Wired USA - NOV 2019

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HOW MACHINE LEARNING EXPERTS ARE PREPARING TO FIGHT BACK
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DARKTRACE WAS FOUNDED

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Photos by Jonathan Browning

meet-agents background. it’s going to become a war of
“I look across the office and algorithms. You can’t bring a
see developers and coders, human to a machine fight any
hardcore double-PhD machine more,” says Heinemeyer.
learning experts, and what we regular updates—for example, And that’s what Darktrace’s
call the ‘dev-analysts’ team,” at sea, or in spacecrafts. R&D team is aiming to solve
says Heinemeyer. “They all for, building more sophisti-
Closer to home, the R&D lab
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has transformed how enter-
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prises respond to fast-acting
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threat hunters come from ize these threats—including cyber-crime, visit
backgrounds across mathe- The team is now creating at night and on weekends— wired.com/Darktrace
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CONTENTS WIRED 27.11
TOTALLY WHEN THE

WIRED MARKETING DIGITAL
ELECTRIC MIND
LOSES BATTLE
WORD GRENADES
ITS FOR
P.6 COOL HONG KONG
P.11 P.16
RANTS
AND
RAVES
BY BY
VIRGINIA ZEYNEP
P.8 HEFFERNAN TUFEKCI
MIDDLE-AGED NASA’S P.24 FETISH: HEAD TO

TECHIES BIGGEST HELM SERVER HEAD:
LEAD SPACE GPS KID
BY
THE WAY TELESCOPE LAURA TRACKERS
MALLONEE P.29 P.30
P.20
GADGET
LAB:
BY SECURITY
CLIVE
THOMPSON
APP PACK: IN DEFENSE WIRED25: P.39

PASSWORD OF UGLY AND MAKE PROG-
MANAGERS OBVIOUS FEATURES RESS, MAKE
SECURITY MISTAKES,
P.32 CAMERAS LEARN LESSON BY NICHOLAS
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P.36
HEAD TO
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WI-FI PLUS: JOY BUOLAMWINI, PATRICK
ROUTERS BY COLLISON, EVA GALPERIN,
JONATHON HANY FARID, AND MORE PEOPLE
P.34 KEATS WHO ARE RACING TO SAVE US
THE P.74 IS THERE ON THE

MOST SPACE LEFT COVER
SIX-WORD
DECEPTIVE FOR APPLE’S
BY SCI-FI
HACK IN ANDY STREAMING
HISTORY GREENBERG SERVICE?
P.86
STORIES
BY WIRED
READERS ILLUSTRATION
BY FOR WIRED
PETER BY
RUBIN P.96 MIKE PERRY
0 0 5
↙
TOTALLY
DIARIES OF
AN UNBRIDLED
DIGITOPIAN
WIRED WE ASKED CONTRIBUTORS:
Candidly, I was about four wines deep by high noon. Hold the judgment, “WHILE WORKING
if you please. It was one of those whoopsie-daisy kinds of Saturdays where ON THIS ISSUE,
the sun begs you to sip its splendor in the form of semi-effervescent Cal-
ifornia whites at your favorite neighborhood cantinas. Minimal risk of WHAT GAVE YOU
indecorum on my part—of all the creative names my enemies call me, HOPE?”
Ripley D. Lightweight isn’t one of them. Though, yes, I do suffer that light-
est pinkening of cheeks, a lush’s flush, when I imbibe. Perhaps also a cer- “Even more than his invention for
tain slackening of step and sense. So sue me! revealing a cell’s active genes, Jason
Presently, I had a decision to make. Where to next? I polled the locals, Buenrostro himself. Like many scien-
tists, he’s passionate about his work.
who could agree only on a nonrecommendation: Wherever I went, it must But he’s also humble and empathetic.
not be that winery down the way. “I’ve worked in the area for 10 years,” If Jason represents the next genera-
one said. “I’ve been there exactly once.” The reason was simple: The win- tion of scientific research, I’m all for it.”
—Contributor Jennifer Kahn (page 56)
ery had embraced—picture a crush of snobs scrunching their schnozzes
in sync—technology. Well, I had my destination. “Talking with Hany Farid about his
I skipped to the front door. Overgrown with vines, it sat recessed from work with political leaders to encour-
age the tech industry to protect us
the street, shrinking from view as if in shame. The room I entered was against deepfakes, without creating
very dark. “Have a seat,” said the woman behind the bar, too noncha- mechanisms that could be exploited
lantly. I was (and remained) her only customer. She poured an inky red to suppress online expression.”
—Senior writer Tom Simonite (page 70)
and relayed the backstory. She and her husband were scientists, labora-
tory scientists, the kind in white coats, and they were bringing chemistry “SpinLaunch, a company ditching
to winemaking. More precisely, to wine preserving. The wine before me conventional rockets to dramatically
lower the cost of access to space.
now, in fact, had been opened … three months ago. I squawked. She smiled. If successful, the company will lay
Parents are wrong on this: Wine does not keep. One day for reds, two or the foundation for a truly robust
three for refrigerated whites. Three months? You might as well quaff the space economy that is essential for
turning humans into a multiplanetary
rufous dregs that collect at the bottom of your trash. What this vintnerd species.” —Staff writer Daniel
was promising was insane, even considering the machine to her right, a Oberhaus (page 61)
cabinet-sized temperature-controlled box that was—forgive me, she lost
“Joanna Pearlstein. Working on a story
me early in the explanation. Likely it involved wafting her exposed wines about the world’s most dangerous
with some noble gas or other to prevent the putrefaction that too much hackers, along with a cover package
oxygen reekingly wreaks. The scientist kept smiling. with 25 profiles, you want someone to
be sure you are getting things right.
I sniffed. I sipped. And? For 16 years at wired , that person has
Terrible! Pfeuh! The wine was bad. I found myself smiling too. “Wow,” been Joanna. As a deputy editor, she
was all I said. I wasn’t there to whinge and whine, to critique her soulful oversees the fact-checking depart-
ment; she also reads every story like
efforts. Beaming, I sucked down the rest of her liquid experiment, genu- a seasoned lawyer and engages in the
inely grateful for the attempt. In an industry so resistant to modernity— deep philosophy of what is fact and
in oenophilia, technophilia surely finds its opposite—here was a true what is opinion. She is, in a word, wise.
And she’s leaving us. Joanna has given
progressive, bravely battling the tides of tradition. For too long has the all of us hope for the power of smart
snifter set, comfortable in their ancient rhythms, viewed the application and accurate storytelling. We are con-
of technology always and only as adulteration. Get over it. Let the inno- soled that she’s staying in journalism.
But we will miss her.” —The editors
vators, like a heavy red, breathe. There may yet come a day when you
can open a genetically re-created ’58 cab, enjoy a few glasses, and save “Somebody finally started putting
the last pour for your best friend—when they come to visit next spring. caffeine in seltzer.” —Senior writer
Andy Greenberg (page 50)
RIPLEY D. LIGHT
@ RIPLEYDLIGHT
0 0 6
FAN LETTERS
In our July/August issue, Stephen Witt
recounted how Apollo 11 nearly crashed into
the moon because its guidance computer kept
glitching. In our September issue, Nitasha Tiku
chronicled the tumultuous past three years at
Google, and Laurie Penny wrote an exultant GET MORE WIRED
essay on how authors of fan fiction have gradu- If you are a print subscriber, you can
ated into the writers’ rooms of major TV shows. read all wired stories online.
Then in October, Lauren Smiley told the story of To authenticate your subscription, go
a murder whose chief witness was a Fitbit—and to: wired .com/register.
whose chief suspect was a 91-year-old man.
↙
Readers share their wonder, This story pretty much summed up and motivated. —Kaila Hale-Stern, via
anger, and advice: all the reasons I recently left my job at The Mary Sue
Google after six years there.
—Kathy Ray, via wired .com Fanfic writers and lovers—this brilliant,
RE: “MISSION OUT OF beautiful piece by @PennyRed is for
CONTROL” RE: “WE CAN BE HEROES” you. —Michael Sheen (@michaelsheen),
via Twitter
I want to call WIRED on its bro- Sometimes a piece of writing is
centric recounting of Apollo 11’s his- so good and so powerful and so No, I’m not crying on the train. You’re
tory. The only mention of women truth-telling that you just have to get crying on the train. (:sob:)
was in reference to them as weav- out of its way. I saw my own expe- —Janina Woods (@Kaori_Ino), via Twitter
ers of the copper wire that con- rience and trajectory—from being a
verted “code to machine-readable nerdy kid alone with their modem, RE: “THE TELLTALE
binary.” However, Margaret Hamil- writing stories set in other worlds HEART”
ton was a major contributor to the and forging communities that way—
development of the software dis- described exactly by Penny. I sent The main subject of this story,
cussed in the article, and was con- the story to many similarly minded Tony Aiello, 91, died shortly after
spicuously missing. friends. Some wrote back that they the magazine went to press. New
—Candace Egan, via wired .com were crying to see themselves rec- details about his criminal case were
ognized and celebrated. Everyone, also made public. The story has
RE: “THREE YEARS OF without fail, said the essay made been updated on WIRED .com.
them feel empowered, powerful, —The editors
MISERY INSIDE
SILICON VALLEY’S
HAPPIEST COMPANY”
Nitasha Tiku’s article is great, but

it fails to point out the hypocrisy of
Google’s reluctance on Project Maven
while benefiting from dual-use sys-
tems like GPS for free. Googlers RE: “WE CAN BE HEROES”
apparently didn’t want to associate
with a defense program that could
potentially aid drone strikes. What “Let’s hear it for
the nerds!”
do they think makes those drone
strikes work? Hint: It’s not AI, it’s the
very thing that powers Google Maps
to the tune of a billion dollars or more —University of Southern Maine Libraries, via Facebook
per year. —Louis, via wired .com
0 0 8
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M I N D G R E N A D E S
WHEN
MARKETING
LOSES ITS
COOL
Keep calm and consider supply and demand.
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
The year 2015 was a heady time to do marketing for tech startups. The venture
baronry that controlled the fates of founders had decided that markets, rather
than engineering or personnel, made or broke new companies. If you were a
strategist or a creative, swagger came with the job, along with corporate Uber and
free lunches of glistening sushi. You’d enter a pitch meeting in your sharp blow-
out and bravura nail art—every time; it was all about the rose gold accent nail
that year—extremely confident that a solid creed preceded you. The only thing
startups need is markets. Q Marketing was on fleek, just as “on fleek” was on fleek.
Those were the days. I was the editorial director of a tech marketing shop based
in San Francisco, and—having come up as a blowout-deprived journalist—I felt
almost high on the luxe marketing-chick lifestyle. Not only did the job often seem
like one long perk, but it was important. I knew, almost by heart, “The Only Thing
That Matters,” the 2007 essay by Marc Andreessen, in which the oracle of Menlo
Park argued that markets are, indeed, “the most important factor in a startup’s
success or failure.” Q But didn’t the product matter? The team? Not really.
ILLUSTRATION / NINA CITA 0 1 1

© 2019 Seiko Watch of America. SPB045
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT

SEIKOWATCHESUSA.COM
Andreessen was blunt: With a great market, deaths by achieving the desideratum to erally seem more shaken than revitalized.
a company can handle a staff of half-wits end all desiderata: product/market fit. Four years ago, when companies had pro-
or jerks because “the team is remarkably PMF. Products were seen as placeholders found problems with their models, leader-
easy to upgrade on the fly.” What’s more, that were to be broken, iterated on, pivoted ship, or products, marketing came to be
he wrote, “the product doesn’t need to be from. By contrast, a nice loamy market, seen as not just a way to lipstick pigs but as
great; it just has to basically work.” primed, was a joy forever. The everything. a way to block and tackle regulation, to keep
VCs had also soundly discredited pricing In the right market, anything—vanilla- secrets, to shut out anyone who wanted to
as the key to success. (When a sector is indif- honey vape, ancient grains meal-delivery so much as see the product.
ferent to the laws of supply and demand, service—can find purchase. Though not all So marketing went from the only solution
that is some serious irrational exuberance.) startups believed marketing was the sil- to the smoke that suggested fire that sug-
“Innovation,” too, was yesterday’s news. Dis- ver bullet for success, the ones that came gested indictments. To be fair, at the advent
appointingly, for those of us who cottoned to us seemed to think: If you build it, they of the social networks, VCs could be for-
to the folktale of a new economy driven by will come, and if they come, you will find given for thinking that marketing was the
brilliant little Edisons and Teslas in Everlane, a way—even if far, far down the road—to whole game. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat,
technological breakthroughs were, by 2015, sell them mugs. Or memberships. Or ads, Pinterest, and Instagram were acquiring
believed to be too easily copied. Instead, or some freemium bunk. users to make a network and attract more
I liked to associate things like payment software and

organic-snack subscription boxes with such universally
admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy.
success lay in branding flourishes—Snapchat The problem was the usual. We were users: The market (users) is the product (the
ghosts, Instagram influencers, the massive bullish for too long. As we watched the big network). So by acquiring users with mar-
glass lantern that is Istanbul’s Apple store. agencies, we saw that even the best marketing you were simultaneously building
We in marketing also held tight to keting couldn’t quite compensate for a cer- your product. VCs used to love the idea of a
Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success, named tain miniature blood test that didn’t work. young big shot who saw a vast market that
for Andy Rachleff, another VC god who Nor, at another agency, could Instagram the old didn’t: the diary writers who would
cofounded the firm Benchmark that made a influencers turn disaster-relief tents into contribute to Tumblr. The lonely hearts that
mint betting on eBay, OpenTable, Snapchat, a sexy island bacchanal worthy of Kendall became Facebook. Investors also swooned
Twitter, and Uber. Rachleff’s Law: The num- Jenner. From our firm’s gleaming digs, we at the idea of using relatively cheap market-
ber one company killer is lack of market. shuddered as we watched the first cracks in ing magic to get millions of users hooked on
And so, flush off earlyish rounds of ven- the facade of Theranos. Later, other offer- something and then cashing in.
ture capital, startups paid us to identify, ings with marvelous marketing—Jawbone, The investors cashed in. But social media
reach, and soften up prospective consum- Hampton Creek (Just Mayo), and Airware— companies had to turn into galactic data
ers, using an alchemy of surveys, intuition, burned through millions of dollars trying Hoovers to become profitable, and the naive
design, blue-sky ideation, typography, to get the optics right on products, services, hope that one day startups could trade on
ethnographies, direct email, advertising, or business models that were, yeah, janky. the users, accounts, or subscriptions they’d
events, comms, logos, PR, stunts, and (in Moreover, when it came right down to acquired meant that the early years of a
theory) art, literature, and film. And of it, staffing did matter, especially because company were expected to be devoted to
course my specialty: decks. These are the teams underperformed when mismanaged UA. It’s not that that logic didn’t hold up; it’s
sententious keynote presentations, used to by bumptious founders like Uber’s Travis that users used to come cheap to divey, bare-
dazzle investors or recruit employees, that Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann. bones joints like Twitter, and they’d stick by
try to get a startup to seem like a holy mis- Teams willing to work with volatile, arro- glitches and unpopular updates because
sion. In my decks, I liked to associate things gant management weren’t so “remarkably they had made them their own and had
like payment software and organic-snack easy to upgrade on the fly,” as Andreessen nowhere else to go. Now users cost much
subscription boxes with such universally had once led investors to believe; word gets more to court—have you seen the freebies
admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy. around about people like Kalanick and Neu- offered at companies like the home-products
We marketing teams came to believe we mann. And then, after shake-ups like the club Grove Collaborative?!—and with too
alone could save startups from untimely ones at Uber and WeWork, startups gen- many apps already on their phone, they enter
0 1 2
new brand relationships more warily. Then,

unless they’re blinded by love, they tend to
jump at the first signs of glitchiness. CHARTGEIST
When Blue Apron ill-advisedly went pub- BY JON J. EILENBERG
lic in 2017, it had a valuation of nearly $2
billion. With brilliant marketing, it gained a
multi-furlong lead among meal kits, includ-
ing an also-ran I worked on, and it had an
unshakable reputation for being the luxe RESEARCH FUNDING
one. At the same time, I remember taking Revelations of
one look at my first, lovely, logo-adorned Jeffrey Epstein
connections
box and thinking: This can’t last. Sustain-
able seafood, no GMOs, antibiotic-free and
five-star, verdant herbs? The margins must
be nearly zilch. But to reduce cost would be
to reduce quality, and to hold onto a market
of pious foodies, Blue Apron couldn’t risk
that. So the company kept spending without
hiking prices, while still throwing no end of Scientific
freebies at customers to gain loyalty. In May, institutions that
the NYSE warned Blue Apron that it was in remain untouched
danger of being delisted. It’s currently valued

at about 94 percent less than it was at its IPO.
Maybe attending to supply and demand is
not such a quaint superstition after all.
Companies that do manage to blind users WEWORK
News stories
by love, like the Calm meditation app, now about (former) CEO
seem to concentrate on the product, while Adam Neumann
essentially bootstrapping. Between 2012 and
2016, investors, evidently late to get religion
on mindfulness, turned Calm down by the
dozens on the grounds that it was “fluffy”
and “a load of nonsense.” Founders Michael
Acton Smith and Alex Tew decided to do
what entrepreneurs did before startups were
called startups: work on the product on a
Demand for
Scrooge budget with fewer than 10 employ- its IPO
ees out of a one-bedroom apartment. They
gave little away but rain sounds and a short
free trial; once you paid, the app provided
lovely, sleepy music and stress-relieving
meditations for its users. Of whom there are WRITING
now 2 million active subscribers. Gaining
Number of
traction with extensive, elegantly produced words typed
content, rather than giveaways and market-
ing jazz, has allowed them to expand their
offerings to meet the desires of subscribers,
who pay up to $156 a year for their services.
And well after the company turned profit-
able on its own terms, in 2017, VCs came
calling. Now I’m not saying the Calm people
are good people and Blue Apron people are Confidence
that they’re the
not. I’m just saying Calm has been valued at right words
$1 billion. Meditate on that.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a

regular contributor to wired .
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MOVE,
COUNTERMOVE
Yes, authoritarians have co-opted digital technology.
But the story is far from over.
BY ZEYNEP TUFEKCI
It was a sweltering August Saturday in Hong Kong, and the authorities

had just shut down one of the most important technologies in the city:
the MTR, Hong Kong’s uber-efficient subway system. So the protesters
walked. Q The demonstrators were in their 12th week of continuous action;
they’d been marching, singing, occupying streets, forming human chains,
confronting police. They started when the city’s chief executive, Carrie
Lam—a leader essentially handpicked by Beijing—introduced a bill that
would allow Hong Kong’s government to extradite suspects to main-
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land China for prosecution. Hong Kong is At the same time, this stream of young ing one eye, in honor of a medic who had
a “special administrative region” of China, people carrying umbrellas and traveling been shot in the eye just a few days earlier.
with an independent judiciary and much on foot were anything but Luddites (at At precisely 9 pm, I watched them all close
wider freedoms than those found on the least as people usually use the term). They one eye, perfectly coordinated.
mainland. Fearing that the extradition law were quite attached to their tech. Like other Move, countermove. The next day,
would lead to the further erosion of those decentralized movements before them—the authorities shut down the subway. And all
freedoms, large numbers of protesters took protesters who amassed in the Arab Spring, throughout my time in Hong Kong, it was
to the streets starting in early June. under the banner of Occupy, in Istanbul’s painfully clear how ubiquitous the surveil-
Now, nearly three months later, the bill Gezi Park, and under the name Indignados lance was. Telegram includes a feature that
had been suspended but not yet within Spain—the demonstrators in Hong Kong allows you to see if a contact is a member of
drawn. (That would come, but later.) And were forever on their phones. They pulled a group; that feature may well have exposed
everyone’s phone number to the authori-
ties. (Telegram says it’s fixing this.) Phones
constantly pinged nearby cell phone towers,
revealing locations. At one point, LIHKG was
The Hong Kong protesters managed down due to a denial of service attack. It’s
unknown whether Beijing was behind the
to form a human barricade 30 miles long, attack, but China’s state-sponsored hack-
ers certainly have the motive and the means
surprising even themselves. (and then some) for such an exploit.
This techno-evolutionary arms race
between authorities and protesters isn’t
the protesters were feeling their strength, them out to learn where the movement was new—and it’s not just playing out in authori-
demanding an independent inquiry into making its next stand; they pulled them out tarian countries. Those smart lampposts are
police misconduct and universal suffrage. to learn where to retreat after being tear- already sprouting up in many democracies
But on that Saturday, as we all ended up gassed; then they pulled them out to learn or are being planned as part of smart-city
walking in the blazing sun, the protesters where everyone was regrouping for the next initiatives. Those governments, too, prom-
had a new target in their sights: “smart” advance. They scrolled through Telegram, ise they will be put to benign use. But once
lampposts equipped with sensors, cam- beaming with myriad protest groups—big a surveillance infrastructure exists, govern-
eras, and internet connections. Fifty had ones conveying information about the ments and corporations will certainly be
been installed in the city, a first batch of whole movement and small ones that orga- tempted to run with it.
an expected 400, and the protesters were nized one neighborhood or another. They Facial recognition is being deployed all
determined to take one down. voted on LIHKG (a homegrown Reddit) to over the world. Biometric databases are
The government had said the smart decide their next steps. expanding. Personal, financial, health,
lampposts would be used only for benign I watched it all happen: The protesters social, and other data is being collected by
purposes—that they’d take air quality mea- would amass and the police would meet entities ranging from social media giants
surements and assist with traffic control, them in force. Then, in a blink, the demon- and apps to websites and retailers—anyone
and would not collect facial or other per- strators would move somewhere else, using and everyone, it appears. And this data is
sonal data. The protesters feared other- the subway—when they could—to outrun being churned through to identify and tar-
wise. When I spoke to them, many brought the authorities. They would decide where get people individually—to sell things, yes,
up what was happening to the Uyghurs to go next through online discussions and but also to spread misinformation.
in the Xinjiang region of China. Trapped polls. It felt like magic. Later that Saturday, the protesters used a
in a massive surveillance net that hacks One day, inspired by a single post on couple of basic technologies, a handheld
their phones and collects biometric data LIHKG, the protesters decided to form a saw and a rope, to set upon a smart lamp-
(including DNA samples from practically human chain. They would do it on the anni- post. As the post fell, cheers rose from the
the whole population), the Uyghurs live versary of the historic 1989 chain across crowd. A jubilant moment isn’t decisive,
under constant scrutiny and worse—Big the three Baltic states that demanded free- though. There will be more smart lampposts
Data along with traditional surveillance dom from the Soviet Union. The Hong Kong and more abuse. But the pessimism that
techniques have sent as many as a million protesters ran with the idea and managed abounds these days—as authoritarians have
people off to internment camps. to form a human barricade 30 miles long, turned new technologies to their advan-
Citizens of Hong Kong feared simi- surprising even themselves. They used apps tage—is likewise not decisive. It’s still early.
lar technologies would be used against to coordinate in real time, getting people We can’t predict who will win and how. That
them. Many wore face masks. They carried to move from overly populated sections of story is still to be written, by us.
umbrellas, not just to shelter from the sun the chain to ones that were more sparse.
but also to block the view of CCTV cameras They held hands and sang in unison. In the ZEYNEP TUFEKCI (@zeynep) is a wired
or the helicopters that flew overhead—or to middle of the event, someone had the idea contributor and a professor at the Univer-
huddle under as they assembled barricades. that they should end with everyone clos- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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OLD SCHOOL
Who are the most successful entrepreneurs? The middle-aged.
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator’s Startup School: Do a
startup before you’re old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. Q “I want to
stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” Q That com-
ment has not aged well. As we watch tsunamis of disinfo rage through social networks, we’re now suspect-
ing it wasn’t so great for cocky young techies to so rapidly reupholster the public sphere. Those dudes may
have been technically adept, but they were, as one early Twitter employee told me, “naive as fuck.” With little
experience of the real world, the dewy pioneers were woefully unprepared for the hate speech, dog-piling,
and sock-puppeted algorithm-juking that ran riot in the 2010s. Now we’re living in the wreckage. Q Sure,
innocence is great. But what if experience is even greater? Maybe we’d get better innovation if we left it to
Zuckerberg’s elders. When it comes to building tools that help solve the world’s truly wicked problems, it’s
the older visionaries who’ll get it done. Q Consider the recent findings of a group of academics from
0 2 0 ILLUSTRATION / GUANGYUAN LIM

