

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Faster, Happier, to other founder podcast, Against
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agile innovation Decode’s recent the ways we
ideas for customer interview with perceive regulation
Bruce Pannaman and employee Riya Grover Jonathan Neman, Adam Dodds and fairness. ‘The
CTO, StorkCard happiness. It CEO, Feedr co-founder of CEO, Freetrade Magic Shoebox’,
helps me drive the Sweetgreen. His on the lack of
StorkCard team’s vision of food transparency and
goals of quickly e-commerce, unethical practices
and efficiently personalisation in high-frequency
providing value for and nutritional trading, was
new parents. If it’s transparency a particularly
not fun, you’re not aligns closely with powerful episode.”
doing it right.” our vision at Feedr.” Sabrina Weiss
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0 45 independently of the head,” says STA R T
Anthony Lovat, a former dentist
who founded OPRO in 1998.
As well as sensors that can

D track linear and rotational

acceleration, each mouthguard
includes an FM radio transmitter
Heading off
to beam a signal to a pitch-side
receiver in real time. Tracking
collisions over time also enables
brain injury
an Lydiate has been lucky. coaches to build a “passport” How a mouthguard helps doctors monitor
“I’ve only probably had three of historical head impact data, the impact of concussions on rugby players
or four concussions,” says the which could help players enjoy
rugby union star (right), who safer, longer careers. “It can
plays as a flanker for Welsh only be a positive,” says Lydiate.
team Ospreys, and for Wales. Amit Katwala opro.com
“But at the time, you just think
it’s a bump to the head.”
Concussions have become
a growing issue in contact
sports since 2006, when
autopsies of former US NFL
players found signs of chronic
traumatic encephalopathy,
a degenerative brain condition
that also afflicts some former
boxers, footballers and rugby
players, inducing symptoms
similar to Alzheimer’s disease.
Returning to play too quickly
after a blow to the head can
also exacerbate both the
short-term symptoms and
the long-term consequences;
but pitch-side doctors rely on
honesty from players who just
want to get back on the field.
A new product being trialled
this season by Lydiate and the
Ospreys team will give doctors
a more objective tool: OPRO+
builds impact sensors into the
gumshields worn by players.
This puts the sensors closer
PHOTOGRAPHY: SAM RILEY

to the centre of the skull – and

because they’re moulded to an
individual, they paint a more
accurate picture of an impact.
“The mouthguard won’t move

Right: Welsh rugby

international Dan Lydiate
and his real-time impact-
monitoring mouthguard
 04 6

Automating the
W EU’s biggest port
riting in black-marker is scrawled over From self-driving ships to containers that can converse
the glass walls of the office of startup with cranes and unmanned patrol vessels, Rotterdam has
Captain AI. “Close your eyes, that’s plans to be the continent’s most advanced shipping hub
intellectual property,” says Gerard
Kruisheer, a co-founder of the Dutch
company. Its HQ is tucked away inside
RDM, a sprawling, high-ceilinged hall
with steel beams, cutting across the
former wharf in what was once the
world’s busiest port. Now, it’s a hub
for innovation in Rotterdam – the port
that wants to be the world’s “smartest”.
Those scribbles are strings of the
code Captain AI wants to use to create
autonomous ships. It is currently training
self-sailing software with navigation
data, testing various scenarios in a
sea simulator. “It’s the extreme cases
you want to test. You want your ship
to be able to sail autonomously in all
conditions,” says Captain AI CEO
Vincent Wegener. “We create conditions
like snow and rain within our simulator,
and use it to train the algorithm.”
Wegener says autonomous ships
will be much safer, citing an Allianz
report that found that 75 per cent of
maritime accidents are attributable
to human error. And they will reduce
port congestion by eliminating lengthy
processes that require humans, such
as pilots. “That’s the official version.
The unofficial reason we started doing
this is because we thought it would be
cool, of course,” he adds.
The port of Rotterdam – 42km wide,
from the far city edge to the North Sea
– is Europe’s biggest. It handles about
470 million tonnes of freight each year,
contributing €45.6bn (£40.9bn) to the
Dutch economy (or 6.2 per cent of GDP),
according to a recent study.
Maintaining that edge requires
foresight. Former port operator ECT
opened the world’s first automated
container terminal as early as 1993.
Today, APM Terminals and RWG run
some of the world’s most advanced port
services. Gigantic, unmanned cranes
lift containers off vessels, the bulk of
their manoeuvres automated, the rest
remote-controlled. AGVs – electrical
automated guided vehicles – resem-

bling lorries with no cabin, transport
the containers to storage facilities,
where they are lifted automatically on
to trucks. RWG says its terminal is run
PHOTOGRAPHY: SHUTTERSTOCK
by no more than 15 people every day.
The Port of Rotterdam Authority is
now looking at automation beyond
the terminals. “Information between
humans by phone or email should, from
2025, be increasingly communicated
directly by smart objects,” says Erwin
Rademaker, a programme manager at
the port. “In the future, we’ll see cranes
talking directly to ships or containers.”
In early 2019, the authority kicked
off the first stage of an internet of
things platform. It’s a building block
in the creation of what the port calls
its “digital twin”, a digital replica of
the port in which all its operations
and resources are tracked. Forty-four
sensors installed on mooring posts,
quay walls, roads and traffic signs
provide data about tides, salinity, wind
and more. The port hopes that these
sensors will one day be able to commu-
nicate directly with other autonomous
systems, including self-driving ships.
In May, a “smart container” made
its first short journey, to Germany and
back. Fitted with sensors that measure
conditions including vibration, slope
and temperature, it will spend two years
travelling the world to collect data that
should give insight into what containers
encounter during their journey.
“Eighty-five per cent of the consumer
goods you see around you were trans-
ported by container,” says Rademaker.
But today’s containers are nothing
more than six sheets of metal welded
together: “Containers are still left
behind on docks, or unloaded in the
wrong port, and nobody notices until
[they] fail to arrive. It’s like your suitcase
getting lost at an airport, except it will
be gone for two months at a seaport.
We want to make containers smart, so
they can talk to the cranes and prevent
things like this from happening.”
Rotterdam wants to be able to host
autonomous ships by 2030. The snag?
Left and above: in Rotterdam’s
ultra-advanced terminals, unmanned
cranes lift containers off vessels
STA R T
Self-steering container ships do not yet
exist. The first of its kind, the Norwegian
ship Yara Birkeland, is not expected
to operate fully autonomously before
2022. That is why Rotterdam has
created a “floating lab”: former patrol
vessel RPA3 has been decked out
with cameras and sensors and made
available to startups and students for
autonomous shipping experiments.
Captain AI was the first startup to
test its software on the lab. “This year
we want to give a demo where the
vessel identifies an object and sails
around it. We’re almost there,” says
Wegener. Ultimately, he envisages a
port where patrol ships are unmanned.
Exciting? Yes – unless you happen
to be a docker. In January 2016, the
port of Rotterdam saw its first strike
in 13 years. The cause: the expected
loss of hundreds of jobs to automation.
“You see traditional harbour work
disappearing. People used to work in
big teams. Canteens were full during
mealtimes. Now, small crews remain
and machine operation has become
a one-man job,” says Niek Stam, of
dockers’ union FNV Havens. Stam
believes that Rotterdam’s terminals
are harbingers of a global upset. “In
other ports, the battle over automation
has yet to come,” he says.
In Rotterdam, Rademaker expects
jobs to disappear beyond the terminals
as well. “Autonomous isn’t the same as
unmanned. But if objects are talking
with each other and taking autonomous
decisions, certain jobs will disappear.”
Still, he sees the port’s drive for
automation not as a luxury, but as
the key to its survival: “Right now, we
are world champions at selling black-
and-white TVs. Today’s reality is that
we have to start selling colour TVs.”
Loes Witschge portofrotterdam.com
WIRED PARTNERSHIP | QUANTUMBL ACK
The Data Decade:
ten years of AI
Artificial intelligence has transformed numerous
sectors – but the biggest changes are yet to come,
says QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company
Artificial Intelligence (AI) began the
decade as little more than a boardroom
buzzword – something to throw out
there if asked about your innovation
strategy. Ten years on, AI algorithms
are being deployed across many
industries, from financial services
and retail to sports and medicine.
2019 marks the tenth anniversary of
QuantumBlack. We have spent the last
decade deploying advanced analytics
to drive performance with the world’s
most forward-thinking companies,
and this has meant that we’ve had
a front-row seat as the AI revolution
has shaped sectors around the world.
The most significant change is
the marked growth in the ambition of
organisations wielding AI. Machines
are no longer undertaking mere routine
tasks – they are now guiding decisions
No longer do people
ask whether algorithms
could theoretically drive
performance – the talk
is of what AI should do
once deployed
with major influence on our lives, from
loan applications to drug discovery.
This rapid expansion of responsibil-
ities has led the conversation around
AI to evolve in recent years. No longer
do people ask whether algorithms
could theoretically drive perfor-
mance – the talk is of what AI should
do once deployed: ensuring fairness of
predictions, efficiency in performance,
transparency in how it achieves results
and the ethics of its application.
AI presents huge opportunities in
unlocking performance and solving
problems for businesses – the
prize is great, but it will take collab-
oration across our communities.
At QuantumBlack we’re excited about
exploring these challenges – and
being at the forefront of the next ten
years of growth. quantumblack.com
0 49 STA R T

Katharina Volz is on a mission to crack

one of medicine’s most intractable
problems – a cure for Parkinson’s
disease – by making a map. The founder
and CEO of medical startup Occamz-
Razor hopes artificial intelligence can
plot everything we know about this
neurodegenerative disorder, fill in the
gaps, and home in on potential cures.
In 2015 she had just finished her
PhD in stem cell biology at Stanford
University, in California, when a close
relative was diagnosed with the disease.
“I was completely devastated,” she
says. “I stayed at home for two days
and cried.” Then she got to work. “I made
this resolution that I was going to find a
cure for Parkinson’s disease.”
But first she had to work out what
was already known, by mining tens
of millions of datasets – scientific
papers, clinical trial evidence, patents,
patient records and genomics data.
Stanford’s AI laboratory helped the
startup develop an artificially intel-
ligent system that combines all this
data into a 3D graph, which Volz calls
the Parkinsome – a complete map of
everything we currently know about
Parkinson’s: genetic components, all the
known proteins, cell types and metabo-
lites that play a role in the disease, and
The company, whose advisers
include Google AI’s lead Jeff Dean
and the Nobel-winning cell biologist
A map for
defeating
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI. ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON

the drugs known to interact with them.
The first challenge for the Parkinsome
is to find any drugs used for other
conditions that could be repurposed
for Parkinson’s. Volz plans to partner
with pharmaceutical firms to take the
candidate drugs through the costly
clinical trial process to the market. “I
don’t want to wait another ten, 20 or
30 years,” Volz says. “I want to bring
effective medications to Parkinson’s
patients as soon as possible.”
Above: CEO Katharina Volz believes OccamzRazor can benefit a huge range of conditions
Randy Schekman, won’t share its
platform directly with researchers,
but it is working with the Michael J Fox
Foundation to identify potential areas
for fruitful research. Volz says that
the OccamzRazor database already
diseases
includes information on a vast range
of conditions that could benefit from When a close relative
an AI-led approach. “We are looking developed Parkinson’s,
at one disease at a time, taking all the Katharina Volz got to
knowledge there is and connecting it.” work. Her AI is now
Matt Reynolds occamzrazor.com creating a 3D database
that could reveal new
therapies for the most
intractable conditions

T H R E E S E R V I N G S A D AY F O R G O O D H E A LT H

We know that we spend too much time checking our smartphones – but what does it take for us
to actually switch off? Ranjan Jagannathan founded Synapse, an app that manages notifications
by organising them into batches delivered at set times. He created the app after working with Dan
Ariely, a professor of behavioural economics at Duke University, in North Carolina, who studies the
impact of push notifications on mental wellbeing. Ariely’s research showed that receiving notifica-
tions in three daily batches increased users’ productivity and reduced stress levels, compared with
getting them immediately, or not at all. “It’s about finding a good balance between constant distrac-
tion and fear of missing out,” says Jagannathan. “People would like to receive 17 notifications a day,
when in reality, they get 73 on average,” says Jagannathan. “The first step in fighting smartphone
addiction is to let users regain control over their devices.” Daphne Leprince-Ringuet synapse.ly
WIRED PARTNERSHIP | J.P. MORGAN
How London’s startups
can reach the next level
J.P. Morgan Private Bank isn’t just funding the tech
scene – its expertise is building impactful businesses
Ten years ago, the financial crisis
cut a swathe through London, sparking
company closures and job losses; as
many as 50 small businesses were
closing each day during the economic
downturn, according to the Federation
of Small Businesses. But the chaos
made room for tech startups to step
in, and a decade on, London’s Silicon
Roundabout is second only to Silicon
Valley. In the past few years, UK tech
companies have attracted a substantial
amount of funding, with more than £5bn
in VC funding this year from US and
Asian investors – with 80 per cent of
that in London alone, it’s fair to say the
capital’s tech scene is a behemoth.
“It’s in the region of £60 billion annual
turnover, with 300,000 jobs at 8,000
startups,” says Oliver Gregson, head of
UK & Ireland at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
However, after five years, only four
out of ten small businesses continue
to trade, says Gregson. “Building from
ILLUSTRATION: MICHAŁ BEDNARSKI
startup to SME to mid-market – that
life cycle is a difficult one, and resil-
iency is definitely a problem,” he says.
What’s the solution? Expert help. Your
business may not have been through
that cycle before, but banks such as J.P.
Morgan have. “We try to deliver access

to vital resources, support networks,
workspaces, mentoring, networking,
collaboration and all of the obvious
financial services,” Gregson says.
For those startups that survive, it’s
time to consider what’s next – be it
scaling or expanding globally, selling
privately or going public – in the
evolution from disruptive startup to
meaningful, impactful business.
The IPO environment remains
strong in terms of dollar amounts, says
Gregson, but that’s down to specific,
big deals, he adds. “If you look at 2019
versus 2018, tech IPO issuance is up in
the region of 80 per cent, and the trans-
action value of IPOs is also up strongly
Right: fuelling startups with the right kind of financing will boost growth
Left: the question of when – and how – to
go global is one every startup will face
year on year versus 2019,” he says,
though some of that increase is down
to the cyclical nature of the business.
There’s no rush to go public,
though. “What’s really interesting is
that companies are staying private for
twice as long as they used to,” says
Gregson. And that’s what’s led to so
many so-called “unicorns” – companies
valued at more than a billion dollars, with
72 in the UK alone over the past two
decades. “We’ve been holding our own.”
And startups remaining private for
longer changes how investment works
in the sector. “A lot of the value creation
is coming earlier in the life cycle when
these companies are private,” Gregson
explains. “That’s why you’ve seen a really
interesting investment sector build up,
because the publicly listed tech stocks
are not necessarily where value is being
created the most.” That’s increased the
importance of private investment oppor-
tunities, venture capital and growth
equity funding, with J.P. Morgan leading
a half-billion dollar growth funding round
for Deliveroo, he notes. “That was about
helping with expansion capital, and it
still remains a private company.”
Regardless of which route a company
takes to scale from local London startup
to large player, financial partners with
expertise is key. It’s not just about
IPOs and M&As, but if you’re growing
globally, you’ll need banking in dozens
of countries, and be able to accept a
myriad of currencies. J.P. Morgan is a
bank, but it’s one that employs 53,000
software engineers, coders and technol-
ogists, Gregson notes, pointing out that
technology is part of the company’s
heritage: “We funded Edison way back
when, and the first transatlantic cable.”
And choosing the right financial
partner isn’t about how much funding
you’ll get up front. “It’s not all about
who’s going to give you the highest
valuation in your Series A round,” says
Matthew Gehl, head of technology at
J.P. Morgan Investment Bank. “You
can get some pretty onerous terms…
WIRED PARTNERSHIP | J.P. MORGAN
‘We try to deliver access
to vital resources’ -
Oliver Gregson
Head of UK and Ireland
People think only about the headline
valuations and not about whether they’re
the right investors who are going to
support you for the long term.” Gehl
says with so much more capital being
raised privately, banks are changing
how they engage. Led by J.P. Morgan,
banks now partner with startups much
earlier in their life cycles, which includes
raising private rounds of funding. “We
want to be with them all the way through
the journey, not just at the IPO – that’s
the old mentality of banks,” says Gehl.
Gregson builds on the point of being
joined up, “Our value is in our global
integrated coverage across the Private
and the Investment Bank. It allows our
clients to leverage our experience and
outreach in advising disruptive, high
growth technology companies as well
as seamless execution from a trans-
action perspective. We are long-term
partners helping companies through
critical phases of growth and devel-
opment across the private and
public capital markets globally.
To find out how J.P. Morgan can support
your business, visit jpmorgan.com
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 L U X U R Y

2 0 1 9 - 2 0

EDI TION
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Edited by

JEREMY WHITE

Photography:

NICK ROCHOWSKI
055 PREVIOUS PAGE_ Eames Plastic Armchair LAR HOODIE HIDEAWAY_ Deep Sleep Cocoon by Vollebak

Instantly recognisable as the work of designers Charles and Ray
Eames, this low-slung seat was created in 1950, but finally has a
Vitra reissue. The Lounge Height Armchair Rod Base (LAR) chair,
shown here in Sea Blue, has a cat’s cradle-style stainless-steel
base for maximum support with minimal materials. £435 vitra.com
Designed to help people sleep in the most inhospitable places – namely, any
long-haul fight – the Deep Sleep Cocoon is a duvet-soft jacket that shuts
out the world with a lined hood that folds over on itself. Its almost pitch-
black chamber blocks light and softens noise – while also providing the
ultimate visual shorthand for “do not disturb”. £800 vollebak.com

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HE Y E A R 2 0 19_ C OMF OR T

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ONE FOR ALL_
McIntosh RS200
Getting in on the burgeoning
high-end, all-in-one sector,
McIntosh’s new RS200 is
taking on the likes of Naim
and Devialet with its own
one-box streaming system.
The 650W amp delivers
power to two bass drivers,
four midrange units and two
tweeters, while streaming
comes via your choice of
AAC and aptX HS Bluetooth
support, DLNA for networked
ROCK THE BLOCK_ <
Airsound Air D1
It’s a brave brand that goes
from £200 soundbars to
a £12,000 speaker, but
Orbitsound – or Airsound as
they’ll soon be rebranded
– has pulled it off with the
room-filling sounds of the
50kg Air D1. Obviously, it can’t
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM. ILLUSTRATION: NEASDEN CONTROL CENTRE
do actual stereo, but its pair
of ten-inch custom designed
neodymium woofers, five-inch
mid, two four-inch drivers and
a surface mounted one-inch
textile dome tweeter powered
by three class A/B amps –
150W, 100W and 70W – offer a
dynamic but precise delivery,
whether you’re listening over
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (aptX) or
plugged in for serious hi-res.
£12,000 orbitsound.com
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files from a NAS drive, AirPlay
2 and DTS Play-Fi. It’ll work
with Alexa and, if you’re
in need of beefing up your
surround-sound set-up, it has
a dedicated soundbar output
and can link to the McIntosh
RS100 wireless surround
speakers. Deep-pocketed
audiophiles will appreciate
that this new addition
matches their other McIntosh
kit. £3,495 mcintoshlabs.com
SLEEK SOUNDS_
Beyerdynamic LAGOON ANC
Beyerdynamic has crammed
active noise cancellation,
great sound quality and
long-haul battery life (24.5hr
battery life with ANC) into
these smart cans – but
it’s the extras that really
impress. As well as a built-in
EQ-adjusting hearing test to
tune the sound to your own
ears, they’ve ditched external
LEDs in favour of tiny lights
inside the ear cups that
highlight when it’s synching,
and to show left and right and
battery level. Given you rarely
need to know this info when
the headphones are on your
head, it makes perfect sense
– and keeps the exterior sleek.
€399 beyerdynamic.com
SILVER SCREEN_
Philips PUS9104
Collaborative tech often
misses the mark, but with
the launch of the PUS9104,
Philips and celebrated Danish
design firm Georg Jensen
have scored a bullseye. The
55in 4K UHD LED Ambilight
TV sports a sleek aluminium
bezel on three sides, with
a polished steel front edge
matching the two Georg
Jensen-branded steel-blade
feet. Philips’ Ambilight spills
coloured lighting outside
the frame to make images
feel more immersive, while
inside, the brains are supplied
by Android Oreo. There’s
also Freeview HD, Google
Assistant and Alexa, plus a
quad-core processor, 16GB
onboard memory and 25W
2.1 audio system – all for a
price that seems a lot more
department store than
designer. £1,200 philips.co.uk
ROYAL RADIO_
Ruark Tempo
Luxury furniture designer
Linley makes exclusive
and intricate wood items,
and while the firm is more
used to working with royal
households than hi-fi brands,
their special collaboration
with Ruark is a thing of rare
beauty. Hand-crafted in the
UK, the Tempo (a limited-
edition version of the R1 DAB/
Bluetooth radio) features
an exquisite marquetry
case in tones of Submarine,
Monday, Norwegian and
Beret colourways in four
different veneers, with a solid
sycamore chamfer, embossed
Linley brand stamp and a soft
goatskin-clad front panel.
£1,295 ruarkaudio.com

