Anti-magnetic. 5-day power reserve. 10-year warranty. The new Aquis Date is powered by Oris Calibre 400. A new movement. The new standard
PHOTOGRAPHY: GUERIN BLASK. STYLING: RIKE WATANABE. MAKEUP: COLBY SMITH. HAIR: NETT Y JORDAN
009
030
Feature Coding is a drag Aiming to increase access to STEM subjects, Anna Lytical holds court on TikTok, serving instructional code with a side of queer visibility
011
p. 022 Start Stubbing out scalpers
p. 028 Start Crypto’s currents
terraXcube is an environmental
Getting into your favourite band’s
Elon Musk’s influence goes beyond
simulator that can create driving
gig can involve hefty extra fees
the Twitter thread – his tweets
blizzards, scorching heat and
and unscrupulous scalpers – but
on cryptocurrencies can send your
torrential rain – all on demand
blockchain could reinvent tickets
coins soaring, or crash their value
p. 048 Start Creating chaos
p. 054 Gear X-ray special
p. 069 Special report 100 Hottest Startups
Taika Waititi – actor-director and
WIRED takes a peek inside some
Our roundup of the most exciting
reinventor of the superhero film –
closed-box products, from the
100 startups in Europe returns,
reveals how his packed schedule
iMac to smart speakers, drones,
showcasing ten cities coming out
helps him produce his best work
game controllers and turntables
of Covid-19 stronger than ever
p. 098 Feature Shutdown
p. 108 Feature The health connection
Ten years on from the Arab
Struggling to cope? Always ill?
Below: Dotan Asselmann,
Spring, the use of internet
Your doctor may have the cure –
co-founder of Tel Aviv-based
shutdowns to stifle democracy
a social prescription that gets you
surgical-education and
and protests is increasing
involved in your local community
best-practice startup, Theator
p. 116 Feature Exponential
p. 124 Feature Reflected glory
p. 136 Feature It’s only a game
Author and entrepreneur Azeem
The ESA’s Euclid telescope will be
Roblox is a wildly popular, kid-
Azhar reveals the prizes and
sent into space to try and solve
friendly build-your-own-world
pitfalls of life in the Exponential
one of the unexplained mysteries
sandbox – but some players
Age – keep up, or be crushed…
of the universe: dark energy
prefer dark, disturbing visions
PHOTOGRAPHY: JONATHAN BLOOM
p. 018 Start Going to extremes
Deputy global editorial director Greg Williams Group creative director Andrew Diprose
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CONTRIBUTORS
JULIA HOTZ Hotz meets the GPs prescribing not pills, treat long-term health issues. “There’s never been a better time to rethink fundamental healthcare philosophy and practice,” she says. “It’s about treating root causes, not symptoms.”
EXPLORING INNER SPACE
AZEEM AZHAR
Armed with his Comet 225 KV x-ray machine – modified from industrial use to create finer images with less distortion – specialist photographer Nick Veasey peeks inside some popular tech. “A successful shot is one that tells the story of the object,” he says. “It should be engaging and beautiful – it takes lots of little tweaks to get it just right.”
“Linear thinking, rooted in the assumption that change takes decades, not months – that’s not the case any more,” writes Azhar, the author
Creating WIRED
of Exponential. “The companies that harness new technology will take off – those that don’t will be quickly undone.”
MAKING A CLEAN GETAWAY
Benedict Redgrove had to dress for an ultra-hygienic environment when he went to photograph the ESA’s Euclid space telescope – but the bunny suit also had Earthly advantages: “My last trips to Euclid were made just after the second lockdown, so I decided to drive to Toulouse to minimise the risk of Covid at the airport. I drove to the hotel, then the test facilities, then home. At the Eurotunnel border the UK guards asked me how could I guarantee that I hadn’t been in contact with anyone, so I explained what I had been doing. She said, ‘Well, how do you know it’s clean there?’ Luckily, I had this picture…”
VICTORIA TURK Our 100 Hottest Startups list is back, reflecting a changed tech landscape: “We’ve seen companies not only survive Covid-19, but thrive,” says Turk, the list’s co-editor. “Some are innovating to address issues caused by Covid, while another key trend to emerge is sustainability.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK VEASEY; BENEDICT REDGROVE. ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW GREEN
but social activities to
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ED IT OR’ S ESSAY
Celebrating a decade of Europe’s startup scene – successes are plentiful, but challenges still remain
September 2011
September 2012
November 2013
September 2014
September 2015
October 2016
October 2017
September 2018
September 2019
September 2021
Early in 2011, a couple of WIRED colleagues and I were discussing the incredible speed at which the startup scene in London was growing and the sheer number of innovative companies that were being founded. Something tangible was happening. Since its launch in 2009, WIRED had been actively covering the UK scene – but we wanted to help our readers understand what was happening elsewhere and report on the innovation, energy and investment in Europe. We dispatched reporters across the continent, from Stockholm to Moscow, Paris to Tel Aviv, in search of businesses that were getting entrepreneurs, investors and others interested in the ecosystem excited about their ambition and potential. Our first guide featured companies that are now household names, including Klarna (currently the continent’s most valuable startup with a valuation of $31bn), Criteo (current market cap of $2.74bn) and Mojang (sold to Microsoft for $2.5bn). Since then, the ecosystem has grown at a brisk pace: according to McKinsey, of the 99 venture-capital-backed European unicorns, 14 were added in 2019 alone. Europe is now producing companies with global ambitions, while investment from the US is at record levels: according to Pitchbook, European startups have raised $52.2bn in the first six months of 2021, more than all of 2020. Challenges remain: Atomico’s 2020 The State of European Tech report
revealed that only 0.25 per cent of VC funding went to Black-led startups, while in 2019, 92 per cent of funding went to all-male teams. Progress over the last decade has been significant – but those in the European ecosystem must find ways to ensure that the best ideas and most ambitious founders are able to pursue opportunity, no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexuality or socioeconomic background. We’re excited to see the startup cohort of 2031.