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MIT, Northwestern University, the National But I think the biggest value of older
Bureau of Economic Research, and the US entrepreneurs isn’t merely that they suc-
Census Bureau who examined the success ceed more often than younger ones. It’s that
rates of startups. When they homed in on they’re better positioned to take on what’s
elite “high-growth” tech firms, they dis- sometimes called “tough tech”—the hard ANGRY NERD
covered the average age of the founders challenges of our age, like clean energy, BY SARA HARRISON
was 45. What’s more, their chance of suc- curing disease, and climate adaptation.
cess didn’t decrease with age. It increased. Sure, young people are great at crank-
Sure, innocence is great. But what

if experience is even greater?
Maybe we’d get better innovation
if we left it to the elders.
DEMOCRATIZE THIS!
The study defined these accomplished ing out software. All they need is a laptop The operations overlords of wired
companies as those with the fastest job and an idea, and arguably they’re better at make me use Airtable. It’s a hip work-
flow tracker, with pretty color coding
growth and that had a successful acquisi- seeing opportunities in the world of culture and copious tabs and a “robust” API
tion or went public. Founders in their fifties (like Facebook or Snap). But if you want to that syncs with Slack. It’s also, appar-
were more than two and half times more pioneer new battery technology or bioen- ently, a superhero. The Captain Amer-
ica of spreadsheets. Airtable isn’t just a
likely to hit those marks than ones in their gineering for growing crops in zones ren- shinier version of Excel—it’s on a self-
mid-twenties. Even those who had hits at dered arid by climate change, you’ll need professed mission to “democratize soft-
a young age had bigger ones later in life. to navigate regulated industries and pull ware creation by enabling anyone to
build tools that meet their needs.” As
As one of the researchers, MIT Sloan off research that requires a PhD or more. if the oppressed white-collar workers of
economist Pierre Azoulay, pointed out to Today’s science is getting more and more the world were crying, “Help! Bring salu-
me, Steve Jobs may have cofounded Apple complicated and specialized. “We’ve never brious democracy to my dismal day-to-
day!” Democratizers run rampant through
in his twenties, but the company only met a biotech founder who’s 25 years old,” tech these days. An app called Robinhood
became a world-spanning behemoth Azoulay notes. Fadell is an investor now (was that guy pro-democracy?) wants to
when Jobs presided over the invention of and is putting money into “the hard stuff,” “democratize finance for all.” Veo aims
to democratize soccer videos “one cam-
the iPhone. By that time, he was 51. including biotech. He was an early investor era, one field, one team at a time.” Cus-
Why might older folks have better suc- in Impossible Foods, a company that wants tom Movement wants to democratize
cess with startups? Part of it is that they to curb our consumption of C02-heavy meat bespoke sneaker ownership, and Creator
imagines the same for hamburger prep.
acquire better people skills. “They develop by making plant-based substitutes and which Then there’s dearest Dadi, here to reform
better empathy,” which is crucial in build- was founded by a 57-year-old professor of that most undemocratic of institutions,
ing devoted teams, notes Rich Karlgaard, biochemistry (see Pat Brown, page 73). sperm storage. It’s all so gross and con-
fusing. I mean, I theoretically support
Forbes publisher and author of the book So maybe it’s time to actively unlock the unfulfilled sneakerheads finding shoes
Late Bloomers. power of older innovators. Tech firms could that match their special personalities,
Tony Fadell, a wunderkind at Apple in his build more multigenerational teams, much but the last time I read my Plato a stable
republic didn’t depend on the freedom to
early thirties, founded Nest at age 41. The the way hospitals pair younger surgeons personalize products. See the contradic-
startups he created in his twenties failed (fast, eager to learn) with older ones (expe- tion? Democracy is a kumbaya-humming
to take off, but with Nest he had rocketing rienced, seen it all). Meanwhile, Silicon Val- potluck where the whole class is invited.
Democratization, meanwhile, caters to
success. He attributes this to the acquisi- ley investors should reconsider their ageist infinite constituencies of one, a nonsen-
tion of self-knowledge: understanding the biases. “People over 45 basically die in sical personalization of the political. By
importance not just of making a cool prod- terms of new ideas”—as venture capitalist now I should be used to marketers pil-
laging the English language for profit,
uct but also what customers want, how to Vinod Khosla has said—is a sentiment that but this is tone-deaf even for tech. The
make a sale, the whole ball game. clearly needs to be retired. town squares of social media? Now roil-
Fadell loves young founders, but “they ing hellsites of extremism! “Democratize”
all you want, but I’m no fool. Democracy
have so many blind spots,” he says, and CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a is burning, and you would have me buy a
they don’t understand the broad picture. w i r e d contributing
editor. Write to him at reclaimed-wood, custom-made violin.
“Or at least I didn’t.” clive@clivethompson.net.
0 2 2 ILLUSTRATION / STORYTK
GOLDEN
EYE
NASA’s massive, $10 billion telescope
prepares to launch in 2021.
BY LAURA MALLONEE
If you were a rogue bee buzzing on the moon, this

heat-detecting honeycomb could find you. But rest
easy, tiny friend: The $10 billion James Webb Space
Telescope will have bigger concerns. Once it is blasted
into orbit in 2021, it will seek out water on Earth-like
planets, stars being born, and remote objects formed
in the first 100 million years after the Big Bang.
Webb’s precision comes from its 21.3-foot primary
mirror, nearly three times as big as Hubble’s. Its fold-
ing, hivelike design is formed by 18 lightweight beryl-
lium hexagons that work as one; to sharpen focus, 126
small motors pivot these segments in increments as
small as one ten-thousandth the width of a grain of lily
pollen. They collect 269.1 square feet of light, 50 times
more than NASA’s current infrared space telescope,
Spitzer. A gold coating enhances the mirror’s reflection
of long-wave light, including infrared radiation created
13.6 billion years ago, further back than any telescope
has ever seen. “The telescope is a time machine,” says
Nobel laureate and lead scientist John Mather. “You see
things as they were when light was sent out.”
Some 10,000 astrophysicists, engineers, and chem-
ists have worked on Webb. Mather’s been at it the lon-
gest, since 1996, when NASA left him a voicemail asking
whether he wanted to help build its biggest telescope yet.
He led the team at NASA’s Goddard facility in Maryland
that identified 10 necessary technologies that didn’t yet
exist, including a tennis-court-sized plastic sun shield
that ensures accurate infrared detection by chilling the
observatory to –370 degrees Fahrenheit. (At right, Webb
prepares for testing in NASA’s cryogenic vacuum cham-
ber in Houston.) The project, initially expected to cost
$500 million and launch in 2007, has faced challenges
(leaks, rips, Congress). But now it’s on track to launch
from French Guiana in a European Ariane 5 rocket.
Hovering 1 million miles from Earth, Webb will beam
down 458 gigabits of data a day for up to 10 years,
potentially revealing the deepest mysteries of the uni-
verse’s origins. Mather imagines “there’s something out
there we would never have guessed.”
LAURA MALLONEE (@LauraMallonee) writes about

photography for wired .
0 2 4
PHOTOGRAPH / CHRIS GUNN / NASA

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GADGET LAB → SECURITY
Safe House Helm’s personal server is a secure way to take back

control of your digital life. —Lily Hay Newman
FETISH
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HELM SERVER
There’s ever more reason to worry about entrusting our data to big tech com-
panies, but the convenience and ubiquity of web services like Gmail and iCloud
make it hard to consider anything else. Helm’s server aims to create a seamless
and equally convenient alternative, letting you host your own email, contacts,
and calendar, as well as store files and photos yourself—no snoopy tech giant
pulling the strings. Set up your Helm with its mobile app, then access its con-
tents from anywhere. Your data stays safe in your home, where it’s protected
by multifactor authentication, including a physical security key. The 4.3-inch-
tall Helm comes with an expandable 120 GB of storage, and it regularly
uploads a fully encrypted backup to the cloud so you won’t lose everything in a
fire. There are always some challenges to striking out on your own—like having
important emails caught in friends’ spam folders after you switch—but if you
want to get scrappy with your privacy, this handsome machine will help you do
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PHOTOGRAPHS / NICOLLE CLEMETSON 0 2 9

HEAD TO
HEAD
Hide
and
Seek
Small children (and sometimes
bigger ones) can be as slippery
as salmon. Keep an eye on them
JIOBIT with a kid-friendly GPS tracker.
Best for: Preschool-age Prefontaines —Adrienne So
The keychain-sized Jiobit is the easiest tracker to clip to a wriggly
kid’s belt loop, shoelace, or backpack. It uses a combination of Blue-
tooth, Wi-Fi, cellular data, and GPS to turn the companion app into
a real-life Marauder’s Map. When I toggled on Live Mode at a park,
I could watch onscreen as my preschooler sprinted out of sight,
turned around at an intersection, and walked back. In the app, you
can share your child’s location with trusted adults, create geofences,
get alerted when your kid goes out of bounds, and swipe between
multiple children—or dogs. ($9 monthly subscription required)
$129
$50
RELAY KIDS PHONE
Best for: Independent

elementary schoolers
If you’re not quite ready to
give your kid a smartphone,
the Relay is a perfect stepping
stone. The screenless commu-
nicator uses a cellular connec-
tion to let your family speak to
one another—Relay to Relay,
or from a Relay to the compan-
ion mobile app. You can also
check your kid’s whereabouts
by viewing the Relay’s GPS
location in the app. Younger
kids find it irresistible: My pre-
schooler gleefully shrieked,
“Mommy, I love you!” every
few minutes while I worked—
until I texted my husband to
confiscate the Relay. ($10
monthly subscription required)
0 3 0 STYLIST / AUDREY TAYLOR

Open
Sesame APP PACK
Your brain has

better things to
do than store
secure passwords.
Offload the job
to a dedicated
password manager,
which will keep
your login data
synced and
protected across
all your devices.
—Scott Gilbertson
1PASSWORD
BITWARDEN The most user-friendly WHY NOT JUST

service of this bunch, USE YOUR
1Password seamlessly LASTPASS
Bitwarden is the most integrates with login win- BROWSER?
transparently secure dows to autofill pass- DASHLANE LastPass made its name
password manager we words across all your by handing out free Yes, your web browser
tested; it’s built on open browsers and apps. This A comprehensive, step- accounts, and those are can store and autofill
source code that’s subject is especially true on iOS, by-step setup makes fine. However, you should passwords for you. So
to regular security audits. where the procedure is Dashlane the best choice upgrade to the paid option why not just do that?
The app is also free, smoother than it is on for those new to pass- ($36 a year for individuals, Because storing pass-
making it a good choice other platforms. Features word managers. The free $48 for families) for the words in your browser
for the password-man- like Travel Mode, which tier securely stores your ability to securely share is a terrible idea! If other
ager curious. Advanced automatically deletes passwords on one device. passwords and other sen- people (like the system
users like the ability to sensitive data from Shelling out $5 a month sitive information with admin at the office) have
study the code, and they devices before you go on syncs your encrypted info your partner or work- access to your computer,
can even host Bitwar- a trip, and Watchtower, across multiple devices mates. Emergency Access, they can open Chrome’s
den on their own server. which identifies weak or and earns you features also a premium feature, settings tab and see all of
The free account has no reused passwords, help like Site Breach Alerts— allows someone you trust your passwords in plain-
limitations, but premium justify the cost: $36 a year Dashlane monitors the (like a family member) to text. Also, dedicated
accounts ($10 a year) for one user, $60 for the web to make sure your get into your account in an apps can generate strong
offer extras like whole family. personal info isn’t being urgent situation. passwords for you and
support for logging in sold on the black market. autofill any passwords
with a YubiKey and If it is, the app notifies you outside the browser, like
advice on strengthening and helps you change any in your banking or shop-
your passwords. compromised passwords. ping apps.
0 3 2
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Balanced Beams
These multitalented routers ensure that your home Wi-Fi isn’t
just stable and fast but also secure. —Michael Calore
EERO PRO
HEAD TO Best for: Networking newbies

HEAD The Eero Pro is a solid router on its own,
but its superpower is in serving as a base
station to bring mesh networking into
your home. Start by connecting it to your
modem, then plug signal-boosting Beacons
($149, not included) into AC outlets around
the house. This multipoint approach dis-
tributes the Wi-Fi more efficiently, blanket-
ing your entire home in data packets—and
the plug-and-play setup requires almost
zero networking know-how. A subscription
to Eero Secure+ ($99 a year) locks the net-
work down: It filters all the traffic, blocking
ads both malicious and benign, identify-
ing and warning against sketchy websites,
and guarding the kids against harmful con-
tent. I appreciate the ability to open Eero’s
smartphone app to see which devices
on my network have endured the most
attempted attacks—a telltale sign some-
one has installed bad software or has been
hanging around unsavory destinations.
$199
$319
TP-LINK ARCHER AX6000
Best for: Hyper-connected families

The eight high-gain antennas spiking up from the
Archer’s chassis pump out a blast of Wi-Fi strong
enough to flood a McMansion. And TP-Link’s
router supports the just-released Wi-Fi 6 wire-
less standard, which can serve bandwidth to
more devices without clogging the tubes—
increasingly important in our stream-happy
world. Security is built in, with TP-Link and Trend
Micro’s HomeCare service preinstalled (free for
three years, price thereafter TBD). It provides
protection against malicious websites and phish-
ing emails, as well as a neat system that quar-
antines any device on your network that may be
compromised. Families will applaud the paren-
tal controls, which group together each person’s
devices for easier management. So if you want
to block Jimmy’s YouTube access after 10 pm,
with one tap you can institute that limit on his
tablet, PC, and Roku. Sorry, Jimmy.
0 3 4
nies like Polaroid and Hive have even hired

sought-after consumer design firms like
Ammunition and Fuseproject, whose other
products include Beats by Dre headphones
and the Snoo robotic bassinet, to design their
cameras.
One irony here: We are increasingly fear-
ful that our smart-home devices are eaves-
dropping on us, that hackers can crack into
our internet of things for fun and profit, that
manufacturers listen in on our conversa-
tions. (Earlier this year Bloomberg set off a
frenzy by revealing that Amazon employees
listen to Alexa audio clips.) These days, to
equate our home security cameras with our
increasingly suspect home devices may no
longer enhance a feeling of peace of mind.
More important, though, is the conflict
with the underlying purpose of security
cameras. While footage can be used to alert
police to a break-in or to secure a court-
room conviction, the most effective func-
tion of surveillance cameras is, say it again,
deterrence.
Private Eyes
Research conducted in the US and UK
shows that the presence of surveillance
cameras in urban settings caused a sig-
nificant decrease in property crimes on
Surveillance works best when the bad guys can see they’re the streets and in subway stations, and
being watched. So why design smart-home security cameras a decrease of 50 percent in parking lots.
to blend in so beautifully? —Jonathon Keats But for that deterrence to work, criminals
need to recognize the device, and the device
needs to convey authority. As a research
At the end of the ’60s, in the embryonic surveillance cameras. In 2018, some 50 mil- report by Arizona State University’s Center
days of cable television, an enterprising lion of them were sold; research firm Strategy for Problem-Oriented Policing states, only
executive had an idea. He persuaded the Analytics estimates that four years from now, an obviously visible security camera has the
leadership of Olean, in upstate New York, customers will buy 120 million. desired demotivating effect: “For this crime-
to hook up closed-circuit TV cameras, via The thing is, these companies have been prevention process to succeed, the offender
the newly laid cables, along the town’s pushing the cameras as stylish additions to must be aware of the cameras’ presence.”
main street. With 20,000 residents, Olean a home. But the attempt to reconcile deter- So the more attractive and inconspicuous
was hardly crime-blighted Manhattan. But rence with a chic image is bound to have dys- security cameras are, the less likely they are
when the first-of-its-kind surveillance sys- topian consequences. to impress intruders.
tem was installed in 1968, law enforcement Public surveillance cameras come in two In the short term, discretion may be a
officials from as far away as Israel and Thai- forms. One, shaped like a cylindrical bul- shrewd move. In Olean, the camera system
land came to marvel at the eight robotic let, is pretty easy to see and is pointed at a was removed when a new mayor was
cameras attached to utility poles. Miscreants subject—say a person standing at a bank elected. In 1969, The New York Times
were also impressed: Not a single crime was teller’s window—like a shotgun. If the cam- reported that the mayor objected that it
attempted during the 18-month run of the era is robotic, it can single out and follow a “smacked of an invasion of privacy.” Para-
experimental network. subject or suspect. The second kind, a dome doxically, the near future feels like a privacy
After that, there was no stopping video- camera typically enclosed in a tinted plastic invasion much worse than anything Olean’s
based crime deterrence. More than 50 mil- bubble, is more sinister. People are aware of mayor could have imagined, in which dis-
lion CCTV cameras now watch over the it but never know who, or what, it is filming. creetly sleek cameras are absolutely every-
residents of the United States, and four times The home surveillance market, however, where, making us all paranoid prisoners of
as many keep Chinese citizens in check. No is more about friendly design; a security our own society.
surprise, then, that in the past five or so years camera that resembles a Nest thermostat
companies like Nest and Ring have been or an Amazon Echo is in keeping with the JONATHON KEATS wrote about sound
pushing peace of mind in the form of home modern, tech-enabled lifestyle. Compa- design in issue 27.06.
0 3 6
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REBUILD
THE
BRIDGE
—AGAI N
MAKING PROGRESS IN 1904, a group of Canadian workers began the hard slog
of constructing the world’s longest bridge, across the Saint
ME A N S M A K ING Lawrence River just south of the city of Quebec. It was a wildly
ambitious project. And it wasn’t just for the Quebecois: Rail-
(S OME T IME S roads were revolutionizing commerce and communications,

and the bridge would connect people and allow trains to run
DE VA S TAT ING) from New Brunswick in the east to Winnipeg in the west.
The river was 190 feet deep at the center, and ice piled
MIS TA K E S . high above the water’s surface in the winter. Nothing about
the bridge’s construction would be easy. The engineers chose
AND THEN LEARNING a complex cantilever design, a cutting-edge approach but a
cost-efficient one too. Ambition creates risks, and warning
FROM THEM. signs started to appear. The steel trusses weighed more than
expected. Some of the lower chords of the bridge seemed mis-
aligned or bent. Workers raised concerns. But the project’s
leaders pressed ahead.
Exactly 100 years later, in February 2004, a young entre-
preneur named Mark Zuckerberg founded The Facebook. His
ambition was nothing less than to remake the internet around
personal relationships and then to remake the world around
BY NICHOLAS THOMPSON Facebook. When the company filed to go public in 2012, he
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T H E A RT O F E S S E N C E
ing in a time of intense backlash against