TONAL TIME_
Tudor Black Bay Bronze
When Tudor first launched
its Black Bay Bronze in 2016,
it generated Kardashian-
levels of Insta attention at
Baselworld, with its larger
case and new in-house
movement – the calibre MT
5601. This year, a simple
colour change made an
equally big splash. The
dial and bezel are now in a
gorgeous slate grey, while the
sultry ombré of the dial allows
the gilt-edged hour markers
and numerals to pop, and
DEEPEST DIVER_
Omega Seamaster
Planet Ocean
Ultra Deep Professional
Omega now has watches that
have gone everywhere from
the Moon to the bottom of
the Mariana Trench, thanks
to explorer Victor Vescovo’s
mission to explore the depths
of the five oceans. The super-
deep chops come courtesy
of a Liquidmetal-secured
crystal – heated to 280°C, the
metal is poured into the space
between the case and the
crystal and compressed with
five tonnes of pressure. This
particular Seamaster isn’t for
sale, but its innovations will
likely come to a civilian watch
soon. £n/a swatchgroup.com
gives a lustre to the bronze
case. Add to that the grey-
toned strap in either fabric
or nubuck leather and you’ve
got a seriously stylish sports
watch. £2,910 tudorwatch.com
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RICH AND THIN_
Audemars Piguet Royal
Oak Selfwinding Perpetual
Calendar Ultra Thin
Aside from a couple of
cosmetic tweaks, this Royal
Oak, which started life as
a showstopping concept
piece, is unchanged from
the original flight of fancy. It
remains the world’s thinnest
automatic perpetual calendar,
clocking in at a cased 6.3mm,
and is still powered by the
calibre 5133 which, unusually
for ultra-thin pieces, has
a full rotor rather than a
micro version. The signature
tapisserie guilloche has been
replaced with a satin-brushed
deep blue dial, which makes
the face feel less frantic;
SUPER SKELETON_
Oris Big Crown
ProPilot X Calibre 115
Nothing is hidden in Oris’
latest calibre – you can
even see the barrel at 12
o’clock and watch it tighten
as the crown is wound. This
stripped-back aesthetic
extends to the bridges, which,
if looked at under a loupe,
are in their natural state –
no bevelling, chamfering or
unnecessary decoration.
In contrast to the futuristic
dial, the case is inspired by
an original pilot’s watch from
1938, given a 21st-century
update by being in titanium.
£5,600.00 (leather strap);
£5,950.00 (bracelet) oris.ch
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the all-titanium case and
bracelet have been modified
so that both are mainly matte
– with the bezel and middle
links bringing some subtle
bling with a tasteful dash of
gleaming polished platinum.
£poa audemarspiguet.com
CLEVER CLOCKS_ 05 8
IWC Ingenieur Perpetual
Calendar Digital Date-Month
There’s something of the
tool-watch spirit about IWC’s
titanium perpetual calendar.
Using this more prosaic
metal makes the watch
look somewhat practical,
but you can’t detract from
the horological fireworks
going on both dial-side and
under the bonnet. There’s
the digital date and month
display, the chronograph is
a flyback and you can even
take it for a swim. Powering it
is the 89801, which has been
programmed to recognise
different month lengths and
leap years. £33,500 iwc.com
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DEEP BLUE_ >
MB&F HM7 Aquapod
Platinum Red
First launched in 2017, MB&F’s
Aquapod was rather a shock –
it was round, for starters, and
more conventional fare than
watch-watchers were used to
from this iconoclastic house.
Now this behemoth – it’s
53.8mm across – is available
WORDS: LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK. ILLUSTRATION: NEASDEN CONTROL CENTRE
in platinum for the first time,
but is restricted to just 25
pieces. To compensate for
the weight of platinum, some
of this watch’s interior has
been altered – the numerals
are now 3D-printed titanium,
and the tourbillon bridge is
sapphire rather than metal.
Given that it only has a
50m water resistance, it’s
not actually suitable for
plumbing the depths – but it
will definitely look cool by the
pool. £150,000 mbandf.com
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RIDE/PARK/RIDE_ >
BMW 8 Series Gran Coupé
and Micro E-Scooter
If Micro’s special edition 150-
watt, 20kph BMW E-Scooter is
the toy your inner child craves,
the all-new 8 Series Gran
Coupé is the toy you crave
that accommodates your
actual child. BMW’s answer
to the Porsche Panamera,
this is a grand-touring
sports coupé with four-door
practicality. The 8 Series also
features Apple CarPlay-over-
Bluetooth, a superb head-up
display, and BMW’s advanced
driver aids – steering assist
on motorways coupled with
advanced cruise control give
a glimpse of the autonomous
future. And, should you need
to park a distance from your
destination, break out that
BMW E-Scooter from the boot
for an eco-friendly last mile.
From £69,340 OTR bmw.co.uk
SEC TION 0. 4 _GE AR OF THE Y E AR 2019_ MOTION
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ELECTRIC RACER_
Lito Sora Generation 2
Electric Superbike
Ten years in development,
Lito Motorcycles brings
it’s premier road-ready
electric ride to market –
albeit in a limited edition
of just 20 examples. The
Sora Generation 2 has a
battery delivering 50 per
cent more range than the
prototype – that’s up to a
real-world-ready 290km. The
liquid-cooled, three-phase
permanent magnet AC motor
will hurl you to 100kph in
three blurred seconds, and
on to nearly 200kph, and its
dashboard is a single, all-in-
one 5.7in LCD touchscreen.
$82,250 (£66,870)
litomotorcycles.com
SUPERIOR CRUISING_
Lexus LY 650 Luxury
Production Yacht
Luxury carmakers are no
strangers to the world’s
exclusive waterfronts – the
flowing forms of a superyacht
are catnip to any automotive
designer, eager to translate
their tarmac-bound design
language to the waves.
Ferrari kicked things off in the
early 90s with a run of rosso
corsa Riva runabouts. Aston
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E-LAND AND SEA_
Nikola NZT and WAV
Nikola (yes, as in Nikola
Tesla) presents its sci-fi-
styled, lithium-powered,
all-terrain NZT utility vehicle.
Looking like a cross between
a tractor and a dune buggy,
it boasts four independent
motors at each wheel,
integrated e-axles with the
inverter and gearbox, and a
rollicking 590hp and 0-100kph
acceleration in four seconds.
In tow is its next adventure in
EV: the all-electric WAV jetski.
$80,000 nikolamotor.com
Martin and Quintessence’s
AM37 powerboat – a tasteful
exercise in teak and carbon
fibre – weighed anchor in
2016, followed swiftly by
Toyota’s luxury division,
Lexus. Toyota Marine’s
Ponam line had already
established itself as Japan’s
market leader in premium
yachts, but 2017’s sinuous
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ROUGH RIDER_
Cérvelo Áspero Gravel Bike
Built for gravel racing, the
Áspero (Spanish for “rough”)
features a paired-down
carbon frame with aero-
style seat-stays, a burly
down-tube protector and no
rack mounts (this ain’t no
touring rig). With a capacity
for 42mm tyres on a 700c
wheel or 49mm tyres on a
smaller 650b wheel, Cérvelo
are again pegging themselves
at the racier end of the
market. The most unique
feature of the Áspero? The
060
42ft Lexus Sport Yacht raised
the bar, hotly pursued by the
LY 650 – a 65ft, six-berth
Lexus Luxury Yacht, due to
launch in autumn 2019 and
developed in partnership with
the master craftsmen of the
Marquis-Larson boat group in
Wisconsin. Powered by twin
800hp Volvo IPS engines, it’s
WORDS: ALEX DOAK; ANDREW DIPROSE
the distinctly Lexus design
that’s everything: the elegant
rise and fall of the yacht’s
roofline flows into the rising
rear section. Inside, it’s pure,
leather-trimmed decadence.
£tbc lexusyachts.com
fork. Switching around the
Trail Mixer – the metal insert
positioned at the “drop out”
where the fork meets the
centre of the wheel – changes
the “rake” (or fore-aft offset)
by 5mm, altering the bike’s
handling characteristics to
suit the chosen wheel size.
Complete bike from £2,699
to £5,399, also available
as frame-only cervelo.com
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SEC T ION 0.5 _ GE A R OF T HE Y E A R 20 19_ ACCOMMODAT ION

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0 63 AIRBNB LUXE_
Staying in style
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A
irbnb changed the way we look at
temporary accommodation, whether
for work or play. Now the San Francisco-
based company, set up by Brian Chesky,
Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk
in 2008, is diversifying its offerings:
alongside ventures such as Airbnb
“Experiences”, “Plus” and “Collections”,
the company has launched Airbnb
Luxe, providing “access to unique and
spectacular properties with… bespoke
experiences and services”.
The trigger was the company’s $300
million (£240m) acquisition of Luxury
Retreats in 2017. The latter site dates
to the early days of the web, set up
in a bedroom in 1999 by a 17-year-old
designer. That founder, Canadian Joe
Poulin, is now Airbnb’s vice-president
of luxury, overseeing more than 2,000
“handpicked homes” around the world.
Luxe offers a blend of high-end travel
agent and luxury concierge (as well as
being a new portal for virtual tourism for
WORDS: JONATHAN BELL; PHOTOGRAPHY: TREVOR TONDRO
the rest of us), tapping into the minted
millennial’s expectations of an entirely
curated life. Whereas Airbnb blew up on
the power of crowd-sourced listings,
reviews and a powerful search system,
it lacks the personal touch of expertise
and engagement that the truly wealthy
feel entitled to. So the company has
overlaid these creamed off listings
with a light dusting of add-on services
and the availability of a dedicated “trip
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designer”, who can sort everything
from travel itineraries to theatre tickets,
grocery deliveries, chefs and drivers.
So how does one assemble a Luxe
portfolio? The Luxury Retreats acqui-
sition included many staff, including
Nick Guezen, now Airbnb’s director of
portfolio strategy at Luxe. It is Guezen
who developed the much-vaunted
300-point checklist for Luxe rentals.
“The criteria ensure properties meet a
set of strictly held standards,” Guezen
explains. “From chef-grade appliances
to the proper amount of bathrooms.”
Other elements are more subjective.
As Guezen notes: “We’re evaluating
form, function, feel, location, services.”
Luxury Retreats is still a going
concern, and the Luxe list is winnowed
down from its more than 5,000 listings
to 2,000-plus homes, all of which
meet the enhanced Luxe criteria. “We
designed an approach that allowed us to
identify properties worthy of joining the
platform, while still being entirely unique
and appropriate to their particular desti-
nation,” Guezen says. As a result, Luxe
properties are usually visual shorthand
for their respective high-end arche-
types: the modernist seaside box;
the contemporary town house; the
fur-strewn ski lodge; the private island.
Back in the real world, Murray Cox
established the website Inside Airbnb
with designer John Morris, as a kind
of data-driven activism, deep-diving
into Airbnb’s impact on rental markets
around the world by dovetailing its
listings with other public data to
provide a snapshot of how the service
changes cities. “At the moment, Inside
Airbnb doesn’t specifically identify Luxe
listings,” Cox says, musing that discov-
ering the proportional split between
regular and Luxe would be an inter-
esting statistical exercise. “Anecdotally,
I’ve noticed that some markets, both
in the city and in regional areas, have
high-priced/luxury Airbnb listings,” he
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Left: the Te Kanu residency on Lake
Wanaka, New Zealand (£2,029 per
night). Below: Nukutepipi in French
Polynesia (from €900,000 a week)
adds. “I don’t think they’re doing it as a
form of advertising, or developing their
brand. I think they’re trying to segment
their supply/demand to develop that
market and seek greater profits.”
Te c h n o l o g y - d r i v e n l u x u r y i s
extremely adept at serving up these
bite-size morsels of curated individu-
ality. They are designed to entice. “One
of my favourite homes is called Alang
Alang in the south of France,” Guerzen
recalls. “I had the opportunity to visit
that home last year, and while it is just
as incredible as any other home on our
platform, it has a unique feature: in the
main entrance of the building, there
is a genuine fossil T-Rex skull (one of
only four privately owned in the world).”
Luxe is a head-first leap into the
digital commodification of exclu-
sivity, the burgeoning sense that
everyone deserves luxury, even if only
for a couple of nights. Private islands
are a long way from air mattresses,
but online, everything scales.
 ICONIC CAMERA_ Hasselblad CFV II 907X 50C

Hasselblad has updated its legendary V system with the CVF II, a 50-megapixel CMOS medium
format sensor offering outstanding colour depth and the ability to capture full-size in-camera JPEG
images. The brand has kept the low-slung shooting style of the original, but added a large touch-
and-tilt rear display, built-in battery and USB-C for fast charging and image transfer. Weighing
in at just 206g, you’ve got yourself a go anywhere, shoot anything camera. £tbc hasselblad.com

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F T HE Y E A R 20 19_T R AV EL

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065 ARRIVE IN STYLE_ Louis Vuitton Horizon Soft Luggage from Marc Newson

Industrial designer Marc Newson has reinterpreted the classic Louis Vuitton hard cases for the mod- The tough outer shell is
ern traveller. The soft case collection consists of two pieces: the rolling Horizon Soft Duffle 55, and the made using thermo-
four-wheeled Horizon Soft 55, both available in a fresh palette of colours including orange, yellow, grey, formed 3D knit material
black and brown. All incorporate a variation of Louis Vuitton’s interlocking “LV” monogram pattern, with a with a water-
while the zips are fitted using ultrasonic cutting and fused tape. £1,770; £1,960 uk.louisvuitton.com repellent treatment

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WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM. ILLUSTRATION: NEASDEN CONTROL CENTRE
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SEC T ION 0.7_GE A R OF T HE Y E A R 2019_ DESIGN
ECO BAG_
Prada Re-Nylon Backpack
The ideal accessory for
the impending climate
apocalypse, Prada’s classic
nylon backpack has been
redesigned using ECONYL
from Aquafil – a clever textile
yarn made out of plastic
waste collected from oceans,
old fishing nets and textile-
fibre waste. Hardwearing
and impressively versatile,
the material can be recycled
countless times without
degrading the quality – and
for every 10,000 tonnes of
ECONYL created, 70,000
barrels of petroleum are
saved. Prada hopes to
convert all its virgin nylon into
Re-Nylon by the end of 2021.
$1,750 prada.com
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FACE THE DARK SIDE_
Little Jedi Floor Lamp
Filipino designer Kenneth
Cobonpue has succumbed
to the powers of the
Star Wars franchise and
designed a complete set of
Sith-inspired living room
furniture that includes a
Sidious Easy Armchair
and Chewie Rocking Stool
– but if you’re not ready
to commit quite so much
floorspace to the Force, our
pick is the Little Jedi Lamp,
which combines dozens of
white Jedi knight figurines,
each holding a mini LED
lightsaber – and one feisty
little red Sith lord.
£poa kennethcobonpue.com
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TURBO FOR TYKES_
McLaren 720S Ride-On
A supercar for six-year-olds,
the all-electric McLaren 720S
Ride-On is available in Papaya
Spark – the launch colour of
the grown-up version – with
functioning dihedral doors
and exposed carbon-style
elements. While the working
accelerator pedal produces
authentic engine sounds, it
can be remote controlled for
GOLDEN GRILLS_
Miansai 14K Gold Grill Set
Forget for a second that these
barbecue tools are made
from solid, polished 14-karat
gold, and will therefore dent
quicker than the bumper
on a Renault Twingo – the
design of the 45cm spatula,
fork, knife and tongs is
exceptional, combining sharp
blades, tight angles and
elegant proportions. They’re
ideal heirlooms for the chef
who has everything – but
until Miami-based Miansai
launches a more affordable
stainless steel set, to own
them you’ll need to be like
the perfect roast leg of lamb:
minted. $65,000 miansai.com
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parental peace of mind.
A complete infotainment
system with preloaded
nursery songs, exclusive
McLaren videos and USB or
SD-card sockets for loading
your own content, rounds
out the package. (Please
resist immediately installing
Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain”.)
From £315 mclaren.com
TRICK-SHOT TABLE 06 6
Cubista Linear Pool Table
Designed by Basaglia + Rota
Nodari for FAS Pendezza, this
low-profile, full-size, free-
play pool table is made from
coated metal, with design
lines borrowed from the early
20th-century avant-garde
Cubist movement. Featuring
a 19mm slate coupled with
professional grade cloth,
the angular legs have
adjustable feet hidden in
the base for easy levelling
(so no beer mats are
required), and a perfectly
fitted top panel turns it into
a stylish dining table or
work desk when play isn’t in
session. €poa faspendezza.it
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CLASSY THRASHER_ >
Chanel Skateboard
First Dior collaborated with
Bogarde on a gold BMX; now
Chanel has added a luxurious
skateboard to its S/S 2019
collection – so we assume
the X-Games is embracing
a high-fashion makeover?
The deck in question is no
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM. JEDI LAMP: COOURTESY OF STAR WARS / KC AND LUCASFILM
mere exercise in bling: this
mini-cruiser is crafted from
lacquered wood, with artwork
simulating the classic Chanel
quilting and the interlocking
“C” logo on the base, while
the trucks are mounted with
appropriately stylish white
wheels. On top, you’ll find
grip tape and a wood-toned
logo. It’ll look great tucked
under a well–dressed arm,
but what we’re really looking
forward to is seeing it
whirling through the air…
$7,700 chanel.com
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SE . _ HE Y E AR 2019_ AU TOPIA

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069 HYPER DRIVE_
The Evija – Lotus’s first
all-electric hypercar
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M
any manufacturers express a desire
to produce the world’s most powerful
electric production car. With the
launch of the Evija, Lotus has joined
the fray: it is the first electric Lotus, and
the company’s first hypercar. Set to cost
from a cool £2m, just 130 will be made
after production begins in 2020.
The Evija (E-vi-ya) has a 1,680kg
target weight, which sounds dumpy
next to a flyweight Elise, but should
undercut much of the competition.
The company’s “simplify, then add
lightness” philosophy is alive and well,
only now, with major investment from
Chinese firm Geely – also owners of
Volvo and Polestar – Lotus has the
resources to deliver this in a big way.
How big? Well, try a power output
of 2,000PS, 1,700Nm of torque, and a
staggering zero-to-300kph time of
under nine seconds. That’s five seconds
quicker than a Bugatti Chiron.
The Evija also ticks the supercar
stat boxes of 0-100kph in under three
WORDS: ALISTAIR CHARLTON
seconds, a top speed of over 320kph
and a target driving range of 400km.
Developed in partnership with
Formula E battery maker Williams
Advanced Engineering, the Evija has
The central console cascades
down the middle of the cabin, like
a honeycomb of touch-sensitive
buttons; the dash is blissfully clean
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four electric motors – two per axle –
and four lightweight magnesium
wheels. The motors are powered by
a 70kWh, 680kg battery pack which
doesn’t reside in the floor like a Tesla,
but behind the two seats. While this
arrangement may compromise the
centre of gravity, it enabled Lotus to
lower the floor, seating position and roof,
and shrink the ride height to 105mm.
With the Evija, Lotus seeks to give
the body a degree of porosity, where
large channels are removed to enhance
airflow, thus boosting downforce and
lowering drag. Nowhere is this more
prominent than at the rear, where red
LED brake lights frame the exits of two
huge Venturi tunnels, reminiscent of
a fighter jet’s afterburners, and each
illuminated from within by further LEDs.
Other concept car design flour-
ishes we fervently hope make it
to production include deployable
cameras for wing mirrors, and how
the T of the rear “Lotus” nameplate
doubles as a reversing light. For added
drama (and less handle-induced drag)
the powered dihedral doors are opened
with a press of the keyfob. Returning to
the car with your hands full of shopping
will never be the same again – we just
don’t know where you’re supposed to
put it, as there’s no boot.
Lotus’s focus on negative space
is continued on the inside. There’s
a yawning void of what you could
call “added lightness” between the
dashboard and bulkhead, while the
central console cascades down the
middle of the cabin, like a honeycomb
of touch-sensitive buttons. The dash,
meanwhile, remains blissfully clean.
That isn’t to say this is a cabin free
of digital screens – the ones that are
there, are strictly functional. Three
replace conventional rearview mirrors
(one in each door and a third centred
above the windscreen), while a fourth
sits behind the F1-style steering wheel.
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And what a wheel it is, trimmed
with carbon fibre and Alcantara, then
festooned with buttons and dials for
indicators, phone, media, lights and
driving modes. A red selector like the
Manettino switch of a Ferrari lets the
driver pick from Eco, City, Tour, Sport
and Track modes, suggesting the Evija
may be as at home in town and on the
motorway as it is on race tracks.
The latter is an important point for
Lotus, which wants to prove it has
developed an electric drivetrain that can
survive sustained high-performance
driving without needing time to cool
down. The company says there will be no
performance drop-off for at least seven
minutes in Track mode. This may not
sound like much, but some of today’s
quickest EVs struggle to perform at
their best repeatedly.
As well as summoning up all 2,000hp,
Track mode engages the rear spoiler
and F1-style DRS system for cutting
drag on the straights and increasing top
speed, brings a lap timer to the centre
of the instrument display, and supple-
ments it with a G-meter.
It would be easy to dismiss the Evija
as a stunt. But with its pockets freshly
lined by Geely, this is a Lotus to be
noticed. It could then, all being well,
use the Evija as a launchpad for devel-
oping a whole new family of electric and
hybrid sports cars – ones which will be
more affordable and, of course, lighter.
£2,000,000 lotuscars.com
HIGH-END HAMPER_ Rolls-Royce Champagne Chest 070

Luxury in its most uncompromising form, Rolls-Royce’s champagne chest pops open to reveal its The chest features
four V12 engine-inspired hand-blown crystal flutes, two thermal caviar caissons, two blini holders, champagne coolers
two mother-of-pearl caviar spoons and a canapé capsule. Made from aluminium and carbon fibre also made from black
coated with black leather and Tudor oak, the materials used echo those found in the cars, so you’ll anodised aluminium
never face the acute embarrassment of not co-ordinating with your ride. £37,000 rolls-royce.com and carbon fibre

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WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM. ILLUSTRATION: NEASDEN CONTROL CENTRE

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 When you’ve been making
watches for as long as we have,
some things just come naturally.

Big Crown
ProPilot X Calibre 115

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09.19 DEEPMIND – DEMIS HASSABIS ON 07.19 GRETA THUNBERG – INSIDE THE 05.19 BLACK MIRROR – THE SECRETS OF
HOW AI WILL SAVE HUMANITY TEENAGE ACTIVIST REBELLION THE SMARTEST SHOW ON NETFLIX

03.19 SOFTBANK – INSIDE THE COMPANY 01.19 FASHION GOES TECH – THE FUTURE 11.18 STRIPE – THE $9.2 BILLION STARTUP
THAT CONTROLS GLOBAL TECH OF RETAIL DRIVING APPLE, AMAZON AND FACEBOOK

09.18 ELON MUSK – WHAT’S DRIVING 07.18 WEWORK – HOW IT BECAME THE MOST 05.18 APPLE’S NEXT MOVE – AND HOW IT
TECH’S ULTIMATE ENTREPRENEUR? HYPED STARTUP IN THE WORLD CAN OWN THE FUTURE

03.18 UBER KILLER - HOW DIDI BECAME 01.18 THE INTERNET IS BROKEN – WIRED 12.17 STEPHEN HAWKING AND THE
THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE FIRM SHOWS HOW TO FIX IT WORLD’S LEADING SCIENTISTS
 THINKING
G L O B A L LY

Poor experiences in sending

money abroad inspired Ismail Ahmed
to build WorldRemit – now it’s
on the verge of becoming a unicorn

EN T R EPR EN EU R I A L CU LT U R E + PRODUCTIV ITY H ACKS + ACCELER ATED LEAR NING

PHOTOGRAPHY: BENEDICT EVANS

EDITED BY
K ATIA MOSK VITCH
 T H I N K I N G G L O B A L LY 0 78

> continued

Ismail Ahmed knows all about the

channels that migrants use to send
funds back home – at one point he was
a refugee from Africa doing just that.
Nearly a decade on, the London-based
startup has almost four million customers,
who send money from 50 countries to
more than 150. With nearly $375 million
in funding, the company is soon expected
to reach a billion-dollar valuation.
Ahmed is now the co-founder of online
money transfer service WorldRemit.
But in 1988, during a brutal civil war
in his homeland, he fled Hargeisa, the
capital of Somaliland, smuggled out in
a tipper truck. He made it to Britain and,
while studying, took on casual work such
as strawberry picking to send money
to his family – who were by then in a
refugee camp in Ethiopia. The transfers
were expensive and could take months to complete.
In the early 2000s, Ahmed got a job at the UN as an adviser to THE M&A EXPERT
money transfer companies in east Africa. While there, he says he MICHAL BERKNER,
noticed corruption in the UN’s Somalia remittance programme. COOLEY
“I became a whistleblower and lost my job,” he recalls. But in
2010, he received £200,000 from the UN in compensation for current : partner at London-
unfair treatment – and, having completed an MBA from the based tech law firm Cooley
London Business School, used the money to set up WorldRemit. experience : more than
Ahmed, who moved from CEO to non-executive chairman 20 years’ in the UK and US
in 2018, argues that WorldRemit’s business model is unique. “People who run tech and
Instead of sending funds from bank to bank like, for example, life science companies are
TransferWise or the traditional money transfer companies focused on their business
Western Union and MoneyGram, the transfers can be sent and don’t invest enough in
directly to a mobile wallet – via a smartphone. making sure the books and
While Western Union and MoneyGram have operated records of the company are
remittance services for years, they still rely on intermediate all cleaned up. When it’s time
agents, typically corner shops, where people go to collect their to sell, it needs to be a priority.
cash. The agents are responsible for carrying out regulatory Once a buyer starts looking
compliance such as “Know Your Client” identity checks, at documents, they should
documenting every money movement. already be in order. Buyers
ILLUSTRATIONS: BILLY CLARK. SPOT ILLUSTRATION: SODAVEKT