Greg Williams Editor
BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2020 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2020 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2019 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2018 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2018 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2017 PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2017 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2017 • BSME Print Writer of the Year 2017 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Cover of the Year 2015 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2014 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2013 • PPA Media Brand of the Year, Consumer 2013 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2012 • DMA Editor of the Year 2012 • BSME Editor of the Year, Special Interest 2012 • D&AD Award: Covers 2012 DMA Editor of the Year 2011 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2011 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2011 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2011 • D&AD Award: Entire Magazine 2011 • D&AD Award: Covers 2010 • Maggies Technology Cover 2010 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2010 • BSME Launch of the Year 2009
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6O C O
terraXcube is an environmental simulation centre that can replicate temperatures ranging from -40°C to 60°C. Its concrete chambers are reinforced with steel walls, extra-thick windows and pressure-tight doors designed to withstand harsh testing.
PHOTOGRAPHY: MANUELA SCHIRRA & FABRIZIO GIRALDI
O
-40 C
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Bolzano in Italy’s mountainous South Tyrol province might have distinctly hot summers and cold winters – at least by Italian standards – but it never truly experiences extreme weather conditions. However, at the city’s NOI Techpark, the mercury can shoot from as low as -40°C to as high as 60°C on consecutive days – and to order. These massive temperature fluctuations occur within the confines of
The facility has six test chambers of three different sizes, which are fitted out with sophisticated hypobaric, altitude and environmental simulation technology, including systems for making varying intensities of rain, snow and wind, as well as temperature and humidity controls. Additionally, air pressure can be decreased to as low as 300mbar to replicate high-altitude conditions, while the lights can be boosted or dimmed to simulate day and night. “We can reproduce the hardest and most extreme parameters of the world in these chambers,” says Christian Steurer, the head of terraXcube. Since its launch in 2019, terraXcube has been harnessed for a variety of purposes, from medical research to industrial testing. For instance, scientists have used the facility to study the physiological effects of hypoxia
Individuals ranging from athletes to pilots step into terraXcube to acclimatise to altitude or climate.
subjects have to be closely monitored. “When it comes to scientific research and testing, it is extremely important to be able to reproduce ambient conditions or adjust specific parameters,” says Steurer. “While there are other climate chambers elsewhere, they do not enable you to change many different parameters at the same time. terraXcube’s infrastructure is unique in the world.” Delle Chan terraxcube.eurac.edu
A technician inspects a chamber during pressurisation – simulated altitudes can change at six m/s.
on humans, while private companies have conducted environmental stress tests on products ranging from drones to tractors. In addition, the centre provides a carefully controlled training environment for individuals who need to acclimatise to high altitudes, such as mountain rescuers, engineers and even adventurers preparing for their next expedition. Safety is also paramount: test
Members of a rescue team brave a simulated snowstorm and practise intubating a plastic medical dummy
PHOTOGRAPHY: MANUELA SCHIRRA & FABRIZIO GIRALDI
terraXcube, an environmental simulation centre that can replicate an array of drastically different climatic conditions – from severe blizzards to torrential rain to parching desert heat – at the push of a button. The aim? To investigate the effects of extreme environments on whatever you place inside: humans, plants, machines and more. terraXcube is the brainchild of Hermann Brugger, the founder of the Institute for Emergency Mountain Medicine at Eurac Research, a private research centre in Bolzano. Frustrated by the safety risks, logistical difficulties and hefty costs of conducting experiments at high altitudes, he began dreaming about an environmental simulator that would allow for safe, repeatable and controlled test conditions – and thus terraXcube was born.
Early adopters Three founders share what’s exciting them, from crypto-wallets to office scent-diffusers
“The NEOM Wellbeing Pod is a heatless oil-diffuser that releases a fine mist Yessi Bello Perez
of scented vapour
Editor at UNLEASH
and fills a room in no time. It’s been life-changing during the pandemic. Using it in my home office is uplifting and makes working much more fun.”
“MetaMask, a crypto wallet living in my browser as an extension, is one of the most Lior Messika
powerful products
Founder at
I’ve used in years.
Eden Block
It provides crypto users intuitive access to the most transformative innovation of our time, simplifying using decentralised crypto applications.”
“Sandy Munro’s YouTube channel features reviews, teardowns and analysis of the Nico Ros
most innovative
CTO at SkyCell
new cars. Munro is a pioneer of the ‘lean design’ methodology and anyone who’s trying to build innovative highquality products can learn from him.”