the technology industry. It’s not clear when
it started, but if one had to choose a date,
November 8, 2016, isn’t a bad one. Within
six months of the election, Molotov cock-
tails were being chucked at the captains
of Silicon Valley from all directions—and
published a letter to potential investors.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a
employees of the biggest tech compa-
nies were among those lighting the wicks. YOU H AV E T O
company. It was built to accomplish a social Antitrust law, disdained for decades, sud- THINK THROUGH WHAT
mission—to make the world more open and denly became exciting. Worries that had
connected,” he wrote. “We don’t build ser- been playing as background music in soci- COULD GO WRONG
vices to make money; we make money to ety for years—online privacy, the fears of
build better services.” An open and con-
nected world, he wrote, would make the
artificial intelligence taking jobs—began to
crescendo. Ad targeting was redefined as INS T E A D OF
economy stronger and businesses better. surveillance capitalism. Self-driving cars ASSUMING EVERYTHING
Facebook was building a bridge and relent- were redefined as death traps. #Delete-
lessly increasing its span. Uber became a meme. The reputation of WILL GO RIGHT.
One day in August 1907, several years an entire industry tanked, just as had hap-
into the construction of the bridge over the pened eight years earlier to finance. In 2016,
Saint Lawrence River, calamity struck in the wired ran a photograph of Mark Zucker-
space of 15 seconds. Every major section of berg on the cover with the line “Could Face-
the structure’s nearly complete southern book Save Your Life?” Fifteen months later,
half collapsed. Workers were crushed or we ran a photo-illustration of him blood-
swept into the current. Another group of ied and bruised. No words were necessary.
men found temporary safety but drowned There’s no question that the tech industry
under the rising tide. In all, 75 people died, had it coming. It had become arrogant. The
including 33 Mohawk steelworkers from nerds had ascended, culturally and socially,
the nearby Kahnawake reserve. and had become enchanted with their own
By now, you surely see where I’m going virtuous self-image. They spoke like Saint
with this. In 2016, Facebook was struck Francis in public while privately worship- a new kind of truss. The canti-
by calamity too. The core algorithm of the ping Mammon. In hindsight, Facebook’s mis- lever arms on either side went
company’s News Feed was weaponized by sionary IPO letter reads like a parody. But up and stood strong. By 1916, the
Russian operatives and purveyors of fake the backlash has included some gratuitous only major task remaining was to
news. A platform designed for connect- swipes too. Take self-driving cars. They don’t link the two sides with a 5,000-
ing people turned out to be a remarkable text while driving; they don’t drink. If we can ton center span. It was maneu-
accelerant for political divisions. The elec- get them to work, they’ll save tens of thou- vered into place via tugboat, and
tion was a mess, whatever your politics, and sands of lives a year. Almost everything we soon the workers began to lift it
Facebook was partly to blame. The com- do has become simpler, easier, and more up with huge hangers. But once
pany’s philosophy—move fast and break efficient in some way because of software. more, calamity struck. The hoist-
things—was fine when the only thing at Even Facebook deserves a certain sympa- ing system failed, and the giant
stake was whether your aunt could recon- thy as it tries to juggle the conflicting priori- centerpiece plunged into the
nect with her high school ex. That philoso- ties of privacy, transparency, and safety—as river, taking 13 workers with it.
phy lost its roguish charm when democracy the public demands perfection on all three. Soon, though, the Canadian
itself was up for grabs. Then, in 2018, Face- Now let’s return to the Quebec bridge. government’s engineers tried a
book faced the worst crisis of its short After the catastrophe, the site became a place third time. Many lives had been
existence when news broke that a shady of pilgrimage and, eventually, renewal. The lost, but connecting the two sides
political outfit called Cambridge Analytica Canadian government needed the railway of the river remained essential
had siphoned off data from nearly 100 mil- link, and it took over the design and con- for the country’s prosperity. So
lion users of the platform. struction of the bridge. New plans were the builders reconstructed the
For several years now, we’ve been liv- drawn up, involving stronger supports and collapsed center span and, just
three years after the second comes from software: the music we hear,
collapse, the Prince of Wales the movies we watch, the stories we tell.
presided over its opening. The We live longer, eat better, and keep in our
bridge held. Soon, cars and trains pockets computers more powerful than the
were crossing the same river in supercomputers that guided the first people
which so many people had died. in space. We can record police abuses
For a century, it has stood as the with our smartphones and hold power to
longest cantilever bridge in the account. Gene editing could help us feed
world. Quebec and Canada have the planet; we may send people to Mars;
prospered for it. certified and regulated; the latter can learn technological acumen is redefining global
More important, the collapses their craft from scratch in their basement. politics. A thousand inefficient businesses
became an ethical touchstone. And there’s good reason for civil engineers have been pulled up from the roots, as bet-
A professor named H. E. T. Haul- to demand more rigor than their software ter ideas have sprung from the soil.
tain decided that he wanted to engineer brethren. If you make a mistake in And that’s what this issue is about: the
commemorate the story, and a line of code, you can fix it from your chair. builders who understand the consequences
he called on the poet and author Repairing a steel beam submerged in an icy of their choices. It’s about people who recog-
Rudyard Kipling, who had pre- river is a different matter. Software com- nize the awesome responsibility of the tech-
viously written an ode to engi- panies grow, too, according to the logic of nological powers bequeathed to us by our
neers, for help. Haultain worked network effects and increasing returns to predecessors. There’s Kate Darling, whose
with Kipling and the leaders of scale. They have to move fast if they want research is redefining the way we think about
Canada’s main engineering to thrive. Such rules and logic rarely, if ever, our moral responsibilities to robots. There’s
universities to develop what’s apply in the physical world. Patrick Collison, who, along with his brother,
called “The Ritual of the Call- So, yes, the cultures have to be different. created a company, Stripe, that makes it
ing of an Engineer.” And for And the problems differ too. The bridge col- vastly easier for people all over the world
nearly a century, graduates lapsed twice because of failure in execution; to start businesses and process payments
have gone through a ceremony Facebook’s problem was more a failure of without tearing down the entire financial
in which they recite their obli- imagination and the inability to see how the system. There’s Laura Boykin, using pocket-
gations to their craft: “I will not platform could be used for harm. DNA sequencing to save Africa’s cassava
henceforward suffer or pass, or That said, Silicon Valley, and software crop. There’s Eva Galperin, protecting her
be privy to the passing of, Bad engineers everywhere, could still learn fellow hackers from stalkerware and author-
Workmanship or Faulty Material something from the culture that asks its itarians. There’s Moriba Jah, working to map
in aught that concerns my works adherents to wear those iron rings. Tech the garbage orbiting our planet.
before mankind as an Engineer, companies operate in digital worlds, but These are people who build things fast
or in my dealings with my own their actions have consequences in the phys- but who are also fixing things. They’re
Soul before my Maker.” ical one. And when you build things, you are using technology to take us to new places.
At the end of the ceremony, responsible to the people who use them. You They’re thinking deeply—but not to the
they are given iron rings to wear have to think through what could go wrong point of paralysis—about the problems
as a reminder of these obliga- instead of assuming everything will go right. society faces and the ways that technol-
tions: Move slow and get things You have to build as if you have a ring forged ogy can help. They’re people who realized
right. According to myth, the from a shattered bridge on your pinky. that the bridge they were building may have
first of these rings were forged Sometimes systems crack, and then they collapsed, but rather than abandon it, they
from pieces of the collapsed shatter. But sometimes the crack leads to built it anew with forethought. Or, as the
bridge. The rings are worn on the remedy. And that’s what we need now: ceremony of the Iron Ring requires one
the pinky finger of the dominant a coming together of many tribes to fix the to pledge, “My Time I will not refuse; my
hand, so that they click on the mess we’re in, and to learn from the mis- Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will
table when the engineer signs takes the industry has made. We need action not deny towards the honour, use, stabil-
or stamps a blueprint. from governments, builders, users, people ity and perfection of any works to which I
The culture of civil engineers inside Silicon Valley, and people every- may be called to set my hand.”
has always been different from where else writing code.
the culture of software engi- The point isn’t to stop progress but to NICHOLAS THOMPSON (@nxthompson) is
neers. The former are formally enable it. Much of the magic in our lives w i r e d ’s editor in chief.
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PORTRAITS BY
NOÉMIE TSHINANGA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
GISELA GOPPEL
CONCEPTUAL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
THE VOORHES
MEDICINE
Wendell Lim
S Y N T H E T I C B I OL O G I S T / UC San Francisco
Arming the immune system to kill

cancer—and more.
WHEN WENDELL LIM booted up his bio- hard to make T cells that kill only cancer,
physical chemistry lab at UC San Francisco in with no collateral damage. Hearing this, Lim
1996, he had no ambition to hack the human realized the tools he’d been tinkering with
immune system. He was focused on more could make CAR-T safer and more reliable.
basic questions, like decoding the underly- Since 2015, Lim’s lab has been making
ing logic of biology. Lim, who nearly majored more finely tuned T cells. One requires a
in art at Harvard, sought answers through drug to trigger its kill mode. Others use mul-
genetic engineering. For years he tinkered tiple molecular markers to identify cancer,
with yeast, inserting code into its DNA to like two-factor authentication. First-gen
make it do things never seen in nature. CAR-T therapies rely on a single lock-and-
Then, in 2010, he met a University of Penn- key switch, Lim notes, but a tumor is a com-
sylvania oncologist named Carl June who plex, mutating environment. That’s why he’s
was developing a cancer treatment called designing cells to read patterns of molecules,
CAR-T. It involves genetically engineering T a bit like how facial recognition algorithms
cells—the assassins of the immune system— analyze faces. He’s also creating T cells that
to create a clone army trained to find and attack only when there’s a critical mass of
destroy a patient’s unique cancer. In 2011, tumor-specific molecules present, and a ver-
June published CAR-T’s first breakthrough sion that intercepts signals between tumor
success, which set off a tsunami of clinical cells to stage assaults on the whole network.
trials, leading to (so far) two FDA-approved Lim expects some of his early T cell designs
treatments. But June and others were wor- to be tested in humans within two years.
ried. A clone army can also be deadly—it’s But he’s already looking beyond cancer, to
hacking the whole immune system: Healing
wounds, halting degeneration, preventing
autoimmunity—all of it could be guided by
designer cells. “The culture now is that CAR-T
is just a big toxin attached to an antibody,”
Lim says. “The idea that immune cells are
programmable computational devices that
can do many things is pretty far away, but I’m
hopeful we change that.” —MEGAN MOLTENI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Joy
Buolamwini
FOUNDER /
Algorithmic Justice League
Calling out bias

hidden in tech tools.
IN 2015, MIT Media Lab master's student Joy Buolam- biases in facial-analysis algorithms from Amazon, IBM,
wini gazed, puzzled, into her webcam. She was work- and Microsoft. She showed that the services frequently
ing on an art piece to project digital masks on faces, but saw women with dark skin as men but made few errors
her own was invisible to the off-the-shelf face-tracking on men with light skin. (All three companies say their
software she was using. She scrawled a face on her tech is now more accurate.)
hand in marker. Face detected. Hmm. She covered her Buolamwini believes that people developing AI tech
dark skin with a white mask left over from Halloween. should check their inventions for bias and other harms
Face detected. Oh. before launch, not rely on Good Samaritans like her to
Buolamwini had come to MIT to explore how people audit them later. She spearheaded the Safe Face Pledge
could use technology for social change. The algorithm with Georgetown Law—a call for companies to agree
that couldn’t see her face set her on a new path: explor- to take steps aimed at mitigating the harms of facial
ing how tech could be misused and abused. When she analysis. She’s also pushing for a moratorium on police
learned how facial recognition is used in law enforce- and government use of facial recognition to allow time
ment, where error-prone algorithms could have grave for debate and possibly the creation of regulations. “We
consequences, she says, “that’s when it became urgent.” need public deliberation,” Buolamwini says. Her own
Buolamwini, now working on a PhD at MIT, is among deliberation takes place in scientific papers, congressio-
those pressing companies and governments to be more nal testimony, and spoken word poetry. “It’s our stories
cautious in their embrace of AI. Her work has revealed that lead to change,” she says. —TOM SIMONITE
FILTER BUBBLES
Guillaume I USED TO WORK at Google, but I had a more positive impact on it after I left.
Chaslot When I started at the company in 2010, I had recently completed a PhD in artificial
intelligence, and I joined a team working on new algorithms to recommend YouTube vid-
FOUNDER / AlgoTransparency eos. Our work centered on increasing a single number—the amount of time people spent
watching videos. That was seen as the way to compete with Facebook and gain audience
Pushing Big Tech to from TV. In my experience, every other idea or creative thought was dismissed.
clean up its algorithms. Our team had a handful of people, but I’d say our recommendations increased watch
time by millions of hours. They were designed to suggest videos that a person was likely to
watch, based largely on their past activity on the service. But we had no idea what people
were watching. We assumed that because watch time was moving in a positive direction,
the impact on the audience was also positive.
Still, I began to worry that the system we built could trap people inside filter bubbles,
pushing them to experience the same type of content over and over. I helped prototype
new ways to offer recommendations that would diversify what people saw, but those sys-
tems were never implemented. I was eventually fired for performance issues.
After leaving Google I joined a startup, then did some consulting before going to a non-
profit. But I kept worrying about the power of YouTube’s recommendations. I decided
to test them with a robot—a piece of software that watches lots of videos and follows
recommendations.
The 2016 presidential election was approaching, so I directed the robot to watch videos
about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. What I discovered was frightening. My analysis
showed YouTube’s recommendation system was helping videos promoting political con-
spiracy theories—like those from right-wing radio host Alex Jones—to get millions of views.
I was shocked, and launched a website called AlgoTransparency that shows live data
on what my robot discovers about YouTube recommendations. Journalists started writ-
ing about what I found, and YouTube finally acted. The company began adding Wikipedia
links below conspiracy theory videos to help people recognize them. This January, the
company changed its recommendation algorithms to limit the spread of conspiracy the-
ories. My data suggests this could reduce the number of times the site recommends con-
spiracy videos each year by the billions. Recommendations are responsible for more than
70 percent of time spent on YouTube, so the effect could be dramatic.
My experience shows that we can hold giant technology companies to account if we
have the right tools. I’m now upgrading AlgoTransparency to display richer data, and I’m
building a browser extension that will warn you about the algorithms trying to manipulate
you as you browse the web. Its advice will be a bit like health ratings on food—some of the
things you enjoy you shouldn’t eat every day. For YouTube’s recommendations, it might say,
“This algorithm is made to make you binge-watch, not to recommend things that are true.”
Longer term, I hope work like mine can allow new technology companies to emerge
that make ethics their first priority. Facebook and Google claim to have reformed, but
large companies won’t change their business models and values. Users don’t realize how
much power they would have if they were paying for a service. Signal, a free messaging
app, enables you to communicate with anybody, similar to Facebook’s WhatsApp, but
doesn’t rely on ad revenue. A complex service like Facebook could be run in its users’
interest, without ads, if people paid a small amount, say a dollar a month. If consumers
can be helped to see the problems with existing, ad-driven services, they may support
companies that operate differently. —AS TOLD TO TOM SIMONITE
(YouTube questions the accuracy of the AlgoTransparency tool and says its service now optimizes for user
satisfaction and information quality in addition to watch time.)
CYBERSECURITY the targets of state-sponsored hackers into two categories: First,

E VA G A L P E R I N D I V I D E S
Eva there are the corporations, government agencies, and billionaires that can afford to pay
expensive cybersecurity consultants, staff 24/7 security operations centers, and hire inci-
Galperin
HEAD OF THREAT LAB /
dent responders after a breach. Then there’s everyone else—an underclass of victims who
enjoy virtually none of those pricey protections. But now they do, at least, have Eva Galperin.
Earlier this year, Galperin, the head of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Founda-
Electronic Frontier Foundation
tion, formed a new and unusual team within the venerable digital rights group. For nearly
three decades, the EFF has acted as a kind of geeky nonprofit law firm, fighting to protect
Protecting the rest of us online privacy and free expression in court, defending security researchers, and launching
from hackers and spies. lawsuits against everyone from patent trolls to warrantless-wiretap enablers. But Galp-
erin’s new initiative, called the Threat Lab, is more like a small, nonprofit cybersecurity
consulting firm—a sort of CrowdStrike or FireEye for the little guy.
Galperin and her team focus on protect- try, which has long neglected stalkerware,
ing the activists, dissidents, lawyers, journal- to take it far more seriously. Several com-
ists, and civilians who find themselves in an panies have since pledged to catalog and
increasingly lopsided conflict with entities eradicate the apps just as thoroughly as they
that hack, surveil, and sabotage them—or do traditional malware. “Stalkerware is con-
better yet, equipping them to protect them- sidered beneath the interest of most secu-
selves. “I think that empowering people to rity researchers,” Galperin says. “Changing
confront power is good,” she says. “That’s norms takes time. But it starts with someone
how change happens.” standing up and saying ‘This is not OK, this
In part, Galperin aims to create tools that is not acceptable—this is spying.’”
level the playing field for surveillance vic- Galperin, who has silvery-violet hair and
tims. In its first months, for instance, the a cyberpunk aesthetic, got her start as a sys-
Threat Lab’s tiny team of three full-time tems administrator, attending security con-
staffers has been building a device to detect ferences and being treated, she says, like
a common form of police surveillance: fake “some hacker’s girlfriend who looks after
LTE cell towers that trick phones into con- Solaris boxes.” In 2007 she joined the EFF,
necting to them, enabling police to pinpoint where her first job was to answer the 50-plus
the location and track the identities of pro- calls and emails that came in every day from
testers and other surveillance targets. people seeking help. The organization had
The Threat Lab also does detective work recently filed a lawsuit against AT&T for aid-
to expose perpetrators of state-sponsored ing warrantless NSA spying, and Galperin
surveillance. For years, even before the was flooded with messages from people who
team’s creation, Galperin and fellow EFF had been targeted for surveillance. Her desk
researcher Cooper Quintin investigated a became a kind of security crisis hotline.
hacking operation that planted spyware on According to Danny O’Brien, Galperin’s
the computers of journalists and opposi- former boss at the EFF, the experience gave
tion figures in Kazakhstan. Working with her a strong sense of the victim’s perspec-
the mobile security firm Lookout, Galp- tive—something that’s often overlooked
erin’s team found that some of the same by the cybersecurity research community,
tools—perhaps made by the same for- which tends to focus more on sexy new
hire hackers—were being used in a mas- hacking techniques than on the people who
sive campaign to spy on civilian targets in suffer from their use. “Eva isn’t afraid to plot
Lebanon. At one point during that investi- out the consequences of hackers’ actions,”
gation, the EFF had a researcher walk the O’Brien says, “to stare those consequences
streets of Beirut with a smartphone to find down until the problem is solved.”
the Wi-Fi network they’d linked with the She’s also good at plotting out, and max-
hackers. The researcher discovered it was imizing, the consequences of her own
emanating from inside the headquarters of actions. Galperin says she has no illusions
the Lebanese General Security Directorate. that she or her small team alone can tip the
Galperin’s own obsession is the scourge balance of security for vulnerable people
known as spouseware, or stalkerware: worldwide. But in line with the EFF’s long-
hidden apps installed on a smartphone time tactic of choosing cases that can set
by someone with physical access to the legal precedents, she says she chooses proj-
device—often a domestic abuser—that let ects that promise to have cascading effects,
them spy on the phone’s owner. Since early that will force the industry to change its pri-
2018, Galperin has offered her services as orities or inspire other researchers. “You
a kind of first responder, security consul- figure out the place where you need to
tant, and therapist for stalkerware victims. push,” she says, “not just to help the people
But Galperin wasn’t satisfied with the scale you help every day, the individuals, but to
of that hands-on approach. So she began change the game. To change the system.”
shaming and pressuring the antivirus indus- —ANDY GREENBERG
SUSTAINABILITY
Lisa
Jackson
V P O F E N V I R O N M E N T, P O L I C Y,
A N D S O C I A L I N I T I AT I V E S /
Apple
Building a fully recycled and

recyclable supply chain.
In Lisa Jackson’s first year at

Apple, fresh off a stint as Pres-
ident Obama’s administrator of
the Environmental Protection
Agency, she took over a campaign
became aware that
I N 2 0 13 , C H A D R I G E T T I zip through calculations that would trouble to transition all company facil-
the field of quantum computing was enter- a conventional machine. Rigetti’s processors ities to 100 percent renewable
ing a kind of adolescence. Sketched out in the are being designed as add-ons: They’ll take energy. But before Apple hit that
goal in April 2018, Jackson rolled
1990s, the technology was supposed to leap- a regular computer and give it a quantum out an even more audacious
frog conventional computing by tapping into boost, creating a best-of-both-worlds hybrid. plan: designing an iPhone made
the weird physics of subatomic particles. For Some of Rigetti’s customers are already entirely from recycled materials.
Since then, Jackson and her
years, researchers had been held up by the test-driving its hardware over the cloud. Oth- team have come up with new
devilish unreliability of qubits, the devices ers are exploring software applications. The methods of recycling aluminum
needed to perform quantum manipulations pharmaceutical giant Merck, for instance, is and recovering tin, engineering
faster circuits that use less sili-
on data. But now, finally, they were finding investigating ways to streamline drug pro- con, and building robots that can
new ways to tame them. “It was black magic, duction. NASA is looking to speed up the strip down 200 iPhones an hour.
and then a framework emerged,” Rigetti says. search for new planets in telescope data. These advances bring Apple
closer to what Jackson calls a
“You could start to see all the pieces coming Rigetti’s chips aren’t consumer gadgets (for “moon shot” goal: to make all
together.” That’s when he quit his job at IBM one thing, their operating temperature is of its products using renewable
and struck out on his own. Six years later, in colder than any natural place in the known resources and recycled materi-
als. She and her team began by
labs stocked with steampunky equipment universe), but they could still change your life. evaluating each of Apple’s pro-
and liquid helium, Rigetti Computing is man- Unlike its rivals—Google, IBM, Intel, Mic- duction materials for its environ-
ufacturing small quantum processors. rosoft—Rigetti can’t count on profits from mental and social impact, along
with the vulnerability of its sup-
The machines on our desks and in our online ads or workplace software. That’s ply, and identified 14 elements
pockets solve problems by flipping bits from partly why it’s pushing the hybrid model, to start with. To date, they’ve
0 to 1, or vice versa. Qubits use the same which should be quicker to bring to market upgraded 11 iPhone models with
main logic boards soldered using
binary format, but they can also ascend into than stand-alone quantum computers. As only recycled tin.
a third state, called a superposition—neither Rigetti sees it, his team benefits from being This isn’t enough for Green-
0 nor 1 but both simultaneously (well, sort of). untethered to older ways of thinking. “We’re peace, which remains fairly unim-
pressed with the company’s
Thanks to this trick, a quantum computer can free from history,” he says. —TOM SIMONITE efforts. But the environmental
group also ranks Apple as green-
est among large tech companies
for its recycling efforts and its
shift to renewable energy. Jack-
Three questions for … that model. The alternative record in terms of technol son’s fully recycled supply chain
is closer to China’s. China ogies like encryption. But is still years away, but according
Matthew Prince treats the internet the way it has the fastestgrowing to colleagues, the word impos
COFOUNDER & CEO / the US treats radio stations, internet user base and sible is not in her lexicon. If that’s
Cloudflare where you need a license some incredibly innovative so, we have a challenge for her:
to put content on it. The business models. Can she recycle some old head-
bad news is that I think we phone jacks into the next-gen
1 Recently, Cloudflare acted will move toward that more 3 How do we guard iPhone? —Meghan Herbst
under pressure to kick bad permissioned model, which against unintended
actors off its service—the constrains innovation. consequences?
Daily Stormer, then 8chan. I don’t know that there’s any
What concerns you most 2 Where’s the biggest perfect answer to that, but
about tech right now? impact of this shift? I think being more modest
The internet is at a cross I’m thinking a lot about is important. Taking smaller
roads. Most of the globe has India. Whatever internet steps. Does a situation
followed the model set by the policy India sets is likely really require a radically dif
US, where anybody can post to be adopted by the rest ferent approach, or can we
online and content is gener of the world. India has the rely on existing principles?
ally available to all. But a lot critical mass to do that.
of the world has lost faith in It doesn’t have the best — L ILY H AY N E W M A N
RARE EARTHS
The Taptic
engine—Apple’s
key component
for producing
haptic feedback—
in the iPhone 11
models uses 100
percent recycled
rare-earth metals.
COBALT TIN
A disassembly At least 15 Apple
robot called products use 100
Daisy extracts percent recycled
cobalt from recy- tin in the solder
cled iPhones. for their main
The company is logic boards and
now producing some power
batteries with adapters.
the reclaimed
material.
ALUMINUM
In 2018, Apple devel-
oped a process for
smelting recycled
aluminum that pro-
duces a much higher
quality finish. The
company is also
investing in greener
smelters, intended
to eliminate carbon
dioxide emissions.
Tia Hatton, AGE 22
When Hatton was young,

she and her family weren't
necessarily convinced by
scientists’ claims about cli
mate change. But when ris
ing temperatures threatened
her beloved pastime as a
crosscountry skier, Hatton
dug into the data. She now
has a degree in environmen
tal sciences and works for a
land trust in a conservative
part of rural Oregon. “This is
something that should have
been resolved 50 years ago,”
she says. “It totally pisses
me off that our government
knew about it.”
Avery M., AGE 14 Nathan Baring, AGE 20
Avery identifies as a “very big Baring grew up in Fairbanks,

animal person.” When she was Alaska. He worries that the
in kindergarten, she raised formative experiences of his
$200 for the Snow Leopard youth—huddling by a wood
Trust. Later she did the same stove at 40 below, shovel
thing for wolves, then salmon. ing himself out of snow—are
At 9 years old, she testified under threat. “We’ve had to
before her city council in Ore repair roads almost every
gon in support of a climate year because of permafrost
ordinance. The following year, melt,” he says. “The Arctic is
she signed on to Juliana v. never going to be the same.”
United States. “I had no idea Baring’s parents are state
what I was getting into,” she employees, which means
says. “It’s kind of disgusting their salaries are tied to oil
how slow everything is. We revenues. As the US works
have the world on the line, and to end its reliance on fossil
it’s been four years.” fuels, he says, it can’t “just
let these oil towns screw
themselves. These are my
neighbors.”
ACTIVISM
IN 1996, THE UN'S Intergovernmental Panel on first wild huckleberries, peered into her first
The youth Climate Change issued the second in a series

of increasingly dire reports. More frequent
tidal pool, and first went backpacking in the
wilderness with her dad—the climate crisis
plaintiffs in heat waves, floods, droughts, fires, and pest

outbreaks were on the way, scientists said.
deepened. US carbon emissions rose by 91
billion tons; the fracking boom got under
Juliana v. The time to act was now.