WorldRemit partners with local banks and mobile networks; can lose confidence pretty
in Kenya, for example, it is working with electronic wallet quickly if they see it’s a mess.
service M-Pesa, so that money can be transferred instantly. The Beware of conditions
recipient can retrieve the funds as a bank deposit into a local in contracts [for example,
WorldRemit bank account; as mobile money; as phone airtime stipulations as to compliance
top-up; or as cash at a supermarket. The fees are two to three to certain regulations]. The
per cent lower than those charged by most banks. WorldRe- first thing I do when I get a
mit’s closest rival is Remitly, another digital-only company draft transaction agreement
sending money from developed to developing countries. is look at conditions. When
The digitisation of remittances also helps safeguard against you’re representing a seller,
money laundering: WorldRemit’s system checks users against the seller is always focused
international watchlists and sanction databases, and can flag on closing with as few
dubious activity. “If a transaction is suspicious, there is a wealth conditions as possible. Parse
of data to trace it back to a bank account, a card, an identity,” through each and every one
says Ahmed. “That’s coming a long way from agents, who – look at it critically and think:
can be untrained at best, and turn a blind eye at worst.” And, is this absolutely necessary?
he adds, WorldRemit has never been fined. Daphne LePrince If not, try and get rid of it.”
 C A S H I N G O U T C L E V E R LY
Selling a company – or better yet, having a
buyer make an attractive offer – is the end goal
for many startups. According to a recent survey
by Silicon Valley Bank, half of British startups
expect to be acquired at some point. Selling a
controlling interest can also help founders take
their business to a new level, thanks to a fresh
injection of capital. Nine in ten founders say they
think the mergers and acquisitions market would
grow or stay the same size in 2019, regardless of
Brexit uncertainty. WIRED asked those who have
been on different sides of deals to highlight the
pitfalls a savvy startup founder should avoid,
and what they’d have done differently, if they
had a second chance… Chris Stokel-Walker
EXITING
YOUR
STARTUP
You’ve spent years growing your
business – but now you want to sell.
WIRED asks veteran investors, founders
and experts how to get the best deal
THE SELLER-
TURNED-INVESTOR
ILKKA KIVIMAKI,
M A K I .V C
current : partner at Maki.vc,
a venture capital firm
experience : sold telco
firm Wicom Communications
to SAP in 2007
“You should be looking at all
the stakeholders, asking
what it means if the company
is sold. That includes the
staff – it’s very important that
you chart a path forward for
your employees. But it’s also
the investors. Early investors
can get five or ten times their
money back. But late-stage
investors, who came in a
year ago, might think it’s the
wrong time to sell.
Keep it quiet. If a company
gets an offer or you’re in
the process of selling, it can
be a major distraction if the
whole company is focusing
on that. For the SAP sale,
we’d negotiated all the terms
and were ready to sign before
we told staff. Most people
saw it as an opportunity
to leverage their expertise
in a wider organisation, and
we got access to resources.
Buyers will try to push the
price down with due diligence
– it’s totally normal, so don’t
get super upset about it.”
W O R K SM AR TE R
THE SERIAL EXITER
E D B U S S E Y,
QUILL
current :
founder of Quill
content production platform
experience : serial
entrepreneur and exiter
“It’s better to be bought than
sold. If you get your business
to a place where it’s being
acquired – driven by the
market rather than the need
to sell – that’s the best place
to be in terms of pricing.
Build relationships [with
prospective buyers]. You
need to know what your
eventual buyer set is, and to
build contacts with the buyer
group, through conversations
and coffees. The process
itself takes six to 12 months
and, unless you’re properly
supported, it can materially
impact the business.
I’ve seen this directly and
indirectly through peers:
inevitably you get drawn into
a huge number of meetings
with a lot of detail, juggling
a lot of balls and you’re ripped
out of the business. If you’re
not properly backfilled and
supported, it can affect the
performance of the company.”
W OR K SM ART ER NOT BY THE NUMBERS

CASSIE KOZYRKOV:

CHOOSING
SUCCESS
By bringing psychology and diversity
to its AI strategies, Google’s chief
decision scientist helps the tech giant
harness its vast data cache

Cassie Kozyrkov is much more than

a data scientist – she is Google’s
chief decision scientist, a title that
is as much mission statement as job
description. For Kozyrkov, artificial
intelligence and big data analytics
are far removed from the dystopian
visions of science fiction movies.
She sees them as just a few new tools
used by humans. To make these tools
work better, she brings together data
and behavioural science with human
decision-making.
Born in South Africa, Kozyrkov’s
fascination with data began when she
was a child, entering information about
her gemstone collection into Excel
while her friends played outside. After
moving to the US as a teen, she got a
degree in economics at the University
of Chicago – where she “realised what
incredible possibilities lie in data”.
She would later get degrees
i n s ta t i s t i c s, n e u ro s c i e n c e a n d
psychology, a combination that raised
some eyebrows. “When I was being

Right : Cassie Kozyrkov,

photographed in June
at WIRED’s Pulse: AI event
0 81 OFFICE PERKS

WORKING ON YOUR
WELLBEING
trained, it was really unusual for Firms are finding creative ways of
someone to do both [data and decision keeping workers happy and productive
science],” she says. “I remember
college advisers telling me I was crazy
with my list of courses, and why on
earth would I want to [study] these
completely different things that had
nothing to do with one another.”
Kozyrkov first thought that she
would become a university professor.
But a chance meeting with a data
scientist at Google led to a summer HEADING SPACE S T H AT
internship at the company, followed OUTDOORS INSPIRE
by jobs as a statistician and machine- Besides scaling its Slava Polonski, a UX
learning expert. After a stint as Google internal climbing wall, researcher in Google’s
Cloud’s chief data scientist, she took IBM researcher Svenja Zurich office, likes to
on the role of chief decision scientist Mauthe leads trips hold meetings while
for the whole company in 2018. into the mountains: playing pool: “We can
What she does is to bridge depart- “It helps you reassess also jam with musical
ments that usually keep to themselves, problems and instruments and play
all the way from research to the teams find new solutions.” in rooms full of LEGO.”
that apply algorithms to business
functions – training more than 17,000
Google staff in the process.
“Typical data science training might
teach you how to analyse survey data,
but not how to design the survey in
the first place. If the survey is poorly
designed, no amount of maths can
help,” she says. Kozrykov wants to use ENCOUR AGING PET
applied data science, AI and analytics PL AY TIME THERAPY
to create better tools and products – a Eilish O’Hagan works To beat stress, James
discipline that she calls decision intel- at Wilmington PLC, a Williams, celebrity
ligence. In real life, it means letting publishing firm in producer at GQ, takes
“well thought-out projects flourish, as London, which gave his dog to work: “he
well as identifying ill-advised projects out bubble-blowing makes me smile and
so these can be shut down before they kits. “We ended up realise that what I’m
begin”. And, by bringing psychology using them as a kind stressing over isn’t
into data science, she hopes to reduce of fun team activity.” the be-all and end-all.”
bias in algorithms. “You need a really
big diversity of skills and perspectives
on any of these projects,” she says. “In
applied machine learning, it’s a terrible
idea to get multiple carbon copies of the
same worker… It’s really hard to think
of everything alone. Diversity helps
creativity flourish.” Emma Sheppard
GETTING
HANDS-ON
ILLUSTRATION: CRAIG BAXTER; SODAVEKT

American PR giant
‘ Y O U N E E D A R E A L LY B I G Edelman offers all its
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI.

DIVERSIT Y OF SKILL S employees subsidised

AND PERSPEC TIVES ON twice-weekly
ANY PROJECT ’ stress-busting back
massages. They’re so
CASSIE KOZYRKOV popular, they’re booked
CHIEF DECISION SCIENTIST. GOOGLE far in advance. WB
W ORK S MA RTE R P O P - U P P R I VA C Y 082

“The way we hold meetings has changed a lot in the last decade,” ESCAPE PODS
says Pontus Kihlman, executive consultant at Rapal Oy, a workplace
management provider based in Espoo, Finland. Remote, agile working ARE LEADING THE NEW
and hotdesking means formal meeting rooms are increasingly
superfluous. “Oversized meeting spaces tend to be underutilised, SPACE RACE
creating a lot of wasted space that could be used more smartly, while
there aren’t enough small meeting rooms or multi-use spaces,”
Kihlman says. His firm found that meeting rooms are filled only to
a fifth of capacity after an analysis of 12,600 meeting rooms across
1,800 offices. In place of these outmoded spaces, consider instead Open-plan offices are great
hatching a pop-up meeting in one of these pods. Chris Stokel-Walker for collaboration – but sometimes you
need a little privacy. WIRED calls
a meeting of micro-rooms to order

MODULAR

On their own, each of

these high-backed,
upholstered seats from
Polish designer Dymitr
Malcew is merely
SOLO CALMING functional; but when MOBILE BLOW-UP
snapped together, they
Around 65 per cent of The plastic Seedpod form Cave, a circular Helsinki-based Traditionally found
work is still performed from Leeds-based workspace that acts as startup Smartblock on the sidelines of
alone, according to Seeds draws on a buffer to the hubbub thinks the meeting conferences, inflatable
Rapal Oy. The O pod, natural shapes and of a busy, open-plan space should come to rooms are springing
from Finnish workpod is designed to evoke office. “The idea was you – so it put its pod up in open offices that
startup Framery, calm. The capsule to provide a variety on wheels. Co-founder need pop-up privacy
promises an echo-free (for up to five people) of scenarios and Janne Orava says says Viktor Nijenhuis,
individual workspace is intended to remove settings for various its mobile Smartblock owner of Dutch
in which to focus. a sense of hierarchy, activities, to create FD pod also has an startup QuickSpace.
Framery CEO Samu while coloured LED a sense of privacy intelligent built-in The structures come
Hällfors claims lighting and built-in without building fixed display that in a variety of shapes
ILLUSTRATION: SODAVEKT

workers using the Bluetooth speakers walls,” explains Malcew. recognises the source and sizes, have
O pod “recover from help set the mood malcew.com of any input plugged sound insulation,
stress, sleep better, in this fire-retardant, into it, so “there’s no and can be up and
and exercise more.” glass-reinforced pod. need for a remote inhabited in minutes.
frameryacoustics.com seeds.company control”. smartblock.fi quickspace.eu
 W I R ED PA R TN E RS HI P | M CL AR E N

The desire for detail

WIRED partners with automotive maestros McLaren to
uncover the story behind its ground-breaking 720S
– one of the most complex, advanced and accomplished
supercars the world has ever encountered

‘The 720S is about Supercar design typically begins with
drama and theatre – an inky flourish, a scribble on the back
but it’s also about of a napkin, or an abstract shape that
engagement and fun’ evolves into much larger, more complex
Dan Parry-Williams, final image. But McLaren approaches
Director of everything it does differently.
Engineering Design, The 720S, a supercar that’s capable
McLaren Automotive of dispatching the 0-100kph sprint in
under three seconds, was designed
from the ground up to unashamedly
flaunt its functional side. There is no
crease, intake or sweeping line on the
vehicle that doesn’t serve a purpose.
In an exclusive video with WIRED,
McL aren’s chief designer explains
why the 720S embodies ever y thing
his company strives to achieve – from
aerodynamic efficiency to pioneering
advanced composite materials – and
why this has enabled its latest supercar
to of fer such an exhilarating drive
to the widest possible audience.
Visit wired.co.uk to watch the full video
WORK S MART ER ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY
HOW AI CURES
TRANSCRIPTION
MISERY
The exquisite pain of typing out audio
recordings is set to be a thing of the past –
just get artificial intelligence to do the work
Whether it’s recording notes from a conference,
sharing a meeting memo with colleagues, or
typing up audio from an extended interview,
transcription is the enemy of productivity.
Automated dictation apps and transcription
services offer a potential solution, but issues
around accuracy, cost and turnaround abound.
Sam Liang, a former Google platform architect,
realised It’s just the kind of problem that artificial
intelligence eats up – so he developed Otter AI,
a freemium note-taking app that uses AI to
transcribe, remember, search and share voice
conversations. It’s free for 600 minutes a month,
with premium services at up to $12.50 (£10) extra.
Users record audio using a smartphone
running the Otter app, and the software
automatically turns it into text in near real time.
(Dictaphone recordings can be uploaded via
Otter’s web portal.)
Multiple voices are
recognised, and the text
is saved to the cloud.
“Journalists use the
technology for interview
notes, creative agencies
use it to process
qualitative research
interviews, students use
it to take notes in class,”
says Seamus McAteer,
general manager of
revenue and
partnerships for Otter.
There are also examples
of podcasters using Otter to make show notes,
he adds, but the most common use case is
minutes from meetings which, with multiple,
overlapping voices to contend with, push the
voice separation and identification, audio
synchronisation and keyword extraction
capabilities of the in-house AI. Tuning for
accents, filtering for background noise and
support for proper names, jargon and acronyms
are in development, as is an option for recording
phone calls. Will Bedingfield otter.ai
0 84
When his son was diagnosed with a form of
high-functioning autism, Dirk Müller-Remus
envisaged the kind of future he would have in
the workplace, and didn’t like what he saw: the
global unemployment rate for people on the autism
spectrum remains at around 80 per cent. So, the
German entrepreneur decided to build a company
that would create long-term employment oppor-
tunities for adults who, like his son, have extraor-
dinary cognitive abilities, but often lack the social
skills needed to find a job and retain it.
In 2011, Müller-Remus founded Auticon, a
for-profit social enterprise that hires individuals
on the autism spectrum as IT consultants and
matches their skills to a specific client project.
The Berlin-based company’s clients include Glaxo
Smith Kline, KPMG and the Virgin Group.
Auticon is now managed by Kurt Schaffer, the
group CEO, who expanded the firm’s reach to the
UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada and the
US. Auticon says it currently employs more than
200 people with a variety of autism diagnoses.
Lars Backstrom joined Auticon UK in early 2018
after being out of full-time employment for eight
years. He was diagnosed with autism as an adult
and has struggled most of his life with social inter-
actions. “If you don’t form social networks at work,
you tend to be a target to be picked on,” he says.
Backstrom is now a consultant for KPMG in
London, where he uses complex analytics tools
to support the audit team. He requires two key
elements to make him feel at ease in the workplace:
patience and clarity. “I don’t like being pulled in
too many directions at once,” he says.
Auticon job coaches are paired with the
consultants to liaise with clients on their behalf.
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON. ILLUSTRATION: MIGUEL PORLAN.
While the consultants perform the IT tasks, the
job coaches convey the needs and special require-
ments of the consultants, as they sometimes find
it hard to interact with others. Some autistic
individuals don’t want to shake hands, for example,
SPOT ILLUSTRATION: SODAVEKT
or don’t wish to be put on the spot in a meeting. The
coaches will make sure clients are aware of this.
Over the past few years there has been a big
push in autism advocacy and awareness in the
UK, spearheaded by entities such as Auticon
and the National Autistic Society. But one of the

TA P P I N G I N TO TA L E N T:
AUTISM
ADVOCACY
The employment outlook for autistic people
can be bleak – but Auticon, a social
enterprise, has found a way to harness the
unique attributes of these workers
ENGAGING AUTISM
Left : Lars Backstrom,
a consultant at Auticon
UK, with his coach (in
reflection) Adam Goldman
main challenges, according to Auticon’s
UK CEO, Ray Coyle, is to convince autistic
individuals to apply for a job.
“The workplace hasn’t been kind
to autistic people, and some feel like
employers have given up on them,” Coyle
says. “Most companies include a job
description that is a hypothetical history
of the type of individual that they want.
It’s very prescriptive and autistic people
will often think it doesn’t describe them.
We make sure that our job descriptions
are deliberately vague.”
Auticon’s London office, which opened
in 2016, now has 36 employees. Regarding
the hiring of IT consultants, Coyle says the
company keeps the process very flexible to
make sure that every skill is measurable,
without being constrained by standardised
testing processes.
The candidates are assessed on their
cognitive skills using a test designed
with researchers from the University
of Berlin. Applicants with relevant
technology experience (whether coding
or programming) are then tested on their
tech capabilities through the London-
based software company Geektastic, which
assesses skills including logical analysis, pattern
recognition, attention to detail, error detection
and sustained concentration.
Job interviews aren’t part of Auticon’s hiring
process. Interviews, says Coyle, test the candi-
date’s social abilities – eye contact, body language,
charm. But many on the autism spectrum can find
it challenging to manage the unwritten rules of the
workplace and would rather focus on their task.
When Auticon opened its London office three
years ago, the Virgin Group was one of the first to
back the social enterprise financially. The group’s
founder, Richard Branson, has dyslexia which, like
autism, is a form of neurodiversity.
While Auticon focuses on tech jobs for
high-functioning autistic individuals, there are
other entities in the UK that also cater to the needs
of people on the autism spectrum. AS Mentoring
provides mentoring, recruiting and employment
support, and Harry Specters offers young people
with autism free training and employment at its
chocolate shop. Bérénice Magistretti
 WIRED
insider
Events, new products and promotions
Compiled by Jake Pummintr

THE INSIDER
EVENT EDIT

WIRED SMARTER
Kings Place
wired.uk/smarter
October 30, 2019

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“Playing games is fundamental to being human.” Jade Raymond, Stadia p88