The pandemic has decimated the live events industry, but Josh Katz believes there’s a silver lining – by turning off the revenue taps of industry giants such as LiveNation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster, Covid has created space for innovation. Katz is hoping to fill it with YellowHeart, a blockchain-based platform that gives event organisers of all sizes control over how their tickets are resold. The New York-based entrepreneur wants to erode a secondary ticket market that was pushing $15 billion a year before Covid-19 took hold. Traditional ticketing platforms are “socially irresponsible,” he says, “and that’s where we come into play.” Katz founded YellowHeart in 2017, but he’s been building the knowledge base beneath it for decades. An avid guitar collector, he began his career at Arista, a Sony subsidiary, before moving into marketing at Jive, where he played a hand in launching the careers of Britney Spears and NSYNC. The curtains to this “wild time” came down in late 2003 when his father passed. “When you lose somebody so close, you have a wake-up call,” Katz says. Determined “not to have any regrets”, he began to pursue an entrepreneurial life. Katz got into blockchain technology almost by accident. In 2017, he sold El Media Group (EMG), then North America’s leading custom music playlist provider, to Searchlight Capital Partners, but a contractual oversight left him responsible for the company’s Manhattan office. Swerving a sub-let, he converted the space into a “playpen”, where he’d mine and trade Ethereum, inviting some of the city’s leading cryptominds to populate it. It was a “freaking tear,” he recalls, “because you couldn’t place a bad bet [on cryptocurrency]!” Away from this, Katz began to contemplate his next venture, and he sought to use the talent pool at his disposal. The idea for YellowHeart came in July 2017, when he paid thousands of dollars for tickets to see Phish perform at Madison Square Garden. The face value was only $140 and, while he was happy to pay, he felt aggrieved because the markup went to the “scalpers” rather than his favourite band, or even the staff at the venues hosting the events. None of it actually supported the music industry. Realising that blockchain technology could solve this problem, he commissioned his developers to build the world’s first “socially responsible” ticketing platform. By running sales through the blockchain’s open-source distributed ledger, YellowHeart allows artists to track the entire ticketing lifecycle. This means that tickets can’t be sold without the original artist knowing about it. Through smart contracts, they can set rules to govern how each ticket is resold. For example, they can prohibit a resale altogether or set a maximum price; they can even stipulate that a cut of any future resale comes back to them. Through caring for the artist and providing them with
PHOTOGRAPHY: BRYAN DERBALLA. ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW GREEN
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Josh Katz, founder of YellowHeart, a blockchain-based vendor that promises to be the world’s first socially responsible ticketing platform
the tools to “do right” by their fans, YellowHeart keeps more money in music’s ecosystem, Katz says. Contrast this with traditional ticketing platforms, which have “done nothing” to stop scalping, meaning fans are “always getting taken advantage of.” Beyond rule-based ticketing, YellowHeart also enables a piece of digital multimedia to be included in every ticket, so each fan leaves with a digital collectible with provable scarcity, or a non-fungible token (NFT) – a means of ownership for digital property which boomed in popularity earlier this year. After the event, these can be traded, with their authenticity verifiable through a chain of providence. “Tickets shouldn’t just die once they’ve been scanned,” Katz says. The concern with YellowHeart centres on “minting”, the term used for adding data to the blockchain. Reports suggest that each transaction requires as much energy as two American households use per day, making it unsustainable and unscalable. While Katz acknowledges this, he explains that through various proprietary technologies, YellowHeart is able to avoid significant environmental impact. Katz also intends to minimise “gas fees” – the costs of conducting transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. YellowHeart was scheduled to launch in 2020 through partnerships with the likes of Ticketmaster, but the disruption caused by the pandemic has opened the door for the company to go it alone. No longer does it have to be a “slave to an old-school industry,” Katz says; YellowHeart can contract directly with artists and sports teams, venues and promoters. Customers can seamlessly buy and sell tickets through an app, and it’s all dollar-based, meaning you don’t even have to buy Ethereum. YellowHeart takes a five per cent commission from the seller on each sale; in contrast, LiveNation takes at least ten per cent, and in almost all cases they’ll charge an “order processing fee” and a service charge to the buyer as well. While technology has contributed to the growth of scalping, it’s also the solution, Katz says. Because Blockchain is challenging to understand, it’s taken companies such as YellowHeart longer to go mainstream. But, with the proliferation of NFTs this year, he believes its time has come. “Blockchain is going to be one of the quickest adoptions you’ve ever seen,” Katz continues. “It’s going to bring truth to a lot of industries that have been fraudulent for a long time.” William Ralston yellowheart.io
STUBBING OUT THE SCALPERS Thanks to unscrupulous ticketing platforms, getting into your favourite band’s gig can involve hefty extra fees and leave you at the mercy of scalpers. But blockchain could offer a fairer, more transparent alternative to tickets
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t the end of an afternoon surgery in 2014, anaesthesiologist Dr. Alistair MacDonald took the oxygen mask off a patient and noticed her skin was turning blue. Other members of the surgical team were getting ready for the next procedure and jamming out to music playing in the operating room, but the patient’s oxygen saturation was dropping dramatically. MacDonald doesn’t recall which song was playing, but he remembers it being extremely loud – so loud that he had to shout over it to get everyone’s attention. A nurse quickly stabilised the patient, and the music blared on. A thought occurred to MacDonald: why didn’t the music system know that the patient’s oxygen levels were degrading and turn itself off? “Why can’t the volume of the music be coupled to the patient’s vital signs?,” he says. “My car can integrate my seatbelt with the [stereo], with incoming calls and with impending collisions. There’s intelligence built into a $20,000 car system that is absent in a $2 million operating room.” By 2018, that realisation – and a tragic story about a Michigan teenage patient dying after suffering an anoxic brain injury
PHOTOGRAPHY: JUSTIN FANTL
MAKING BEATS PER MINUTE FAR SAFER DURING SURGERY Whether it’s playing country or pop, CanaryBox lets medical staff rock out without missing their patients’ vital-sign alarms