That same year, in a small forested town
way. When Juliana was 15, she sued the
governor of Oregon, demanding a carbon-
United States in Oregon, Kelsey Cascadia Juliana was born.

Her parents, who met at an anti-logging
reduction plan. (The state supreme court
will hear the case later this year.)
demonstration, named her after the nearby By 2015, Juliana had had enough. She’d
Suing for climate justice. Kelsey Creek and the Cascadia bioregion. heard that a local legal nonprofit, Our Chil-
They took her to her first environmen- dren’s Trust, was mounting a climate suit
tal protest when she was two months old. against the federal government. Together
Over the next 14 years—as Juliana tasted her with 20 other young people, ranging in age
Kiran Oommen, AGE 22
Oommen fears for their rela

tives in hurricaneprone Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, and in
coastal India, where last year
more than 480 people died in
flooding and landslides from
an exceptionally devastat
ing monsoon season. What
scares Oommen most about
climate change is its dispro
portionate effect on margin
alized communities. “Having
loved ones in these places,
it doesn’t feel great,” they
say. “What makes it worse is
knowing that it’s not just nat
ural changes in the environ
ment; it’s humancaused.”
Levi D., AGE 12
Levi is the youngest plaintiff

in the case. He grew up on a
barrier island on the eastern
coast of Florida; each year, he
and his mother plant beach
grass to shore up the dunes.
“Every time I see the street
flood outside my house, I think
about how fragile our barrier
island is,” he says. “If sealevel
rise continues, that means
the island I spent my whole
entire life on will eventually go
underwater.”
20
11
7 8 9 10 12 13
from 8 to 19, she joined as a plaintiff. Citing “At stake are the lives and safety of these
harms such as worsening respiratory ill- young people,” says Julia Olson, the lead 1 4
2 3 5 6
nesses, forced relocation due to water scar- attorney in the case. “This is really their
city, and the threat of losing their homes last stand.”
to rising seas, Juliana and her coplaintiffs Juliana, who is now 23, agrees. “I want to
argue that elected officials have failed to be a parent and have a family,” she says. “I
protect their constitutional rights. Their don’t know if I’d be able to do that unless KEY
case, which has survived a number of legal I felt like our leaders did everything they
1 Nathan Baring 2 Avery M. 3 Miko Vergun
challenges from both the fossil-fuel industry possibly could to ensure a livable future.” To
4 Kiran Oommen 5 Hazel V. 6 Levi D. 7 Nick
and the Obama and Trump administrations, lose this case, she adds, “would be a huge Venner 8 Isaac V. 9 Tia Hatton 10 Jacob Lebel
11 Vic Barrett 12 Sahara V. 13 Xiuhtezcatl
demands nothing less than a sweeping court blow to myself and to my peers who are
Martinez 14 Alex Loznak 15 Zealand B.
order on the scale of Brown v. Board of Edu- still holding on to this belief in democracy 16 Journey Zephier 17 Kelsey Juliana 18 Sophie
Kivlehan 19 Jaime Butler 20 Aji Piper 21 Jayden F.
cation—one that will affirm the fundamen- and justice.” Five of her coplaintiffs weigh
tal right to a stable climate system for all. in above. —SARASWATI RATHOD
wound regions of DNA (inside a nucleus) to a more effective or narrowly targeted drug
glimpse active, open genes. Even the best or gene therapy.
technology could get a signal only from But Buenrostro’s invention also sparked
comparatively large samples—millions of more sweeping and fundamental changes,
cells, not all the same kind—and find the especially in cellular taxonomy. Cells had
average activity. But that’s a bit like aver- long been classified based on their loca-
aging the behaviors of a cat, a dog, a giraffe, tion in the body, along with a handful of
and a shark: How can you tell what’s doing identifying markers—a bit like fingerprints.
what? “You were literally taking chunks of But, like fingerprints, it was only possible to
skin or chunks of brain or chunks of heart match prints already on file, not new ones.
WHEN JASON BUENROSTRO started grad-
and then asking, ‘What’s the heart’s genetic Single-cell ATAC-seq made it possible to
uate school at Stanford, he became capti-
activity profile? What’s the brain’s profile?’” sort cells according to their genetic activity
vated by a problem that had long frustrated
Buenrostro recalls. Because the chunks instead, upending old categories. Not long
researchers. At the time, Buenrostro was
contained so many different cell types, in ago researchers estimated that the body
already something of a prodigy: A child of
other words, it “was pretty meaningless.” As contained roughly 200 cell types; now it’s
immigrants without high school diplomas,
a result, researchers were effectively blind clear there are far more—probably thou-
he had attended a small liberal arts college
not only to the fundamental genetics that sands. (One group recently identified 75 cell
and then worked in a lab where he helped
made cells different but also to the ways types in a tiny piece of tissue in the neocor-
invent a new tool for diagnosing cancer and
cells can malfunction to cause diseases like tex alone.) And even seemingly identical
other diseases.
leukemia, cystic fibrosis, or diabetes. cells are turning out to have subtle differ-
Within weeks of his arrival, though,
Buenrostro changed that. In his first ences. Buenrostro noted that one cell might
Buenrostro was singularly focused. The
year of grad school, he and two mentors be more likely to respond to an infection
human body is made of trillions of cells,
adapted a standard technique for sequenc- than another, while others seem to pop into
nearly all carrying the same DNA. What
ing genes so that it would mark only a cell’s existence only under certain circumstances,
makes a kidney cell different from a brain
open genes, rather than the entire genome. like when you have the flu.
cell lies in which set of genes—out of the
It was like turning on a light in a pitch-black Those insights could eventually help refine
roughly 25,000 in the human genome—are
room. Within months, the tool, called ATAC- our understanding of what happens when
active, meaning turned on and doing stuff
seq, had taken off. the body gets out of balance. Pott is currently
(undergoing methylation, interfacing with
“It really opened the door,” says Univer- studying patients with inflammatory bowel
RNA, and so on). If you think of each indi-
sity of Chicago geneticist Sebastian Pott, who diseases such as ulcerative colitis, looking
vidual gene as a single book in the library of
has since developed a sequencing method at how the proportion of different cell types
our DNA, active genes are the books that are
similar to Buenrostro’s invention. Because changes with illness. Buenrostro, who is now
open and being read—and those determine
Buenrostro’s tool was both easy to use and an assistant professor at Harvard, has started
not only what a cell becomes (part of your ear
quick—an experiment could be done in half using single-cell ATAC-seq to see how differ-
or part of your heart) but what it does (e.g.,
a day—questions that had long been impossi- ent cells contribute to certain cancers, and
make a certain set of proteins that prevent
ble to study suddenly became accessible. One also to study how changes in a cell’s genetic
cholesterol from sticking to an artery wall).
of the most pressing was how different kinds activity could affect its ability to self-repair
The problem, Buenrostro discovered, was
of cells were affected by a specific mutation. or regenerate as a body ages.
that scientists had no way to see into tightly
“For years, we’ve had a lot of informa- Last year, he also partnered with the
tion about how genetic variants are asso- life-science company Bio-Rad to cre-
ciated with certain diseases,” Pott noted. ate a radically upgraded version of sin-
The problem was that it was hard to know gle-cell ATAC-seq, which researchers can
which variants were associated with which buy as an off-the-shelf kit. “Growing up as
cells—and with what result. a first-generation student, and as an under-
Just recently, for instance, a group of represented minority in particular, you don’t
researchers discovered that in the lung, the really think of yourself as having the chops
genetic mutation responsible for cystic fibro- to be an inventor,” Buenrostro tells me. “But I
sis may affect just a single kind of lung cell: a always wanted to work on a technology that
rare structure known as a pulmonary iono- could change health care.” He shrugs, wryly.
cyte. Simply knowing that could help create “You know, big dreams.” — J E N N I F E R K A H N
BIOTECH
Emily
Leproust
CEO / Twist Bioscience
Engineering DNA to store

data—forever.
around in her pocket until

E M I LY L E P R O U S T F I S H E D Microsoft are funding DNA storage projects. But perhaps
she found what she was seeking: a stainless steel tube, no company is pushing harder than Twist.
about the size of a large pill capsule. She set it on the Six years ago Twist figured out how to ramp up the
table with a metallic ping. “In this you can put dozens of process of making bespoke DNA. While many traditional
Google data centers,” she says. “If not hundreds.” machines make 96 short strands of DNA at a time, Twist’s
Leproust’s company, Twist Bioscience, makes what robots can make a million, depositing microscopic drops
goes in that capsule: DNA. Hyperdense, easy to replicate, of DNA’s building blocks onto silicon chips. But at $1,000
and stable over millennia, it’s close to an ideal archival per megabyte, it’s still too costly for storing data at scale.
storage medium. Twist engineers the DNA to repre- As of September, Twist was finalizing a two-year con-
sent the data, translating the binary code of machines tract with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects
into the genetic code of life (for example: 00=A, 01=G, Activity, an organization within the Office of the Direc-
10=C, 11=T). If you want to read that data, say, two cen- tor of National Intelligence. The objective: to lower the
turies later, you sequence the DNA and translate it back cost of DNA data storage to as little as $100 per giga-
to binary. Silicon Valley is investing in DNA storage to byte. Twist’s ultimate goal? $100 per terabyte. Leproust
replace the short-lived magnetic tape and flash drives says that's at least three years out. “We’re at the point
housing much of the world’s data. By 2040, researchers in society where we’re throwing away stuff because we
estimate humans will generate so much data there won’t can’t afford to store it,” she says. “But if you put it in DNA,
be enough silicon chips to hold it all. Both Micron and then it will last forever.” — M E G A N M O LT E N I
ANTITRUST
Lina Khan
MAJORITY COUNSEL /
The US House Subcommittee
on Antitrust, Commercial, and
Administrative Law
Laying the foundation for

breaking up Big Tech.
AT A C N N T O W N H A L L meeting this April, Elizabeth move Pet Pillows from the front page.” (Amazon dis-
Warren fielded a question from an audience member. putes this characterization of its business practices.) In
The questioner, named Meghan, extolled the conve- the name of fair competition, Warren concluded, Ama-
nience of Amazon and then asked Warren—who had zon’s two businesses had to be split up.
recently proposed a plan to cut online platforms down “Elizabeth Warren’s Really Simple Case for Breaking
to size—“How is breaking up Big Tech good for me?” Up Big Tech,” ran the headline of a story that night on
The candidate launched in. “A lot of these giant tech Vox. The article gave Warren props for being “crystal
companies, they actually run two businesses,” she said: clear on a topic that often feels abstract.” But if Warren
They run a platform that connects buyers and sellers, has become particularly lucid on the issue of antitrust
and they compete on that platform as vendors them- enforcement, she owes much of that clarity to a millen-
selves—while collecting near-omniscient data on their nial from Mamaroneck, New York, named Lina Khan.
rivals. Warren then described how Amazon might use In 2017, when she was a 27-year-old law student, Khan
this intel to quash a hypothetical brand called Pet Pillows wrote a paper for the Yale Law Journal called “Amazon’s
after it starts to take off: “I know what we’ll do,” Warren Antitrust Paradox.” The 24,000-word article offered a
said, imagining the behemoth’s thoughts. “Let’s jump careful anatomy of Amazon’s market power and called
in front of Pet Pillows and do ‘Amazon Pet Pillows’ and for a wholesale reassessment of antitrust jurisprudence.
PRIVACY
Dawn Song
COFOUNDER & CEO /
Oasis Labs
Helping people control—

For 40-odd years, she noted, US and profit from—their data.
authorities have hewed to the the-
ory that they should only take action
against monopolies that harm “con- data has emerged as an ideal state.
L A T E LY, “ O W N I N G ” Y O U R
sumer welfare”—essentially, ones It's seen as a remedy to the rampant collection, leaks, deals,
that raise prices. Amazon, she sug- and hacks that compromise our privacy at every turn, and a
gested, had stretched the natural way to give ordinary users a piece of the action in a hot market.
limits of anticompetitive behavior But there’s a problem: Share your data with the companies that
in every sense but that one: “It is can put the information to use and it will slip from your grasp,
as if Bezos charted the company’s reshared and copied until its value to you is nil. Guard your
growth by first drawing a map of data jealously and it’s just as worthless—because nobody can
antitrust laws, and then devising do anything with it. “I think most people don’t even know that
routes to smoothly bypass them.” their data can be valuable,” says UC Berkeley computer scien-
Khan’s article made her the face tist Dawn Song. She wants to change that.
of a broad movement to revive Her startup, Oasis Labs, is built on the idea of differential pri-
trust-busting. “Lina’s work gave vacy—cryptographic techniques that allow companies to incor-
people something you could point porate data into their algorithms without seeing the individual
to and say, ‘Read that and you’ll data points. It’s the technique Apple uses to collect information
understand,’” says Barry Lynn, a for- on your iPhone without collecting data on you. Song believes
mer employer of Khan’s who runs blockchain technology can help to push that idea further, offer-
the anti-monopoly Open Markets ing a secure home for data that doesn’t require trusting any one
Institute. “It’s a document that has company with the keys to it. That might open up new models
become foundational.” of data ownership.
Khan certainly seems to have Take health care. Medical researchers would love to use AI to get
been foundational for Warren. a better grip on how to cure diseases. However, the data they need
The two met in 2016, and Warren’s is often trapped in hospital and pharma company servers. But you,
thinking has often paralleled Khan’s as a patient, have access, and Song’s system would enable you to
since. Khan’s 2017 article discusses copy your medical data onto the Oasis blockchain. There, research-
the case of a real company called ers could use it to train their AI algorithms, but they couldn’t snoop
Pillow Pets—which faced much the through the information or tie it to your identity. You retain control
same dilemma as Warren’s belea- of your data—and can even put a price on it. —GR EGORY BA R BER
guered Pet Pillows. And Khan pro-
poses the same policy response that
Warren rattled off on CNN: forcing
Amazon “to split up its retail and
marketplace operation.”
After her article blew up, Khan Three questions for …
was dismissively pegged as a leader
N. K. Jemisin
of a “hipster antitrust” movement,
but her next moves were anything A W A R D-W I N N I N G S C I-F I A U T H O R 2 How can genre whether it’s a good thing
fiction help? for everybody or just for
but hipsterish. In 2018, she became 1 What concerns you Simply by portraying the some. Science fiction
an adviser to Rohit Chopra, a com- most right now? world and humanity accu- tends to exalt technol-
missioner at the FTC. And she’s now Lack of forward-thinking rately. What we see in ogy as the solution to all
leadership in key positions real life is that technology of our problems, but
the majority counsel to the House of our society. We're facing is just a tool, which can we are the solution. The
Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee. a climate crisis, and the “probe used or abused. So as tech will follow.
In September, that subcommittee gressive” members of our writers and readers, we
government seem committed need to be realistic about 3 What excites you
asked more than 80 companies for to the status quo, while the our engagement with about the future?
accounts of how they’d been harmed radical right wing seems technology—how quickly The possibility that we
by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and nihilistically committed to we acknowledge its limi- might survive it—and
making things worse. We as tations and dangers, how become better people.
Google. Maybe Pillow Pets is one of a species have the intelli- rapidly our laws and sys-
them. —J. BR I A N CH A R LES gence to resolve this. tems of access adapt to it, —JASON KEHE
FARM AID
Laura Boykin
COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGIST /
Cassava Virus Action Project
Diagnosing crop disease in

the field to stop its spread.
Cassava is an obliging plant. The

tuber can be turned into flour, paper,
adhesives. It can be steamed, fried,
roasted, boiled. Sweet or bitter. In
Africa, it feeds more than 500 mil-
lion people daily. Cassava can endure
long periods of drought and abide
plenty of rain, making it ideal for A TYRANT GUARDS the gate to outer space, and that tyrant’s name is the rocket
a changing climate. But for years, equation. It states, quite simply, that the heavier your rocket is, the more fuel
viruses have been decimating the
tubers. Cassava is dying. you’ll need to launch it into orbit. That’s a problem, because the more fuel you
In 2013, Laura Boykin didn’t know add, the heavier your rocket gets. No amount of calculus can change this stub-
much about that. She had stud- born fact: For every ton of payload your rocket carries, it will have to burn nearly
ied whiteflies—a vector for cassava
viruses—and was head-down at her 25 tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Short of disrupting gravity itself, what’s
desk at the University of Western a tech ideator to do?
Australia, doing computational work Jonathan Yaney and his colleagues at SpinLaunch, a startup based in Long
on the evolution of various plants,
when she was asked to join a team of Beach, California, believe they’ve found the answer. Their nearly fuel-free sys-
East African scientists tackling the tem, known as a mass accelerator, will use a giant vacuum-sealed centrifuge
problem in their countries. to spin a payload to more than 4,000 mph. Once released, the payload will go
So off Boykin went to start collect-
ing DNA from cassava. Turns out screaming through the atmosphere, coasting nearly 30 vertical miles before
there were mulitple viruses killing propelling itself the rest of the way to orbit by means of a small rocket. The
the plants and, with enough com- company already has a working prototype; Yaney calls it “science fiction stuff.”
puter processing power, she could
identify the pathogens. But getting Eventually, Yaney claims, SpinLaunch will be able to fling several 200-pound
an answer took six months, and the payloads into space every day, at a cost of less than half a million dollars each—
diseases were spreading. five or 10 times cheaper than the competition. Human passengers are out of the
Then, in 2015, a company called
Oxford Nanopore Technologies built question; the accelerator would turn their bodies to mush. Even satellites must
the MinION, a pocket DNA sequenc- be specially hardened to survive the ride. But that’s a small concession, Yaney
ing device that connects to a small argues, when you’re talking about putting together, say, a constellation of inter-
supercomputer for data analytics.
Boykin got her hands on one. net satellites in a matter of days rather than months.
Today, in just about three hours, Yaney and his colleagues recently broke ground on a facility at Spaceport
Boykin and team can find their America, south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they expect to begin flight
pathogen—and help farmers get
virus-resistant strains of cassava to tests by the end of next year. If all goes well, they may finally break the strangle-
plant after they burn their fields. A hold of the rocket equation. Sic semper tyrannis! —DANIEL OBERHAUS
year ago, the team found the virus
that was killing a Tanzanian farmer’s
crops; the farmer then shared the
information with her village. “When 1 SpinLaunch’s vac- 100 M 4 The payload is
we went back months later, 3,000 uum chamber will be wrapped in a bullet-
people had more food,” Boykin says. 5
angled upward at 35 shaped “aeroshell,”
The Cassava Virus Action Project to 40 degrees, for an which protects the
is only 30 people in six countries, but 3
ideal launch trajec- satellite and the
Boykin isn’t deterred. “When you 1 4
tory. It takes about an small rocket inside
bring the data closer to the problem,” hour to pump all the like a “violin in a violin
she says, “you solve the problem air from the chamber. case,” Yaney says.
faster.” —Maria Streshinsky
2
2 The accelerator’s 5 A mechanical air
electric motor spools lock at the end of the
up to launch velocity in launch tunnel opens
90 minutes. At its cen- milliseconds before
ter is a bearing—large the payload takes
enough for a human flight. SpinLaunch
to walk through—that
35–40˚ 3 The system’s arm, will install sonic baf-
LAUNCH called the tether,
reduces friction and ANGLE fling to dampen the
vibration. reaches a top rota- ear-splitting boom.
tional speed of 450
rpm. By comparison,
the centrifuge that
NASA uses to stress-
test payloads tops
out at about 50 rpm.
ECONOMICS
Mariana Mazzucato
F O U N D E R & D I R E C T O R, I N S T I T U T E F O R I N N O VAT I O N A N D
P U B L I C P U R P O S E / University College London
Setting us up for a green moon shot.
A few years ago, when governments across the globe were responding to the financial crisis by
embracing fiscal austerity, Mariana Mazzucato assigned herself an odd accounting task: She
began tallying all the public investments that had given rise to the iPhone. The internet, GPS, touch-
screens, Siri: All that tech had originally been commissioned by either the Pentagon, the National
Science Foundation, or the CIA. So why were today’s leaders excoriating government spending?
In 2013, Mazzucato published her findings in The Entrepreneurial State, a book that describes
how governments have been a primary investor in innovation. Since then, she’s become one of the
world’s most influential economists, advising leaders at the UN, in the EU, and in the US on how to
renew the tradition of the government moon shot—just barely in time for the climate emergency.
—John Gravois
WIRED: You’re part of a group of economists create markets, then it’s very hard for start- As the former cybersecu-
that’s reviving an interest in industrial pol- ups to scale up. In the IT revolution, ven- rity chief for both Yahoo
icy—strategic, state-driven economic devel- ture capitalists followed the wave of patient, and Facebook, Alex Sta-
mos knows something about
opment. What’s the right way to do that? long-term finance provided by the govern- the power—and pitfalls—of
ment. Currently, there’s a risk that the big sheer size. Which is why his
MARIAN A MAZZUCATO: To think in terms of wave that VCs surfed in the IT revolution next act doesn’t involve pro-
tecting any single compa-
missions. This year was the 50th anniver- is not happening in the green revolution. ny’s users. It aims instead
sary of the Apollo 11 mission: That required You just have a lot of surfers and no wave. to shield even larger online
dozens of different sectors and hundreds populations. How? By giv-
ing researchers around the
of homework problems—and who knows You argue that, because the government world what they need to
how many attempts to solve those prob- takes big risks when it invests in early inno- study the scourge of disinfor-
lems failed? There was a willingness to vation, it should also expect to see big mation, security breaches,
and propaganda, particularly
take risks and use government instruments upsides from those investments. What would on social media. Launched
to drive bottom-up experimentation. Right those returns look like? earlier this year and funded
now, the climate emergency is a challenge. with $5 million from Craig
Newmark’s foundation, the
It’s important to turn it into missions, like There are lots of ways you can give the Stanford Internet Observa-
building 100 carbon-neutral cities across public—literally meaning people—a return tory, which Stamos leads,
the US. But as an economist I’m not the one for public investment: In the health sec- hopes to act as a clearing-
house for data about all
to decide what the mission is; the more tor, where you have $39 billion a year being those abuses—both real-
we can get different voices at the table, spent by the NIH, it’s ridiculous that you have time and historical—from
the more resilient these missions will be. drug prices set by the pharmaceutical indus- across the web. Rather than
spend months wrangling
try. The prices could be made to reflect that data themselves, social sci-
You helped advise Alexandria Ocasio- public investment, and the patent system entists could instead put
Cortez in formulating the Green New Deal. should be better governed to prevent pure in a call to Stamos and his
team. Plenty of work remains
Is that “mission-driven” policy? rent-seeking. Also, you can set conditions before the project is hum-
that require companies to reinvest profits ming, starting with attract-
The idea behind the Green New Deal is you back into the economy instead of spending the full cooperation of
giants like Google, Twitter,
need an economy-wide transformation. ing trillions to buy back shares of their own and his former employers.
But it’ll be hard for that to happen without stock. To retain its monopoly status, AT&T But if anyone can map the uni-
some concrete green missions. My point to was forced to reinvest its profits—and that’s verse of digital woes, it’s the
guy who has spent his entire
her was that you have to reframe your view where Bell Labs came from! career fighting them up close.
of government as not just a regulator and —Brian Barrett
market fixer but as an active investor with People have called you the world’s scariest
a portfolio, having to make bets across dif- economist. Why? You seem very nice.
ferent sectors. And you have to learn from
history. When women economists have something
Procurement policy, for example, was to say, they become scary. Having said that,
pretty much what allowed Moore’s law to my other answer is: The situation is scary,
happen: Semiconductor chips were bought but we can’t confront it with being scared.
en masse by the government. If the govern- We have to turn global warming into an
ment doesn’t use its purchasing power to opportunity to reimagine our economies.
ELECTION SECURITY
Dana
DeBeauvoir
COUNTY CLERK /
Travis County, Texas
Saying “enough” to lousy