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK
THE FUTURE OF STREAMING . STUDY 01 G OO GLE S TAD IA

BY STEPHEN ARMSTRONG

UNDAR PICHAI, THE GOOGLE CEO,
strode on to the stage at the 31st
Game Developers Conference in San
Francisco during March 2019, to deliver
a keynote product launch for Stadia:
a console-free, cloud-based gaming
platform. This was an intriguing propo-
sition from the tech giant, which has
no real experience in gaming. Pichai
even started his speech by confessing
that he wasn’t a big gamer, aside from
playing FIFA 19 “quite a bit”.
It was left to Phil Harrison, the
company’s vice-president in charge
of the project, to sell the vision. He
told the developers, designers and
producers who had assembled for
the conference that Stadia would be
“a new-generation game platform
purpose-built for the 21st century” –
one where “the worlds of watching and
playing games converge”.
With Stadia, Harrison explained,
gamers could play high-resolution,
AAA titles in real time, with no need
to purchase a console. All you would
need is a Google Chrome browser and
an internet connection, and you could
play the same games on any screen –
whether a desktop, laptop, television,
tablet or mobile phone. Say you’re
playing Assassin’s Creed on your TV, but
you suddenly need to leave the house
– you could carry on gaming from
exactly the same point on your mobile.
The new service would support cross-
platform play and, given its ability to
scale, would allow developers to expand
games – “so that 100-person games like
Fortnite could turn into 1,000-player
battles royale”. And it would be fully
integrated with YouTube, so you could
watch a streamer playing, click on a
link, and immediately be transported
into the game world yourself, with no
download, no updates and no install.
A “share” button on Stadia’s Wi-Fi-
enabled controller – the only new
piece of hardware – would let you start
live-streaming your own session for
others to watch or join in with.
Gaming, Harrison said, is now the
biggest form of entertainment on
the planet, with more than two billion
players globally and hundreds of
millions of people watching gaming
content every day on YouTube alone.
“Our vision is to bring those worlds
closer together – to connect game
developers with players and YouTube
creators in a way that only Google can.”
A few months later, Harrison is
standing at a high, white desk in his
office at Google’s headquarters in
Mountain View, California. The Stadia
team is housed in a two-storey office
block towards the edge of the campus,
which stretches 3km by 3km – meaning
you could fit the City of London into it
three times over. The whole complex
feels less like a collection of high-rise
company buildings than a Hollywood
studio that has bought an entire town,
giving each movie or TV show its own
house. There are around 30 staff
restaurants, including Indian, sushi,
pizza, burrito and noodle eateries; plus
a hospital, sports fields and gyms.
Employees like to say the company
doesn’t mind if you go home at the end of
the day, but does make it easier to stay.
Harrison, tall with closely cropped
hair and a light Hertfordshire accent,
joined Google in 2018, after a multi-
decade career in the gaming industry.
Having initially built a reputation as a
games designer in the UK in the late
1980s, he was one of the first people to
be approached by Sony to launch the
PlayStation in 1992. He went on to run
Xbox in Europe for Microsoft, before
leaving to invest in gaming startups
and regain a little work-life balance.
Then came the call from Google.
“I was sitting round a campfire near
Stonehenge with my family back in
2017,” he recalls. “Suddenly, up popped
a Facebook message saying ‘Hey, I
want to connect you to somebody at
Google’. Pretty much the first thing I said
to Google was ‘No, I’m not interested
in working for you’.” But in the end he
flew out to Mountain View, where he was
convinced that Google’s ambition could
provide the kind of gaming experience
he’d been working towards for years.
Having invested in Gaikai, a high-end
video game streaming service that
was bought by Sony in 2012 to build
its PlayStation Now platform, Harrison
knew that cloud gaming wasn’t just an
R&D problem. “It’s a scale problem, and
if you try to count them on both hands,
you run out of companies that could
do this on a global scale before you run
out of fingers,” he says. “I looked at
Google’s network infrastructure, data
centres, YouTube, engineering culture
and long-term investment horizon
and I thought – even if we’re only 50
per cent successful in lining up all of
those planets, that’s going to be a pretty
amazing constellation.”
He also knew that Google’s technology
alone would not be enough to make
Stadia a success. This is why the
company chose to announce the new
launch at the San Francisco conference
– a full eight months before Stadia was
scheduled to become available to
consumers in November 2019.
“The reason is simple,” Harrison
says, spreading his fingers on the
tabletop. “We have to excite one
crucial stakeholder first, which is the
game developers. We need to get them
tuned into the opportunity of creating
for Stadia. We’d been speaking to some
developers for three or four years,
because of the lead times in creating
games, but we needed the developers
onside before the consumers, or we
wouldn’t have a platform.”
The company didn’t announce details
of how the platform was going to work
for consumers until early June 2019. The
important details are that it will operate
a subscription model, with an initial
offer of a starter pack for £119, which
includes a dark blue Stadia controller,
a Chromecast Ultra stick (needed to
play games on a TV) and a three-month
subscription to Stadia Pro, which will
give access to an assortment of free,
Right: Phil Harrison was sitting round a
campfire at Stonehenge when Google called
– and put him in charge of the Stadia project
091 TH E FUT URE OF ST RE AM ING . S TUD Y 01 GOOGLE STADIA
full-price and discounted games in 4k
resolution and 5.1 surround sound.
From 2020, the company will offer the
controllers separately for £59 (though
you do not need a Stadia controller
to access the platform, which is also
compatible with other controllers or
a mouse and keyboard), and a Stadia
Pro subscription for £8.99 per month.
It will also start offering a second-tier
streaming subscription, called Stadia
Base, with lower resolution.
The first of the free games is Destiny
2: The Collection , and Stadia has
confirmed 31 other titles at the time of
writing, including Borderlands 3, Doom
Eternal, Football Manager, Marvel’s
Avengers, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Breakpoint, Wolfenstein: Youngblood
and Watch Dogs: Legion. All of these
titles are, however, available on other
platforms – in the way that the popularity
of Halo helped Xbox take off, Stadia will
perhaps need its “killer app” game.
Ultimately, the vision Stadia is trying
to sell to developers and gamers is a
kind of real-world Ready Player One – a
multiverse of games, linked by the cloud,
that players can move freely between,
possibly even using the same avatar
across game worlds. With streaming
becoming the default way to consume
entertainment – from music to video
and now gaming – does this herald the
end of the games console?
Sony is clearly worried. In February
2019, Sony’s chief financial officer,
Hiroki Totoki, said that cloud gaming
and video game streaming services
could threaten PlayStation, damage if
not destroy console sales, and require
a major investment in servers and
infrastructure management – an area
where Sony lags behind its rivals.
Microsoft is preparing to launch its
own streaming service, xCloud, with
public trials scheduled for October
2019, and Amazon is rumoured to be
considering a rival service. In a move
widely seen as defensive, console
rivals Microsoft and Sony unveiled a
partnership in May 2019, with plans to
collaborate on cloud-based gaming.
“Historically, gaming was defined by
the device you were playing on,” says
Kareem Choudhry, vice-president of
cloud gaming at Xbox and the man
who is stepping up to stymie Stadia’s
ambitions. “Music and video started
that way – now you listen and watch
wherever you want. Now it’s gaming’s
time. In mobile, music drove 3G, video
drove 4G – and gaming will drive 5G.”
In a brightly lit conference room at
Mountain View, across the hall from what
looks like a student lounge – beaten-up
sofas, bean bags, gaming controllers
on every surface, and a huge screen –
Majd Bakar, the cheerful Syrian-born
head of engineering at Stadia, explains
how the idea was born. It started, he
says, with Chromecast – Google’s
dongle that allows users to stream
video or audio content from a phone or
computer on to a TV, launched in 2013.
“I joined Google from Xbox to develop
Google’s Chromecast digital media
player, but very rapidly it became clear
there was a significant hole in the
dongle’s offering: computer games,”
Bakar says. “It’s the largest single
entertainment industry in the world.”
According to the Entertainment
Software Association, global video
game revenue reached $134.9 billion
(£110 billion) in 2018. For comparison,
market research company The NPD
Group puts global cinema box office
revenues at $41.1 billion (up to $136 billion
when combined with home movie enter-
tainment revenue), and the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry
puts the global recorded music market
at $19.1 billion. At the start of 2019, Netflix
told shareholders that gaming was a
bigger threat to business than rival TV
services, writing in its quarterly report
that “we compete with (and lose to)
Fortnite more than HBO”.
Bakar tried to get gaming to work on
Chromecast. “The problem was, how
can you get high-end, AAA games on to
a very low-end device?” he says. “Cloud
gaming was the obvious answer for us,
but as we learned more – and as we
understood the technology behind it –
we realised that it made more sense to
develop a cloud service that’s available
on any screen anywhere.”
The biggest challenge is latency – the
time it takes packets of information to go
from your device to the server and back.
Even fibre optic cables have roughly a
one millisecond delay for every 200km;
if you’re in London and the server is in
Tel Aviv, and you have optical fibre all
the way, it would take about 30–48
milliseconds for the signal to return to
you – if the network wasn’t busy.
“For gamers, a latency of dozens of
milliseconds is the most you can have
to make sure that any delay is imper-
ceptible,” says John Justice, Stadia’s
head of product management. “That
means you don’t score worse in your
matches than before. The solution is
complicated and hasn’t been techni-
cally possible before, which is why other
services have struggled.”
Google’s first solution was to build
more data centres nearer to users,
but this wasn’t enough. There is also
the matter of data compression. Since
digital data was first compressed back in
1974 by a team at the University of Texas,
there have been two options – “lossy”
or “lossless” compression.
With lossless compression, every
bit of data that was originally in the file
remains after the file is uncompressed.
With lossy compression, encoding and
decoding discards some of the data
to reduce size, using inexact approxi-
mations to recreate the content. Lossy
compression is the way companies
such as Netflix and YouTube can deliver
apparently real-time video, but most
streaming services use some level of
buffering – meaning the video sent
to your screen is some way ahead of
your viewing. For buffering to work,
Netflix needs to know what the next
few minutes of video you’ll be viewing
are, and send enough of it so that you
never catch up with the decoding of data.
Failure to stay ahead of the viewer leads
to the dreaded “loading” screen.
In game streaming, buffering is all but
impossible, as the player interacts with
and changes the content on a second-
by-second basis. All forms of lossy
093 TH E FUT URE
compression use some sort of “codec”
– a portmanteau word combining coding
and decoding. Stadia required a codec
that could send and receive data without
any buffering at approximately the
speed of light. Back in 2011, when Bakar
started work on the project, there wasn’t
a codec capable of the compression that
game streaming needed.
In 2010, however, Google had
acquired On2 Technologies, a small
codec technology firm in upstate New
York. Since it was founded in 1992, the
company had created a series of video
codecs called TrueMotion, designed
specifically for gaming – initially for the
Sega Saturn console. Fresh iterations
of the technology were known by their
version numbers; by the time Google
acquired the company, its latest codec
was VP8, speedy but poorly equipped
to handle high-resolution images.
Engineers then worked on VP9, which
deals with high-resolution images in an
innovative way – expanding sky pixels,
for instance, to fill more space.
“The VP9 codec is open, but in
Stadia’s case, we do special work in
the encoder that makes it super fast,”
Justice explains. “That encoder still
follows the VP9 standard format, so
every VP9 decoder out there can read
the streams. But our encoder is specially
optimised, making it much faster.
We put a lot of special sauce in there.”
OF ST RE AM ING . S TUD Y 01
In theory, this means massively multi-
player online role-playing games such
as Neverwinter or World of Warcraft can
actually deliver on the offer they seem
to be making. Currently, the massively
multiplayer element of such games
is in fact the result of a kind of online
smoke and mirrors known as “shards”.
In effect, developers balance the number
of players with available computing
power by dividing players into shards,
or subgroups, on different servers.
That means players are restricted to
interacting with a small subset of the
overall game community.
“There’s only enough computational
power to maybe render 50 or 100 people
on the screen, but really there are many,
many more people in that world – they’re
just in a parallel universe,” says Jack
Buser, Stadia’s director for games.
“But think of the creative possibility of
removing all those limitations. You could
have hundreds of thousands of people
on screen at a particular time – with the
potential for millions of people, jumping
in and out of a single instance in the
game anywhere you can place a link on
the internet. It would be one giant world
that goes on for decades, never turns off
and never resets. We’ve dreamed of this,
but it was always the kind of thing you
would only see in a movie until today.”
There is one fully functioning single-
shard game, called EVE Online, available
GOOGLE STADIA
Turning the tables: Stadia’s head of product
management John Justice (left) and head
of engineering Majd Bakar at Mountain View
on Steam. It’s a community-driven
spaceship MMO game, where players
can explore, set up mining operations
and industries, plot and plan in an
ever expanding sandbox. The game is
slow moving and, for players used to
high-adrenaline action, can verge on
the boring – until, as happens every now
and then, massive events sweep the
game. In 2014, for instance, 7,548 players
took part in a 21-hour player-versus-
player battle known as the Bloodbath of
B-R5RB. In June 2019, a vast non-player
fleet of aliens attacked the majority of
players at the same time.
Stadia’s potential – and the thing
that sees the team’s faces light up – is
that it could offer an EVE Online-style
experience at Fortnite’s breakneck
speed. But first, it needs the games.
Two people have been given the job
of overseeing content so compelling
that it will attract players to Stadia: Jade
Raymond and Erin Hoffman-John.
Raymond is something of a legend
in the industry, known as much for her
biker jacket as for her enviable CV. The
Canadian producer worked on The Sims
Online at Electronic Arts (EA), developed
Assassin’s Creed for Ubisoft, and helped
EA create its Star Wars games.
095 TH E FUT URE
“Playing games is fundamental to
being human,” she says. “People don’t
choose a new platform because they
love its technology – they go because
their hearts are touched. Would Xbox
have been a success without Halo?
We have to make sure that the core
gamers are our core fans and the people
we are delivering value to first.”
Raymond is creating a publishing
team to work with external developers
to make exclusive content for Stadia,
while also building Stadia’s own internal
game studio. Her move to the company
in March 2019 was widely seen as a boost
to Google’s gaming credentials.
Hoffman-John’s role is more
future-focused. She runs Star Labs, a
prototyping games studio on the ground
floor of the Stadia building. The games
she and her team build are intended
to explore what could be possible on
the platform. Currently, they are toying
with the idea of a dragon world – an
immersive wilderness where you find
a dragon egg, see it hatch and raise
the dragon to recognise your voice.
You have to feed and care for it – much
like a Pokémon – but can also ride it,
fight other players, form groups and
guilds, and carve out territory.
Growing up in San Diego, Hoffman-
John loved Dungeons & Dragons – the
original multiplayer role-playing game,
which used pencils and dice. When
the game came under assault from
religious groups – who feared that it
would convert players to satanism –
in the 1980s, her parents banned her
from playing. However, she discovered
America Online and its chat rooms
devoted to D&D. Soon she was building
worlds and running text-based adven-
tures on the computer instead.
At Stadia, her mission is to work
towards reaching the “next billion
gamers” – which is “something of a
concept for Google”, she says. “There are
nowhere near enough game developers
to reach a billion extra gamers, so we
need to radically widen the content
pipeline and the ability for developers
to really amplify themselves.”
The high development and marketing
costs of gaming can be fatal to small
companies, and the funding imbalance
creates a huge division between AAA
and indie studios. “The indies are known
for being very innovative, but often that
innovation won’t reach the market for
Left: Erin Hoffman-John, a Stadia games
developer. Above right: a still image from
Destiny 2, the first free game on Stadia
OF ST RE AM ING . S TUD Y 01
many years – by which time the indies
are not there to benefit from it,” she
says. “If they could iterate very quickly,
throw out an entire level and make a new
one in a week instead of in three months,
then all of a sudden you get a lot more
swings at that problem.”
Cloud computing allows for cheaper
tools, which could make this kind of
iteration possible – and allow for more
options in-game. Hoffman-John gives
the telling example of character diversity.
“One of the reasons that we see narrow
demographics in gamers is representa-
tional… do I see people that are like me in
the game?” she asks. “If you can create
a character with 8,000 animations for
the same price as creating one with 15
animations, then you can suddenly have
hundreds more characters representing
far more demographics.”
Her team is also bringing some of
Google’s natural language processing
into Stadia’s game development tools
in a bid to create characters who
respond believably to individual players.
Currently, designers have to imagine
every possible conversation, and type
character responses in by hand. “What
I want is a character that is, say, kind of
neurotic, really likes ice cream and had
a really passive aggressive mother,” she
says. “The AI will create all the little tics
and patterns in the dialogue resulting
from that kind of background. Ideally,
that character would have a simple
memory so when you encounter them
hours later, they remember conversa-
tions they had with you.”
All of these tools, she believes, will
enable a crucial part of Stadia’s vision
– to provide a liminal space between
games for players to be creative and
express themselves, and to construct
their perfect digital self.
Aside from games, Google is
counting on its not so secret weapon
to help attract developers and players:
YouTube. In 2018, users viewed over
GOOGLE STADIA
50 billion hours of gaming content on
YouTube, making it the largest gaming
spectator platform in the world. This
may be small beer when compared with
the global television industry – a report
by Eurodata TV found that average TV
viewing around the world in 2018 was
2 hours 55 minutes per day) – but in
terms of a dedicated targeted audience
to whom developers can market new
games, it offers a huge opportunity.
Stadia plans to expand on this by
offering a feature whereby viewers
can easily jump into a game with their
favourite YouTube stars. It could also
work with video game trailers. Like what
you see? Just click and start playing.
The man in charge of this fluid viewer/
player interaction is Stadia’s director of
product, Andrey Doronichev. He gives
me a tour of the Stadia building, with
Willy Wonka-style rooms full of multi-
coloured controllers, and smaller suites
with huge sofas and large two-way wall
mirrors that allow the Stadia team to
observe people testing the system.
Doronichev recalls that, as a child,
he really wanted a new Star Wars game
– Star Wars: TIE Fighter. So he worked
shifting manure at his parents’ farm to
earn the money to buy it. When he did, it
took two hours to copy to his computer –
and then he didn’t have enough memory
to run it. He had to wait six months for
his parents to upgrade his computer
before he could play it. “My job here is
to make that delay into zero,” he says.

or all Stadia’s promises, two big
questions remain: can it succeed? And
if so, what will it mean for the industry?
“This is definitely the kind of power
move only a large tech company could
make,” says David Farrell, lecturer in
computer games at Glasgow Caledonian
University. We meet in a pub in
Edinburgh, south of Scotland’s gaming
hub Dundee, where the companies
behind Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto,
Crackdown and Minecraft were all based.
In 2018, Edinburgh startup Cloudgine,
which developed real-time cloud gaming
technology, was bought by Fortnite
creators Epic Games to help move Epic’s
Unreal game engine into the cloud.
“Cloud gaming is the future –
although when it comes to the next
generation of consoles, Google’s
offering isn’t the most exciting thing
around, and it’s not clear how long it will
take to get there,” Farrell says. “In the
long term, Google isn’t really trying to be
Xbox; they’re trying to be the platform
on which everyone else builds their
cloud gaming – so essentially, they’d
be offering their ‘Netflix of gaming’ on
the back of Google technology. Unless
Google comes up with some killer app
games, it’s just building the pipes for
others’ cloud gaming to run through.”
George Jijiashvili, senior analyst at
tech research giant Ovum, has reserva-
tions about the technology, especially
when it comes to latency and lag. “Most
of what Google is promising is possible
and deliverable, but there are three or
four pain points that will take a few years
to be ironed out,” he says. “The biggest
one is networks – they can open up new games traditionally used to gain market
data centres closer to hubs, but most of share, and these are not cheap to
the networks users are receiving are low develop. Most AAA games cost up to
quality, and were put in place to transfer $70 million, and that’s just pure devel-
voice or small packets of data.” opment costs, with the marketing
Majd Bakar insists that Google has spend coming on top of that. The real
the answers. “Our platform and infra- killer app games can end up doubling
structure allow for techniques that that figure – Grand Theft Auto V cost
create additional time buffers,” he $137 million back in 2013, and Halo
explains. “We can generate frames Infinite (the kind of game that Stadia
in less time than it takes consoles or is up against) is rumoured to have a
PCs, and with our machine-learning budget of between $200 million and
experience we have built models to $500 million. And while Stadia does
help with the prediction and generation offer a monthly subscription, Jijiashvili
of content faster. This counteracts the says that “it’s not the Netflix service”
impact of network distribution time.” some gamers were expecting. “People
But consumers will still need a who sign up will still have to purchase
connection of a certain speed to make games. Unlike music with Spotify, where
full use of Stadia’s offering. Google albums died and cheaper individual
says that players will need a 35Mbps tracks became the offer, you can’t break
connection for the top-end 4K resolution games down into smaller chunks.”
experience or 20Mbps to play in HD, with Handrahan says that developers
a recommended minimum of 10Mbps. are desperate for a new marketplace.
Matthew Handrahan, editor of the trade “VR has stalled so there’s been no new
site gamesindustry.biz, thinks this may platform since mobile gaming 15 years
be asking too much. “I lived in Berlin until ago,” he says. “But developers are
six months ago, and I could only dream wary about Stadia. They are waiting to
of 6Mbps. We will only be able to judge hear how their games will earn money
properly when they’re out in the wild – in the free streaming service.”
and not in high-speed San Francisco.” Typically, platforms take 30 per cent
Then there’s the issue of Stadia’s of a game’s cover price, meaning big
business model, in terms of attracting publishers take 70 per cent – and
both game developers and end users. developers without a big publisher
At this point, the Stadia service lacks can end up with just 40 per cent.
the exclusive, hugely desirable AAA Increasingly, revenue for developers
is shifting towards in-game spending,
under which they earn more money per
minute of play rather than per copy
sold. Developers offering a game with
a defined end goal – such as first-
person shooter Doom (which on the
PlayStation 4 takes an average of 23
hours to finish) or the beautifully simple
puzzle game Gorogoa, which takes just
over two hours to complete – might
struggle financially on a subscription
streaming service.
That said, increased competition
among gaming platforms could be
good news for developers. In December
2018, Epic Games opened its digital
store for Mac and PC games, targeting
Steam owner Valve, which currently
controls 90 per cent of that market.
In a bid to disrupt Valve, Epic is taking
just 12 per cent of a game’s earnings.
Google remains tight-lipped about its
financial agreements with developers,
but Miles Jacobson, studio director at
Football Manager developer Sports
Interactive Games, says that Google’s
deal “works for us – which I haven’t
been able to say about other attempts
at streaming platforms previously”.
Jacobson does think that any future
arrangements will need to include
ancillary revenues. “We need to be better
as an industry at monetising away from
just core game sales,” he says. “Mobile
has done this in some ways, both good
and bad, but we will need to look at
merchandise opportunities – and some
kind of deal with the content streaming
platforms, like YouTube, to actually get
a cut from them when people use their
platforms to watch our content being
played, just like music companies have
for music being used in any context on
the videos on their platforms.”
Back in his office, Phil Harrison says
everyone is missing the big picture.
“Arguably, the least interesting
thing about Stadia is the fact that it’s
a streaming platform,” he says. “Every
successful technology disappears – it
becomes ambient, and you only think
about the experience. That changes
fundamentally the way that the game
is designed and the market works.”
For the last 40-odd years of game
development, Harrison maintains,
every game has been device-centric.
Game design has been gated by
the capabilities of the box, and the
hardware and software inside. Each
time a developer wants to move a game
to a different box, they have to go and
reinvent some aspect of it.
“Stadia turns it on its head,” he
says. “We are allowing the developer
to make the game once and then bring
it to any screen in your life, so that you,
the player, has the relationship with the
game, not the device. That’s a big mental
Playing to win: Stadia’s product director
Andrey Doronichev (left) and head of games
Jack Buser at Google’s Mountain View HQ
shift in the way that games are made,
but also the way that games are played.”
This shift can be compared to the
history of the moving image, Harrison
says. In the very early days of cinema,
the creation and distribution of content
was vertical, not horizontal. Films only
worked in certain cinemas, because
they had been shot on certain cameras.
“Then the distributors democratised
the exhibition of movies and created a
platform that everybody could build to
– which detonated a huge explosion of
content and access to content.”
What game would he design with all
of Stadia’s potential? Harrison pauses.
“I now look at games through the eyes
of my children,” he says. “I would love
to create an experience that my eight-
and ten-year-old sons would allow me
to play with them. To have that shared
experience where we can go on a
journey together as a band of brothers.
“Those kind of experiences become
shared and memorable, like if you go to
a theme park with your kids and take
photographs and videos – why shouldn’t
you have the same experiences
when you go into the game world?”�
Stephen Armstrong wrote about the
search for an Alzheimer’s vaccine in 07.19
TH E FUT UR E O F S TR EAM ING . S T UDY 0 2
099 NETFLI X VS DIS NEY

NETFLIX IS UNDER SIEGE. TWO

decades after it was founded, and
almost ten years since it moved into
streaming, its competitors have woken
up – though Netflix’s position as the
streaming king won’t be seriously
challenged for most of the next decade.
The firm has built up a critical mass
of 150 million subscribers, streams
in almost every country in the world,
and since 2012, has been making its
own Netflix Originals programming.
In 2013, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief
content officer, said the company was
racing against HBO to create the future
of television. “The goal is to become
HBO faster than HBO can become us,”
he said. Netflix arguably achieved this
in 2018, when it earned more Emmy
nominations than HBO for the first time,
while in the same year Now – HBO’s
over-the-top streaming service –
languished at five million subscribers.
But the pressure is intensifying, with
the launch of international streaming
services Apple TV+ and Disney+ in
November 2019. Moreover, Warner-
Media, the owner of HBO and Warner (In 2019, for example, it claimed three which perhaps explains why it has so
Brothers, and NBCUniversal are set to Oscars with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.) far failed to announce any shows that
launch proprietary streaming services. Disney has the production power to really surprise or delight. In September
These new rivals will join original attract subscribers, with three of the top 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported
programming efforts from Amazon five grossing films in 2018. And in 2019, that Apple CEO Tim Cook had objected
Prime and YouTube, plus traditional Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, to Vital Signs, a drama about hip hop
broadcasters, in trying to topple Netflix. Captain Marvel and Toy Story 4 sit at star Dr Dre which featured cocaine use
In the UK it has to contend with Sky’s the top of the charts. Moreover, Disney and an “extended orgy” scene.
Now TV and the upcoming Britbox, a has commissioned new Star Wars But the biggest impact of the
joint BBC and ITV venture. In India, series The Mandalorian specifically for new streaming services may not
Walmart-owned Flipkart launched its Disney+. Netflix has struggled to create be in what they offer, but what they
own streaming service in August 2019. film franchises, but has had success take away from Netflix. “The greater
Once Netflix’s competitors have creating series such as Stranger Things impact of Disney’s launch will be that
launched their services, the tedious and Orange is the New Black. all Disney content will be off Netflix
work of growing customer numbers However, Disney’s streaming capabil- by 2020,” says Michael Pachter, of
begins – a process that won’t see ities are yet to be tested at scale. It analysts Wedbush Securities, who has
quick results, even with the deep has children-focused Disney Life in frequently predicted Netflix stock is
pockets of Disney and Apple. “There’s the UK, and sports streaming through due to decline in value.
absolutely no way that Disney will ESPN+ in the US, but neither serves On top of this, Friends and The
overnight become as big as either tens of millions of people simultane- Office are set to vanish from Netflix’s
Netflix or Amazon – it’s going to take ously. Disney has yet to prove it has the library in 2020 – and in a poll by The
Disney well into the 2020s,” says Tony technical capability to create a system Hollywood Reporter, 49 per cent of
Gunnarsson, a principal analyst at that’s easy to navigate, user-friendly Netflix subscribers aged 18-29 in the
Ovum, specialising in pay TV and OTT and able to keep people watching. US said they would cancel if these two
video. In the US, Netflix took around a Apple has the opposite problem. With shows and Disney content were pulled.
decade to reach 65 million subscribers. more than a billion iPhones and iPads But for now Netflix has one final
For rivals, the main challenge is in circulation, it has a simple way to put trump card: in terms of brand recog-
that Netflix simply has the most out its TV offering – one update to iOS nition, it’s the first place users often look
complete offering. The platform is and everyone gets a new streaming for new shows. Want to see if something
technologically capable, with enough icon. Where it lacks experience is in is streaming? A Google search usually
ILLUSTRATION: BERKE YASIKIOGLU