due to a missed ventilator alarm that was muted by music – had led MacDonald into creating a prototype of the CanaryBox, a smart music system the size of an iPad that decreases or shuts off music when a patient’s vital signs are critical. CanaryBox users can link it to a patient’s blood pressure, heart rate and pulse oximetry. “I didn’t want to piss off my fellow surgeons and medical professionals by having the CanaryBox turn off the music for everything,” MacDonald says. A 2017 study found that average noise levels in American operating rooms can reach up to 130 decibels, much higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended 45 decibels. “There is the humming of the machine that blows warm air into a blanket so the patient doesn’t get too cold. There is the sound of drills and hammers echoing off the wall. People may be talking to one another,” says Dr. Daniel Orlovich, a clinical instructor for the department of anaesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University. On top of that, music is usually played during surgeries: studies
show that music in the operating room is positive for both the medics and the patient. “It would be absolute torture to operate without music,” MacDonald says. Yet, any medical professional who works in an operating theatre will have their own anecdotes about loud music. Dr. Joseph Schlesinger, an associate professor in the Department of Anaesthesiology at Vanderbilt University, remembers one case during an operation for removing cancerous tumours from a pancreas. He recalls “thundering country music” – Toby Keith’s “I Wanna Talk About Me” – playing as the head surgeon “nicked the inferior vena cava,”
STAR T
the big blood vessel going from the lower body to the heart. “If you make a hole, it’s going to bleed out,” Schlesinger says. The patient’s blood pressure plummeted and Schlesigner, who was teaching a resident about waveforms, only noticed it while looking at the heart monitor – had he not been, the patient would have died. Currently, Schlesinger is using the CanaryBox both in his operating rooms and in his research studying the effects of decreasing music volume to alert anaesthesia providers to “alarm events”. CanaryBox is about to release its second version, an update from the Raspberry-Pibased single-board computer units that are currently being used in hospitals in Oregon, Nebraska, Minnesota and more. MacDonald has also teamed up with Karl Storz, the world’s leading endoscopy
manufacturer, to release the CanaryBox as a smart addition to the operating room. “Right now, we’re depending on human vigilance and there’s a potential for human error and human distraction,” MacDonald says. “We need a piece of technology to make it easier on everyone.” Stephan Boissonneault canarysounddesign.com
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MANAGING DIABETES DIGITALLY For diabetics, getting insulin doses right is a serious matter. The Quin app can predict when and how much they need
doses and timings. She was leaving the company to create an app to make managing that easier. That year, Williams and Degan founded Quin. The app tracks users’ data and contextualises it in order to produce highly personalised recommendations that take the guesswork out of regulating insulin levels. “It’s about curation and putting the right information in front of people at the right time to stimulate engagement,” says Williams, who serves as CEO. “We have technologies that we’ve used in media and retail to engage people – we just need to apply them.” Williams is banking on this hyper-personalisation to set Quin apart from competitors in the burgeoning mobile health market, predicted to be worth $189bn by 2025. Since launch in 2014, Quin has received £3.6m in funding, and more than 17,000 users have
Cyndi Williams, CEO of Quin, which aims to help diabetics regulate their insulin intake
PHOTOGRAPHY: JAMES DAY
ealthcare wasn’t in Cyndi Williams’ original career plans. A chemical engineer by training and a one-time software engineer by trade, she’d worked on the business side of tech with Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, telecoms and finance. But in 2014, a conversation with a colleague and mentee at global software consultancy ThoughtWorks changed that. During one of their bi-weekly mentoring sessions, Isabella Degen revealed that she was one of the 400,000 people in the UK living with type 1 diabetes, a disease that required her to inject insulin multiple times a day, working from crude formulas and personal experience to determine
downloaded the iOS app since its release in the UK and Ireland last October. Quin – “quantifying intuition” – relies on predictive algorithms and personal data, which can be collected automatically or added manually. To get started, users input information about their food intake, insulin doses, activity and blood sugar levels over their day. Once the app has enough information about how certain factors affect the user’s blood sugar levels, it’s able to suggest specific insulin dosage amounts to regulate them, and graph how the user’s blood sugar levels are likely to change over the next five hours. Since 2014, Quin has consulted more than 300 diabetics. “We had to spend time [asking], Why are people using apps? Do they want an app? What would an app that they would use do?” she says. “The people we’re working with are taking a drug that, if they take too much, it can kill them; if they take too little, it can kill them. There are potentially catastrophic risks here, so we have to be respectful of that.” As Quin prepares to launch in the US at the end of this summer, the company is looking into measuring and tracking other physiological, psychological and behavioural data, such as sleep and stress, to provide more holistic recommendations. But where social media apps are designed to keep users checking in as much as possible, Williams hopes that, over time, Quin users will feel confident enough in the app’s recommendations that they find themselves turning to it less and less: “We just want to be useful at the moments when you need to make decisions.” Allyssia Alleyne quintech.io
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Frodo was the underdoge, All thought he would fail, Himself most of all
You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin
249k
895k
@lexfridman
Sometimes it’s about Doge
If major Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is the only real issue imo
@Grimezsz Dogecake 9.7k
33 4k
49k
Bought some Dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler hodler 55 4k
Why are you so dogematic, they ask
There will definitely be a MarsCoin!
24 6k
26k
Tesla’s action is not directly reflective of my opinion. Having some Bitcoin, which is simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash, is adventurous enough for an S&P500 company 28k
Who let the Doge out
BTC (Bitcoin) is an anagram of TBC (The Boring Company) What a coincidence!
795k
24 5k
Heard a rumor some crypto coin was pegging the dollar 278k
Ð is for Ðogecoin! Instructional video
Doge meme shield (legendary item) 283k
262k
Doge spelled backwards is Egod 410k
@beeple 420M Doge 81k
Scammers & crypto should get a room 200k
Dojo 4 Doge 330k
No highs, no lows, only Doge 781k
20 JANUARY 2021
DOGE T WEE T S
CRYPTO CURRENTS: THE MUSK EFFECT’S EBB & FLOW
BITCOIN T WEE TS
CRYP TO T WEE TS
Elon Musk’s influence goes beyond the Twitter thread – he’s also got the power to shake financial markets
02 9
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To clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can’t drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal 374k
SpaceX launching satellite Doge-1 to the Moon next year. Mission paid for in Doge. 1st crypto in space. 1st meme in space. To the Mooooonnn!!