voting technology.
THIS COUNTRY'S SYSTEM for running elections is about says. So a motley squad of cryptographers and engineers
as decentralized as its system of local public libraries. descended on Austin to design an impregnable voting
When Americans go to cast their ballots in November system from scratch. They left with a dense white paper
2020, they’ll file into polling places administered by a and a name: STAR-Vote. Their designs call for encrypting
sprawling archipelago of more than 10,000 county, town, the vote using an application of pure math called homo-
and precinct authorities. Or, as Dana DeBeauvoir puts it, morphic cryptography. There’s also a built-in paper trail
it’ll be “Aunt Sally and Uncle Bob” against the Russians. and a system of automatic audits designed to ensure
DeBeauvoir happens to be one of those local officials an election’s accuracy with unprecedented certainty.
herself. For more than 30 years, she’s been the Travis The trouble was that DeBeauvoir couldn’t find any-
County Clerk in Austin, Texas. And for much of that time, one to build it. But then this year, Darpa and Microsoft
she’s been caught in a bind: forced to purchase clunky, separately revived aspects of the concept under new
expensive voting machines from the three big vendors names, each aiming to develop a prototype within the
in the cartel-like election industry, while simultane- next few years. The designs will be open source, open-
ously catching hell from concerned computer scien- ing the way for future companies (or tinkerers) to manu-
tists in Texas for buying woefully insecure technology. facture cheap, secure systems that liberate officials like
In 2011, DeBeauvoir curtly responded to her critics: DeBeauvoir from the tyranny of high-priced, hidebound,
Why not come to Austin and help her design a better hackable technology. Soon, thanks to her initiative, any-
voting machine? “Anyone can tear down a barn,” she one may be able to build a barn. —BENJAMIN WOFFORD
the 31-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Stripe, is an

PAT R I C K C O L L I S O N ,
exceedingly careful thinker. In his Twitter bio, he identifies himself as a “fallibilist,” by

which he means he likes to probe every system of ideas, looking for its bugs. Collison
fits a Silicon Valley archetype: a programming whiz who dropped out of college (MIT)
and started a company now worth a stratospheric sum ($35 billion, on paper). But unlike
others in his cohort, he speaks in strikingly self-effacing terms. At a conference in May,
he described Stripe as “a hard-to-understand and maybe boring company.”
Well, fair enough. But let’s give it a whirl. There is a piece of plastic in your pocket.
Every time you enter the number on it into a website or app and click Buy, money moves
from you to the vendor. The process is fast but not instantaneous. The payment travels
through a hidden domain of processors and merchant banks, each of which charges fees
and requires vendors to do lots of paper- is reading on his personal website.) Cowen
work. For young companies that want to had come with a stack of books. Collison
accept payments—especially tech startups, went through the volumes, lingering over
which are Stripe’s core clientele—that can one about the British East India Company.
be a costly time suck. By using Stripe’s soft- “I would love to read this. I find it super
ware, they essentially outsource the has- interesting, the East India Company,” Colli-
sle. Stripe acts like an E-ZPass, allowing its son said, “because they’re an organization
clients to skip the tollbooths and charging that really had to operate through values.”
a flat fee, usually around 3 percent of every “And they were doing everything for the
transaction. first time,” Cowen said. For artists, singers, writers, and
Collison describes the financial system “And though none of them acquitted other creative types who are
that his company navigates as a clunky themselves well,” Collison said, “the East nice to have around if you enjoy a
flourishing civilization, the inter-
piece of legacy infrastructure that needs to India Company was not primarily predi- net has been a mixed bag. Yes,
be modernized. But he doesn’t rail against cated on slavery, unlike the others.” it provides a bottomless well of
it or advocate starting from scratch, as Many of the titles on Collison’s reading collaborators and ideas, along
with the power to reach a nearly
cryptocurrency enthusiasts do. Stripe list focus on the mystery of progress. He unlimited audience. But pesky
employs hundreds of workers to comply and Cowen would soon cowrite an essay thing, the internet also keeps
with complex rules in many jurisdictions for The Atlantic, calling for the creation finding new ways to destroy the
economic basis for these folks
and to monitor for fraud and money laun- of an academic discipline called Prog- to make a living, replacing it
dering. “Just to state the obvious, regulating ress Studies to search fields like busi- with flimsy ad-revenue-sharing
finance is a good idea,” Collison says. “It’s ness, art, and medicine, with the aim of deals. “A creative person can
be reaching millions of people
people’s money.” He wants to renovate, not improving the productivity of society as a through this free distribution
demolish. “We’ve always been very incre- whole. Collison’s obsession with the idea architecture and getting paid a
mental in our strategy,” he says. “We’re even shapes his recreational time. He has few hundred bucks,” says Jack
Conte, a YouTube musician
really not believers in radical disruption helped to organize an invitation-only turned tech CEO. “It sucks.” (See
or epochal transformation.” Strange words conference for scientists and technolo- “The Alchemist,” issue 27.10.)
in Silicon Valley. gists called Borlaug Camp, named for the Conte’s company, Patreon,
aims to rescue the creative
He does believe, however, that incre- agronomist responsible for the Green Rev- class from economic oblivion.
mental change can have epochal conse- olution. Over the Thanksgiving holiday “What we want to do is rebuild
quences. Collison lives in San Francisco last year, he jetted across four countries the infrastructure of the web so
there’s a better financial mech-
now, but he’s from Ireland, and he wants in Africa so he could “see places where the anism to—I guess to be crass
Stripe to facilitate global trade. A service Western notion that progress is inevitable about it—convert art into dol-
called Stripe Atlas allows a company any- is up for grabs,” said Cowen, who drew up lars.” His proposition: Turn your
most passionate fans into sub-
where in the world to incorporate in Del- the itinerary for the trip. scribers, or members of a club,
aware, so it can more easily access the US Stripe Press (motto: “Ideas for Prog- and let Patreon facilitate that
market and banking system. In Collison’s ress”) emerged two years ago. It publishes relationship. Since its found-
ing in 2013, the company has
view, these small interventions should add books that appeal to Collison’s imagina- sent nearly $1 billion from fans
up to fulfill Stripe’s mission: “to increase tion, like The Dream Machine, a formerly to creators, which suggests, if
the GDP of the internet.” out-of-print biography of internet pio- not a wholesale new model for
supporting all artists, at least
Last spring I met Collison for lunch at an neer J. C. R. Licklider. In his immodest a very substantial lifeboat.
Indian restaurant in Washington, DC. He moments, Collison suggests that Stripe —John Gravois
is skinny and fair, with strawberry blond aims to complete the work begun by such
hair, and he speaks in a gymnastic patter, early visionaries, by allowing people to
leaping rapidly across fields of knowledge. transmit money as easily as ideas. Stripe’s
Collison had also invited Tyler Cowen, a edition of The Dream Machine is a beau-
George Mason University economist who tiful, hardbound artifact, and there is
wrote the book The Great Stagnation. He something nostalgic, too, in his venera-
and Cowen share an incrementalist way of tion of an old view of progress, in which
looking at the world, often trading read- globalization and technology will inevi-
ing recommendations. (Since 2011, Colli- tably result in betterment for the world.
son has been posting lists of the books he —A NDR EW R ICE
ROBOTICS
Kate
Darling
RESEARCH SPECIALIST /
MIT Media Lab
Preparing humans for life

with robots.
A decade ago, Kate Dar-

ling asked a friend to hold
a Pleo toy dino-bot upside
down until it squirmed and
whined. Because Darling isn’t
when the internet was
I N T H E M I D -1 9 9 0 S , Williams’ startup, Dfinity, will be a member) a sociopath, it upset her—and
spurred her to begin explor-
in its infancy, some companies thought they and powered by independent data centers ing the strange new frontier of
could build a better version of it. One of them worldwide. To preserve order (and secu- human-robot interaction. Now
was Microsoft, which envisioned a network rity) in this decentralized system, Williams an outspoken researcher at
MIT, she is writing a book, The
that would be faster and more capacious, is using elements of blockchain technology. New Breed, about our budding
able to handle a new thing called multimedia. The idea is that little guys should be less relationships with robots in the
This was the infamous Information Super- dependent on Big Tech for computing infra- context of how we’ve treated
animals throughout history.
highway. There was just one hitch: It likely structure. But Williams goes further. He Consider that in the Mid-
would have been a proprietary network—a thinks the Internet Computer could spawn dle Ages, Europeans put
toll road. “Can you imagine how horrible that consumer tech companies that will build cows and other animals on
trial for killing people. They
would have been?” says Dominic Williams. open services to mirror (and rival) tech believed animals had moral
We escaped that nightmare, but Williams giants. It’s a fix, he says, for “platform risk”: agency. The temptation, as
says we’ve stumbled straight into another: when a big company lures in startups to build robots become more sophisti-
cated and social, is to assume
cloud computing. The cloud is now nearly products that rely on the giant’s troves of user they’re working with similar
as crucial as the internet itself, key infra- data, only to cut off access to that data later. agency when really they’re
structure for data storage and high-powered Taking on Amazon Web Services and Goo- just a collection of 1s and 0s. “I
don’t think anybody wants to
processing. And it’s dominated by tech giants gle Cloud? Overhauling the web’s infrastruc- put robots on trial for crimes
like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. ture? A skeptic could point out that it has they’ve committed,” Darling
Williams believes there should be a public already taken years, lavish funding, and top says, “but it shows we’ve
had different solutions to this
option. He calls his plan the Internet Com- cryptography talent to design a system that’s throughout history.”
puter. Think of it as an extension of the secure and usable enough to have a prayer Darling wants us all to
internet, with the tools of cloud computing at taking on Big Tech. But Williams is unde- start grappling with the novel
and powerful bonds that are
baked into the protocol. And, like the web, terred: “It’s what we feel the world needs.” sure to develop between
it won’t be controlled by a single company. He’ll soon get a sense of what the world humans and robots. “Do we
Instead, it will be open, maintained by a wants: A test version of the Internet Com- need things like laws around
assigning responsibility for
Switzerland-based foundation (of which puter goes live this fall. —GREGORY BARBER harm because people have
biases when interacting with
robots that they don’t have
with other devices?” she asks.
Best to find common ground
now, because it’s not so hard
to imagine a future in which
the bots are holding us upside
down. —Matt Simon
CONNECTIVITY
Unicef Ventures
Bringing broadband internet to underserved parts of the globe.
IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged— ing. Before a telco can be talked into turn-
by the Allbirds-wearing set, at least—that a ing the red dots green, it needs a guarantee.
technological problem must be in want of a “ ‘Do good’ doesn’t usually fly,” says Sunita
technological fix. So when a tech CEO hears Grote, the manager of Unicef’s Innovation
that nearly 3.7 billion people around the Fund. A group of countries in, say, Central
world lack access to the internet, he gets to Asia will put together a joint bid, bankrolled
solutioneering. If the problem is that some with some combination of public funds, low-
regions are just too remote or too impover- interest loans, debt and equity financing, and
ished for telecom operators to cover profit- a sliver of cryptocurrency. Fabian acknowl-
ably, he asks, then why not launch satellites edges that crypto talk invariably “makes you
to beam broadband to the masses from on sound really nutty,” but the advantage is that O U T E R S PA C E M AYbe infinite,
high? All it’ll take to close the digital divide blockchain transactions are trackable and but these days it’s starting to feel
is billions of dollars in R&D. auditable. If a service provider fails to hold a little crowded. An estimated
That’s the tack SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb, up its end of the bargain, everyone knows it. 500,000 human-made objects
and other companies are taking. But Chris- Once the school is connected, the rest of are hurtling around our planet
topher Fabian and his colleagues at Unicef the community can piggyback off of it, buy- right now. Some of them beam
Ventures, a kind of tech incubator within the ing a share of the available bandwidth. (In GPS signals to our phones or
United Nations, have a more earthbound especially far-flung areas, Fabian says, the premium programming to our
approach. Their solution to universal con- bandwidth may come from those tech com- TVs; others fill scientists’ hard
nectivity is a program called GIGA, whose panies in orbit, whose signals can go where drives with up-to-the-minute
initials currently don’t stand for anything. utility trucks can’t.) climate readings and glamour
(“Isn’t that nice?” Fabian says.) This being The next phase of the project really shots of the cosmos. More than
Unicef, the mission starts with kids: bring excites Fabian. With funding from the 99 percent of what’s up there,
internet access first to schools and then, if all government of Norway, his team is build- however, is just plain junk—
goes well, to the surrounding communities. ing a kind of nonprofit App Store stocked spent rocket boosters, exploded
GIGA grew out of Project Connect, a with free pedagogical software and “nerdy satellites, runaway flecks of
machine-learning tool that combs through little open source projects.” As connectiv- paint. NASA and the Depart-
satellite imagery, identifies schools, and ity expands, the customer base for these ment of Defense don’t know
displays them on a map. (Schools every- “digital public goods” will swell. An educa- what, or where, much of it is.
where have certain tells—soccer fields, tion minister in the Caribbean, for instance, That makes getting to space a
early-morning lines of stu- might go to the GIGA store for bit like merging onto the high-
dents.) The schools with con- a VR training tool, because it’s way without using your mir-
sistent internet access get a too expensive to fly students rors. Also, all the other cars are
green dot, while those with- to a neighboring island for going more than 6,700 mph.
out it show up as red. engineering classes. “I predict really bad things
That’s where the tech fixes GIGA’s goal of universal happening if that does not
end and the diplomatic ones connectivity is years away, change,” says Moriba Jah, the
begin. First, Unicef Ventures but Fabian and his colleagues 48-year-old director of Astria,
will approach a head of state, remain energized. Some of the Advanced Sciences and
or perhaps several from the the staff in New York—26 Technology Research in Astro-
same region, and offer to C H RIS T O P HE R FA BIA N people holding 20 different nautics program at the Univer-
map all of their schools for passports, he boasts—joined sity of Texas at Austin. Even
free. This is a more tempting the team from Facebook, those flecks of paint, moving
proposition than you might Google, and other corporate at orbital speeds, are enough
think: In Colombia, the tool juggernauts. “We have a pur- to seriously damage a space-
spotted some 6,700 schools pose for being here, and that’s craft. Jah, a beachcomber for
that weren’t on official maps. really nice,” he says. A project the space age, uses big-data
The team’s goal is to reach 130 like GIGA is a bottom-up anti- analysis to locate and iden-
countries by the end of 2021, dote to Silicon Valley’s busi- tify larger debris. Last year, he
at a cost of about $30 million. ness model. “This,” he adds, and his colleagues launched a
They’ve mapped 15 so far. “is rewriting the internet.” demo version of AstriaGraph,
Next comes the financ- S U N I TA G R O T E —ANTHONY LYDGATE a kind of open source traf-
fic monitor for the heavens that takes the key to ensuring the sustainability of space
AN ESTIMATED often conflicting data from satellites and exploration. After all, it’s not just national
500,000 HUMAN-MADE OBJECTS ground-based sensors and combines them space agencies contributing to the con-
into a 3D display. gestion anymore. Private companies plan
ARE HURTLING AROUND Born in San Francisco to immigrant par-

ents, raised in Venezuela, and trained at
to deploy thousands of small satellites in
the coming years, at least tripling the total
OUR PLANET RIGHT NOW. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jah didn’t
expect to spend his career tracking space
number in orbit and greatly increasing the
risk of a collision. Jah can’t enforce the rules
MORE THAN 99 PERCENT trash. It seemed like “the most unsexy, of the road for these new operators, but
unappealing thing you could do in life,” he he can, at least, give them a map of where
OF THEM ARE JUNK. says. But 20 years later, Jah sees it as the they’re going. —DANIEL OBERHAUS
was frustrated.
I N 2 0 0 1, H A N Y FA R I D
He just couldn’t beat his long-standing
tennis buddy. To make light of his hope-
lessness, Farid, then a computer science
professor at Dartmouth, made a fake. He
used Photoshop to paste his friend’s head
onto the shoulders of a professional tennis
player. (He thinks it was Andre Agassi.) As he
stretched the face to make it fit its new phy-
sique, he realized that the algorithm Photo-
shop used to perform the operation would
leave a characteristic signature on that part
of the image. Farid had previously special-
ized in computer vision, getting comput-
ers to understand pictures more as humans
do. But now he set about establishing a new
field of image science, developing meth-
ods to detect when digital photos had been
manipulated. Today, he’s one of the leading
authorities on detecting fake photos.
Farid sensed all those years ago that as demics, and entrepreneurs have made
digital cameras became more common, AI fakery much more convincing, and
photos would become less trustworthy. deepfakes have become a tool of online
Computer files, so easily modified, were harassment. With the 2020 presidential
more corruptible than film negatives. A election approaching, Farid and others
succession of techniques he invented to are concerned that these manipulations,
spot fakery were quickly pressed into use. spread on social media, could enable mass
Farid worked with prosecutors to convict deception—potentially skewing elections
child abusers and helped fishing contests by showing a candidate saying or doing
spot when anglers had faked the true size something they did not. “This used to be a
of their catch. boutique little field, but now we’re defend-
In 2017, Farid’s satisfying but niche spe- ing democracy,” Farid says. “What happens
cialty took on new significance. A Reddit when more than half the content you see
account called deepfakes posted por- and hear online is fake?”
nographic clips with the faces of actresses One of Farid’s favorite clips in his per-
like Gal Gadot pasted on other bodies. The sonal library of deepfakes underlines
videos were made using a tool—which the that troubling question. It shows Hillary
account soon released online—based on Clinton standing at a podium and making
machine learning. campaign pledges she never made. As she
Deepfakes quickly became a catchall utters lines like “Vote for me and I promise
term for any image, video, or audio fab- I will be a stone-cold B,” winking archly,
ricated or altered by machine learning. not-Clinton’s face appears indistinguish-
In the past two years, hobbyists, aca- able from the real thing.
That clip was made by com-

puter graphics researchers at
the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia. They added a photo-
real re-creation of Clinton’s
visage over the face of actress
Kate McKinnon in a Saturday
Night Live skit. The USC group
is trying to make better digital IN AUGUST 2016, a group called the the Department of Defense and Navy.
manipulations for the enter- Shadow Brokers popped up on Twitter tout- The daughter of a Hungarian Jewish refu-
tainment industry, but they ing a brazen cybertheft: It linked to a trove gee, she grew up in an Orthodox commu-
also send their best work to of hacking tools stolen from the National nity in Brooklyn. There, she once said, she
Farid, who is now at UC Berke- Security Agency. The know-how of one of saw “women who raised large families,
ley, so he can test the power of the top intelligence agencies in the US had ran community organizations,” and they
his detection tools. been released into the wild. Criminals and inspired her to “just not talk, get it done.”
Fa r id’s l ates t dete c t ion foreign government hackers seized on the Neuberger helped establish US Cyber
method can easily see through tools, and within months North Korea was Command, which conducts digital combat
the fake Clinton. It works by weaponizing them to inject ransomware operations. And she was working at the NSA
analyzing verified videos to onto 300,000 computers in hospitals, tele- when Edward Snowden leaked information
build up a signature of a partic- coms, and energy firms around the world. about the agency’s mass surveillance initia-
ular person’s habitual, charac- Now, three years after that disastrous data tives. That event led Neuberger to be named
teristic facial movements. New dump, the NSA has established a Cybersecu- the NSA’s first chief risk officer.
clips can then be compared rity Directorate. Its leader, Anne Neuberger, The Cybersecurity Directorate is part of a
with that signature to see if is tasked with creating a conduit between larger shift in the intelligence world. Once
they contain the same pattern. siloed parts of the agency. By sharing infor- a sideshow, cyberspace operations have
McKinnon is a good mimic, mation about threats and new hacking tech- moved to center stage. The safety of every-
but she doesn’t move her face niques used by adversaries, the agency thing from electric grids to voting records is
exactly as Clinton does. hopes, among other things, to protect itself at stake, and digital defense needs to keep
Technical tools alone can’t against new types of attacks. pace. As Neuberger told w i r e d , “We’re
stop deepfakes, though, and Neuberger came to the NSA in 2009, focused on security of the nation’s most sen-
the false images will only grow having worked in the private sector and sitive networks.” — LILY HAY NEWMAN
more sophisticated. Farid is
talking with policymakers
in the US and Europe about
how new laws could crimi-
nalize malicious deepfakes Three questions for … give up a lot of their quality 3 How can X projects
of life. That’s not realistic, like molten-salt energy
or force internet companies Astro Teller which is why technology storage and a wind-
to work harder at detecting C A P TA I N O F M O O N S H O T S / X has to be an important part harvesting kite make
them. Despite the gloomy por- of the solution. a big impact?
Microgrids would open up
tents, though, Farid still finds 1 X is all about far-out ideas 2 What about geoengi- a lot of opportunities for
fun in fakes. He recommends that solve massive prob- neering schemes, like things like energy kites in
a YouTube clip in which Nico- lems. How might tech help spraying aerosols in the remote areas. Rather than
us fix the climate crisis? atmosphere to reflect spending lots of money
las Cage’s face replaces that of Radical improvements to, the sun’s energy? to do things in the tradi-
Julie Andrews in the opening or radical creative reuses of, We learn by sandboxing tional way, especially on
scene of The Sound of Music. technology are necessary but so we can try things safely. infrastructure, bet on new
not sufficient to solve the cli- A lot of geoengineering technologies and you’ll
( w i r e d does too.) “They’re mate crisis. If you were to try tends to get ruled out. Any- end up getting a better
hysterical—we should wel- to solve the problem purely thing that has to be done outcome at a tiny frac-
come and encourage it,” Farid through public policy and at a planetary scale and tion of the cost and car-
social solutions without any can’t be rolled back is not bon footprint.
says. “But let’s put safeguards real changes in technology, amenable to “Well, let’s try
in place.” —TOM SIMONITE you would be asking people to it and see.” —MATT SIMON
F L E S HE D OU T
The modern livestock industry
is one of the most resource-
intensive and ethically fraught
sectors of the global econ-
omy. The extraordinary land
use and methane gases pro-
duced by the beef industry in
particular will rise to unsus-
tainable levels, as more people
in the developing world add
meat to their diets. That’s why
Pat Brown and Uma Valeti are
each blazing their own path to
eliminating the livestock busi-
ness as we know it. Whether
it’s Brown’s plant-based meat
alternatives or Valeti growing
meat in tanks, we’re rooting
for both of them.
To nail the flavor factor for