experience in creating its own shows
and films to align itself with the
entertainment industry’s big-hitters.
Disney has the production power to attract
subscribers, with its 2019 films set to
emulate its top-grossing output of 2018
content. The roster of stars it has
signed up for Apple TV+ includes
Steven Spielberg, Reese Wither-
spoon, Jennifer Aniston and Oprah
Winfrey. But the company is known for
being family friendly and risk averse,
includes the word “Netflix”. “They’ve
branded it where they are the repository
of all television ever made,” Pachter
says. “So we will type in ‘I Love Lucy
Netflix’, which isn’t there, but we’ll just
assume maybe it is.” Matt Burgess
TW IT C H VS MI XER
IMAGINE WATCHING A LIVESTREAM
of your favourite sport – a football match,
say, or tennis tournament. But instead of
listening to the official commentator, you
provide your own play-by-play analysis –
and thousands of people hang on to your
every word. This is the vision of Twitch
CEO Emmett Shear, who sees a growing
future for “interactive livestreaming”
across the entertainment landscape.
Twitch, now a subsidiary of Amazon, is
best known for its video game content:
millions of followers watch top streamers
play games such as League of Legends,
Fortnite, and Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive in real time. But the platform
is branching out into potential areas of
growth such as sports. It has already
streamed football’s UEFA Champions
League and Europa League qualifiers,
and has made deals for USA Basketball
games and WWE wrestling pre-shows.
One challenge with hosting sporting
content, Shear says, is negotiating
rights that allow Twitch streamers to
run the broadcast on their own channels
with their own commentary.
This crucial interactive element is
what distinguishes Twitch and similar
platforms from the “passive” video
streaming services, such as Netflix.
People are interested not just in
watching the content; they congregate
around particular streamers and are
encouraged to actively engage with
them and other viewers by exchanging
messages and emotes (small images
The big streaming showdown is hotting
up with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins taking his
14 million followers from Twitch to Mixer
T H E FUT U RE O F S TR EAM ING . STUD Y
that express a reaction, similar to
emojis) in a live chat. Twitch also invites
third parties to create “extensions” that
streamers can activate to interact in
different ways, for example by sharing
real-time stats or holding a vote.
The upshot is many channels
streaming the same content – be it
Fortnite gameplay or wrestling – but
with their own spin. When it comes to
sport, Shear imagines a channel that
is dedicated to a particular player in
different tournaments and teams, or a
specific skill such as goalkeeping. “We
really think that that’s the future.”
Beyond sport, Twitch is attempting
to expand into other pastimes, such
as music. In April 2019, it launched its
first game under its own brand – Twitch
Sings, a karaoke title, developed with
US game maker Harmonix, that allows
streamers to sing along (usually endear-
ingly badly) to a library of pop and rock
songs. Under the “creative” category
on the platform, you can find streamers
0 3
making their own cooking or craft shows,
while the “IRL” category includes people
hosting talk shows or casually hanging
out. In many ways, this marks a return to
Twitch’s roots. It started out as Justin.TV,
a “lifecasting” channel for co-founder
Justin Kan, who livestreamed his daily
life via a baseball cap-mounted webcam.
However, Twitch is seeing more
competition, especially on the gaming
front. In August 2019, Tyler “Ninja”
Blevins, who with 14 million followers
had been the platform’s top streamer,
announced he was moving from Twitch
to Microsoft-owned Mixer.
Mixer may have only 30 million
monthly active users to Twitch’s
average 15+ million daily visitors, but
one advantage it has is a natural
relationship with Microsoft’s other
gaming properties, such as Xbox and
planned cloud gaming platform xCloud.
General manager Chad Gibson sees
potential for Mixer to work with xCloud
as a tool for game discovery, with users
able to go from watching a streamer play,
say, the next Halo title (itself published
by Xbox Game Studios) to playing the
game themselves in just a couple of
clicks – perhaps even jumping in to play
alongside the streamer.
Similarly, Google’s cloud-based Stadia
will allow players to stream to YouTube
by pushing a button on the controller – a
feature that seems to target the success
of gaming livestreams on Twitch.
Shear says he is not concerned about
increased competition. “Twitch has
never not benefited from innovation in
the game space,” he says. And more
broadly, he sees the rise of interactive
livestreaming as part of a broader shift
ILLUSTRATION: BERKE YASIKIOGLU
towards live events and experiences –
harking back to an era of community
entertainment. “Entertainment was
people sitting around a campfire, singing
songs, dancing,” he says. “It was always
a two-way experience.” Victoria Turk
10 1 SPOTI FY V S A P PLE M U SI C
THERE’S A CLUBTHAT’S OPEN STRICTLY
from 9pm until midnight. It’s called Out
Now. “At the front of the queue, you’ve
got Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Calvin
Harris. The queue is getting bigger and
bigger – it’s snaking round the block,
and new artists are right at the back.”
Out Now is a hypothetical club, but
the point that Zane Lowe – DJ, creative
director of Apple’s radio station Beats 1,
and now global head of artist relations
for Apple Music – is making is that, in
the music industry, it’s difficult to stand
out enough to get through the door –
and “when you get inside, it’s full”.
Beats 1 went on air in 2015, and what
Lowe has done with the platform is to
give musicians their own “clubs”, in the
form of freeform shows. “Whenever
Nicki Minaj does a [Beats 1] Queen Radio
show,” says Oliver Schusser, the current
head of Apple Music, “she’s number one
trending on Twitter.”
One of Apple’s priorities is to merge
its streaming service and its Beats 1
shows. “I want to integrate what we
do into Apple Music more thoroughly,”
says Lowe. “I would guess there are
still subscribers who don’t realise Elton
John has done over 200 shows. These
are works of art in their own right.”
Apple isn’t the only player trying
to own the future of radio. Spotify
spearheaded its move into audio
beyond music with $375 million of
podcast acquisitions in the first half
of 2019, and is now experimenting with
podcast playlists grouped around
themes. “Podcast discovery is moving
in the direction of the discovery of new
music,” says Spotify’s UK managing
director Tom Connaughton. “You’ll see
more bitesize, 20-minute shows that
work for the commute; not everyone has
two and a half hours to spare.”
While Zane Lowe might have the
music industry’s hottest contacts
book, Spotify is still the go-to music
As platforms flourish, artists still need
hundreds of thousands of plays a month to
make the equivalent of minimum wage
streaming service in Europe, with 83.5
million monthly active users as of
June 2019. (Apple Music has 60 million
subscribers worldwide.) But what’s next
is moving away from streaming. Spotify
has already produced live music events
based around its top playlists, such as
the Who We Be festival-style concert
series. Apple put on gigs for emerging
musicians in 2019, and Schusser says
the company wants more in the next 12
months. “We never retired the iTunes
Festival,” he says. “We paused it.”
The search is now on for customers
outside Europe and the US. Spotify Lite,
for older, low-cost phones, launched
in July 2019 in 36 countries. In Africa
it will face competition from Chinese
streaming service Boomplay. Amazon
Music Unlimited – in third place globally
in terms of subscribers – may poach
Spotify users with its free, ad-supported
streaming over Alexa-enabled devices.
It’s a good time to be a music fan.
Soundcloud’s role as a launchpad for
less well-known acts remains safe, and
YouTube Music has found its niche in
live performances and music video
playlists. French service Qobuz claims
to have 32 million subscribers to its
high-resolution, 24-bit catalogue in the
US; its success could push Apple and
Spotify on high quality audio.
But what about musicians? Data
from music analytics firm BuzzAngle
shows the top 25 artists accounted for
11 per cent of total streams in the US in
2018, and acts still need hundreds of
thousands of plays a month to make
the equivalent of minimum wage.
Spotify points out that, since the end
of 2018, 60,000 artists have submitted
music via its playlist submission tool
to be featured on Discover Weekly and
editorially curated playlists, where they
can get a substantial boost to listening
figures: of that number 36,000 artists
have been playlisted for the first time.
Its editors also monitor “hyperlocal”
scenes, such as rap in Birmingham, and
offer real-world promotion for breakout
artists on posters and billboards. The
Spotify for Podcasters tool came
out of beta in 2019 to join Spotify for
Artists, which lets musicians track the
performance of their releases. Apple
Music for Artists has also come out
of beta, sharing data on iTunes, Apple
Music and Shazam activity.
The ongoing battle between the
self-proclaimed “artist-first” (Apple)
and “fan-first” (Spotify) philosophies
will continue to shape music streaming
as both platforms battle for a bigger
share of the market. Sophie Charara
JAK ARTA
THE S I N K I N G MEGACITY
 THANKS TO A Heading north from the city centre to the coastline, Jakarta
seems to be collapsing in slow motion. The Indonesian
capital sprawls, its black-glass business district giving way

COMBINATION OF to a low-rise hinterland where the bones of the city jut out;
long spines of pale concrete pillars bearing kilometres of
knotted overpasses and raised highways. In their shadows are

SEA LEVEL RISE, industrial estates in various states of abandonment, stalled

construction sites already succumbing to the creep of tropical
foliage, sluggish waterways clotted with litter, and thousands

SUBSIDENCE upon thousands of houses, from clusters of bare-iron shacks

to landed three-storey homes, none the same as its neighbour.
The chaos runs to the seafront, where waterparks, malls and

AND POLITICAL luxury condos jostle for space with container ports and fishing
docks crammed so tight with small boats that from above
they look like tangles of rusted wire snagged on the shore.

INERTIA, JAKARTA Some of these docks are now hemmed in by giant walls.
At Cilincing – a northeastern suburb of the city made up
of scattered fishing communities and industrial ports –

COULD SOON five-metre-high concrete pillars have been dropped into the
shoreline, supporting a sloping buttress that blocks all view
of the sea from the land. Less than 50 metres behind it on the

BE THE FIRST landward side is another wall, constructed less than a decade
ago, that is now redundant; between them, fishermen use a
placid inlet to tie up and maintain their boats.

MEGACITY Twenty kilometres of sea walls have been thrown up around

Jakarta Bay in the past three years, along with many more
reinforcements along river banks, the first phase of a desperate

CLAIMED BY attempt to fortify the city’s waterlogged northern districts.

Jakarta, a megacity of 30 million people, is sinking. In places
along the coastline the ground has subsided by four metres over

CLIMATE CHANGE. the last few decades. Concrete barricades are the only thing
preventing whole communities from being engulfed by the sea.
Although many coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai,

DE SP ITE A have been forced by the threat of climate change to build high
walls to protect themselves, there are few places in the world
as vulnerable as Jakarta, where a decades-old problem of land

LAST-DITCH PLAN subsidence has intersected with rising sea levels.

Such is the concern about Jakarta’s future that the national
government is considering bailing out. In April, President Joko

TO SAVE IT, TH E Widodo – himself a former governor of the city – announced a

public search for a new capital for Indonesia, in no small part
because of its environmental problems.

I N D ON E SI AN The city’s new walls have bought it some time, but possibly
not enough. Behind them is an alarming case study in how
politicking, greed and vested economic interests can lead

CAPITAL’S DEMISE to a dangerous inertia – a microcosm of the global failure

to address climate change. Whether the city saves itself, or
whether it becomes the first megacity lost to environmental

SHOWS WHAT WILL catastrophe, will depend on a combination of ground-level

social change and engineering works of unprecedented scale.
“If we don’t do something, we’re doomed,” says Oswar

HAPPEN IF OTHER Mungkasa, the city’s deputy governor. “We will be leaving Jakarta.”

Jakarta has always flooded. With much of the city so close

COASTAL CITIES to sea level, the 13 rivers that flow through the metropolitan
area take a long time to drain into Jakarta Bay. Even relatively
short periods of heavy rain cause water to build up. To

FAIL TO ACT manage this, successive governments have built a network

By PETER GUEST
Photography: CHRISTOFFER RUDQUIST
of canals, most of them glassy in appearance and slow-flowing.
Pumping stations, weirs and run-off reservoirs sit between
malls and offices and in the centre of housing estates.
Over the past decade – oddly, because of a lack of water –
this canal infrastructure has come under increasing stress.
PRE V IOUS: A JA K A R TA RE SIDEN T WA DE S PA S T
A FL OODED MO SQUE NE A R T HE WAT ERFRON T
T HIS PAGE : OV ERFL OW CA N A L S, SUCH A S T HIS
ONE IN NOR T H JA K A R TA , H AV E P OWERF UL
PUMPING S TAT IONS T O DI V ER T S T ORM WAT ER
IN T O T HEM. HOWE V ER , MO S T A RE F UL L T O
CA PACI T Y, E V EN DURING T HE DR Y SE A SON

As the city grew after the 1970s oil boom – the population
of the wider metro region has more than tripled in 50 years –
it spread far faster than its supporting infrastructure. Piped
water services only reach around 60 per cent of the population
and are concentrated in the relatively wealthy areas in south
and central Jakarta. The rivers, which should provide fresh
water, are largely unusable due to unregulated dumping of
waste, from untreated human excrement to industrial effluent.
Residents and businesses – even some government buildings
– have sunk boreholes into the aquifers beneath the city.
“People are pumping out too much groundwater, and because
of the rapid urbanisation over the last 30 years, the permeable
surface in the city has decreased to a point where you don’t have
enough recharge [from rain] to the groundwater,” says Kian
Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at the University
of California, Los Angeles, who has studied Jakarta in depth.
Pumping out groundwater has lowered the city’s founda-
tions, causing widespread subsidence. Some areas in the north
have sunk four metres in two decades; they’re so far below the
level of the bay that there is nowhere for water to drain out.
Climate change is likely to compound this problem. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that
“business as usual” carbon emissions would drive a one-metre
rise in sea levels by 2100. In the more hopeful scenarios
envisioned by the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change
– temperature rises of 1.5°C or 2°C – sea levels are predicted
to increase by 0.4m or 0.46m, respectively.
In Jakarta, where so much of the city is already low-lying,
the margin for error is nonexistent. “I’ve seen several studies
that say that if the trend of sea level rise continues, by 2030 the
north of Jakarta will be flooded, including the international
airport,” says Arief Wijaya, who heads the climate change
programme at the World Resources Institute Indonesia.
Jakarta is already hit by storm surges and heavy rain from
annual cyclones; added to this is the threat of unpredictable
and extreme weather, made more frequent by global heating.
Successive administrations have been aware of the problem,
but have felt able to ignore it, largely because the consequences
impacted poorer areas of the city, such as the southern district
of Bukit Duri, which straddles the Ciliwung River. There, on one
bank, wood-framed houses lean on stilts over the water, which
is filthy and clogged with plastic waste; on the other, more
solid structures show signs of constant patching and repairs.
Lupus, a resident of the district for more than 50 years,
shows me around the inside of a ruined government building,
which was abandoned in the 1970s after being gutted by a flood
that reached the rafters. Since then, it has never reopened –
although it has been used as a set for several horror movies. The
city government ignored these districts, and residents either
adapted to the perennial floods or learned to accept them.
The calculus was changed by two disasters. In 2007, four-me-
tre-deep floods swept through the city. In Bukit Duri, Lupus
remembers the water reaching waist height on the second
floor: “We had to sleep on the roof,” he says. During the floods
the city was inundated both by rainfall and by seawater coming
in from the coast – the land had subsided so far that storm
surges carried water inland, engulfing whole neighbourhoods.
More than 300,000 people were evacuated and 80 died.
Then, in 2013, sustained rainfall overwhelmed the
flood management infrastructure. Canals collapsed and
clogged, and the flooding spread beyond the poorer areas
of the city and into the central business district. Around 45
L EF T: O SWA R MUNGK A S A , JA K A R TA’S
DEPU T Y GOV ERNOR . RIGH T: T HE NE W SE A
WA L L RUNNING A L ONG T HE B AY – T HE
PIL E S OF “GR AV EL” A RE MUS SEL SHEL L S,
DISCA RDED IN T HEIR MIL L IONS BY L OCA L
MUS SEL-PICK ING INDUS T RIE S
people died and thousands of households were evacuated.
The then-governor, Joko Widodo – now Indonesia’s
president – ordered a large-scale renovation of the city’s
rivers, reservoirs and flood canals, which had become fatally
clogged. Controversially, under an initiative euphemistically
called “normalisation”, some informal settlements on river-
banks were bulldozed to widen the waterways.
In Muara Baru, a four-metre-high wall was built on one
bank of the Ciliwung, protecting the community on that side
of the river from most of the smaller floods – although water
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: PETER GUEST
still spills over regularly during the wet season.
At the same time, the national government began to look
at coastal defence in earnest. It launched a new project, the
National Capital Integrated Coastal Development, or NCICD,
and called in a coalition of international experts, most of
them from the Netherlands, which has turned its own centu-
ries-old experience of protecting its low-lying shoreline
into a global industry. Among them was Victor Coenen.
10 7 Coenen, a tall, genial Dutchman, moved to Jakarta six
years ago to head the project with Witteveen+Bos, a Dutch
engineering company. His first job was to weigh up the possible
scenarios, starting with simply giving up on north Jakarta.
“There are places on the north coast of Indonesia where
abandoning is the cheapest way,” Coenen says. “Like in the UK,
coastal areas are now being given back to the sea because it’s
simply too expensive to protect them.” His team calculated that
the economic cost alone would be around $200 billion (£158
billion), before the human cost of moving between two and
three million people was taken into account. “But where would
you relocate [the people]?” he says. “So that abandonment
scenario was quickly: ‘Forget about it. That’s not possible.’”
The second option was to build defences onshore. After
the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, its
government ordered the construction of nearly 400km of sea
walls on the country’s northern coast. Those walls, some more
than 12 metres high, cost more than $12 billion (£9.5 billion).
For Jakarta, Coenen and his team calculated that they would
need walls five to seven metres high, stretching the length of the
bayfront, with massive pumping stations behind the walls and
deep reservoirs for overflows. That would still mean moving
large numbers of people and buying up large areas of land.
“The urban impact of such an on-land solution is huge,”
Coenen says. “Imagine seven-metre-high sea walls on the
coastline. It’s like a reversed aquarium, with the water outside.”
An onshore project would be prohibitively expensive, socially
disruptive, and not a long term answer. They had to go offshore.
Construction soon began on a short-term fix: upgrading
the existing sea walls, adding 1.5 to 2.5 metres on top of
existing structures and filling in gaps in the defences,
while ever more engineers, consultants and government
agencies began to work on the shape of the offshore plan.
Fairly soon, however, Jakarta’s politics started to get in the way.
THE ISLAND OF
PANTAI
INDAH KAPUK
is linked to the Javan mainland by white half-helix bridges
that, uncharacteristically for Jakarta, are clear of traffic and
lined with neat pavements. In the glare of the dry season
Sun, it looks like a Florida resort village. Multi-storey condos
overlook a food court with bright-coloured awnings, while
plastic corporate art adorns the grass verges and roundabouts.
The finished buildings are clearly unoccupied, and away
from the bridges all work has stopped and the remaining land
is fenced off behind high construction hoardings. Idle earth
movers are lined up in neat ranks, watched over by security
guards, and several sites are going to seed, the bare steel poles
of rebar rusting where they jut out of unfinished foundations.
Pantai Indah Kapuk is a vestigial piece of the first – now-can-
celled – plan for Jakarta’s flood defence, and an emblem of
how commercial concerns hijacked the city’s attempts to
secure its coastline; it is one of 17 islands that were due to be
reclaimed from the bay using millions of tonnes of sand and
concrete. Those islands were due to stud the inner curve of
Jakarta Bay, providing homes for hundreds of thousands of
residents, as well as office space, malls and even a new airport.
Out in front of them, the plan called for a massive series of
sea walls which, viewed from above, would make the shape of
the Garuda, a mythical bird that is the emblem of Indonesia.
Artists’ impressions show a city on the sea, a tropical Dubai.
However, the project, which was unveiled in 2014, was out
of control from the very beginning.
“The consultants at that time were given the boundary
conditions that the Indonesian government should not invest
one penny in this,” says Peter Letitre, a groundwater expert
from Dutch hydrological institute Deltares and an advisor to
the NCICD project. “A typical Jakarta project. The only way
to finance it was through land reclamations.”
The project, which Letitre calls “megalomaniac”, became
self-perpetuating: each new part needed more infrastructure
and more defences, which meant raising more money, which
meant yet more reclamation to make land to sell to devel-
opers. As it grew, it began to suck in other projects onshore
and offshore. Local media reported that the total cost of the
project would be $40 billion (£31.5 billion), and although the
engineers and architects disputed that figure, it stuck.
“All of the things that were needed to improve the infra-
structure of Jakarta were put under the price tag of the
NCICD project. So the amount became higher. And the only
way that you could make money back was through more land
reclamation,” Letitre says. “That was the trap… it became
so huge and massive and expensive.”
The project was flawed beyond the price tag. To manage the
difference in water levels on either side of the sea wall, it called
for deep reservoirs on the land side that would have collected
the runoff from the rivers, with huge pumps that would have
transferred the excess out to sea. However, Jakarta’s rivers are
some of the most polluted in the world. Without a drastic – and
frankly unrealistic – improvement to the city’s water quality,
the area behind the “Great Garuda” could have become a giant
109

‘ IF WE DON’ T DO
SOMETHING ,
WE’RE DOOMED ‘
O SWA R MUNGK A S A , DEPU T Y GOV ERNOR , JA K A R TA
111 lagoon fouled with the combined effluent of the megacity
– an environmental hazard in its own right. One hydrologist,
who worked on the project and asked not to be named because
he is still working with the national government, says the
solution was “a completely insane idea” that would have
resulted in polluted water backing up into the city.
Some opponents suspected that the land reclamation
was the whole point. Since the 1990s, developers had been
pushing for the creation of new land; the 17 new islands were
planned before NCICD was conceived and hastily brought
under the umbrella of the project. “It was never about flood
defence,” says Tubagus Soleh Ahmadi, the executive director
of WALHI Jakarta, a local environment advocacy NGO and
campaign group. “This was an economic project.”
Opposition to the scheme began to grow. Coastal
communities worried about the destruction of their fishing
grounds; inland, discontent lingered over the clearance and
eviction of riverside settlements from the last time that the
government had “prioritised” flood defence. Work stopped
and started throughout 2016. In gubernatorial elections
the following year, one candidate, Anies Baswedan, made a
moratorium on land reclamation a major part of his platform.
He won, and stood by his promise.
The Great Garuda was quietly shelved, although it lingers in
the city’s imagination, due to the absence of public announce-
ments regarding any replacement. Reclamation work was
halted. By the time the moratorium took effect, four of the 17
islands – including Pantai Indah Kapuk – had been built. The
developments on top of them are now frozen in time.
AS THE
NCICD PLAN
MORPHED
AND EVOLVED
AND STALLED,
JAKARTA KEPT
FLOODING,
and attention shifted to the other side of the equation Ð
stopping the city from sinking any further.
In charge of that rearguard action is Oswar Mungkasa.
Tall and professorial, dressed in the military-style khakis
of the city’s civil servants, Mungkasa is a 25-year veteran
of national and regional government and Jakarta’s deputy
governor in charge of spatial planning and the environment.
Since 2017 he has also held the title of “chief resilience
officer” – a wide-ranging role that gives him responsibility
for fixing everything that threatens the running of the city,
L EF T: M A K E SHIF T HOME S IN
BUK I T DURI, A L ONGSIDE T HE
P OL LU T ED CIL IW UNG RI V ER .
RIGH T: V IC T OR COENEN,
PRO JEC T M A N AGER OF
NCICD, WHICH IS PL A NNING
JA K A R TA’S NE W DEFENCE S
from rubbish collection to racial harmony to preparing
for a giant earthquake. These challenges grow every year
in proportion to the population; 200,000 people move to
Jakarta annually, drawn by and adding to the city’s huge
economic expansion. “The urbanisation process has been
too fast. We cannot keep up,” Mungkasa says.
His role has hammered home just how fragile the megacity
is. “If something happened in Jakarta, our food only lasts
maybe one week,” he says.
The sinking of the city is one of the most pressing
challenges on Mungkasa’s slate. It is also one of the most
intractable, a complex problem that involves dealing with
some of the city’s longest-standing environmental issues.
It all starts with clean water.
The mechanism by which Jakarta is settling into its
foundations has been understood for decades. The soft soil
underneath the city is held up by the pressure of water in
aquifers and reservoirs deep below the surface. Removing
that water lowers the pressure, and the land above it sinks.
That issue is exacerbated by building heavy structures on
the surface, and by coating it with impermeable materials,
like concrete, which prevent water from seeping back down
and recharging the subsoil reservoirs.
It is a challenge that has presented itself elsewhere,
including in Tokyo and Venice. “They stopped it by simply
starting to regulate this enormous overuse of water,” says
Jørgen Steenfelt, technical director of marine and foundation
engineering at consultancy COWI and an expert on urban water
issues. “At the root, it’s regulation. If you can’t regulate it, you
have no control over what is happening. If it’s the wild west and
everybody does as they please, then there’s no stopping it.”
Even that is just a palliative measure – groundwater levels
would need to be recharged, restoring the pressure deep
underground to prevent further slippage. Tokyo, which effec-
tively halted all groundwater extraction by the late 90s, is still
sinking by around one centimetre every year.
There are examples where restoring these water levels is
being attempted. In Chesapeake Bay, in the US, hundreds of
thousands of cubic metres per day of recycled wastewater
are being pumped into aquifers to stop the subsidence of
farmlands. In the fields around Bangkok, which has also been
sinking for decades, the government has put in place regula-
tions requiring farmers to include reservoirs in their properties
to store rainwater and allow it to seep back into the soil.
However, there is no precedent of anything of this sort
being attempted in a city close to the massive scale of
Jakarta, Steenfelt says. The sheer size of the challenge,
and the city’s historical failures to meaningfully tackle the
problem, mean that he is not hopeful.
IN JUNE THIS
“Jakarta is a sad story, and it’s very difficult to see how it
could be resolved, because of the timescale and the number
of people,” he says. “It’s a gigantic task. But you can’t
YEAR, A
just close your eyes.”
Mungkasa is well aware of the scale of the problem, and
of the rapidly approaching deadlines. By his estimates, the
NEW PLAN FOR
city needs to stop pumping groundwater entirely within five
years. It is an enormously ambitious target. “We have to be
confident that we can do it,” he says.
JAKARTA’ S
The alternative is unthinkable. “If this is not a success, if we
fail to do it, to reach our target, then there are two [plans]. Plan
B and Plan C. Plan B is we need to build another sea wall. The
OFFSHORE
second, of course, if the sea wall still doesn’t work, we have
to move the people… to move people is really unbelievable.”
His first job is to rationalise the ways in which Jakarta
has managed, or mismanaged, its water supplies. The city’s
administration is as tangled and chaotic as the city it serves,
with dozens of overlapping ministries, agencies, parastatal
companies and private contractors all working on ostensibly
similar missions, but often not talking to one another. In
sanitation alone, Mungkasa says, there are three agencies
that share responsibility for managing sewage, which will
occasionally duplicate each other’s work in some areas while
collectively neglecting others.
Even where there are laws governing how water should be
treated and recycled, enforcement is poor. An estimated half a
million people have no access at all to sanitation, and defecate
straight into the water courses. The company responsible
for wastewater treatment for the city says it covers around
11 per cent of the total area of the city; Mungkasa insists the
reality is closer to five per cent.
“I think this [lack of co-ordination] happens in every city
in developing countries,” Mungkasa says. “But in Jakarta
it is really killing us.”
Mungkasa and his small “resilience secretariat” – a group
of three young urban experts in a windowless room in an
annex of city hall – are putting together a new “master plan”
for the water sector, which will be unveiled later this year. It
is likely to advise more regulation or taxes on groundwater
extraction, and to encourage public sector organisations to lead
by example; currently even ministries tasked with fixing the
problem of flooding are themselves pumping out groundwater.
Cleaning the rivers will be a huge challenge. As well as sea wall was approved in principle by the ministry of public
human waste, most of the 13 rivers have been contaminated works, although it could be another 12 months before it gets
with industrial chemicals, including heavy metals, and it could its final approval and work can finally start.
take years just to stop the ongoing pollution. In the meantime, NCICD II is modest in scope compared to the Great Garuda,
the city will need to expand its use of rainwater harvesting and but it is still vast, comprising of a single open dyke that
other emerging water collection and purification technologies. will run 40km across the bay of Jakarta, from the port at
Property developers are being encouraged to build ponds Tanjung Priok in the east, to the Soekarno-Hatta airport in
and reservoirs into their designs in order to store rainwater, the west. Lessons have been learned from NCICD I’s failure.
and to switch to vertical drainage, pumping used water down Gone are the reclaimed islands and the property develop-
into the earth rather than letting it flow back into the rivers. ments, although a toll road will be built along the dyke in
Mungkasa – who has a politician’s gift for making out that order to help secure financing for the project. The outer dyke
intractable problems have simple solutions – says that he has is scheduled to begin construction in 2023.
no doubt this master plan will work. “If we provide people “Reclamation is now off the table, and we’re back to flood
with water, we will stop the subsidence,” he says. defence,” Coenen says. “We were always against merging
Few experts would question that, but many are skeptical the economy and the flood defence in such a way that you
about whether the measures can be taken in time – if at all. depended on economic development for your flood defence.
“It could work,” says Deltares’ Peter Letitre. “It depends on The Great Garuda was a real estate project, basically. But
the sense of urgency… we don’t think it’s impossible.” real estate goes up and down. Real estate crashes. You have
113 periods where the market goes up into the sky. What you don’t
want is that your flood defence depends on that dynamic.”
He is also aware, he says, that more work is needed to
make sure that the project’s architects understand the
complex social issues that it brings up. Discussions have
often been led by foreign experts and by engineers who
are unaware of or unwilling to confront the messy reality
on the ground. “You have to commit yourself to the social
issues that you are creating,” he says. “And don’t just scratch
the surface – but go very deep.”
Coenen estimates that the total cost of the dyke will be
around $4 billion (£3.2 billion), with another $4 billion
for pumping stations and on-land reservoirs – although
that could change. “We are heavily dependent on the sand
price. If it goes up one dollar per tonne, we will have to pay
€1 billion extra, because the volumes are so big. A very small