Tesla has 4 69k
Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners. They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising
5 42k
SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal Moon
102k
Do you want Tesla to accept Doge? 4 00k
332k
How much is that Doge in the window? 313k
5 4 4k
I have not sold any of my Bitcoin. Tesla sold 10% of its holdings essentially to prove liquidity of Bitcoin as an alternative to holding cash on balance sheet 99k
Tesla & Bitcoin 508k
The true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter 67k
Doge has dogs & memes, whereas the others do not 51k
Doge Barking at the Moon 335k
INFOGRAPHIC: SET RESET
1 JUNE 2021
This chart shows the prices of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Dogecoin – plotted alongside choice tweets from crypto’s highest-profile fan, SpaceX CEO and Tesla Technoking Elon Musk. “There is a ‘Musk effect’ on the prices of cryptocurrencies,” says Lennart Ante, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Lab,
who has analysed the impact of Musk’s social media exploits. According to Ante, Musk’s tweets have in the past had a direct effect on the price of the two coins – but more recently, he says, Musk’s interventions have only led to short-term spikes. Here’s 12 months of tweet turbulence in the cryptosphere. James OÕMalley
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Drag artist Anna Lytical wants to bring underrepresented groups into STEM subjects by making them approachable
PHOTOGRAPHY: GUERIN BLASK. STYLING: RIKE WATANABE. MAKEUP: COLBY SMITH. HAIR: NETT Y JORDAN
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pparently, organising your makeup bag is very much like storing data when coding. Don’t believe us? Ask drag queen Anna Lytical, who recently declared it so in a TikTok video. (Eyeshadow palettes represent an array in which a group of elements can easily be identified, FYI.) “There is a limited number of equallysized spaces for product, and if I tell you I used the first one, you’ll know which one I’m talking about,” they say to the camera while sporting a lavender wig, eyeshadow and lipstick. “Who knew data structures could be so glamorous?” It’s just one of many videos shared that bridge two passions: computer science and drag. Anna Lytical – also known as Billy Jacobson – is a New York-based developer experience engineer for Google with a long-time love of maths. Jacobson always viewed coding and his LGBTQ identity as two separate entities, and didn’t know many queer engineers. But during his second year at Washington University in Missouri he attended “Out for Undergrad”, a conference that gathered a thousand computer science students. It was the first moment he really felt at home in the coding community. Like many people, Jacobson was first exposed to drag through Ru Paul’s Drag Race, but it wasn’t until returning to New York that he started attending shows and developing an act. Inspired by co-workers who had gained an audience through live-streaming their coding, he decided to use drag to teach others computer science, and Anna Lytical was born. The Anna Lytical look is a twist on formal business attire: a shirt and blazer paired with a colourful wig and dramatic makeup. “I style the wigs myself and try to make them very colourful, but also very teacher-librarian,” Jacobson says. “Hair is out of the face to keep my vision
clear so I can see everything that I'm coding, but I still want it to be big and colourful and drag.” Jacobson started by making longer YouTube videos intended to supplement what is taught in computer science classes, with the broader goal of demystifying STEM and challenging the idea of the self-taught whizz-kid who seemingly wakes up knowing every coding language. “There are no stupid questions,” he says. “It's just me creating a space where we can look at concepts from hard to easy and explain them in a way that feels approachable.” Two years into their social media career, Anna Lytical has found an even broader following on TikTok. A recent TikTok video highlighting the history of women in computing quickly became their most popular, garnering over 1.5 million views. In the comments, women shared horror stories of the sexism they faced, and some even said that Anna Lytical is inspiring them to get back into STEM. “It was very validating that even beyond the drag of what I do, I think my audience really likes Anna as a teacher,” Jacobson says. However, Anna Lytical has also faced trolls who believe the bar is lowered for minorities in the tech industry. Even though programmers commonly work with pre-existing code, Anna Lytical has been accused of relying on someone else’s work and not knowing how to do it themselves. The response? Building a full website using only copy-and-pasted code: “Even just being in drag can be enough to bring that group of haters forward, so I feel at least some responsibility to duel them in a fun way,” says Jacobson. Anna Lytical’s larger goal is to draw in those who are underrepresented in tech. Jacobson explains
that if queer people are not involved in creating technology, it could lead to issues of biases in machine learning or online forms that don’t consider a range of gender and sexual identities. Given historic higher rates of poverty in many LGBTQ communities, Jacobson’s work also highlights the lucrative career opportunities that value the soft skills often overlooked in STEM fields. As Anna Lytical proves, communicating a technical problem in a clear way often requires more than a textbook definition, and a purple-haired drag queen might just make the field a bit more welcoming. “I don't have all the answers,” Jacobson says, “but it's great to have so many others who are willing to help fill the gaps and make sure people know where the right resources are and help them feel seen.” Hannah Steinkopf-Frank
CODING ISN’T ALWAYS A DRAG (BUT IT DOES HELP) Aiming to demystify STEM subjects – and bring much-needed diversity to the field – Anna Lytical holds court on TikTok, helping budding coders get to grips with tricky programming concepts. The time has come… To command-line interface for your life…
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At several points in human history, there have been great transitions that accelerated our progress and shaped everything that would follow. Ten thousand years ago, the first Agricultural Revolution allowed us to establish cities and civilization. Four hundred years ago, the Scientific Revolution gave us a reliable method for understanding the laws of nature. Two hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution launched us on a new trajectory of rapid economic growth. But there has recently been another transition that is more important than any that has come before it. With the detonation of the first deployed atomic bomb in 1945, a new age of humanity began. Our rising power finally reached the point where we could destroy ourselves – the first point at which the risks to humanity from within exceeded the risks to us from the natural world. These extreme risks – high-impact threats with global reach – define our time. They range from global tragedies such as the Covid-19 pandemic, to existential risks which could lead to extinction of the human race. By our estimates – weighing the different probabilities of events ranging from asteroid impact to nuclear war – the likelihood of the world experiencing an existential catastrophe over the next 100 years is one in six. Russian roulette. This is clearly unsustainable: we cannot survive many more centuries while operating at a level of extreme risk such as this. And, as technology accelerates, there is strong reason to believe the risks will only continue to grow – unless we make serious efforts to increase our resilience to these threats. We do not know which extreme risk event will come next. It might be another pandemic. Or it might be something completely different, such as a threat from an emerging technology. Progress of artificial intelligence, for instance, is rapid, unprecedented and transform-
THE FUTURE IS GETTING MORE DANGEROUS And humans only have themselves to blame. We must act if we are to establish safeguards against existential threats
Toby Ord is
Angus Mercer
the author of
is the executive
The Precipice:
director of the
Existential Risk
Centre for Long-
and the Future
Term Resilience,
of Humanity
based in London
ative. But we do not even need to look at what artificial intelligence might do in the future to see the extreme risks it potentially poses. Even with the AI we already have available today, we could face an extreme risk event, either through accident or misuse. To do justice to the seriousness of these threats, our political leaders need to give them more attention than they have so far. They must go beyond merely ensuring we are better prepared for the next naturally occurring pandemic such as Covid-19, and transform the way we manage extreme risks across the board.