a plant-based meat substitute,
the team came up with one key
ingredient: heme, a molecule
containing iron that’s found in
animal blood but also exists in
plants. Impossible’s version is
produced by genetically mod-
ified yeast.
Quantis International, a sus-
BACK IN 2009, Pat Brown set tainability consulting firm, ana-
off on a sabbatical from the lyzed the Impossible Burger U M A VA L E T I LOV E Dmeat. But he didn’t eat it. Cru-
department of biochemistry production process and found elty to animals was something he just couldn’t stom-
at Stanford, intent on identi- that it uses 87 percent less ach. Fortunately, Valeti was also a cardiologist who
fying the most important prob- water, creates 92 percent less worked on regenerating human heart muscle with
lem in the world that he could water pollution, emits 89 per- stem cells. So he cinched up these two parts of his life
help solve. That, he eventu- cent fewer greenhouse gases, and became cofounder of the first cell-based meat
ally decided, was the impact and requires 96 percent less company, Memphis Meats.
of animal agriculture on the land than the traditional pro- With cell-based meat, conscientious carnivores can
environment. By July 2011, duction of beef. That bit is cru- have their steak and eat it too: real animal flesh, no
Brown had founded Impossi- cial; clearing land for livestock slaughter necessary. Muscle cells from animals are
ble Foods, hired a team, and is the leading driver of habitat placed in a bioreactor—similar to the tanks used to brew
set off on a five-year journey to loss around the world and has beer—and supplied with a combination of nutrients,
develop a plant-based replace- been connected to the devas- vitamins, and minerals to help them grow and multiply.
ment for meat. tating fires in Brazil’s Amazon Three to six weeks later, the raw meat is pulled from
The big hurdle, of course, was rain forest—more than 90,000 the tank, ready to be seasoned and cooked.
making something that tastes blazes so far this year. The challenge, though, is scale. Memphis Meats’ first
so good people would give up Since 2016, the Impossible meatball cost about $1,200 to make. Valeti says that
the real thing: “The most urgent, Burger has appeared on the improvements in the production process have low-
important scientific question in menus of select restaurants, ered that figure by “multiple orders of magnitude.” (The
the world is what makes meat like David Chang’s Momofuku company also has a proprietary soup of nutrients.) Valeti
delicious,” Brown says. Off the Nishi, but it hit the mainstream won’t yet share the current cost, but he says his product
bat, the team at Impossible when White Castle put it on would not be the most expensive meat on the menu if
dove into the science behind the menu in April 2018. Then, it went to market today. Memphis expects to start ship-
meat’s flavor, texture, and juic- Burger King introduced the ping its meat to stores in the next few years.
iness, and how those properties Impossible Whopper earlier Global meat production is expected to almost dou-
change as it’s cooked. this year, driving up the fran- ble by 2050, and the resulting toll in land, water, and
chise’s foot traffic by 18 per- fossil fuel use under traditional methods of produc-
cent, according to consumer tion would destroy ecosystems and hasten climate
data firm inMarket inSights. change. That’s one reason agribusiness giants Tyson
Grocery stores in Southern and Cargill have invested in Memphis Meats. The long-
California started selling the term potential for actual cost savings is, of course,
product this fall. Brown says another. (It’s hard to pin down the environmental
he hopes his alt-meat will one footprint of cell-based meat—none of the compa-
day totally replace animals as nies are producing at scale—but it’s expected to be a lot
food. He wants his company’s smaller than that of Big Ag, and a lab uses a lot less land
burger to be better than the than a pasture.)
real thing. “We can continue “We’re not asking people to switch their behavior,”
to innovate forever,” he says. Valeti says. “We’re all in this to feed the world.” A wor-
“The cow stopped innovating thy goal, as long as the world can get used to the idea
years ago.” —MEREDITH FORE of eating meat from a tank. —M.F.
THE
MOST
DECEPTIVE
HACK IN
HISTORY
BY
ANDY
GREENBERG
...
.
Inside the
hunt for
THE
HACKERS
who nearly
took down
the Olympics.
And why
the next big
cyberattack
will be even
harder
to crack.
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
JOAN WONG
...
with the entire world watching, the com-
J
pany was still working out its bugs?
The data centers in Seoul, however,
weren’t reporting any such problems, and
Oh’s team believed the issues with the con-
.... tractor were manageable. He didn’t yet
know that they were already preventing
some attendees from printing tickets that
would let them enter the stadium. So he’d
settled into his seat, ready to watch a high-
light of his career unfold.
Ten seconds before 8 pm, numbers
began to form, one by one, in projected
light around the stage, as a choir of chil-
dren’s voices counted down in Korean to
the start of the event:
JUST BEFORE
“Sip! … Gu! … Pal! … Chil!”
In the middle of the countdown, Oh’s
Samsung Galaxy Note8 phone abruptly
8 PM ON
lit up. He looked down to see a message
from a subordinate on KakaoTalk, a pop-
FEBRUARY 9, 2018,
ular Korean messaging app. The message
shared perhaps the worst possible news Oh
could have received at that exact moment:
Something was shutting down every domain
controller in the Seoul data centers, the
servers that formed the backbone of the
Olympics’ IT infrastructure.
As the opening ceremony got underway,
thousands of fireworks exploded around the
stadium on cue, and dozens of massive pup-
pets and Korean dancers entered the stage.
Oh saw none of it. He was texting furiously
with his staff as they watched their entire IT
setup go dark. He quickly realized that what
the partner company had reported wasn’t a
mere glitch. It had been the first sign of an
high in the northeastern mountains of South Korea, Sang-jin Oh was sitting on unfolding attack. He needed to get to his
a plastic chair a few dozen rows up from the floor of Pyeongchang’s vast, pen- technology operations center.
tagonal Olympic Stadium. He wore a gray and red official Olympics jacket that As Oh made his way out of the press sec-
kept him warm despite the near-freezing weather, and his seat, behind the press tion toward the exit, reporters around him
section, had a clear view of the raised, circular stage a few hundred feet in front had already begun complaining that the
of him. The 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony was about to start. Wi-Fi seemed to have suddenly stopped
As the lights darkened around the roofless structure, anticipation buzzed working. Thousands of internet-linked TVs
through the 35,000-person crowd, the glow of their phone screens floating showing the ceremony around the stadium
like fireflies around the stadium. Few felt that anticipation more intensely than and in 12 other Olympic facilities had gone
Oh. For more than three years, the 47-year-old civil servant had been direc- black. Every RFID-based security gate lead-
tor of technology for the Pyeongchang Olympics organizing committee. He’d ing into every Olympic building was down.
overseen the setup of an IT infrastructure for the games comprising more than The Olympics’ official app, including its dig-
10,000 PCs, more than 20,000 mobile devices, 6,300 Wi-Fi routers, and 300 ital ticketing function, was broken too; when
servers in two Seoul data centers. it reached out for data from backend serv-
That immense collection of machines seemed to be functioning perfectly— ers, they suddenly had none to offer.
almost. Half an hour earlier, he’d gotten word about a nagging technical The Pyeongchang organizing commit-
issue. The source of that problem was a contractor, an IT firm from which the tee had prepared for this: Its cybersecurity
Olympics were renting another hundred servers. The contractor’s glitches had advisory group had met 20 times since
been a long-term headache. Oh’s response had been annoyance: Even now, 2015. They’d conducted drills as early as
the summer of the previous year, simulat- All nine of the Olympic staff’s domain controllers, the powerful machines that
ing disasters like cyberattacks, fires, and governed which employee could access which computers in the network, had
earthquakes. But now that one of those somehow been paralyzed, crippling the entire system. The staff decided on a
nightmare scenarios was playing out in temporary workaround: They set all the surviving servers that powered some
reality, the feeling, for Oh, was both infuri- basic services, such as Wi-Fi and the internet-linked TVs, to bypass the dead
ating and surreal. “It’s actually happened,” gatekeeper machines. By doing
Oh thought, as if to shake himself out of the 0 so, they managed to bring those
sense that it was all a bad dream. bare-minimum systems back
7 7
Once Oh had made his way through online just minutes before the
the crowd, he ran to the stadium’s exit, end of the ceremony.
out into the cold night air, and across the Over the next two hours, as
parking lot, now joined by two other IT they attempted to rebuild the
staffers. They jumped into a Hyundai SUV domain controllers to re-create
and began the 45-minute drive east, down a more long-term, secure net-
through the mountains to the coastal city of work, the engineers would find
Gangneung, where the Olympics’ technol- again and again that the servers
ogy operations center was located. had been crippled. Some mali-
From the car, Oh called staffers at the cious presence in their systems
stadium and told them to start distribut- remained, disrupting the machines faster than they could be rebuilt.
ing Wi-Fi hot spots to reporters and to tell A few minutes before midnight, Oh and his administrators reluctantly decided
security to check badges manually, because on a desperate measure: They would cut off their entire network from the inter-
all RFID systems were down. But that was net in an attempt to isolate it from the saboteurs who they figured must still have
the least of their worries. Oh knew that maintained a presence inside. That meant taking down every service—even the
in just over two hours the opening cere- Olympics’ public website—while they worked to root out whatever malware
mony would end, and tens of thousands infection was tearing apart their machines from within.
of athletes, visiting dignitaries, and spec- For the rest of the night, Oh and his staff worked frantically to rebuild the
tators would find that they had no Wi-Fi Olympics’ digital nervous system. By 5 am, a Korean security contractor, AhnLab,
connections and no access to the Olympics had managed to create an antivirus signature that could help Oh’s staff vaccinate
app, full of schedules, hotel information, the network’s thousands of PCs and servers against the mysterious malware that
and maps. The result would be a humiliat- had infected them, a malicious file that Oh says was named simply winlogon.exe.
ing confusion. If they couldn’t recover the At 6:30 am, the Olympics’ administrators reset staffers’ passwords in hopes of
servers by the next morning, the entire IT locking out whatever means of access the hackers might have stolen. Just before
backend of the organizing committee— 8 that morning, almost exactly 12 hours after the cyberattack on the Olympics
responsible for everything from meals had begun, Oh and his sleepless staffers finished reconstructing their servers
to hotel reservations to event ticketing— from backups and began restarting every service.
would remain offline as the actual games Amazingly, it worked. The day’s skating and ski jumping events went off
got underway. And a kind of technologi- with little more than a few Wi-Fi hiccups. R2-D2-style robots puttered around
cal fiasco that had never before struck Olympic venues, vacuuming floors, delivering water bottles, and projecting
the Olympics would unfold in one of the weather reports. A Boston Globe reporter later called the games “impecca-
world’s most wired countries. bly organized.” One USA Today columnist wrote that “it’s possible no Olympic
.... Games have ever had so many moving pieces all run on time.” Thousands of ath-
letes and millions of spectators remained blissfully unaware that the Olympics’
staff had spent its first night fighting off an invisible enemy that threatened to
OH ARRIVED throw the entire event into chaos.
at the technology operations center in
Gangneung by 9 pm, halfway into the
....
opening ceremony. The center consisted
of a large open room with desks and com- WITHIN HOURS OF
puters for 150 staffers; one wall was cov- the attack, rumors began to trickle out into the cybersecurity community about
ered with screens. When he walked in, the glitches that had marred the Olympics’ website, Wi-Fi, and apps during
many of those staffers were standing, the opening ceremony. Two days after the ceremony, the Pyeongchang orga-
clumped together, anxiously discussing
how to respond to the attack—a problem From the book SANDWORM , by Andy Greenberg, to be published on Novem-
compounded by the fact that they’d been ber 5, 2019, by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a divi-
locked out of many of their own basic ser- sion of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Andy Greenberg.
vices, like email and messaging. Greenberg is a senior writer for wired .
nizing committee confirmed that it had indeed been the target of a cyberat- find in its code not merely a single false flag
tack. But it refused to comment on who might have been behind it. Oh, who but layers of false clues pointing at multiple
led the committee’s response, has declined to discuss any possible source of potential culprits. And some of those clues
the attack with wired . were hidden deeper than any cybersecurity
The incident immediately became an international whodunit: Who would dare analyst had ever seen before.
to hack the Olympics? The Pyeongchang cyberattack would turn out to be per- From the start, the geopolitical motiva-
haps the most deceptive hacking operation in history, using the most sophisti- tions behind the Olympics sabotage were
cated means ever seen to confound the forensic analysts searching for its culprit. far from clear. The usual suspect for any
The difficulty of proving the source of an attack—the so-called attribution cyberattack in South Korea is, of course,
problem—has plagued cybersecurity since practically the dawn of the inter- North Korea. The hermit kingdom has tor-
net. Sophisticated hackers can route their connections through circuitous mented its capitalist neighbors with mili-
proxies and blind alleys, making it almost impossible to follow their tracks. tary provocations and low-grade cyberwar
Forensic analysts have nonetheless learned how to determine hackers’ iden- for years. In the run-up to the Olympics,
tities by other means, tying together clues in code, infrastructure connections, analysts at the cybersecurity firm McAfee
and political motivations. had warned that Korean-speaking hack-
In the past few years, however, state-sponsored cyberspies and saboteurs ers had targeted the Pyeongchang Olympic
have increasingly experimented with organizers with phishing emails and what
another trick: planting false flags. 0 appeared to be espionage malware. At the
Those evolving acts of deception, time, McAfee analysts hinted in a phone call
7 8
designed to throw off both security with me that North Korea was likely behind
analysts and the public, have given rise the spying scheme.
to fraudulent narratives about hack- But there were contradictory signals on
ers’ identities that are difficult to dis- the public stage. As the Olympics began, the
pel, even after governments announce North seemed to be experimenting with a
the official findings of their intelligence friendlier approach to geopolitics. The North
agencies. It doesn’t help that those Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, had sent his
official findings often arrive weeks or sister as a diplomatic emissary to the games
months later, with the most convincing and had invited South Korea’s president,
evidence redacted to preserve secret Moon Jae-in, to visit the North Korean cap-
investigative techniques and sources. ital of Pyongyang. The two countries had
When North Korean hackers breached Sony Pictures in 2014 to prevent the even taken the surprising step of combining
release of the Kim Jong-un assassination comedy The Interview, for instance, their Olympic women’s hockey teams in a
they invented a hacktivist group called Guardians of Peace and tried to throw show of friendship. Why would North Korea
off investigators with a vague demand for “monetary compensation.” Even launch a disruptive cyberattack in the midst
after the FBI officially named North Korea as the culprit and the White House of that charm offensive?
imposed new sanctions against the Kim regime as punishment, several security Then there was Russia. The Kremlin
firms continued to argue that the attack must have been an inside job, a story had its own motive for an attack on
picked up by numerous news outlets—including wired . Pyeongchang. Investigations into doping
When state-sponsored Russian hackers stole and leaked emails from the by Russian athletes had led to a humiliat-
Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, we ing result in advance of the 2018 Olympics:
now know that the Kremlin likewise created diversions and cover stories. It Russia was banned. Its athletes would be
invented a lone Romanian hacker named Guccifer 2.0 to take credit for the allowed to compete but not to wear Russian
hacks; it also spread the rumors that a murdered DNC staffer named Seth Rich flags or accept medals on behalf of their
had leaked the emails from inside the organization—and it distributed many country. For years in the lead-up to that ver-
of the stolen documents through a fake whistle-blowing site called DCLeaks. dict, a state-sponsored Russian hacker team
Those deceptions became conspiracy theories, fanned by right-wing commen- known as Fancy Bear had been retaliating,
tators and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. stealing and leaking data from Olympics-
The deceptions generated a self-perpetuating ouroboros of mistrust: Skeptics related targets. Russia’s exile from the games
dismissed even glaring clues of the Kremlin’s guilt, like Russian-language for- was exactly the sort of slight that might
matting errors in the leaked documents, seeing those giveaways as planted inspire the Kremlin to unleash a piece of
evidence. Even a joint statement from US intelligence agencies four months
later naming Russia as the perpetrator couldn’t shake the conviction of disbe-
lievers. They persist even today: In an Economist/YouGov poll earlier this year,
only about half of Americans said they believed Russia interfered in the election.
With the malware that hit the Pyeongchang Olympics, the state of the art in
digital deception took several evolutionary leaps forward. Investigators would
disruptive malware against the opening ceremony. If the Russian government toward any single false answer but to a col-
couldn’t enjoy the Olympics, then no one would. lection of them, undermining any partic-
If Russia had been trying to send a message with an attack on the Olympics’ ular conclusion. The mystery became an
servers, however, it was hardly a direct one. Days before the opening ceremony, epistemological crisis that left researchers
it had preemptively denied any Olympics-targeted hacking. “We know that doubting themselves. “It was psychological
Western media are planning pseudo-investigations on the theme of ‘Russian warfare on reverse-engineers,” says Silas
fingerprints’ in hacking attacks on information resources related to the hosting Cutler, a security researcher who worked
of the Winter Olympic Games in the Republic of Korea,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry for CrowdStrike at the time. “It hooked into
had told Reuters. “Of course, no evidence will be presented to the world.” all those things you do as a backup check,
In fact, there would be plenty of evidence vaguely hinting at Russia’s respon- that make you think ‘I know what this is.’
sibility. The problem, it would soon become clear, was that there seemed to be And it poisoned them.”
just as much evidence pointing in a tangle of other directions too. That self-doubt, just as much as the sab-
.... otage effects on the Olympics, seemed to

have been the malware’s true aim, says
Craig Williams, a researcher at Cisco. “Even
THREE DAYS AFTER as it accomplished its mission, it also sent
the opening ceremony, Cisco’s Talos security division revealed that it had a message to the security community,”
obtained a copy of Olympics-targeted malware and dissected it. Someone Williams says. “You can be misled.”
from the Olympics organizing committee or perhaps the Korean security firm
AhnLab had uploaded the code to VirusTotal, a common database of malware
....
samples used by cybersecurity analysts, where Cisco’s reverse-engineers
found it. The company published its findings in a blog post that would give THE OLYMPICS
that malware a name: Olympic Destroyer. organizing committee, it turned out, wasn’t
In broad outline, Cisco’s description of Olympic Destroyer’s anatomy called Olympic Destroyer’s only victim. According
to mind two previous Russian cyberattacks, NotPetya and Bad Rabbit. As with to the Russian security firm Kaspersky, the
those earlier attacks, Olympic Destroyer used a password-stealing tool, then cyberattack also hit other targets with con-
combined those stolen passwords with remote access features in Windows nections to the Olympics, including Atos,
that allowed it to spread among computers on a network. Finally, it used a an IT services provider in France that had
data-destroying component to delete the boot configuration from infected supported the event, and two ski resorts
machines before disabling all Windows services and shutting the computer in Pyeongchang. One of those resorts had
down so that it couldn’t be rebooted. Analysts at the security firm CrowdStrike been infected seriously enough that its
would find other apparent Russian calling cards, elements that resembled a automated ski gates and ski lifts were tem-
piece of Russian ransomware known as XData. porarily paralyzed.
Yet there seemed to be no clear code matches between Olympic Destroyer In the days after the opening ceremony
and the previous NotPetya or Bad Rabbit worms. Although it contained simi- attack, Kaspersky’s Global Research and
lar features, they had apparently been re-created from scratch or copied from Analysis Team obtained a copy of the
elsewhere. Olympic Destroyer malware from one
The deeper analysts dug, the stranger the clues became. The data-wiping of the ski resorts and began dusting it for
portion of Olympic Destroyer shared characteristics with a sample of data- fingerprints. But rather than focusing on the
deleting code that had been used not by Russia but by the North Korean hacker malware’s code, as Cisco and Intezer had
group known as Lazarus. When Cisco researchers put the logical structures of done, they looked at its “header,” a part of
the data-wiping components side by side, they seemed to roughly match. And the file’s metadata that includes clues about
both destroyed files with the same distinctive trick of deleting just their first what sorts of programming tools were used
4,096 bytes. Was North Korea behind the attack after all? to write it. Comparing that header with oth-
There were still more signposts that led in completely different directions. ers in Kaspersky’s vast database of malware
The security firm Intezer noted that a chunk of the password-stealing code in samples, they found it perfectly matched
Olympic Destroyer matched exactly with tools used by a hacker group known the header of the North Korean Lazarus
as APT3—a group that multiple cybersecurity firms have linked to the Chinese hackers’ data-wiping malware—the same
government. The company also traced a component that Olympic Destroyer one Cisco had already pointed to as shar-
used to generate encryption keys back to a third group, APT10, also reportedly ing traits with Olympic Destroyer. The North
linked to China. Intezer pointed out that the encryption component had never
been used before by any other hacking teams, as far as the company’s ana-
lysts could tell. Russia? North Korea? China? The more that forensic analysts
reverse-engineered Olympic Destroyer’s code, the further they seemed to get
from arriving at a resolution.
In fact, all those contradictory clues seemed designed not to lead analysts
Korean theory seemed to be confirmed. malware, Soumenkov had found one flag that was provably false. It was now
But one senior Kaspersky researcher clear that someone had tried to make the malware look North Korean and
named Igor Soumenkov decided to go a failed due to a slipup. It was only through Kaspersky’s fastidious triple-check-
step further. Soumenkov, a hacker prod- ing that it came to light.
igy who’d been recruited to Kaspersky’s A few months later, I sat down with Soumenkov in a Kaspersky conference
research team as a teenager years ear- room in Moscow. Over an hour-long briefing, he explained in perfect English
lier, had a uniquely deep knowledge of file and with the clarity of a computer science professor how he’d defeated the
headers, and he decided to double-check attempted deception deep in Olympic Destroyer’s metadata. I summarized
his colleagues’ findings. what he seemed to have laid out for me: The Olympics attack clearly wasn’t
the work of North Korea. “It didn’t look like
them at all,” Soumenkov agreed.
.... And it certainly wasn’t Chinese, I sug-

gested, despite the more transparent false
code hidden in Olympic Destroyer that
fooled some researchers early on. “Chinese
“IT WAS PSYCHOLOGICAL code is very recognizable, and this looks dif-
ferent,” Soumenkov agreed again.
WARFARE ON Finally, I asked the glaring question: If
REVERSE-ENGINEERS.” not China, and not North Korea, then who?