L EF T: BRIDGE S L E A DING T O
ONE OF T HE FOUR RECL A IMED
“GRE AT G A RUDA” ISL A ND S
RIGH T: T HE REM A INS OF T HE
TA X OFFICE IN BUK I T DURI.
T HE BUIL DING WA S
FL OODED IN T HE 19 70 S, A ND
T HEN A B A NDONED

uptick of the price has enormous consequences,” he says.
The dyke will act as a huge breakwater to reduce the height
of waves entering the bay, and to take the momentum out
of storm surges so that they do not wash over the inner sea
walls. Crucially, it leaves room for failure. The base level
plan assumes that land subsidence will be addressed, but
it includes contingencies in case it continues, or if sea level
rise occurs faster than anticipated.
“Two scenarios are still on the table: close the bay, or
keep it open,” Coenen says. “That really depends on what
will happen with the land subsidence. If the land subsidence
remains as it is or even accelerates, then you have to go to
this mega closed system. If the land subsidence is managed
then we can still keep the bay of Jakarta open.”
That call will be made around 2030 when, at current
rates of subsidence, the existing walls will be obsolete.
Closing the dyke would be a massive project in its own
right, and raise all of the same issues of water pollution that
arose during the Great Garuda, but by then there would be
very few other options left on the table.
With the timescales for the project so long, there is still
a chance that politics could once again get in the way, and
Coenen is not entirely certain that everything will be resolved
before Jakarta reaches the point of no return.
“I think you can compare it to the problem of climate change
– where governments do see the problem, but they postpone
very expensive and difficult measures towards the longer
term, and only focus on the quick wins… That is the nature
of this kind of problem and the way politicians solve it,” he
says. “Indonesia is a country where things can stall, or happen
very fast. It doesn’t seem like this country has something in
between. In an optimistic view, this is a just-in-time society.
But in a more realistic view, we’re always a little bit too late.” �
Peter Guest wrote about BioCarbon’s use of flying, seed-firing
drones to reforest Myanmar’s mangrove wetlands in 05.19
he idea that made Mariana Mazzucato one of the most Mazzucato included her findings in a 150-page pamphlet she
influential economists in the world came to her in early submitted to UK policy thinktank Demos. It was distributed
2011. It had been three years since the financial crisis of to thousands of policymakers, and received coverage in daily
2008 and, in the UK, the coalition government of Conserv- newspapers. “It was obvious that it had touched a nerve,”
atives and Liberal Democrats had chosen to pursue a she says. “The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to
fiscal policy of austerity that was forcing councils to cut go straight to the core of the myths about innovation.” She
back public services and leading to a rise of homelessness decided to dissect the product that best symbolised Silicon
and crime. “In my neighbourhood, after-school clubs, Valley’s engineering prowess: the iPhone.
youth centres, public libraries, policing and mental Mazzucato traced the provenance of every technology
health budgets were all cut, affecting the most vulnerable that made the iPhone. The HTTP protocol, of course, had
people in society,” she recalls. “It was very sad.” been developed by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and
What particularly infuriated Mazzucato was the prevailing implemented on the computers at CERN, in Geneva. The
narrative that such cuts were necessary to boost competi- internet began as a network of computers called Arpanet,
tiveness and innovation. In March 2011, then Prime Minister funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in the 60s
David Cameron gave a speech excoriating civil servants to solve the problem of satellite communication. The DoD
working in government, labelling them “enemies of MAZZUCATO’S MANIFESTOS: was also behind the development of GPS
enterprise”. Later that year, in November, he visited THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STATE during the 70s, initially to determine the
the Truman Brewery in east London to announce his location of military equipment. The hard
plans for a new technology cluster called Tech City. The ideas for this acclaimed disk drive, microprocessors, memory chips
“They were hyping up entrepreneurs and dismissing 2013 book were first presented and LCD display had also been funded by
everyone else,” Mazzucato recalls. “There was this in a pamphlet for the cross- the DoD. Siri was the outcome of a Stanford
belief that we didn’t have European Googles and party political think tank Research Institute project to develop a
Facebooks because we didn’t subscribe to Silicon Demos. By means of case virtual assistant for military staff, commis-
Valley’s free market approach. It was just ideology: studies, Mazzucato argues sioned by the Defense Advanced Research
there was no free market in Silicon Valley.” that the state – which is Projects Agency (DARPA). The touchscreen
It was then that Mazzucato, an Italian-American generally considered to was the result of graduate research at the
economist who had spent decades researching the be a static bureaucratic University of Delaware, funded by the
economics of innovation and the high tech industry, organisation – has actively National Science Foundation and the CIA.
decided to look deeper into the early history of some shaped markets and drives “Steve Jobs has rightly been called
of the world’s most innovative companies. The devel- innovation. The first iPhone, a genius for the visionary products he
opment of Google’s search algorithm, for instance, for instance, was the product conceived and marketed, [but] this story
had been supported by a grant from the National of various government-funded creates a myth about the origin of Apple’s
Science Foundation, a US public grant-awarding technologies, from the internet success,” Mazzucato writes in her 2013
body. Electric car company Tesla initially struggled to GPS to Siri voice assistance. book The Entrepreneurial State. “Without
to secure investment until it received a $465 million the massive amount of public investment
(£380 million) loan from the US Department of behind the computer and internet revolu-
Energy. In fact, three companies founded by Elon tions, such attributes might have led only
Musk – Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX – had jointly to the invention of a new toy.”
benefited from nearly $4.9 billion in public support But a narrative of innovation that
of various kinds. Many other well-known US startups omitted the role of the state was exactly
had been funded by the Small Business Innovation Mazzucato with US politician what corporations had been deploying
Research programme, a public venture capital Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they lobbied for lax regulation and low
fund. “It wasn’t just early research, it was also taxation. According to a study by Mazzucato
applied research, early stage finance, strategic and economist Bill Lazonick, between 2003
procurement,” she says. “The more I looked, the and 2013 publicly listed companies in the
more I realised: state investment is everywhere.” S&P 500 index used more than half of their
117 earnings to buy back their shares to boost stock prices, rather
than reinvesting in further R&D. Pharmaceutical company
Pfizer, for example, spent $139 billion on share buybacks. Apple,
which had never engaged in this type of financial engineering
under Jobs, started doing so in 2012. By 2018, it had spent
nearly one trillion dollars on share buybacks. “Those profits
could be used to fund research and training,” Mazzucato says.
“Instead, they are often used on share buybacks and golfing.”
That posed an urgent, more fundamental problem. If it
was the state, not the private sector, which had traditionally
assumed the risks of uncertain technological enterprises
that led to the development of aviation, nuclear energy,
computers, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the internet,
how were we going to find the next wave of technologies to
tackle urgent challenges such as catastrophic climate change,
the epidemic of antibiotic resistance, the rise of dementia?
“History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive
collective effort – not just from a narrow group of young white
men in California,” Mazzucato says. “And if we want to solve
the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.”

One of Mazzucato’s most enduring memories of her

childhood is watching her father Ernesto, a nuclear fusion
physicist at Princeton University, yelling at the news. She
would say, “Dad, that’s just information,” to which he would
reply: “That’s not information, that’s just what they’re trying
to make you believe.” “A critical eye was the first thing my
dad instilled in me, mainly just from watching him swear at
the TV,” Mazzucato says. After the publication of The Entre-
preneurial State, Mazzucato, an effervescent woman in her
late forties, became a regular on current affairs programmes,
often delivering devastating critiques of commonly held
economic beliefs with eloquence. During a debate about the
budget deficit on Newsnight in 2017, she berated host Evan
Davis for obsessing about it, explaining with exasperation:
“Deficits matter, but what matters is what you’re spending it on.”
When asked about Google’s tax avoidance by Jon Snow MAZZUCATO’S MANIFESTOS: something wrong with the story. We need
on Channel 4 News, she retorted: “You know what? RETHINKING CAPITALISM a new theory to replace this, and Mariana
That’s not the problem. The real problem is that people is trying to build a rival narrative.”
don’t know about the backroom deals that the Googles Published in 2016, it was co- Mazzucato was surprised to find
and the Apples and the Glaxos and the Pfizers have edited with Michael Jacobs of s u p p o r te r s i n s i d e t h e c o a l i t i o n
with the treasuries around the world on tax policy.” the Institute for Public Policy government. “To be honest, given that
That the message at the core of her book had Research, a London-based I had mainly written academic things,
resonated with a general audience didn’t necessarily left-wing think tank (Jacobs there was no real risk that I sounded like
surprise Mazzucato. “Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had also been a special adviser a communist,” she says. That support came
rarely acknowledged that they were standing on the to Gordon Brown while he was in the form of Business Secretary Vince
shoulders of giants. It was a call to arms to innovators PM). The book explains how Cable, who founded the Catapult centres
to sort of step up and acknowledge that,” says Saul and why modern capitalism to promote partnerships between scien-
Klein, co-founder of venture capital firm LocalGlobe. went wrong and offers ideas for tists and entrepreneurs; and the “eight
“There has been a very concerted effort, over the past more inclusive and sustainable great technologies” investment announced
40 years, to build this intellectual construct that was growth. Contributors include by David Willetts, Minister for Univer-
sold to government and sold to society about the free Nobel Prize-winning economist sities and Science. “There’s been a gap in
market, supported by businessmen who were trying to Joseph Stiglitz, and current conservatism in offering a constructive
tell a story that was advantageous to them,” says tech chief economist of the Bank account of the role of the state,” Willetts
mogul Tim O’Reilly. “It’s now very clear that there’s of England, Andy Haldane. says. “Mariana provided an account of
the role of government which was neither one of minimal
government nor traditional socialism. I was able to say in
government, hang on, this isn’t some experiment with left-wing
socialism. This is what happens in Republican America.”
Soon, she was a regular at Whitehall, advising both Cable
and Willetts on policies such as the Small Business Research
Above: Mariana Mazzucato in front of a whiteboard outlining how Initiative, which funded small and medium enterprises, and the
a mission might break down into actionable parts patent box, which reduced the rate of corporate tax on income
derived from patents (which she calls “the stupidest policy ever”.)
Mazzucato knew that to influence politicians she would need to
do more than just criticise. “Progressives often lose the argument
because they focus too much on wealth redistribution and not
119 on wealth creation,” she says. “We need a progressive narrative
that’s not only about spending, but investing in smarter ways.”
At the time, Mazzucato was increasingly interested in what
she called mission-oriented organisations. The prime example
was DARPA, the research agency founded by President Eisen-
hower in 1958 following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik.
The agency pumped billions of dollars into the development
of prototypes that preceded commercial technology such as
Microsoft Windows, videoconferencing, Google Maps, Linux
and the cloud. In Israel, Yozma, a government-backed venture
capital fund that ran between 1993 and 1998, supported more
than 40 companies. In the UK, the Government Digital Service,
launched in 2010, was behind the award-winning .gov.uk domain,
saving the government £1.7 billion in IT procurement. “When I
use the word ‘state’ I am talking about a decentralised network
of different state agencies,” she says. When such agencies are
mission-oriented to solve problems and structured to take
risks, they can be an engine of innovation.”
To Mazzucato, the epitome of the mission-oriented
concept was Apollo, the space programme designed to land
Americans on the Moon and return them safely to Earth.
Between 1960 and 1972, the US government spent $26 billion and ambitiously for the public good and, in the words of Steve
to achieve precisely that. More than 300 different projects Jobs, to ‘stay hungry and stay foolish’,” she says.
contributed, not only in aeronautics but in areas such as In early 2017, Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner
nutrition, textiles, electronics and medicine, resulting in for Research, Science and Innovation, offered her a position
1,800 spinoff products, from freeze-dried food to cooling suits, as special adviser, which she accepted. “I wanted the work to
spring tyres and digital fly-by-wire flight control systems used have an impact,” she says. “Otherwise it’s champagne socialism:
in commercial aeroplanes. The programme was also instru- you go in, talk every now and then, and nothing happens.” She
mental in kick-starting an industry for the integrated circuit, suggested reframing the European research and innovation
an unproven technology at the time, and other space projects programme as Horizon Europe, a €100 billion (£90 billion)
such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. mission-oriented initiative due to start in 2020. Moedas gave
The modus operandi of these mission-oriented institutions her carte blanche to pursue the project.
provided Mazzucato with an alternative vocabulary that told a The European Commission had traditionally framed its
different story about the role of the state. “Economics is full of policies in terms of grand challenges, but Mazzucato’s concept
stories,” she says. “Words like ‘enabling’, ‘facilitating’, ‘spending’, of missions translates these into concrete projects: the Cold
‘regulating’ – they create a story of the state as boring and War was a challenge; landing on the Moon was a mission. In
inertial. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need a new February 2018, she published a report – “Mission-Oriented
narrative to guide better policies.” These mission-oriented insti- Research & Innovation in the European Union” – that defined
tutions were actively creating and shaping markets, rather than five criteria missions should obey: they must be bold and inspire
merely fixing them. They were ambitiously seeking MAZZUCATO’S MANIFESTOS: citizens; be ambitious and risky; have a
high-risk directions for research and investment, THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING clear target and deadline (you have to be
rather than outsourcing and avoiding uncertainty. able to unambiguously answer whether the
Mazzucato’s collaboration with Whitehall was Exploring the concept of mission was accomplished to deadline or
put on hold after the 2015 general election: Willetts value in the economy, this not); be cross-disciplinary and cross-sec-
stood down from his seat, and Cable lost his. By then, 2018 book illustrates why GDP torial (eradicating cancer, for example,
however, she had gone global – working with US growth and stock values tend would require innovation in healthcare,
Democrat Elizabeth Warren on public funding for to be prioritised over societal nutrition, AI and pharmaceuticals); and
health innovation, and advising Scottish First Minister wellbeing. Mazzucato argues allow for experimentation and multiple
Nicola Sturgeon on the development of a Scottish that it has been too easy for attempts at a solution, rather than be
national investment bank. Mazzucato also launched the financial sector to get rich micromanaged top-down by a government.
a new type of economics department at University by extracting value from other In the report, she illustrated what
College London, the Institute for Innovation and Public sectors, and not creating it missions could look like with three
Purpose (IIPP) – with the mission of training the next itself. The book also highlights hypothetical examples: a plastic-free
generation of civil servants in the theory of mission-ori- the government’s potential for ocean, 100 carbon-neutral cities by 2030,
ented policies. “We want to them to think strategically building “societal wealth”. SW and cutting dementia by 50 per cent. The
clean oceans mission could involve removing half of the plastic
already polluting the oceans and reducing by 90 per cent the
quantity of plastics entering them before 2025, through projects
such as autonomous plastic collection stations or distributed
nets. The solution would require inventing alternatives to
plastic, designing novel forms of food packaging, and creating
Left : Mazzucato in her Bloomsbury office. The poster is for the AI systems that could separate waste automatically. “These
Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose lectures she chaired were just examples to tease out the difficulties,” Mazzucato
says. “When people talk about missions, I always warn them:
if this is something that makes you feel comfortable and happy
and cosy, then you haven’t understood it, because it’s actually
about fundamentally changing how we think about innovation.”
In March 2018, Mazzucato was contacted by two
members of a progressive political movement in the
US called Justice Democrats. She had no idea who
Saikat Chakrabarti and Zack Exley were.
Chakrabarti and Exley had previously worked for
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, going
on to co-found a political action committee with the
aim of recruiting 400 working class candidates to run
for Congress. “The idea was to create a new caucus
within the Democratic Party,” Chakrabarti says. “We
have people like Donald Trump in the White House,
the Democratic Party leadership is acting as if it’s still
1995. The real divide is not between left and right. It’s
between ambition and not ambition.”
In London, at Mazzucato’s home in Camden, they
told her that, in three months, they were hoping to
have elected officials in Congress who would be willing
to talk about big policy ideas, particularly environ-
mental. One of their most promising candidates was
a young bartender from New York: Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez. In June 2018, Ocasio-Cortez defeated ten-term
incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary.
A month later, Mazzucato and Ocasio-Cortez
spoke over Skype for the first time, discussing a new,
ambitious industrial policy that the Justice Democrats
were calling the Green New Deal. Mazzucato had
been one of the originators, in collaboration with the
economist Carlota Perez. “The most important thing is
to stop thinking that we should sacrifice our way of life
in order to solve our environmental problems,” Perez
says. “[It’s] an opportunity to transform our society
in a way that is also fairer and socially sustainable.”
To Mazzucato, a Green New Deal could
be as bold as the 1969 moonshot. “When
my book came out, Bill Gates invited me
to come to Seattle,” she says. “He told me
that he had followed the lead of the public
SCALING UP INNOVATION: sector when it came to IT. And now he was
MARIANA MAZZUCATO’S concerned that he couldn’t see it leading in
GROWING INFLUENCE green in the same way.” A Green New Deal
would involve, as she puts it, “greening the
In 2017, Mazzucato became entire economy”, transforming not only
professor in the economics of the renewable energy industry but every
innovation and public value at single aspect of manufacturing.
UCL, where she founded the On September 11, Mazzucato and Ocasio-
Institute for Innovation and Cortez met at the Firefly restaurant,
Public Purpose. IIPP helps the latter’s local hangout in Sunnyside,
policymakers around the world New York. They spoke about everything
to find solutions to ambitious from the issue of public return for public
societal challenges – it investment to the notion of market co-cre-
recently advised the Scottish ation versus market fixing. “She’s quite
government on its plans for academic,” Mazzucato says. “It was much
a national investment bank. easier to talk to her about these things than
it normally is with a politician.”
Mazzucato joined the Ocasio-Cortez also asked the economist
Committee for Development for advice on messaging. In 2009, when
Policy (CDP), a subsidiary of Obama was proposing his healthcare
the United Nations Economic reform, he had to assure people that
and Social Council (ECOSOC) government bureaucrats weren’t meddling.
in 2019, to provide independent That was fine, but it didn’t capture the
advice on issues critical to public imagination, Mazzucato said. He
the international development should have said that, actually, public-
agenda. Her research was also funded agencies were not just regulating –
taken up as a framework to they were financing most of the innovation
address the UN’s Sustainable in the healthcare system. The pharmaceu-
Development Goals. tical industry gets $32 billion a year of
innovation financing from a state agency
As special advisor to European – the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
commissioner Carlos Moedas, – condition free, and yet taxpayers still
Mazzucato’s “Governing pay extortionate prices for life-saving
Missions in the European drugs. It made no sense. “Get the language
Union” report sets out what right,” Mazzucato told Ocasio-Cortez.
it takes to deliver on the five “Otherwise, you’re just going to be a nice,
major research and innovation social democratic, boring lefty politician.”
missions that will be part of In February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez released
Horizon Europe, the next EU her first piece of legislation as a congress-
funding programme (2021- woman: a 14-page resolution on the Green
2027), which has a proposed New Deal, which she called the “moonshot
budget of €100 billion. SW of our generation”. A few weeks later,
during a congressional hearing on the drug industry, she asked
Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine from Harvard: “Would
it be correct, Dr Kesselheim, to characterise the NIH money that is
being used in development and research as an early investment?
The public is acting as an early investor in the production of
these drugs. Is the public receiving any sort of direct return
on that investment from the highly profitable drugs that
are developed from that research?” “No,” Kesselheim replied.
Left: Mariana Mazzucato beneath a neon sign depicting the title
of her latest book, depicted in her children’s handwriting
121 of how much a policy will cost and how much money it will
generate. “That’s why some new drugs are not paid for by the NHS
– because not enough people can benefit from them,” Kattel says.
Cost-benefit analysis is not suitable for evaluating mission-ori-
ented policies, which are inherently risky and uncertain, and
aimed at creating new markets rather than fixing existing ones.
As Mazzucato likes to point out, we would never have walked on
the Moon if the Apollo programme had been evaluated this way.
At the launch of the report, she told the audience a story:
in the 1500s, the Jesuits had a system that involved opening a
cash box by turning two keys simultaneously – one belonged
to the procurator (the CFO of the era), the second to the rector
ne afternoon in May 2019, Mazzucato sat alongside David (the CEO). This meant that, to open the coffer, “you had to
Willetts in a packed lecture theatre at University College London. have a vision, but you also had to think about the budget”, she
She stood up and introduced herself to the audience. Then she concluded. “I know it sounds strange, but that’s what’s missing.”
pointed towards a stack of 100-page-long reports on the desk: “A
Mission-Oriented UK Industrial Strategy”. “This is what we’ve It’s late June 2019, and Mazzucato sits pensively in her central
been doing for the past year,” she said. “And this is the outcome.” London office. A neon sign spelling “the value of everything” –
Almost exactly a year before, Prime Minister Theresa May had a present from her husband, and the title of her second book
delivered a speech at Jodrell Bank Observatory about the govern- – adorns one wall. Large posters depict Mazzucato’s complex
ment’s new industrial strategy, which was centered around four mission diagrams. Two days after the launch of the industrial
grand challenges: clean growth, mobility, healthy ageing and AI. strategy report, Theresa May had announced she would resign
May announced one mission for each challenge: halving the energy as prime minister, potentially derailing the industry strategy
use in new buildings by 2030; using AI to transform treatment policy – and once again putting Mazzucato’s work with the
of chronic disease; extending people’s healthy, independent life British government on hold. “You either want to go crawl back
by five years; being at the forefront of zero-emission vehicle in bed or you fight back harder,” she says. “I tend to do the latter.”
manufacturing by 2040. These had already been a direct outcome Mazzucato sees her work as a battle of ideas. “So much
of Mazzucato’s influence with the then business secretary, Greg bullshit happens in the name of innovation,” she says. “For an
Clark. Months before, Clark had contacted Mazzucato to learn adviser, it’s critical to follow up and help people get the details
more about mission-oriented policies. He later asked her to right.” Sometimes, when addressing an audience, she thinks
co-chair a commission with Willetts and co-ordinate cross- to herself: “Oh my god, I’ve said this so many times.’ “My dad
departmental mission teams in Whitehall, inspired by DARPA. makes fun of me,” she says. “He tells me: ‘Don’t people realise
For a year, the commission met every month. “Putting into that you keep telling them the same thing?’ But the audience is
practice Mariana’s five criteria for the missions was harder different and the message remains heretical in many circles.”
than expected,” says Rainer Kattel, the IIPP’s deputy director. She laughs, because she does realise – but it’s a necessity.
For instance, the commission deemed the mission for the Recently, at the European Investment Bank, she had to tell
future of mobility as unambitious and too siloed within the an audience of economists: “Please never write the word
Department of Transport. “That target was going to happen ‘de-risking’ again in any of your reports, because that’s not
anyway,” Katter says. “We went back to them and said that it what you’re doing. You took risks and you should able to say it
was too low-hanging, but they were very open to our criticism.” openly – kind of coming out of the closet about it.”
Regarding the healthy ageing mission, they struggled with At a talk at Nasa, where Mazzucato is part of a group studying
the definition of “healthiness” “How do you even measure the low-Earth orbit economy, she urged them to recover the
that?” Mazzucato asks. Initially, they considered the scenario ambition befitting an agency of its calibre. “I don’t think many
of an Alzheimer’s patient who is independent in the home and people realise that Novartis, one of the richest pharmaceutical
assisted by cutting-edge technologies. But the mission leader companies in the world, is working for free on the International
didn’t like the idea. “Why obsess about independence?” she Space Station,” she says. “Who thought that up? Charge them.
said. “How about nurturing co-dependency instead?” Or make sure the relationship is symbiotic, not parasitic.”
On the future of mobility, the musician and adviser Brian Eno In May 2019, the European Parliament approved Mazzu-
questioned the assumption that getting from A to B quicker was cato’s mission-oriented proposal for the Horizon Europe
the goal. (“How about going slower and appreciating life?”) programme. Five mission areas were chosen: adaptation to
The year-long collaboration between the IIPP and Whitehall climate change; cancer; healthy oceans, seas, coastal and
included a series of workshops around the theory of mission-ori- inland waters; climate-neutral and smart cities; and soil
ented policies, delivered by Mazzucato and her team to civil health and food. The European Commission will now appoint
servants in Whitehall. “These were, after all, people that had been a mission board of 15 experts for each area, identifying the
constantly told to get out of the way and stop stifling innovation. first specific missions using Mazzucato’s criteria. “Moedas
It can get depressing,” Mazzucato says. “Giving them jokingly offered me the role of chief muse
a different narrative about ambitious missions, of missions,” she laughs. “That report was
their eyes would just light up. I felt like a life coach.” the most important thing I’ve written.
Some conversations, however, were challenging – It’s now a legal instrument, it can’t be
particularly regarding the policy appraisals conducted undone unless another vote is had.” She
by the Treasury. “As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pauses. “I’ve influenced politicians, but
HAIR & MAKE UP: JULIE COOPER