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ILLUSTRATION: HOKYOUNG KIM; MAT THEW GREEN
There are promising signs that the UK Government is starting to appreciate the scale and complexity of this challenge. In the coming months it is set to produce an AI strategy, a review of its biosecurity strategy and a National Resilience Strategy. As we noted in “Future Proof”, a report we co-authored earlier this year, it is vital that extreme risks are at the heart of all these efforts. There are three broad areas which require our maximum attention. First, we must transform our biological security. The UK remains vulnerable to a wide range of accidental and deliberate biological threats, which risk even worse consequences than Covid-19. These risks will only grow in line with the rapid developments being made in synthetic biology and biotechnology, which offer harrowing prospects of misuse. One sole body in the UK – ideally a new National Centre for Biological
The human race is on thin ice – literally in the case of glacial loss – but we also need to start planning to mitigate risks from other areas, such as AI and biotechnology
WIRED
TIRED
EXPIRED
Internet computer
Infinite machine
Internet of value
Powerpaste
Fuel cells
Canisters
Substack drop
Blogpost
Senior No. 10 source
Team GB
GB News
GB
Vaccine diplomacy
Vaccine nationalism
Vaccine hesitancy
Security – should be charged with ensuring preparedness for the full range of biological threats the country faces. Its focus should be on preventing and countering the threat of biological weapons, which should be treated as an equivalent national security threat to that of nuclear weapons. It should also develop effective new defences to biological threats (for instance, by pioneering new technologies such as clinical metagenomics), and focus on building talent and collaboration across the UK biosecurity community. Second, we need to boost our resilience to the threat posed by artificial intelligence. One way to do this is to create a “compute fund” providing free or subsidised resources to researchers working on issues such as AI safety, security and alignment. Access to large amounts of AI compute is critically important for AI safety. Many recent machine learning breakthroughs were reliant on large compute budgets that academia and civil society simply cannot afford. This has led to research being skewed towards short-term and commercial aims rather than developing socially beneficial applications. This cannot be allowed to continue. Third, we need to ensure that our national security community gives the threat posed by emerging technology the degree of attention it deserves. Appropriate steps must be taken, for instance, to ensure that AI systems are not incorporated into NC3 (nuclear command, control and communications). As evidenced by the sobering
history of nuclear near-misses, introducing artificial intelligence systems into NC3 increases the risk of accidental launch. Surely no benefits can be worth introducing this additional risk? Cyber operations that target the NC3 of Nuclear Proliferation Treaty signatories also need to be avoided. As the G7 president this year, the United Kingdom has an excellent opportunity to advocate for this policy norm internationally by establishing a multilateral agreement to this effect. We truly are living in a remarkable time in human history. Policymakers need to rise to the moment before it passes. Just as Covid-19 triggers an immune response in each individual, protecting them from reinfection, so the pandemic has triggered a social immune response across the UK, where there is public will to prevent the next extreme risk. But like the individual immune response, this social immune response will fade over time. Before it does, we need to seize this opportunity to put in place lasting protections to safeguard the country – and the wider world – from extreme risks.