It seemed that the conclusion of that pro-
cess of elimination was practically sitting
there in the conference room with us and
yet couldn’t be spoken aloud.
“Ah, for that question, I brought a nice
game,” Soumenkov said, affecting a kind
of chipper tone. He pulled out a small
A tall, soft-spoken engineer, Soumenkov black cloth bag and took out of it a set of dice. On each side of the small black
had a habit of arriving at work late in the cubes were written words like Anonymous, Cybercriminals, Hacktivists, USA,
morning and staying at Kaspersky’s head- China, Russia, Ukraine, Cyberterrorists, Iran.
quarters well after dark—a partially nocturnal Kaspersky, like many other security firms, has a strict policy of only pinning
schedule that he kept to avoid Moscow traffic. attacks on hackers using the firm’s own system of nicknames, never naming
One night, as his coworkers headed the country or government behind a hacking incident or hacker group—the
home, he pored over the code at a cubi- safest way to avoid the murky and often political pitfalls of attribution. But the
cle overlooking the city’s jammed Lenin- so-called attribution dice that Soumenkov held in his hand, which I’d seen
gradskoye Highway. By the end of that night, before at hacker conferences, represented the most cynical exaggeration of
the traffic had thinned, he was virtually the attribution problem: That no cyberattack can ever truly be traced to its
alone in the office, and he had determined source, and anyone who tries is simply guessing.
that the header metadata didn’t actually Soumenkov tossed the dice on the table. “Attribution is a tricky game,” he
match other clues in the Olympic Destroyer said. “Who is behind this? It’s not our story, and it will never be.”
code itself; the malware hadn’t been written
with the programming tools that the header
....
implied. The metadata had been forged.
This was something different from all the MICHAEL MATONIS WAS
other signs of misdirection that research- working from his home, a 400-square-foot basement apartment in the
ers had fixated on. The other red herrings Washington, DC, neighborhood of Capitol Hill, when he first began to pull at
in Olympic Destroyer had been so vex- the threads that would unravel Olympic Destroyer’s mystery. The 28-year-
ing in part because there was no way to old, a former anarchist punk turned security researcher with a controlled
tell which clues were real and which were mass of curly black hair, had only recently moved to the city from upstate
deceptions. But now, deep in the folds of New York, and he still didn’t have a desk at the Reston, Virginia, office of
false flags wrapped around the Olympic FireEye, the security and private intelligence firm that employed him. So on
the day in February when he started to examine the malware that had struck
Pyeongchang, Matonis was sitting at his makeshift workspace: a folding metal
chair with his laptop propped up on a plastic table.
On a whim, Matonis decided to try a different approach from much of the
rest of the perplexed security industry. He didn’t search for clues in the mal-
ware’s code. Instead, in the days after the attack, Matonis looked at a far more
mundane element of the operation: a fake, malware-laced Word document off the hackers to their tell. But he could see
that had served as the first step in the nearly disastrous opening ceremony sab- that, like teenage punks who all pin just the
otage campaign. right obscure band’s buttons to their jack-
The document, which appeared to contain a list of VIP delegates to the games, ets and style their hair in the same shapes,
had likely been emailed to Olympics staff as an attachment. If anyone opened the attempt to make the encoded files look
that attachment, it would run a malicious macro script that planted a backdoor unique had instead made one set of them
on their PC, offering the Olympics hackers their first foothold on the target net- a distinctly recognizable group. He soon
work. When Matonis pulled the infected document from VirusTotal, the malware deduced that the source of that signal in
repository where it had been uploaded by incident responders, he saw that the the noise was a common tool used to create
bait had likely been sent to Olympics staff in late November 2017, more than two each one of the booby-trapped documents.
months before the games began. The hackers had laid in wait for months before It was an open source program, easily found
triggering their logic bomb. online, called Malicious Macro Generator.
Matonis began combing VirusTotal and FireEye’s historical collection of mal- Matonis speculated that the hackers had
ware, looking for matches to that code sample. On a first scan, he found none. chosen the program in order to blend in
But Matonis did notice that a few dozen malware-infected documents from the with a crowd of other malware authors, but
archives corresponded to his file’s rough characteristics: They similarly carried it had ultimately had the opposite effect, set-
embedded Word macros and, like the Olympics-targeted file, had been built to ting them apart as a distinct set. Beyond their
launch a certain common set of hacking tools called PowerShell Empire. The shared tools, the malware group was also
malicious Word macro traps, however, looked very different from one another, tied together by the author names Matonis
with their own unique layers of obfuscation. pulled from the files’ metadata: Almost all
Over the next two days, Matonis searched for patterns in that obfuscation that had been written by someone named either
might serve as a clue. When he wasn’t at his laptop, he’d turn the puzzle over in “AV,” “BD,” or “john.” When he looked at the
his mind, in the shower or lying on the floor of his apartment, staring up at the command and control servers that the mal-
ceiling. Finally, he found a telling pattern in the malware specimens’ encoding. ware connected back to—the strings that
Matonis declined to share with me the details of this discovery for fear of tipping would control the puppetry of any successful
infections—all but a few of the IP addresses collection Matonis had unearthed seemed to target victims in the Russian busi-
of those machines overlapped too. The fin- ness and real estate world. Had a team of Russian hackers been tasked with spying
gerprints were hardly exact. But over the next on some Russian oligarch on behalf of their intelligence taskmasters? Were they
days, he assembled a loose mesh of clues that engaged in profit-focused cybercrime as a side gig?
added up to a solid net, tying the fake Word Regardless, Matonis felt that he was on his way to finally, definitively cut-
documents together. ting through the Olympics cyberattack’s false flags to reveal its true origin:
Only after he had established those hid- the Kremlin.
den connections did Matonis go back to the
Word documents that had served as the vehi-
....
cles for each malware sample and begin to
Google-translate their contents, some writ- AFTER MATONIS
ten in Cyrillic. Among the files he’d tied to had made those first, thrilling connections between Olympic Destroyer and a
the Olympic Destroyer bait, Matonis found very familiar set of Russian hacking victims, he sensed he had explored beyond
two other bait documents from the collec- the part of Olympic Destroyer that its creators had intended for researchers to
tion that dated back to 2017 and seemed to see—that he was now peering behind its curtain of false flags. He wanted to
target Ukrainian LGBT activist groups, using find out how much further he could go toward uncovering those hackers’ full
infected files that pretended to be a gay identities. So he told his boss that he wouldn’t be coming into the FireEye office
rights organization’s strategy document and for the foreseeable future. For the next three weeks, he barely left his bunker
a map of a Kiev Pride parade. Others targeted apartment. He worked on his laptop from the same folding chair, with his back
Ukrainian companies and government agen- to the only window in his home that allowed in sunlight, poring over every data
cies with a tainted copy of draft legislation. point that might reveal the next cluster of the hackers’ targets.
This, for Matonis, was ominously familiar A pre-internet-era detective might start a rudimentary search for a person
territory: For more than two years, he and by consulting phone books. Matonis started digging into the online equiva-
the rest of the security industry had watched lent, the directory of the web’s global network known as the Domain Name
Russia launch a series of destructive hack- System. DNS servers translate human-readable domains like facebook.com
ing operations against Ukraine, a relentless into the machine-readable IP addresses that describe the location of a net-
cyberwar that accompanied Russia’s inva- worked computer that runs that site or service, like 69.63.176.13.
sion of the country after its pro-Western Matonis began painstakingly check-
2014 revolution. 0 ing every IP address his hackers had used
Even as that physical war had killed as a command and control server in their
13,000 people in Ukraine and displaced 8 3 campaign of malicious Word document
millions more, a Russian hacker group phishing; he wanted to see what domains
known as Sandworm had waged a full- those IP addresses had hosted. Since those
blown cyberwar against Ukraine as well: It domain names can move from machine to
had barraged Ukrainian companies, gov- machine, he also used a reverse-lookup
ernment agencies, railways, and airports tool to flip the search—checking every
with wave after wave of data-destroying name to see what other IP addresses had
intrusions, including two unprecedented hosted it. He created a set of treelike maps
breaches of Ukrainian power utilities in connecting dozens of IP addresses and
2015 and 2016 that had caused blackouts domain names linked to the Olympics
for hundreds of thousands of people. Those attack. And far down the branch of one tree, a string of characters lit up like
attacks culminated in NotPetya, a worm that neon in Matonis’ mind: account-loginserv.com.
had spread rapidly beyond Ukraine’s bor- A photographic memory can come in handy for an intelligence analyst. As
ders and ultimately inflicted $10 billion in soon as Matonis saw the account-loginserv.com domain, he instantly knew he
damage on global networks, the most costly had seen it nearly a year earlier in an FBI “flash”—a short alert sent out to US
cyberattack in history. cybersecurity practitioners and potential victims. This one had offered a new
In Matonis’ mind, all other suspects for the detail about the hackers who, in 2016, had reportedly breached the Arizona and
Olympics attack fell away. Matonis couldn’t Illinois state boards of elections. These had been some of the most aggressive
yet connect the attack to any particular elements of Russia’s meddling in US elections: Election officials had warned in
hacker group, but only one country would 2016 that, beyond stealing and leaking emails from Democratic Party targets,
have been targeting Ukraine, nearly a year Russian hackers had broken into the two states’ voter rolls, accessing comput-
before the Pyeongchang attack, using the ers that held thousands of Americans’ personal data with unknown intentions.
same infrastructure it would later use to hack According to the FBI flash alert Matonis had seen, the same intruders had also
the Olympics organizing committee—and it spoofed emails from a voting technology company, later reported to be the
wasn’t China or North Korea. Tallahassee, Florida-based firm VR Systems, in an attempt to trick more elec-
Strangely, other infected documents in the tion-related victims into giving up their passwords.
Matonis drew up a jumbled map of the connections on a piece of paper that hacker persona that had claimed credit for
he slapped onto his refrigerator with an Elvis magnet, and marveled at what the intrusions and given the Democrats’
he’d found. Based on the FBI alert—and Matonis told me he confirmed the stolen emails to WikiLeaks.
connection with another human source he declined to reveal—the fake VR Kovalev, listed as 26 years old, was also
Systems emails were part of a phishing campaign that seemed to have also accused of breaching one state’s board of
used a spoofed login page at the account-loginserv.com domain he’d found elections and stealing the personal infor-
in his Olympic Destroyer map. At the end of his long chain of internet-address mation of some 500,000 voters. Later, he
connections, Matonis had found a fingerprint that linked the Olympics attack- allegedly breached a voting systems com-
ers back to a hacking operation that directly targeted the 2016 US election. Not pany and then impersonated its emails in
only had he solved the whodunit of Olympic Destroyer’s origin, he’d gone fur- an attempt to hack voting officials in Florida
ther, showing that the culprit had been implicated in the most notorious hack- with spoofed messages laced with malware.
ing campaign ever to hit the American political system. An FBI wanted poster for Kovalev showed
Matonis had, since he was a teenager, been a motorcycle fan. When he was a picture of a blue-eyed man with a slight
just barely old enough to ride one legally, he had scraped together enough smile and close-cropped, blond hair.
money to buy a 1975 Honda CB750. Then one day a friend let him try riding his Though the indictment didn’t say it
2001 Harley-Davidson with an 1100 EVO engine. In three seconds, he was fly- explicitly, Kovalev’s charges described
ing along a country road in upstate New York at 65 miles an hour, simultane- exactly the activities outlined in the FBI flash
ously fearing for his life and laughing uncontrollably. alert that Matonis had linked to the Olympic
When Matonis had finally outsmarted the most deceptive malware in history, Destroyer attack. Despite all of the mal-
he says he felt that same feeling, a rush that he could only compare to taking off ware’s unprecedented deceptions and mis-
on that Harley-Davidson in first gear. He sat alone in his DC apartment, staring directions, Matonis could now tie Olympic
at his screen and laughing. Destroyer to a specific GRU unit, working at
.... 22 Kirova Street in Khimki, Moscow, a tower

of steel and mirrored glass on the western
bank of the Moscow Canal.
BY THE TIME ....
Matonis had drawn those connections, the US government had already drawn
its own. The NSA and CIA, after all, have access to human spies and hacking
abilities that no private-sector cybersecurity firm can rival. In late February, A FEW MONTHS
while Matonis was still holed up in his basement apartment, two unnamed after Matonis shared those connections
intelligence officials told The Washington Post that the Olympics cyberattack with me, in late November of 2018, I stood
had been carried out by Russia and that it had sought to frame North Korea. The on a snow-covered path that wound along
anonymous officials went further, blaming the attack specifically on Russia’s that frozen waterway on the outskirts of
military intelligence agency, the GRU—the same agency that had masterminded Moscow, staring up at the Tower.
the interference in the 2016 US election and the blackout attacks in Ukraine, I had, by then, been following the hack-
and had unleashed NotPetya’s devastation. ers known as Sandworm for two full years,
But as with most public pronouncements from inside the black box of the and I was in the final stages of writing a
US intelligence apparatus, there was no way to check the government’s work. book that investigated the remarkable arc
Neither Matonis nor anyone else in media or cybersecurity research was privy of their attacks. I had traveled to Ukraine to
to the trail the agencies had followed. interview the utility engineers who’d twice
A set of US government findings that were far more useful and interesting to watched their power grids’ circuit breakers
Matonis came months after his basement detective work. On July 13, 2018, spe- be flipped open by unseen hands. I’d flown
cial counsel Robert Mueller unsealed an indictment against 12 GRU hackers for to Copenhagen to speak with sources at the
engaging in election interference, laying out the evidence that they’d hacked the shipping firm Maersk who whispered to me
DNC and the Clinton campaign; the indictment even included details like the about the chaos that had unfolded when
servers they’d used and the terms they’d typed into a search engine. NotPetya paralyzed 17 of their terminals
Deep in the 29-page indictment, Matonis read a description of the alleged at ports around the globe, instantly shut-
activities of one GRU hacker named Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev. Along with ting down the world’s largest shipping con-
two other agents, Kovalev was named as a member of GRU Unit 74455, based glomerate. And I’d sat with analysts from
in the northern Moscow suburb of Khimki in a 20-story building known as the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET
“the Tower.” in their office in Bratislava as they broke
The indictment stated that Unit 74455 had provided backend servers for down their evidence that tied all of those
the GRU’s intrusions into the DNC and the Clinton campaign. But more sur- attacks to a single group of hackers.
prisingly, the indictment added that the group had “assisted in” the operation Beyond the connections in Matonis’
to leak the emails stolen in those operations. Unit 74455, the charges stated, branching chart and in the Mueller report
had helped to set up DCLeaks.com and even Guccifer 2.0, the fake Romanian that pinned the Olympics attack on the
GRU, Matonis had shared with me other

details that loosely tied those hackers
....
directly to Sandworm’s earlier attacks. In
some cases, they had placed command and IN EARLY
control servers in data centers run by two April of this year, I received an email via my Korean translator from Sang-
of the same companies, Fortunix Networks jin Oh, the Korean official who led the response to Olympic Destroyer on the
and Global Layer, that had hosted serv- ground in Pyeongchang. He repeated what he’d said all along—that he would
ers used to trigger Ukraine’s 2015 black- never discuss who might be responsible for the Olympics attack. He also
out and later the 2017 NotPetya worm. noted that he and I wouldn’t speak again: He’d moved on to a position in South
Matonis argued that those thin clues, on top Korea’s Blue House, the office of the president, and wasn’t authorized to take
of the vastly stronger case that all of those interviews. But in our final phone conversation months earlier, Oh’s voice had
attacks were carried out by the GRU, sug- still smoldered with anger when he recalled the opening ceremony and the 12
gested that Sandworm was, in fact, GRU hours he’d spent desperately working to avert disaster.
Unit 74455. Which would put them in the “It still makes me furious that, without any clear purpose, someone hacked
building looming over me that snowy day this event,” he’d said. “It would have been a huge black mark on these games
in Moscow. of peace. I can only hope that the international community can figure out a
Standing there in the shadow of that way that this will never happen again.”
opaque, reflective tower, I didn’t know Even now, Russia’s attack on the Olympics still haunts
exactly what I hoped to accomplish. There 0 cyberwar wonks. (Russia’s foreign ministry didn’t respond
was no guarantee that Sandworm’s hack- to multiple requests for comment from wired.) Yes, the US
ers were inside—they may have just as 8 5 government and the cybersecurity industry eventually
easily been split between that Khimki solved the puzzle, after some initial false starts and con-
b u i l d i n g a n d a n o t h e r G RU a d d re ss fusion. But the attack set a new bar for deception, one that
named in the Mueller indictment, at 20 might still prove to have disastrous consequences when its
Komsomolskiy Prospekt, a building in tricks are repeated or evolve further, says Jason Healey, a
central Moscow that I’d walked by that cyberconflict-focused researcher at the Columbia School
morning on my way to the train. for International and Public Affairs
The Tower, of course, wasn’t marked “Olympic Destroyer was the first time someone used false flags of that kind of
as a GRU facility. It was surrounded by sophistication in a significant, national-security-relevant attack,” Healey says.
an iron fence and surveillance cameras, “It’s a harbinger of what the conflicts of the future might look like.”
with a sign at its gate that read glavnoye Healey, who worked in the George W. Bush White House as director for cyber
upravleniye obustroystva voysk —roughly, infrastructure protection, says he has no doubt that US intelligence agencies can
“General Directorate for the Arrangement see through deceptive clues that muddy attribution. He’s more worried about
of Troops.” I guessed that if I dared ask the other countries where a misattributed cyberattack could have lasting conse-
guard at that gate if I could speak with quences. “For the folks that can’t afford CrowdStrike and FireEye, for the vast bulk
someone from GRU Unit 74455, I was of nations, attribution is still an issue,” Healey says. “If you can’t imagine this with
likely to end up detained in a room where I US and Russia, imagine it with India and Pakistan, or China and Taiwan, where a
would be asked hard questions by Russian false flag provokes a much stronger response than even its authors intended, in a
government officials, rather than the other way that leaves the world looking very different afterwards.”
way around. But false flags work here in the US, too, argues John Hultquist, the director
This, I realized, might be the closest I of intelligence analysis at FireEye and Matonis’ former boss before Matonis left
had ever stood to Sandworm’s hackers, the firm in July. Look no further, Hultquist says, than the half of Americans—or
and yet I could get no closer. A security 73 percent of registered Republicans—who refuse to accept that Russia hacked
guard appeared on the edge of the park- the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
ing lot above me, looking out from within As the 2020 election approaches, Olympic Destroyer shows that Russia has only
the Tower’s fence—whether watching me or advanced its deception techniques—graduating from flimsy cover stories to the
taking a smoke break, I couldn’t tell. It was most sophisticated planted digital fingerprints ever seen. And if they can fool even
time for me to leave. a few researchers or reporters, they can sow even more of the public confusion
I walked north along the Moscow Canal, that misled the American electorate in 2016. “The question is one of audience,”
away from the Tower, and through the hush Hultquist says. “The problem is that the US government may never say a thing, and
of the neighborhood’s snow-padded parks within 24 hours, the damage is done. The public was the audience in the first place.”
and pathways to the nearby train station. On The GRU hackers known as Sandworm, meanwhile, are still out there. And
the train back to the city center, I glimpsed Olympic Destroyer suggests they’ve been escalating not only their wanton acts
the glass building one last time, from the of disruption but also their deception techniques. After years of crossing one red
other side of the frozen water, before it was line after another, their next move is impossible to predict. But when those hack-
swallowed up in the Moscow skyline. ers do strike again, they may appear in a form we don’t even recognize.
WITH RON MOORE’S