you find that all across government 20 people come to Mazzucato and First Minister having a parliament vote on something
you with different policy proposals that you can spend of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon which I wrote is just fantastic. That’s
the money on. How do you decide?” asks George Dibbs, what I want: to bring about change.”�
the IIPP’s head of industrial strategy. The standard
method used by governments around the world, is João Medeiros wrote about the Japanese
cost-benefit analysis: a simplistic quantitative estimate tech conglomerate SoftBank in 03.19
Right: Austin and (in white top) Ethan White, with sister Kayla. The boys have the same genetic problem that killed their brother
> THE
EVENING
BEFORE
HE
DIED,
HOGAN
TEEM
STAYED
IN.
IT WAS DECEMBER 12, 2012, AND THE
teenager played cards with his mother
at their home in Clayton, North Carolina.
His girlfriend spent Wednesdays with
her family, and card games had become
a weekly tradition for the Teems. They
settled down to a session of Phase 10.
Hogan beat his mother, closing the
gap in their running rivalry to 13-11. At
9.30pm he went to bed; the following day
was a busy day of high school, ending
with baseball practice. There was no
indication that it would be his last.
Hogan was physically fit, spending
long summer days mowing lawns in
the North Carolina heat. He played
American football, basketball, baseball
and golf. He loved swimming, hiking and
fishing. He went on mission trips with
his church. He never suffered illness or
missed a day of school. To all intents and
purposes, he was a healthy 17-year-old.
Baseball practice on December 13
was business as usual. Participating
in light conditioning work, Hogan took
it easy so as not to strain his ankle,
which he had sprained a couple of
weeks earlier. Then he approached
one of his coaches midway through
practice, saying: “I don’t feel right.”
Before the coach could respond, Hogan
blacked out and fell to the ground. The
training staff administered CPR, and an
ambulance was on the scene almost
instantly. The paramedics discerned
a faint heartbeat. Hogan’s parents,
Allyson and David Teem, arrived, and
Allyson travelled in the ambulance. On
the way to the hospital, paramedics
lost Hogan’s heartbeat. After several
minutes at the roadside they recovered
it and sped on to the emergency room.
In an effort to keep her son awake,
Allyson taunted him about the card
game. “I was yelling, ‘You cheated! You
owe me a card game,’” she says. “Then
I said, ‘OK, you won fair and square,
but it’s still 13-11!’” Despite Allyson’s
efforts to rouse her son, Hogan was
unresponsive by the time they arrived
at the hospital. Medical staff worked
on him but, after 45 minutes, admitted
there was nothing more they could do.
Hogan had suffered an acute cardiac
event, brought on by a rare and previ-
ously undiagnosed genetic condition
known as an arrhythmogenic right
ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC.
There had been no reason to suspect
that Hogan was at risk, and doctors
don’t commonly run tests for ARVC.
The tragedy was unforeseeable.
HOGAN HAD BEEN ADOPTED WHEN
he was five weeks old. Seventeen years
later, his biological parents were raising
three children of their own – two sons
and a daughter, all full siblings to Hogan.
Allyson regularly sent the family letters
and pictures of Hogan via the adoption
agency. After Hogan’s death, she wrote
to his biological parents, urging them
to get the family checked out.
Due to bureaucratic procedures, it
took nine months to get the message
through. The two boys, their sister and
parents underwent cardiac imaging.
The results came back normal, and the
family breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Then, four years later, the youngest
sibling, Ethan White – then 14 –
complained of chest pains while playing
basketball. He called his mother, who
arrived to find him grey and clammy,
complaining of pain in his jaw and
arm – heart attack symptoms. His
mother rushed him to hospital where
his heart rate was found to be 263
beats per minute – the average heart
rate fluctuates at 60-100bpm. Ethan’s
condition worsened, but as doctors were
preparing to carry out defibrillation, he
vomited and his heart rate fell.
As his condition stabilised, Ethan
was transferred to Duke University
Hospital, the major medical centre in
that part of North Carolina, where he
was monitored and fitted with an inbuilt
defibrillator. It was clear to staff that
Ethan had experienced an acute cardiac
event consistent with ARVC – and that
another episode was likely. The defibril-
lator was designed to restart his heart
in the event of a further attack. An MRI
scan of his brother, Austin, confirmed
he also had ARVC. The brothers had
the same genetic problem as Hogan,
despite all the tests finding nothing to
indicate a genetic cause. Yet how else
could three brothers raised in different
families, in different parts of the state,
develop the same condition?
With local medical staff stumped,
Ethan and Austin were referred to the
Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN),
a group of 12 clinical research hubs set
up to delve into chronic illnesses that
have previously been undiagnosed,
misdiagnosed or simply written off
as psychosomatic. Bringing together
experts in neurology, immunology,
cardiology, endocrinology, genetics,
rheumatology and other domains of
medicine, the UDN was custom-built to
delve into just such a medical mystery.
12 5 Below: A photograph of Hogan Teem as his parents remember him, before the unforeseable tragedy that ended the 17-year-old’s life
IN JULY, THE TREE-LINED AVENUES
of Duke University are a furnace of
mid-summer heat. It is part of the famed
“Research Triangle”, linking Duke with
North Carolina State University and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Duke, based in Durham, boasts a
formidable campus, with more than 100
buildings, 1,600 medical students, 2,400
clinical staff – and Dr Vandana Shashi,
principal investigator for the UDN site.
Shashi, 60, speaks with a calm and
benevolent authority. She has worked at
Duke for around ten years. “I’m a clinical
geneticist and a paediatrician, so I
have seen patients who were difficult
to diagnose my entire life,” she says.
In 2011, Shashi found herself
discussing the difficulty of diagnosing
genetic diseases with a colleague, Dr
David Goldstein. At the time, just 50 per
cent of patients received a diagnosis.
The two doctors started working with
new gene-sequencing technology, and
in 2012 published work demonstrating
its efficacy in reaching a diagnosis.
Two years later, Shashi heard that
the National Institutes of Health – a
research centre affiliated with the US
Department of Health – was looking to
expand a small programme aimed at
helping the most difficult to diagnose
patients, and settting up research
centres at clinical sites across the
country. Shashi immediately applied,
and Duke was accepted in 2014, in what
was the first iteration of the UDN.
The Duke site took on its first patients
in 2015. To date, it has accepted 199
applicants and made 79 diagnoses.
As of 2019, the UDN as a whole has
received 3,601 patient applications, 1,372
of which it has been able to accept. It
has reached a diagnosis in 323 cases.
“The mission of the UDN was and
is to provide diagnostic services to
patients who have had difficulty getting
a diagnosis, and also to be able to have
‘TO the patients participate in research
ALL activities,” Shashi explains.
INTENTS In the US, a rare disease is defined
AND as something that affects fewer than
PURPOSES 200,000 people, and an ultra-rare
HOGAN disease as affecting fewer than
WAS 50,000. They are hard to diagnose
A FIT simply because so few patients are
17-YEAR-OLD ‘ available to study, and are often misdi-
Below : UDN principal investigator Dr Vandana Shashi. Right: Allyson and David Teem had no reason to suspect their son Hogan was at risk
127

agnosed. Without any reason to suspect ‘GENETIC

otherwise, doctors have to rely on what EVIDENCE
they know. In many cases, like that of IS VITAL
Ethan and Austin, they know what the FOR
problem is but fail to unearth genetic AT-RISK
evidence – vital for identifying at-risk FAMILY
family members and formulating a MEMBERS’
treatment plan. Frustrated by months
or years of disjointed medical testing,
a doctor may suggest patients apply
to the UDN in a final bid for answers.
The Duke team reviews applications
in a meeting every Tuesday. In order
to be eligible, a patient must have an
“objective finding” – a first clue or loose
thread for the team to begin unravelling.
“There is a perception that ‘undiag-
nosed’ also means ‘functional’, so the
two can be confused,” explains Shashi.
“So if you have symptoms like pain or
fatigue, yes you can be undiagnosed,
but that doesn’t mean you have a true
objective undiagnosed disease. These
symptoms could be due to pre-existing
functional diseases.”
A functional disease is one that
exhibits symptoms – nausea, say,
or light-headedness – and affects
functionality. Such symptoms are
common, and easy to diagnose as
caused by common illnesses. UDN
patients may have these symptoms, but
it’s the objective finding – the unusual
clue – that makes them suitable.
Once a patient is accepted, represen-
tatives from each of the UDN sites join
a call to share suggestions regarding
possible diagnoses or tests. This culture
of collaboration means specialists can
confer in real time, working together
to find a diagnosis. The network has
the resources to examine a patient’s
history in detail and formulate a working
hypothesis based on this data, leading
to a suite of tests tailored around the
specific condition, a large part of which
involves closely examining genetic data
for rare or unusual variants or changes.
Below : Genetic counsellor Heidi Cope: “When a variant is very rare, we think there’s a chance it could be disease-causing”

To date, the UDN has discovered and

published papers on two new disease
genes, NACC1 and IRF2BPL. After
identifying these genes in children, they
were able to track down other affected
patients. They have also diagnosed a
patient with a variant in the KCNC1 gene,
known to cause progressive myoclonic
epilepsy. Because of that diagnosis, the
patient is now enrolling in a clinical trial
at another institution that could lead to
a drug trial specific to her gene variant.
The majority of UDN patients come
from the United States, but interna-
tional patients are accepted as long
as they can afford to travel. Patients
apply with suspected auto-immune
diseases, infectious diseases, rheuma-
tological diseases, genetic diseases and
neurological diseases – although it is
not often clear which category they fit
into when they first visit the UDN.

TYPICALLY,THE UDN HAS A DIAGNOSIS

rate of 30 per cent, with the Duke site
slightly higher at 40 per cent. Because
of the rarity of so many conditions,
this percentage represents a signif-
icant accomplishment. However, the
reality is that most patients will never
receive a diagnosis. “Most patients
tell us that they expect not to get an
answer, because they have already been
through so many tests elsewhere,” says
Shashi. “They come in with the idea
that this is their last hope, and they’ll be
surprised if they get an answer.”
Holly, 47, is still waiting. Five years
ago, she began experiencing pain in the
bottom of her feet, which then spread
to her legs and quads. She saw an
orthopaedist, then a rheumatologist,
and eventually a neurologist, who
performed tests that suggested a
muscle disease but didn’t result in a
specific diagnosis. He suggested that
she would be a good candidate for the
UDN, and she underwent her first round
of UDN tests in the summer of 2018.
“I was very hopeful when I got in touch
with the UDN,” Holly says. “I was excited
to have someone take a deeper look,
to try to make sure they encompass
everything they felt might be to
blame, and to have so many different
specialists looking at different angles.”
But full genome sequencing, blood
work and a skin biopsy revealed no
new information. A year later, Holly
1 29 Below : Blood samples are collected to be reverse-engineered into stem cells – a “blank slate with all a patient’s genetic information”
‘MOST
PATIENTS
TELL US
THEY
DON’T
EXPECT
ANSWERS ’
is no closer to understanding her
condition. “It’s hard to put into words the
frustration at this point,” she says. “It’s
very disappointing to seek out answers
and not be able to find a shred of what’s
causing this – just something to provide
relief and help me with quality of life.”
Shashi says that the team is realistic
with patients. “We tell them their
chances are not great,” she says. “It’s
very stimulating when you do find an
answer. But that’s what drives us, to try
to solve these most difficult situations.”
A common refrain among patients
applying for the UDN is that they “want
their old life back”. Whatever their
condition, chances are it has robbed
them of their health, their mobility, the
chance to play with their children, the
chance to follow the career they wanted.
Jackie Boyd, 27, is one such patient.
Around 2013, she began experiencing
numbness in her hands which rapidly
spread to other parts of her body. “It
felt like sitting on your hands and them
being numb,” she says. “I thought
‘maybe I slept wrong’ but it lasted for
weeks, then months.” Boyd rapidly
developed ataxia, a loss of muscle
control and balance. Her doctor
prescribed pills that didn’t seem to work.
She saw a neurologist who essentially
told her there was nothing wrong.
The same year, she began a new job
as a prison officer. One day, a colleague
noticed her struggling to move upstairs
to check on prisoners, and eventually
she was relocated to a smaller, single-
storey facility, where she was given
a position in administration. The job
change was a blow, but what bothers
her most is finding it difficult to play
with her eight-year-old son. Although
Boyd is able to walk with difficulty, she
typically uses a wheelchair.
“My son is sometimes sad,” she says.
“I can’t push him to do things now, I get
up to play sports with him and I’m tired.
It’s hard. My son worries about me more
than I wish he had to. If he hears me fall
down at home, he will call out: ‘Are you
OK mom? Did you fall down?’ I tell him
that I’m OK. Sometimes I’m not, but I’m
fine enough. I don’t want him to worry
about me, it’s not his job.”
Boyd was referred to the UDN in April
2019. At first the team thought that
she had genetic ataxia, a condition
associated with progressive loss of
co-ordination. However, the neurologist
Dr Vern Juel noticed symptoms that
were consistent with a rheumatological
disease called Sjogren’s syndrome. And
this led to an antibody test.
“She had one of the antibodies
associated with Sjogren’s disease,
but she didn’t have the full repertoire of
what one would expect with Sjogren’s,”
Juel explains. Sjogren’s disease can
present with extreme fatigue, joint
swelling and stiffness – symptoms
that matched Boyd’s condition. The
anomaly was that Boyd did not display
the dry eyes or mouth more commonly
associated with the condition.
“One of the great things about this
being a UDN case is if I had seen the
patient on my own, the first thing I would
have wanted her to do would be to see a
neurologist, and that could take another
month or two,” says rheumatologist
Dr Rebecca Sadun, who also worked
on Boyd’s case. “I think this collabo-
ration is crucial; I actually read over the
notes of an external rheumatologist who
also thought this was a likely case of
Sjogren’s but didn’t have the advantage
of being able to talk to a neurologist, so
was mostly focusing on the patient’s
joint symptoms as a solo issue, and not
as part of a larger disease.”
While initial testing pointed in the
direction of Sjogren’s, Boyd needed to
return to Duke for additional testing to
confirm the diagnosis. On July 9, she is
back for a lip biopsy, designed to look for
evidence of inflammation of the salivary
glands, a hallmark of Sjogren’s.
“Sometimes, when people are told
there’s nothing wrong with them, they
just accept it, stay home and get worse,”
Boyd says from the examining chair
while she waits for a numbing cream
to take effect on her lip. “It’s been six
years and my body has been getting
worse. You think ‘What if it’s this, or what
if it’s that?’ I don’t have anything to lose
by coming [to the UDN]. At this point, I
still want to know what this is, I want to
know how long I have left to do certain
things independently. I want to be able
to make some kind of plan for my son.”
As the numbing cream takes effect,
the doctor returns and removes an
inch-long sliver of tissue from the inside
of Boyd’s lower lip before stitching the
wound up. The following day she is
scheduled for a lumbar puncture in
order to test her cerebrospinal fluid. It
is a notoriously painful procedure, but
should be Boyd’s last at the UDN.
“She’s a work in progress,” says
Sadun. “But we have a working theory
and we’re hopeful that [after these
tests] we can make that diagnosis and
get her started on therapy.
AUTO-IMMUNE DISEASES ARE
common at the UDN, but by far the
majority of work at the Duke site – 85
per cent – is focused on diseases that
are suspected to have a genetic cause.
Following Ethan White’s cardiac event,
he and his brother were accepted into
the UDN in September 2017. In their
week of tests, the brothers saw experts
in genetics, cardiology, ophthalmology
and neuropsychology. Because he
suffers from type one diabetes, Ethan
was also seen by an endocrinologist,
although no link was found. To ensure
a comprehensive analysis, the UDN
even reached out to the Teem family
for a sample of Hogan’s DNA, which the
coroner was able to provide.
The team then sequenced the
brothers’ exome – the part of the
genome that makes up just 1-2 per
cent of our genetic data but is the part
most rich in mutations that have an
effect on disease. Exome sequencing
is not unique to the UDN; in fact, 75
per cent of UDN patients at the Duke
site have previously had their exome
analysed, but their doctors have been
unable to find any clues in the results.
As current estimates suggest 80 per
cent of disease mutations can be found
within the exome, however, the UDN
decided to start its investigation there.
“Our site has a very agnostic
approach to the genome,” says Shashi.
“We not only look at the genes which we
think might be causing the problem, but
all the other genes as well, picking out
variants that we think are compelling.
This approach has led us to pick out
candidate genes that otherwise might
be missed in a clinical laboratory.”
ARVC is caused by changes in one
of a number of genes that produce
proteins necessary for proper function
of the heart. These genetic changes
lead to an abnormal or missing protein,
causing a breakdown of the muscle
‘ANALYSING
THE
BROTHERS’
GENES
PRODUCED
SOMETHING
UNIQUE’
tissue and a build-up of fatty deposits.
This, in turn, significantly inhibits the
heart’s ability to function normally.
Changes within 13 genes are currently
known to cause ARVC – yet around 50
per cent of patients will come up with a
negative result when tested for them,
indicating the existence of additional
genes associated with ARVC – genes
that are as yet undiscovered.
In analysing the brothers’ exome,
the UDN uncovered something unique:
variants in a novel gene that they were
unable to locate in medical databases
compiling genetic data from more than
200,000 people who do not have rare
diseases. “Typically when a genetic
variant is very rare, we think there’s a
chance it could be disease-causing,”
says Heidi Cope, the lead genetic
counsellor on the case. “If we saw the
variant in 3,000 people, most likely it’s
benign, as you wouldn’t see it that often
in that many healthy people.”
With this gene a likely candidate, the
next step was to study it in different
models in order to monitor how the
gene is expressed and run tests without
having to study Ethan and Austin’s
hearts directly. Dr Andrew Landstrom,
a paediatric cardiologist working out of
a complex of labyrinthine laboratories
at Duke University, agreed to lend his
expertise to the case.
The main tool in Landstrom’s
arsenal is formed by induced pluri-
potent stem cells. In this process,
blood cells are taken from an affected
patient and, using molecular genetics,
are encouraged to release all of their
differentiation, so reverting back to the
stem cell state. Essentially, this forms a
blank slate containing all of a patient’s
genetic information. By exposing these
stem cells to certain chemical signals,
researchers are able to steer them
towards becoming whichever type of
cell is most pertinent to their research,
from liver cells to lung cells.
In this case, Landstrom’s team
re-programmed stem cells from the
brothers to become heart cells, from
which they were able to grow heart
tissue. “These stem cells carry all the
same genetic markers as the patient
so we can use it as a tool, like having
their hearts right in front of us without
ever going near them,” Landstrom says.
He produces a tray of heart cells from
an incubator and places them under a
microscope. Swirls of heart tissue pulse
on the screen, something like a living
version of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
Researchers first look for evidence
that the gene they have identified
causes the cell to function as has
been hypothesised. Because defective
genes produce abnormal proteins, a cell
made up of these genes will function
abnormally. In this case, Austin, Ethan
and Hogan’s hearts displayed a high
build-up of fatty tissue. If the in-vitro
cells also develop this build-up, it will
be seen as a strong indication that the
gene identified by Cope and her team
is the culprit. In addition, the team
will monitor the in-vitro cells to see if
they develop the same arrhythmias
displayed by the brothers.
Frequently, as in this case, the UDN
also works with its Model Organism
Screening Center laboratories to model
genes in zebrafish models. Professor
Monte Westerfield, at the University of
Oregon, runs this programme. His team
use CRISPR Cas9 gene-editing tools to
generate a zebrafish embryo with the
1 31 Below : For paediatric cardiologist Andrew Landstrom, studying stem cells is “like having the brothers’ hearts right in front of us”
correct mutation. Because there is a
high degree of genetic conservation
among vertebrates, zebrafish allow
researchers to make an almost exact
replica of human genes.
“Zebrafish are transparent during
early developmental stages, which
means within a few days you can
actually see the heart beating,”
Wester field says. “We can then
monitor its heart rate for arrhythmia or
circulatory issues, and are also planning
to do some high-resolution imaging to
understand the cellular nature of the
disease.” Westerfield expects that the
experiments will yield results within
two months – but it is already clear that
the gene is expressed in the zebrafish
heart. This, he says, is “pretty good
evidence that it is in the right place”.
SHOULD THE ANIMAL TRIALS PROVE
fruitful, Dr Landstrom feels confident
that the UDN will be able to provide a
genetic diagnosis. For the first time,
the Teems and the Whites will be able
to put a name to the cause of their
families’ suffering. Considering that
so few patients ever get this far, the
cardiologist calls this a “huge step”.
The UDN hopes to publish its
research on this gene in early 2020;
until then, the name of the specific gene
will be confidential. Cope explains that,
once the UDN publishes, the gene can
be added to the panel of ARVC tests, so
future patients can be diagnosed before
it is too late. “At present, it isn’t public
knowledge so a cardiologist wouldn’t
know to look for it,” she says.
The goal then will be to develop a
medicine that can regulate the condition
and inform treatment for people like
Ethan and Austin. Landstrom admits
that this type of precision medicine is “a
very long-term goal that we may never
get to in my career” – so is unlikely to
directly benefit the two brothers.
Although the potential breakthrough
will realistically make little immediate
difference to his sons’ lives, Jeff White,
Ethan and Austin’s father, is thankful for
the UDN’s work. “Even if we don’t get
anything else out of it, if this means we
could help one person – save one life
through what we’re doing – that’s good
enough for me,” he says.�
Tom Ward wrote about fighting
match-fixing in football in 07.19
This is the hidden impact of technology.
For decades, David Maisel has photo-
graphed places where humans are changing
the environment so dramatically, the
impact can be seen from the sky. In his
latest project, Desolation Desert, the
San Francisco-based visual artist spent
two weeks in a plane over the Atacama
desert, where our insatiable demand for
copper, lithium and rare-earth metals
– to fuel the consumer electronics
and electric vehicle industries – is
reshaping a fragile ecosystem. The
Atacama, in northern Chile, is one of
the driest and least populated places on
Earth, but water-intensive extraction
is scarring pristine salt flats. Maisel
– who still shoots on film – documented
some of the biggest mining sites. The
work isn’t intended to single out an
industry, Maisel says – in fact, we
are all complicit: these resources
enable almost every facet of our lives.
“These new photographs show how the
supposedly remote Atacama desert is
becoming part of a planetary fabric of
urbanisation, and at what cost,” he says.
Photography: David Maisel