CLEAR CACHE Remember when you could see inside your games console? WIRED looks back (and inside)
Not long after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays, he granted his only interview about the matter to an American reporter. The reporter’s first question: “Is the invisible visible?” Kids around the world asked a version of that same question in 1998, when Nintendo released the “atomic purple” Game Boy Color. Behind its translucent lilac-tinted plastic shell, the console’s guts were all laid out to see – button actuators, conductive membranes, metal-dotted silicon, multicoloured wires. When the screen lit up with a little surfing Pikachu, you could observe all the unfathomables that were powering him. Gamers are “naturally intrigued by the technology and space inside their consoles,” says Taihei Oomori, art director of Sony’s product design group. When you reveal that space through plastic, he says, you “bring the distance between the player and the game world even closer.” These days, most consoles are black boxes. But over the past two decades, all the major gaming hardware manufacturers have released translucent designs. From the crystalline midnight-blue PlayStation 2 to the grasshopper-green Xbox, these objects offer a selective window into the machinery – and what it means to be a gamer. Cecilia D’Anastasio To see what makes more tech tick, check out our Gear x-ray special This lemon-yellow Game Boy Light was a 1998 Japan-only exclusive for Toys “R” Us
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“Fuchsia” was a launch colour for the 2001 GB Advance. (It’s “milky pink” in Malaysia) This lime-green 2001 “Launch Team Edition” Xbox was available only to developers Xbox loves a limited edition controller: this
PHOTOGRAPHY: QUINN RUSSELL BROWN
Wireless Phantom Magenta is from 2020
The PlayStation 2 came out in “Ocean Blue” in 2002 to celebrate 10 million consoles sold
ix years ago, I accidentally read a message that was about me, not to me, in a Facebook messages thread on a friend’s iMac screen. This led to a drunken debate outside a bar that descended into a brief street brawl between a member of the Facebook thread and a stranger who came to my defence. Yes, it went to court. Sitting in the witness room opposite a very nice police officer, the thought did cross my mind: I probably should have just minimised that Facebook window. Lesson learned? Well… I was recently browsing Spotify on my sofa – I had just typed “On r” into the search bar and physically jumped back from my phone, eyes wide. Two “On Repeats”. Two purple infinity icons. Two sets of “songs you love right now”. One was mine: Junie Morrison, Chihei Hatakeyama, respectable. The other belonged to someone named Luke. Michael Jackson, The Weeknd, Harry Styles. I smirked, I judged, I screenshotted. I was thrilled. I was not supposed to be seeing this. This is not an unusual occurrence – leaks and security bugs have brought together the private lives of many
strangers: one night in mid-May, Cherrie woke up at 2am, in her bedroom in North Carolina. She thought she heard her two-year-old crying through the security camera system. She checked on her daughter, clicked back to the homescreen and hit cancel on a “do you trust this account?” pop-up. “Then I saw someone else’s cameras. It was a totally different home.” Cherrie was one of 712 Eufy users who were mistakenly shown other people’s live home security feeds. She took two screenshots to prove it to her husband Mitch, who was sleeping, as she didn’t think he’d believe her. Did she have a look around first, though? “Part of me was curious as to how I could see someone else’s feed, so I clicked two of their outdoor cameras,” she says. “I also looked at the timestamp to see if we were viewing a neighbour’s home. I specifically didn’t click the camera called ‘bedroom’ as I don’t want to know what’s going on in there.” The more likely snooping scenario is that you glance at a private message on a phone lockscreen. Earlier this year, Sam was cooking at her boyfriend’s house in York, looking at a recipe online on his
SNOOPING IS EASY – AND DISASTROUS By accident or design, it’s easier than ever to invade someone else’s privacy. The question is whether we allow our worst instincts to drive what we do next
03 6
laptop. A Facebook Messenger notification popped up: “I’m so horny, I wish you were here right now.” She froze. “I was tempted to click on it but I was scared of what I might read. He came back about two minutes later, but I was so tempted to go through his phone after that. I didn’t and he still doesn’t know I saw it.” Cherrie and Sam are better people than me. To find out how much better, I asked a moral philosopher. “One of the unfortunate characteristics of morality is moral disengagement,” says Katleen Gabriels, an assistant professor at Maastricht University. “So if many people are doing the same thing, such as forwarding nude pictures of celebrities as entertainment, they don’t feel responsible. With people who we don’t know, we feel less empathetic.” She thinks victim blaming – the subject shouldn’t have been so stupid to let this happen – and the habit of
filming strangers without their consent for viral social media footage aren’t helping with disengagement, either. What should you do if you unwittingly invade someone’s privacy? Don’t share it, and notify the company if it’s a glitch. You’re not a bad person if you find yourself in front of a private thread or feed – and then do the right thing. As it turns out, I wasn’t even a Spotify snooper. After a few minutes, I realised I hadn’t stumbled through a secret door onto a stranger’s digital bookcase. I was looking at a playlist that this undiscovered tastemaker had made public. So the guffawing at his music taste wasn’t actually immoral. Just a bit mean. Sophie Charara
ILLUSTRATION: MATT CHASE
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NFT ART: STILL COINING IT
PHOTOGRAPHY: JEFFERY SALTER
Non-fungible-token-based artworks are hot, and can sell for vast sums – but what’s considered worthy is in constant flux, and often has nothing to do with ‘good taste’
ablo Rodriguez-Fraile is moving house – it’s not that he doesn’t like his current Miami pad, it’s more that he needs a place better suited to enjoying his art collection. “The new home is going to have 15 or 16 screens all around, and projectors,” Rodriguez-Fraile, a 33-year-old Spaniard with a background in finance, says. That is because his collection consists not of sculptures, paintings or etchings, but of non-fungible tokens – NFTs – unique cryptographic files that collectors regard as proofs of ownership for digital art pieces such as videos, gifs, or computer-designed images. Everyone can right-click and download the artwork an NFT is associated with; but it’s people like Rodriguez-Fraile, who buy the tokens in online auctions for swingeing cryptocurrency sums, that feel like the real owners. Which is why Rodriguez-Fraile is looking forward to spending his days surrounded by screens displaying his purchases. Rodriguez-Fraile’s patronage of the crypto arts, however, extends beyond his living room: he is working to open several digital art exhibition rooms around the world (the first launching in Miami in the second half of 2021). And his efforts even transcend the physical realm, as he is one of the founders of the MOCA (Museum of Crypto Art), an NFT-backed art gallery hosted on a VR platform. “The best thing with these digital artworks is that we can travel with them, we can take them wherever we want, we can showcase them to people around the globe,” he says.