SPACE-RACE DRAMA
FOR ALL MANKIND ,
_
APPLE IS BETTING ON
2 1
7 1 MARQUEE NAMES AND
LUSH PRODUCTION TO
GET ITS TV+ SERVICE
LAUNCH
OFF THE GROUND.
CAN IT ACHIEVE ORBIT?
_Sequence
BY
PETER RUBIN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MICHELLE GROSKOPF
MORE
THAN
50
buildings and soundstages sprawl across the 44 After the journalists handed their phones
to Apple staffers to be taped up with
acres of the Sony Pictures lot. That’s a lot of window- camera-blocking stickers, the vans shut-
tled the group to Stage 15. (The Sony com-
less oblongs, and even more distance between them. plex is also home to HBO’s Insecure and
If you need to get from, say, the Jimmy Stewart Showtime’s Ray Donovan. Apple may have
a near-trillion-dollar market cap, but it
Building to Stage 15, golf carts and Sprinter vans still leases soundstages like everyone else
are the customary mode—even on sunny days. On in Hollywood.) Dryness maintained, we
walked into the control room of NASA’s
a particular Saturday in February, while an atmo- Manned Spacecraft Center circa 1969.
spheric river settled over Los Angeles, those vehi- Mission Control, as it’s more commonly
known, was painstakingly refurbished by
cles were a necessity. The downpour was bad luck NASA in its original Houston location and
for the dozens of journalists there that day, but it reopened to the public earlier this year. The
Hollywood version in front of us, taking up
was also a touch allegorical. After what felt like almost 8,000 square feet of Stage 15, is its
years of anticipation, Apple was about to take us utter replica, from the soft packs of Kools
strewn on long tiers of desks to the million-
behind the scenes of a show it was making for its buttoned BOOSTER consoles that tracked the
still mysterious, still unnamed subscription stream- Saturn V rockets powering the Apollo space-
craft into orbit. Rotary phones. Horn-rimmed
ing service. We were going to find out if Apple, glasses. Even the ceiling tiles have been
maker of so many devices that have redefined the custom-made to match the ones in Houston.
Such millimeter-perfect verisimilitude is
way we consume content, could finally make con- to be expected. After all, we’re standing in a
tent—good content—of its own. Ronald D. Moore project. A veteran of mul-
tiple Star Trek series and creator of numer-

ous other shows, including the beloved
mid-’00s space opera Battlestar Galactica,
Moore is known for paradigm-busting genre
television, creating worlds that are meticu-
lously designed and populated by fully real-
ized characters. This newest project, a series
called For All Mankind, imagines how our
society might look today had the space race
never ended. It’s at once rueful and optimis-
tic, a journey that undoes decades of declin-
ing ambition by imagining how an alternate
past spawns a new future.
For all its attention to the little things,
though, For All Mankind is bigger and risk-
ier than anything Moore has created. The
show is one of the first series appearing on
the (now named) Apple TV+ streaming ser-
vice, a multibillion-dollar push that includes
projects from Steven Spielberg and Oprah
Winfrey. And Mission Control is more than
the simulated nerve center for the zero-g
space walks and lunar landings of For All
Mankind. It’s also the launchpad for Apple’s
own moon shot. The company sits at a
_
crossroads, its hardware approaching mar-
ket saturation and its updates increasingly
incremental; part of the path forward, by its
own admission, involves being a purveyor
of services. So, after Apple’s two decades of
ASTRONAUT MEETING windfall as a manufacturer and distributor,
ROOM FROM THE SET TV+ is the company’s highly anticipated—
OF FOR ALL MANKIND. and very expensive—attempt to become an
BELOW, ACTOR JOEL entertainment studio, one that competes
KINNAMAN not just with the upstarts that inaugurated
the streaming wars (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon)
but also with the old hands that are now
trying to muscle in (Disney, Warner Bros.,
NBCUniversal). The landscape is crowded,
but there’s room among the stars.
Cupertino, we have liftoff.
T
WENTY YEARS AGO , with three
simple words, Steve Jobs changed
the way the public saw Apple. One
more thing … read the screen at the end of
his Macworld Expo keynote speech in San
Francisco that January. It was actually five
more things—blueberry, grape, tangerine,
lime, and strawberry, the colors of the new
translucent iMacs he announced—but the
construction stuck. For the next 12 years, the
line became Jobs’ catchphrase, the showman’s
wink at Apple’s cycle of secrecy and surprise.
By the time Tim Cook replaced Jobs as
CEO in 2011, Apple had thrust most of its
0 8 9
after the pitcher of mojitos was drained,”

wrote Variety. Among a sea of headlines like
“I Watched Planet of the Apps So You Don’t
Have To” and “Apple’s Planet of the Apps Is
Even Worse Than You Thought,” Variety’s
IF APPL E W E R E A P E R S O N — was one of the kinder sentiments.
IF I T T RU LY T O O K M O R TA L Carpool Karaoke: The Series landed
on iTunes and Apple TV shortly thereaf-
FO RM —T H AT F O R M M I G H T B E ter, and while it didn’t invite the same
RON AL D MOOR E . rancor as Planet of the Apps, it also did lit-
tle to distinguish itself. The original talk-
show segment relied on Corden’s ability
to bridge the gap between viewer and
celebrity; Apple’s version simply put two
celebrities in a car and turned on the dash-
best secrets into daylight—iTunes, iPhones, legend Dr. Dre (cofounder of headphone cam. Seth MacFarlane and Ariana Grande?
iPads—but one rumor Cook could still dance maker Beats, which Apple bought in 2014). Billy Eichner and Metallica? When Apple
around was the company’s plans for tele- The show, which reportedly contained renewed the series, TechCrunch went
vision. (Apple had released a Macintosh sex and violence, would be watchable via with the headline “Sorry, Apple’s Carpool
back in 1993 that could display a TV feed, iTunes and Apple TV boxes. Soon, Apple also Karaoke Gets a Second Season.”
but the curio lasted only a few months on developed a Shark Tank–style reality show What’s more, the company’s content
the market.) Industry watchers had long called Planet of the Apps, which the com- trouble extended beyond ill-conceived
wondered what the company might have pany began casting in the summer of 2016; reality shows. As The Wall Street Journal
in store. “Intense interest” became Cook’s then a series based on Carpool Karaoke, a would later report, Apple scrapped its plans
favorite side step—as in, TV was “an area perma-viral segment from James Corden’s for Vital Signs around the same time. The
of intense interest for us.” In those days, he late-night NBC talk show. issue was Tim Cook’s discomfort with the
was referring to the experience of watch- In October 2016, during a quarterly show’s graphic content. Violence and sex
ing television. The Apple TV set-top device, earnings call with investors, Cook’s rheto- might have been a ratings-boosting recipe
which launched in 2007, was beginning to ric finally changed. When an analyst asked for HBO or Netflix, but Apple was trying to
gain some sales steam by its third genera- him about the productions, he responded: be a content company that was also depen-
tion, and the company was widely believed “I think it’s a great opportunity for us both dent on its consumers continuing to buy
to be prototyping an Apple-branded TV set. from a creation point of view and an own- phones and computers. Prestige was fine.
Over the years, though, Cook’s intense ership point of view.” Mostly tap dancing, Prurience was not.
interest began to shift. According to The to be sure, but “creation” and “ownership”
Wall Street Journal, Apple approached were new words in Apple’s vocabulary. And
T
Time Warner about acquisition in mid-2016; none too soon. Not only would Apple miss its EN DAYS AFTER Planet of the Apps
some even suspected the company might own revenue target in 2016, in large part due premiered, Apple announced
make a bid for Netflix. Neither happened, to slowing sales of iOS devices, but its share that it had hired two television
but by then what was once called “web tele- of the movie-rental market—which, thanks veterans to head up “video programming
vision” had come into its own, and stream- to iTunes, had been more than 50 percent— worldwide.” Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van
ing content took on a new urgency. Amazon was tumbling, cannibalized by smart cable Amburg had been copresidents of Sony
had won multiple Emmys for its original boxes and Amazon. Apple’s services division Pictures Television for a decade. The two
show Transparent, and Hulu had evolved needed an extra boost if it was going to help were known for rescuing the division from
from a platform that just delivered the pre- the company offset such setbacks. early-2000s dreck like Shasta McNasty
vious day’s cable shows to one with its own Planet of the Apps premiered on June 6, and Madigan Men, replacing it with shows
slate of original programming. 2017. In it, contestants were given 60 sec- that fit the burgeoning age of so-called
Apple seemed ready to jump into the onds to pitch their app idea—while on a prestige TV: Breaking Bad, Community,
pool. Cook began trumpeting the perfor- moving walkway—to a panel of judges that Damages, Masters of Sex. At Apple, report-
mance of the company’s “services” divi- included Jessica Alba, will.i.am, Gwyneth ing to the company’s head of services,
sion, which included iTunes, Apple Music, Paltrow, and tech entrepreneur Gary Eddy Cue, they would try to help one of the
Apple Pay, and the App Store. Services were Vaynerchuk, author of such books as Crush richest companies in the world do televi-
by then second only to the iPhone in gen- It! and Crushing It! The ensuing reviews sion the right way.
erating revenue for Apple, and Cook said also crushed it, the “it” in this case being Though the timing of Apple’s announce-
he saw more growth for that group ahead. any hopes of a second season. “Apple’s first ment seemed comically coincidental, Erlicht
Part of it, it seemed, would come from tele- offering … feels like something that was and Van Amburg had been talking to Apple
vision; Apple quietly began filming Vital developed at a cocktail party, and not given for some time. In its quest to develop con-
Signs, a show based on the life of hip hop much more rigorous thought or attention tent that could hold up to fare from Netflix
0 9 1
and Hulu, the company had been discussing and wondering why he couldn’t see Neil
possible partnerships with numerous stu- Armstrong up there. As a teen, he planned
dios, including Sony. “Obviously we were on entering the Navy and applying to flight
intrigued,” Erlicht says. At the time, “there test school to be an astronaut himself. “Then
wasn’t an agency, production company, or I started wearing glasses,” he says now, sit-
studio that wasn’t trying to hunt down what ting in his office outside the Mankind writ-
Apple would be doing.” When they were ers’ room. “And poof, it was gone.”
eventually offered the job (and accepted), We’re in an unassuming, dated-looking,
one of their first calls went to Van Amburg’s three-story stone building on an even
old friend: Ronald Moore. less assuming street in that liminal space
If Apple were a person—if it truly took between Los Angeles and Burbank, Moore
mortal form—that form might be Ron sporting the habitual mane of hair and
Moore. Like Apple, Moore has created open-collar shirt that make him look like
epochal works that improve on the halt- he stepped off the cover of a romance novel
ing steps of their predecessors. And like for the bookish. His office accoutrements
Apple, he imagines a future that meshes evince a similar flair: a framed shot of Errol
with how humans actually behave and what Flynn from 1938’s The Adventures of Robin
they expect. Apple might call that Human Hood, an Apple IIe just like the one he wrote
Interface Design; Moore has called it “natu- his first Star Trek spec script on, old maps
ralistic science fiction.” and employee patches from Disneyland.
Th e con cept b egan wit h Mo ore’s “Star Trek, Disneyland, and NASA,” he says,
Battlestar Galactica miniseries. That four- ticking off his obsessions.
hour show ran on the Sci-Fi Channel (now Those obsessions informed Battlestar’s
Syfy) in 2003 and updated the single-season atmosphere, but it was Moore’s prioritiza-
1978 cult classic into an epic for the 21st cen- tion of soul over special effects that helped
_
tury. Like the original, it focused on the last the show entrance both fans and critics over
vestiges of humanity fleeing murderous its four-season run. The crewmembers of the
robots called Cylons; in the Moore mini- Galactica weren’t archetypes—they were
series, the Cylons looked just like those they people (and Cylons) who knew trauma and
stalked across the galaxy, infusing a fusty anxiety, who knew jealousy and pride and
premise with simmering dread. The mini- deceit and redemption. In a decade that NASA’S BACKUP
series ended on the holy-shit cliff-hanger began with The Sopranos and would end with CONTROL ROOM
revelation that a crew member was actu- Mad Men, Battlestar told human stories that FROM THE TV
ally a Cylon. So the network green-lit a full felt, in spite of their cosmic setting, grounded. SHOW’S SET
series, and Moore articulated his vision in
the show’s 49-page bible:
We take as a given the idea that the traditional

space opera, with its stock characters, techno
double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian his-
trionics, and empty heroics has run its course and
a new approach is required. That approach is to
introduce realism into what has heretofore been
an aggressively unrealistic genre.
Indeed, Galactica felt as if it had beamed

down from the Enterprise itself. Not Jean-
Luc Picard’s—though Moore had cut his
teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation—
but NASA’s. Gone was the stilted pseudo-
science of Trek; in its place was an analog,
organic, inhabited sci-fi. This was space as
humans would really live in it, with dirt and
claustrophobia and hard, hard drinking.
Much of the sensibility, if not the drinking,
was steeped in Moore’s lifelong fascination
with the US space program. As a 5-year-old
in 1969, Moore had stood in his backyard in
Chowchilla, California, looking at the moon
It also rocketed Moore squarely into

Sought-After Creator territory, and in 2010,
after BSG ended, he signed a development
deal with Sony Pictures Television—bringing
him into Van Amburg and Erlicht’s orbit. The
juiciest fruit to sprout, in 2014, was an adap-
tation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander fan-
tasy novels, now heading into its fifth season
on Starz. It was during Outlander’s early
days that Van Amburg approached Moore
with the idea of doing a show about NASA
in the ’70s for NBC. Moore figured it was
a “momentary blip” that would never get
made; then Van Amburg and Erlicht got the
job at Apple. They officially began in August
2017, at which point Van Amburg called to
see if the premise still held interest. “I still
think about that NASA-in-the-’70s idea,” he
told Moore. “What do you think about doing
a Mad Men sort of thing?”
As much as he was captivated by the
thought, Moore quickly realized: This has a
fatal flaw. By the 1970s, the space program
simply wasn’t inspiring. “The Apollo mis-
sions were over,” Moore says. “There was
this broken-dream quality to it, and that’s
not a heroic adventure. It’s a sad story of
declining ambition.” Instead, he said to Van
Amburg: What if NASA had kept going? Van
Amburg countered with his own question:
Why would NASA have kept going? Moore
THE FIRST SEASON, didn’t know, but he thought his friend
S PA N NI NG F R O M Garrett Reisman might.
The two had met back in 2008, when
1 9 6 9 T O 1 9 74 , Reisman was living 220 miles above Earth.
W O U L D U NS P O O L As an astronaut on the International Space
Station, Reisman could request a call from
W H AT M I G H T H AV E anyone—and he chose the creators of his
HAPPENED HAD favorite show, Battlestar Galactica. That vid-
eoconference across orbital altitude began
T H E S O V I E T S B E AT E N an exchange program of sorts. Moore invited
APOLLO 11 Reisman to the BSG set for the series finale;
Reisman invited Moore to Cape Canaveral
T O T H E M O O N. for the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis
(upon which Reisman rode). By the time
Moore called Reisman about the new Apple
idea, the astronaut was the director of space
operations at SpaceX. Moore paid him a visit
at the company’s Southern California head-
quarters that August and, over lunch, laid
out his quandary. “You could do the his-
torical version,” Moore said, “but I’m really
intrigued by this other version. Why couldn’t
we have kept going in the ’70s?”
Reisman responded by telling Moore the
tale of a failed Soviet lunar mission. “Most
people don’t know how close they came,”
0 9 3
E
he said. The Russians had denied it for years, VEN THOUGH For All Mankind seemed, the company was going to give the
but if the development of their rocket had feels like the most Apple of Apple public a taste of what was to come.
gone just a little bit differently, he explained, shows, it was actually the third Not so. Instead, Apple opted to talk.
they might have gotten to the moon before show that Van Amburg and Erlicht green-lit, Celebrity after celebrity—Spielberg, Kumail
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. after a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Nanjiani, Abrams, Oprah, Big Bird—walked
Moore had his why. For two months, Stories and The Morning Show, a drama out from the wings to the stage, where, to a
he and his writing team plotted the arc of starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer one, they described their Apple TV+ project,
For All Mankind. The 10-episode first sea- Aniston. Many more followed in rapid suc- how thrilled they were to be working with
son, spanning from 1969 to 1974, would cession: a fantasy epic starring Jason Momoa the company, and how excited they were
unspool what might have happened had and Alfre Woodard called See; an adapta- for people to get to see it. That was it. Not
the Soviets beaten Apollo 11 to the moon. tion of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation; Servant, a single frame of footage, save a quick-cut
Congressional hearings, for one, which a psychological thriller from M. Night montage that revealed precisely nothing.
young senator Ted Kennedy attends in the Shyamalan. J. J. Abrams and Oprah signed No details about how the service was going
summer of 1969—meaning he doesn’t go to on to executive-produce projects. There to work. Stranger still, no one mentioned
Chappaquiddick, meaning he runs against were documentary series too, like one about For All Mankind, and Moore was nowhere to
Nixon in 1972. For another, the government spectacular houses and their designers. With be seen onstage. It wasn’t until June, when
goes all-in on establishing a foothold on each new acquisition or order throughout Apple released a trailer for his show, that
the moon, meaning that the US pulls out of 2018, Apple’s stockpile looked more robust. anyone who didn’t obsessively read trade
Vietnam in 1970. Maybe not as vast as Netflix’s, but enough publications knew the series even existed.
But that wasn’t all that was in Moore’s to compete. The company originally appeared ready
head. Around Halloween, when he pitched But trouble wasn’t over. Maybe because to launch Apple TV+ late in 2018. The goal-
his story line to a small group of Apple exec- of the same content conservatism that had post then moved to before the March 2019
utives in the company’s Culver City outpost, scuttled Vital Signs, executives report- event. Yet, through the summer of 2019,
Van Amburg was shocked by the way Moore edly asked Shyamalan to remove cruci- uncertainty lingered. All the while, other
launched headlong into the show. “When fixes from his characters’ houses. Some new streaming services were promoting
you’re making television shows, the idea high-profile staff departures also created high-profile acquisitions and too-good-
of something is usually much greater than an air of uncertainty. Amazing Stories to-be-true pricing. For $6.99, the new
the execution,” he says. “But Ron hadn’t and The Morning Show lost their original Disney+ service would offer massive con-
just thought about what the first hour of TV showrunners due to what Variety termed tent libraries from Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar,
was—he had thought about hour 40.” “creative differences.” The actress Kristen and its other IP empires—as well as develop
On the wall, a series of timelines and char- Wiig dropped out of a project because of a numerous original series and movies, many
acter profiles helped illustrate how the show scheduling conflict. of which were unveiled to a rapturous crowd
might progress over the seven seasons that In March 2019, scrutiny accumulating, at Comic-Con International in San Diego.
Moore and his writers had broken down. “The Apple sent out invitations for a “special event” NBCUniversal paid $500 million to regain
level of detail was overwhelming,” Erlicht to be held at the Steve Jobs Theater, an iPod the streaming rights to The Office, famously
says. “Every aspect of the butterfly effect that Nano’s throw from the colossal circular build- the most-watched show on Netflix, for
would happen from the slightest change in ing at the center of the company’s Cupertino its own forthcoming streaming service.
that event.” The executives walked out into campus. “It’s show time,” the invitation said, WarnerMedia shelled out $425 million to
the hallway, grinned at each other, and nego- below a flickering countdown film leader. It do the same with Friends.
tiated which one of them was going to give was the perfect opportunity for a course cor- For two decades, Apple had single-
Moore the good news. rection. After nearly three years of secrecy, it handedly changed how people consumed
entertainment. The iPod made listening
to music a playground of infinite playlists;
iTunes took lethal aim at Blockbuster long
before Netflix finished it off; the iPhone
ignited whole new categories of experi-
AP PL E H AD N ’ T I N V E N TE D M P 3 S ences. The company hadn’t invented MP3s
or smartphones. Rather, it had found a way
OR SM ART P H ON E S . R ATH E R, I T H A D to do them better, to change the landscape
FO UND A WAY T O DO TH E M B E T TE R, around those businesses. But in the time
it took Apple to draw up plans for original
T O CH AN GE TH E L A N D S C A P E content, the landscape had changed around
AROU N D T H O S E B US I N E S S E S . them. Even without Disney+ and other new-
comers, Apple was stepping onto a battle-
field full of experienced fighters: Netflix was
focusing on an ever-expanding global reach,
Amazon offered its programming as yet
another perk for Prime members, Hulu had developed live-TV func-
tionality that made it an all-in-one replacement for cable. All of a sud-
den, the well-worn Apple Way—keeping quiet until a world-changing
device or service was ready for consumers—looked like a road to ruin Facts that helped get this
for the company’s newest product. issue out:
A
ND YET. YET! This is Apple. Even as business and entertain- A supernatural ability for searching the FAA da-
tabase is key to breaking news on criminal inves-
ment pundits wondered aloud why the company seemed tigations; the US uses about as much electricity
to be floundering in its attempt to go Hollywood, Ron for air-conditioning as Africa uses for all purpos-
es; Marie’s Crisis Café is the best place in New
Moore kept his head down, working to make For All Mankind into York City; napkin-hoarding pays off eventually;
it’s possible to make a cookie so delicious that if
an unrestrained, uncompromising thought experiment. Not just the everyone on Earth tasted it, it would bring world
Mad Men stuff, either—the accuracy of the ceiling tiles, the exhaus- peace; September is never too early to start
listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; she is
tively researched period clothing. He was consumed by how the an accomplished pianist and singer, has terrible
handwriting, has been to the Academy Awards,
made world might have become better than the one we have today. and will keep you calm and procedural in a crisis;
Battery research pushes solar energy into the mainstream. NASA most books are not fact-checked; Wikipedia is
not a source; be prepared to show your notes;
starts recruiting women astronauts earlier, putting them in space her relationship with cheese is complicated; sea
otters spend about five hours a day on hair care;
and turning them into global icons. The US sets up a lunar base as stone-fruit season is the best time of year; the
early as the 1970s. An alternate history in progress, one rooted in a conversation is over when anyone says the word
lawyer; maybe one particular elite Los Angeles
fundamental optimism. “It’s an aspirational show,” Moore says. “It private school was better when it was two elite
private schools; Joanna Pearlstein has been a
says, ‘Wouldn’t this have made us a better country and a better world champion of wired for the past 16 years!
if we had done all these things?’ Not just more Apollo missions, but
wi r e d is a registered trademark of Advance
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On September 10, Tim Cook once again took the stage at the Steve Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the
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eantry, and the secrecy, around TV+, and in its place came a giddy, is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers
you-asked-for-it forthrightness. And this time, gamesmanship: The Inc. Editorial office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305,
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platform would launch November 1 (11 days before Disney); it would Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York,
NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer;
cost $4.99 a month (less than any other major streaming service). If David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Officer, US;
you bought an iOS device, Mac, or Apple TV, you’d get a year of the Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Mar-
keting Officer, US. Periodicals postage paid at
service for free. “All of these incredible shows for the price of a sin- New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices.
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0 9 5
SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS WIRED 27.11
PREDICT A SCANDAL AT THE 2040 SUMMER OLYMPICS:
PHELPS CLONE SWEEPS

ENTIRE SWIMMING EVENT. —@seanmizerski via Instagram
HONORABLE MENTIONS: FIVE-YEAR-OLD WINS FORTNITE GOLD. BRENDON HOOPER VIA FACEBOOK // NANOBOTS Each month we publish a six-word story—and
FOUND IN GOLD MEDALIST’S URINE. @ABERNALESTEVEZ VIA INSTAGRAM // TEENAGE GOLD MEDALIST IS ACTUALLY it could be written by you. Submit your story
60. @CHLOEJAYNEASKEW VIA INSTAGRAM // GENETICALLY ENGINEERED OLYMPIANS PROTEST SEGREGATED GAMES. on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, along with
@ADMBRADFORD VIA INSTAGRAM // REIGNING SCOOTER CHAMPION ADMITS DNA MOD. @MATTHEW.GILSON VIA #WIREDBACKPAGE. We’ll pick one to illustrate
INSTAGRAM // FIRST ALL-HUMAN WINNER IN AGES! ANWAR MISMAR VIA FACEBOOK // BLACKWATER FIRST, PFIZER here. Your next assignment: In six words,
SECOND, AMERICA LAST. @JAY_HERNANDEZ VIA TWITTER sketch the plot of Star Wars: Episode XXI.
0 9 6 ILLUSTRATION / MAXIME MOUYSSET

Craig DeMartino
Climber
Arc’teryx specializes in technical, high-performance apparel,

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