The Salar de Atacama salt flats contain more than a quarter of the
world’s lithium. At this lithium-extraction field north of the town of
San Pedro de Atacama, one of the largest of its type in the world, brine
rich in lithium is pumped from underneath the salt flats into huge,
jewel-like pools, where it is left to evaporate in stages, in the way
that salt has been produced for millennia. The end result is a silvery
powder – lithium carbonate – that can be manufactured into batteries.
The process consumes huge amounts of water in a region that gets less
than 2.5cm of rainfall a year. “It might appear to be this weirdly
beautiful place, but the damage being wrought is significant,” Maisel says.
Maisel spent months planning and securing permission to fly over the copper mining operations. Much of
the airspace is controlled by the Chilean military, so the photographer and his team of two pilots would
sometimes have to re-jig their itineraries to make room for last-minute military exercises. Despite the
meticulous planning, there was still room for serendipity. “I knew about this mine and was interested
in photographing it, but I didn’t anticipate that they would actually be doing this blasting there,”
Maisel says. This picture is one of a series showing extraction work at the Centinela copper mine, one
of the largest in Chile – the machines and vehicles visible in the pit give a sense of the overall scale.
13 5 Chuquicamata, near the city of Calama, is the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. It has been in
operation since 1882, but production ramped up in the early 20th century when the extraction machinery
was modernised. Today, the pit is over 4km long, 3km wide and 850 metres deep – the world’s tallest
building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, would fit inside comfortably. The site is 2,900 metres above sea
level – so high that Maisel had to wear an oxygen mask while taking photos from the plane. It was an
appropriate location for him to end his trip: the Guggenheim Fellowship funded Maisel’s work, and the
Chuquicamata copper mine is where the Guggenheim family originally made their fortune.
Because of the altitude, Maisel had to hire a much larger aircraft than he usually uses for his projects
– a former medical rescue plane that had enough room for a stretcher between him and the pilots. When
on the ground, the team returned to their base in the port of Antofagasta. From the window of his
accommodation,­Maisel­says­he­could­watch­the­next­step­of­the­journey­for­the­lithium­extracted­from­
­
operations in the desert, like the one below. “Right outside my window, along the ocean, were these tankers
getting­filled­up­with­all­this­material­that’s­being­mined­–­all­these­tankers­going­to­China,”­he­says.­
“It’s­part­of­a­global­economy,­and­it­comes­back­from­China­in­the­form­of­batteries.”­
1 37 Scientists are scrambling to find a replacement for lithium batteries, which are expected to rise in price
as increasing numbers of people switch to electric cars. But alternatives based on sulphur or carbon are
some decades away, and billions of dollars are still being invested in new lithium battery factories and
extraction plants. If prices go up, lithium extraction projects closer to home could become feasible, says
Brian Menell, CEO of TechMet, a company focused on securing metals required by the technology industry.
There is potential for brine-based extraction in Alsace, France, and hard-rock mining in Cornwall;
one day, images like this, from a plant in Salar del Carmen, could become a familiar sight in Europe.
Previous spread: This region of the world has been exploited for its natural resources for centuries –
from silver and gold in the early days of the Spanish empire, sodium nitrate (used for explosives) in the

DAVID MAISEL/INSTITUTE
1910s and 1920s, and copper and lithium today. At Los Dones, about 130km north of Antofagasta, Maisel
observed the end result of that history: a huge field of abandoned sites where miners have excavated the

PHOTOGRAPHY:
ground and come up empty-handed. “We’re laying this fabric of development over these formerly ‘pure’,
remote landscapes that are environmentally sensitive, and the rate is increasing so ferociously,” he says.
“What does that mean for us, when every area has become a site of development or resource extraction?”
14 1 You can’t assess the full environmental impact of mining just by looking at the hole left in the ground.
These pictures show the area around the Centinela copper mine, and the huge “tailings” ponds that surround
the site. After the copper is separated from rock, the unwanted materials remain in the form of slurry
(tailings, in industry terminology), which collects in pools, hemmed in by dams, that Maisel describes
as “vast beyond comprehension”. Tailings can contain toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury. In January
2019, a tailings dam at an iron-ore mine in Brazil collapsed, killing at least 248 people. As of this
June, the facilities at the mine pictured here held 154 million cubic metres of tailings. � Amit Katwala
During his time as a Puma CEO and a Kering Group
executive, Jochen Zeitz introduced
rigorous ethical and environmental standards –
yet turned enormous profits

Now he’s on a mission to convince

global organisations to re-think their business
practices – not just for society
and the planet, but for profitability
.

By Richard Benson
Photography: Liam Sharp

motorcycle dealership in downtown San
Francisco, on an autumn evening in 2011, a
group of automotive engineers and market
researchers stood staring at several unusu-
al-looking black-and-silver motorbikes.
The mystery vehicles were about to be put to
the test by a dozen motorcycle enthusiasts.
The bikes had no markings to show who had
manufactured them. More remarkably, they did
not have standard petrol engines but electric
motors, with panels where the cylinders should be.
This design element was a contentious choice for
the manufacturer, as the proximity of the rider to
a loud petrol engine is generally regarded as part
of a motorbike’s appeal. A researcher explained
that these were new electric vehicles, designed
for an authentic riding experience and not just
a short-hop urban commute. They invited each
person to take one of the models for a test ride.
After the ride, the researchers asked the testers
about the bikes; the feedback was positive. They
then wanted to know how the riders’ attitudes
would be affected by branding: would the bikes
seem more exciting and innovative if they were
made by, say, Honda or Tesla? As the researchers
ran down their list, the engineers held their
breath. Finally, the big question: what if they
were made by Harley-Davidson?
“They loved the idea,” says Harley-Davidson
CEO Matt Levatich, speaking from his Milwaukee
office eight years later. He still remembers
that in the report, one attendee had
actually exclaimed, “Wow!”
Levatich admits he had initially
been apprehensive, because “Harley
might well have been the last brand
in the world you would expect to go
electric”. However, the tests in San
Francisco (and, subsequently, Atlanta,
London, Berlin and Tokyo) revealed
that, provided the ride experience was
good enough, the brand had sufficient
strength to make electric seem not a
compromise, but an exciting innovation.
It would take eight years and the
work of a thousand engineers to fully
realise the product, but the Harley-
Davidson LiveWire, the company’s first
electric model, was finally due to go
on sale at $30,000 (£28,995 in the UK)
in September 2019. Levatich credits
the LiveWire with reviving optimism
about Harley’s future at a time when
motorcycle sales are in decline. It has
attracted generally favourable reviews
in the motorcycle media, and Levatich
says: “It made me think, ‘Look what this
brand can do. Look what this company
can do. Look what we could become.
We could transform things.’”
But Levatich is keen to share the
credit. Harley-Davidson fans shouldn’t
just thank him, he concedes. They
should also thank Jochen Zeitz.
Zeitz is a 56-year-old executive and
entrepreneur with a formidable set of
achievements to his name. In 1993, at
the age of 30, he became CEO of Puma
– at the time, he was the youngest ever
CEO of a German company – and turned
the near-bankrupt business into one of
the world’s top three sports brands. The
company was acquired by the luxury
goods conglomerate Kering in 2007,
and a few years later Zeitz served as
Kering’s Chief Sustainability Officer.
He now sits on the boards of Harley-
Davidson, financial services company
Cranemere and the Kenya Wildlife
Service, as well as running his own chari-
table foundation and co-chairing The B
Team, a non-profit that he co-founded
with Richard Branson in 2012 to promote
sustainable business practices.
He has won the Financial Times
Strategist of the Year award three
times, been awarded the German Federal
Cross of Merit, and co-authored two
books – one of which, a dialogue with
Benedictine monk Anselm Grün called
The Manager and the Monk: A Discourse
on Prayer, Profit and Principles, has been
translated into 15 languages.
Across his many endeavours, Zeitz has
one overarching aim: making businesses
144
sustainable in a way that improves both
society and the natural environment, and
that creates economic growth. Sipping
water in a pub in south-west London,
where he keeps one of several homes,
Zeitz cuts a benign figure: bearded,
dressed in greenish cords and a T-shirt,
he sits next to an acoustic guitar he’s
brought with him. He looks more like
a 1970s singer-songwriter than an
influential business leader.
In soft, measured tones, Zeitz explains
how he sees business as moving from
an industrial revolution model based
on extraction to one based on the
regeneration of resources. “My belief
is that every company has an oppor-
tunity to innovate by creating business
solutions for services or products that
significantly reduce your impact and
create more demand for your product,”
he says. “Well, unless you are an
extracting business. In that case, you’re
a dinosaur and you’re dying.”
Central to Zeitz’s vision is redefining
the role of business in society in a
way that promotes sustainability
on all fronts: social, environmental
and financial. The new definition, he
says, needs “to create a kind of share-
holder value that is socially just and
environmentally sustainable. I believe
that creating shareholder value is
necessary because it creates jobs and
all the things that we need on a planet
with a rising population. But it can’t be
at the expense of everything.”
The solution is to marry sustaina-
bility with growth. “It’s a question of
what we grow and how we grow, and
how we can reduce our impact signifi-
PHOTOGRAPHY THIS PAGE: JOSHUA KURPINS
cantly and still grow,” he says. “We have
to grow within planetary boundaries.”
In practice, this means that instead of
making short-term profits that may incur
costs later on (an obvious example being
depleted resources leading to higher
raw material prices, or social inequal-
ities reducing at-work performances and
purchasing power), businesses need to spread some
of that growth to the wider world around them, for
the sake of the planet – but also for themselves.
When Zeitz was encouraging Levatich to think
about sustainability, for example, he focused not
just on the moral justification for electric engines,
but on the needs of Harley-Davidson customers to
have healthy natural landscapes in which to ride.
Levatich remembers talking about “what every
rider loves about the ride – it’s the environment
they’re riding in, isn’t it? After that, it was easy
to get brand alignment, and then you’re right into
using that argument to support [sustainability]
as part of the brand.” Eventually, Harley-Davidson
devised a new mission, turning the brand’s historic
celebration of freedom into a desire “to preserve
and renew the freedom to ride”.
Zeitz manages to convince business leaders Jochen Zeitz with an electric Harley-Davidson LiveWire motorcycle
to embrace his vision because he himself has
repeatedly led by example. At Puma, he increased
the company’s share price by 4,000 per cent while
also introducing two procedures that have since
influenced businesses across the world. In 2008, he
created PUMAVision, an ethical code of behaviour
that applied to the company’s staff, its business
dealings and its relationships with external organi-
sations. Three years later, he developed the environ-
mental profit and loss account, which set a monetary
value on the natural resources that were used by
Puma across its supply chain. (Zeitz could even tell
you about the environmental impact of the aglets
– the little plastic tips on the shoelaces of Puma’s
trainers.) This meant that “natural services”, as

they were called by academics at the time, could
be brought into accounting spreadsheets.
At Kering, Zeitz introduced environmental profit
and loss accounting to all companies, including
Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, McQueen and Balen-
ciaga; and at the same time he pushed through
sustainability standards in supply chains that set
the group apart from its competitors. While he was
with the company, its share price rose 150 per cent.
At The B Team his advisers include Salesforce
co-CEO Marc Benioff, former PepsiCo CEO and chair
Indra Nooyi, and Danone CEO Emmanuel
Faber. They are pushing the idea of
“business as a force for good” – the
group was thanked by then British Prime
Minister David Cameron for pressing the
2015 Paris climate conference to adopt
the first ever legally binding climate
change deal, under which 196 countries
signed up to a commitment to limit the
increase in global average temperatures
to 1.5°C. The B Team is now bringing
together businesses and organisations
with the aim of eradicating anonymous
shell companies and associated
corruption (which it estimates costs $2.6
trillion, or over two per cent of global
GDP, annually). Two hundred companies
are working with The B Team, and some,
including Unilever and Brazil’s Natura,
have opened up their ownership struc-
tures as a result of the campaign.
Levatich characterises Zeitz as both
inspirational and practical. When Zeitz
introduced his environmental profit
and loss accounting concept to Harley-
Davidson, he says, it was a crucial
moment. “That’s the tool that we use to
ensure that we do the right thing and the
best things we can do,” Levatich says.
“It’s important to point out that this
didn’t cost us money – it saved money.”
Zeitz was born in Mannheim, Germany,
in 1963, to a gynaecologist father and
dentist mother. His parents had strong
values: he remembers his father almost
being fired when he insisted on intro-
ducing mammography at his hospital
when the Christian medical authorities
objected. Zeitz grew up at a time when
the Green and anti-nuclear movements
were enjoying strong support, and that,
together with the family lodge in the
Odenwald forest, planted the seed of
his environmentalism. He says he was
a “pretty regular” kid, though, into
American football and westerns, and
interested in becoming a doctor. It was
only when he enrolled on a business
course before medical school that he
developed an interest in commerce.
After a job with Colgate-Palmolive,
he was headhunted to work on Puma’s
marketing. “The company was a total
mess, basically,” he says. “It had made
no money since going public in 1988. I
worked with three CEOs in two and a
half years, and there was no marketing
department. I had to build it up, and
when I produced a plan they looked at
me as if I was from another planet.”
Zeitz has been characterised as
impatient and demanding unrealistic
standards (at Kering, he was known as the “sustain-
ability Taliban”), and has learned that good ideas
can easily founder on the reality of supply chains.
“You have to get your hands really dirty,” he says.
“We can theorise a lot of things, but to see the
impact, especially far down the supply chain, you
have to see the real impact on the ground. It’s that
that tells you if something’s working or not.”
Fourteen years ago, he decided to put his ideas
into practice by starting his own business – Segera,
a 50,000-acre luxury holiday retreat on the Laikipia
plateau in Kenya’s central highlands. “I felt you can’t
preach what you don’t live,” he says. Kenya was
where Zeitz found his mission. Growing up watching
the natural history documentaries of Bernhard
Grzimek – the “German David Attenborough” – he
was fascinated by Africa, and in November 1989
went on a budget safari to Kenya and Nigeria.
It wasn’t all he had hoped for; he remembers being
taken to see a lion and finding 30 other minibuses
full of people. He saw the environmental impacts of
business and mass tourism, and felt his perspective
changing. In the evening, he watched footage of the
fall of the Berlin Wall back in Germany, but he felt
more of a connection to his present surroundings.
“I just fell totally in love with the continent,” he
says, “and I knew I wanted to make it my home.”
He now spends about three months of the year
at Segera, a former cattle ranch run down by a
previous owner, who went bankrupt. Its soil fertility
had been reduced by overgrazing, there was little
relationship with local communities, and poaching
for meat and fur was common; in his first year, Zeitz
would often find the bodies of giraffe, buffalo and
elephant that had been shot and trapped.
At the time he set up Segera, he also created his
philanthropic Zeitz Foundation. He and Segera
manager Benaiah Odhiambo set to work creating a
business framework by making baseline studies of
the community and the environment, and talking
to zoologists, conservationists and local people
with knowledge of the land. He brainstormed the
“4C” concept of conservation, community, culture
and commerce. “The secret is to create wins for
everybody,” Zeitz says. “You can’t just
preserve the environment by putting
a big fence around the property and
casting the community aside, because
you need the community to sustain the
property. You need culture because
cultural shifts help to transform people’s
mindsets. Commerce is the driver
of everything because you can’t run
something on philanthropy forever.”
Using the 4C plan as a framework,
Zeitz and Odhiambo developed five-year
goals. The fruit of all that planning is
now evident: the central part of Segera
consists of a ten-acre circle of grass in
the brushland, with eight guest cottages
(costing up to $2,400 a night) on stilts,
interspersed with open-air baths, cacti
and contemporary African art, and a
water recycling plant; the land has been
re-wilded and is again home to giraffes,
elephants, impala and other game;
and local people graze their animals
there on a rotational basis. Writers
and activists have praised the depth
of Segera’s engagement with the local
community – although at the beginning,
Zeitz’s team were unpopular, because
they weren’t, as one director told the
Financial Times, “doing the conventional
thing of throwing sweets over the fence”.
The complex employs 240 people,
and has opened up access to markets for
other businesses such as bead-makers
a n d f o o d p ro d u c e r s. T h e Z e i t z
Foundation has collaborated with aid
agencies to build local “climate-smart”
schools that drain rain runoff into tanks,
where it can be filtered to make clean
drinking water. One of the most inter-
esting initiatives is an anti-poaching
unit staffed entirely by local women.
“They are tough ladies, and fully trained,
but the idea is to get them to commu-
nicate what we are doing at Segera to
help the communities, and to explain
that preserving the wildlife is more of
an opportunity than exploiting it.”
Zeitz has launched other projects in
Africa: the Zeitz Collection of contem-
porary art from Africa and its diaspora;
the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art
Africa, a complex of 100 galleries in a
1920s granary in Cape Town converted
by Thomas Heatherwick; and The Long
Run, which rates sustainable tourism
projects according to the four Cs.
146
Right : Ester Emaret, a member of
the SATUBO women’s beading group,
which is supported by the Zeitz
Foundation and the Segera reserve
Below : the main compound and
accommodation for reserve visitors
A great deal of Zeitz’s work now
involves supporting businesses that
have realised they need to transform,
but lack the confidence. Jean Oelwang,
a senior B Team partner and president
of Virgin Unite, the Virgin Group’s entre-
preneurial foundation, says leadership is
the most important commodity for The
B Team: it was set up “partly because
when the founders started to think
about the need for change, they saw
that leadership was what was scarce”.
Business leadership works differ-
ently during a transformation, because,
Zeitz says, bosses are less able to rely
on practices that previously insulated
them from criticism. He points to market
research. “Traditional consumer goods
companies are very research driven,
and don’t really decide on action until
research tells them to change – but the
reality is that research doesn’t always
tell you what the consumer wants,
because you ask the consumer, and then
the product comes out two years later.
“If you’re evolving slowly but surely, it
works well, but if you’re trying to change
you need a different approach, especially
in today’s world with technology, where
everything can change so much more
quickly than it used to, and entry barriers
to markets are lower in terms of costs.
Nowadays you need to think more about
using a product to create a new demand,
not satisfy an existing one.”
That’s what he did at Puma, where the
research told him “to just give up, as the
company had no future”. It’s easier now,
he says, because VCs and private equity
are more willing to back entrepreneurs,
though there is also more pressure on
CEOs, because they are increasingly
required to act ethically as well as
ensure the health of the company. This
expectation is a key part of The B Team’s
premise. Its leaders believe that organi-
1 49 sations seeking to effect changes in society can do
so only if people trust them, and people now tend
to trust businesses more than politicians.
Oelwang points to the Edelman Trust Barometer,
an annual international survey of 33,000 people and
the degree of trust they have in various professions
and institutions. In recent years trust in politi-
cians and public institutions has fallen, while faith
in employers has remained strong; in 2019, only
one in five people felt the system was working for
them, and 76 per cent felt CEOs should take the
lead on change without waiting for government
to impose it. That, says Oelwang, is why actions
taken by business can sometimes achieve greater
social change. One might ask, for example, if the
Harley-Davidson testers who took to the electric
bike would have been as ready to embrace a
government initiative on cleaner engines. Perhaps
this faith in business is likely to increase, because
younger demographics tend to be more jaded about
mainstream politics, and have higher expectations
of CEOs on ethical decision-making.
For The B Team, environmental and social
sustainability have to go hand in hand, and
much of its work is based on improving the way
workplaces function. Its 100 Percent People project
saw 350 companies, including Unilever, Zappos
and Natura, sign up to a rolling series of experi-
ments in HR practices, geared towards improving
equality, respect, growth and a sense of purpose
among workers. In New Zealand, financial services
company Perpetual Guardian trialled a four-day
week based on a “100-80-100” rule – 100 per cent
remuneration, for 80 per cent of time in the office,
meeting 100 per cent of agreed productivity. Staff
stress levels lowered (from 45 per cent pre-trial
to 38 per cent post-trial) and satisfaction with
work-life balance increased (54 per cent to 78 per
cent). By 2019, the four-day week was on the agenda
PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIC M ROJAS
at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In the US, Greyston Bakery pioneered a
programme of “radical inclusion”, which meant
people were employed without having to show a CV
or have any background checks done, and the HR
department partnered with employees
to remove obstacles around issues such
as childcare or safe housing. Greyston
branded the idea as “open hiring”,
and is committed to supporting other
companies curious about the approach.
The questions that Zeitz gets
asked most often around the issue of
sustainability are “How do we do it?”,
“Is it a responsibility or is it more?”,
and “How do we justify the expense?”
Answering these often requires a
change of culture within an organi-
sation: perhaps leaders may need to alter
the way they think about employees –
shifting emphasis from shareholders
to all stakeholders, for example, or
adjusting pay structures that incen-
tivise short-term profits at the expense
of environmental or social benefits.
CEOs looking for a place to start, he
says, could get rid of quarterly reports,
which lead to companies looking for
immediate gains, rather than working
out long-term goals. “Transforming your
business is an investment, just like you
invest in R&D or marketing. It’s investing
in sustainability and developing new
materials, and it’s not going to come for
free, so I look at it as part of my operating
expenses… The argument that sustaina-
bility should pay for itself is a short-term
argument that I do not think is correct
unless you are a business where it is
relatively easy to transform.”
Zeitz admires boldness, and the ability
to make things happen quickly. At Kering
Group, he watched in admiration as
CEO François-Henri Pinault decided
that he wanted gender equality on the
company’s board, and promptly replaced
three men with three women.
As for the future, he sees the
increasing tendency of investors to look
for sustainability in business plans as
a sign that things will continue in the
right trajectory. “Money will show you
if something is going to happen, and
usually it’s just a question of time,” he
says. “Especially now, because there
is smart money out there looking for
opportunities with strength. Money
Left : Jochen Zeitz with an observation
plane at his Kenyan nature reserve
Below : Zeitz and Mats Granryd,
director general of the GSMA mobile
technology operators group, at the
B Team Leader meeting, held in July on
Richard Branson’s Necker Island
finds the opportunity, and it sees that
opportunity before anybody else.”
But getting there won’t be quick or
easy, as it requires a cultural shift beyond
just consumer behaviour. “I am a very
impatient person, but I have learned
that we can’t shift culture overnight,”
he says. “The environmental movement
requires such a cultural shift that you
can’t assume it will happen in a decade
or even a couple of decades.
“Of course I am very pessimistic
looking at today’s politics in America
and I’m terrified of what’s happening
in Brazil and other countries, but I am a
realistic optimist. Look at the UK super-
markets: the plastic bags are disap-
pearing. Look at the plastic bottles at
Glastonbury – just because there were
plenty left on the ground doesn’t mean
we haven’t saved a million. It’s the signal
effect that will change things.”
He shoulders his guitar, and steps
out into the late summer sunshine.
“The important thing is for businesses
to see this as a necessity and an oppor-
tunity,” he says. “They would be
absolutely stupid if they didn’t.”�
Richard Benson wrote about artificial
surfing lakes in 09.19
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Photographer Liam Sharp expected to be photographing
high-powered executives at a swish Kenyan nature reserve for
our profile of ethical businessman Jochen Zeitz. However, he
found that Zeitz and his foundation are as invested in the local
community as they are in building sustainable billion-dollar
firms. “The Zeitz foundation supports Kenyan businesses
– and also makes education more accessible. One of the
schools it built is in a village that borders the Segera Retreat,
so I asked if I could photograph there. I was ready for disap-
pointment when the headmaster said that all the students
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