NFT-art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, overlaid with Island in the Clouds by video artist GMUNK
“If you own a very nice masterpiece by Picasso, everybody knows you own it, but very few people will get to see it.” The NFT art scene grew white-hot incredibly fast: an NFT linked to a collage by American digital artist Beeple sold for $69,346,250 in cryptocurrency at a Christie’s auction in March 2021. Rodriguez-Fraile says he has twice spent $1m on an NFT – on works by visual artists
Pak and WhIsBe – and in March he made headlines after re-selling one of his pieces, a 38-second Beeple video, for over $6 million. To critics, this is just the usual boom-and-bust cycle cryptocurrency-adjacent fads go through – nearly all collectors are wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, and, as of June 2021, NFT sales had crashed to less eye-watering levels. Proponents think that whatever the
STAR T
Keeping the oceans clean: rust-busting on oil rigs with a new kind of plastic blaster
Ninety-two
and high-pressure
“You go from 100
per cent of the
water jets. Much
per cent paint
Oceans’ plastic
of the debris falls
microplastic
pollution, by one
into the water,
emissions to
estimate, is due
and as many of
zero.” Pinovo
to microplastics:
the constituents
aims to license
pieces of plastic
that make up
this technology,
under five
paint are plastic,
and current
millimetres in size,
that means
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and Norwegian
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navies. A big
with unknown
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part of Pinovo’s
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mission is also
on the health of
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humans eating
of microplastics
about paint as a
those fish. The
in the ocean,
major source of
Atlantic Ocean
according to
microplastics,
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the Norwegian
and lobbying
to harbour as
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regulatory bodies
much as 21
Agency. Pinovo,
such as the EU to
million tonnes
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enforce stricter
of microplastics
company, wants to
regulations on
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clean it up. It has
industry to curb
source of these is
designed a safer
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way of maintaining
emissions.
structures in the
the paint which
McAdams thinks
ocean – such as oil
involves, to put it
that over 90 per
rigs, wind turbines
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removed using
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pinovo.com
old paint can be safely disposed of. “We can stop paint microplastic emissions,” Declan McAdams, the chairman of Pinovo, explains.
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
fluctuations in price and buzz, NFT art is here to stay. Vincent Harrison, a Los Angeles-based art gallerist who also works with NFT artists and platforms, says that collectors of digital art are no different from those who splurge on Tintorettos and Jeff Koons. “It’s the same collector mentality. The beauty of it with digital art is that people don’t have to stop collecting, because they never run out of space,” he says. “This almost creates digital hoarders – which is fine, because I know plenty of collectors that have art they can’t put on the wall: they have it in storage. But they still collect, just because they love art.” Rodriguez-Fraile styles himself as a collector through and through: he carefully chooses his pieces guided by his aesthetic sense and the artist’s brand, and he cultivates friendly relationships with the creators whose work he enjoys. “This is never, ever a monetary thought,” he says. He even says that, while he could hardly call himself an art collector before his journey through the NFT space (he was familiar with cryptocurrency, on the other hand), the experience has increased his love of “traditional art”: in May, he bought a David Bowie portrait by Elizabeth Peyton from Sotheby’s for $2 million. For others in this space, NFT-collecting is either a nuanced enterprise suffused with revolutionary undertones, or a pointless financial rat-race. Anand Venkateswaran – aka Twobadour – is one of the pseudonymous avatar-donning halves of the Metapurse duo who bought Beeple’s $69m piece at Christie’s. In a blogpost published shortly after the auction, Twobadour and his colleague Metakovan argued that through the purchase they had intended to challenge the overwhelming whiteness of the art scene. (Both Twobadour and Metakovan are Indian Tamils.) Twobadour says he enjoys the open, democratising nature of the NFT art space, contrasting it to the traditional art scene. “Here, there are no gatekeepers,” he says. “The accessibility that you have to these [NFT] platforms for the artists themselves, I think, is revolutionary.” By comparison, UK-based venture capitalist Jamie Burke started dabbling in NFT art simply because he smelled a “financial opportunity”. His initial purchases were pieces he found visually striking. “A lot of people would buy low-aesthetic, self-referential stuff,” Burke says: NFTs linked to memes, cryptocurrency cartoons, or badly-drawn characters. “That didn’t appeal to me – I went for aesthetically pleasing stuff. That was a mistake.” The longer Burke spent collecting NFTs – he even launched a virtual art gallery – the more he realised that in this sphere, aesthetics count for nothing. The zanier and uglier an NFT, the better. Now, Burke is the proud owner of a Twerky Pepe – the image of a sashaying cartoon-frog. “I moved from aesthetics to memetics,” he says. In the crypto-art scene, he thinks, connoisseurs and hipsters are bound to lose their shirts: the big bucks are all on the side of people who follow the online crowd and buy popular, funny images. “NFTs are a form of social media: it’s not just something to put on a wall,” he says. “It’s more like a membership of a club or cult.” Gian Volpicelli
040
THE INSIDER
WIRED insider
EVENT EDIT WIRED HEALTH: TECH 2021
wired.uk/health-tech September 22, 2021
Events, new products and promotions Compiled by Sophie Clark
After WIRED Health: Tech 2020, speakers Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR technology; Tal Zaks, chief medical officer, Moderna; and Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO, BioNTech made the news – Doudna for winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and both Zaks and Sahin for their Covid-19 vaccines. In 2021, we return to cover some of the most compelling technology driving future patient care. WIRED RETAIL WIRED MONEY WIRED SECURITY
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(IUI). “A lot of papers were produced around ICI and IUI documenting very similar efficacy rates,” explains O’Rourke. Béa says it expects its ICI device to deliver the same kind of success rate as IUI – 10-20 per cent on the first cycle – at a fifth of the cost of a single IUI treatment, which can be in the region of £1,500. Fertility treatments are typically effective after multiple rounds, but the high cost of IVF and IUI often makes that unaffordable. Béa says that the lower cost of its kit will make it easier to use repeatedly, thus bringing up the
Fertility treatment is infamously tough to access. While one in seven UK couples faces infertility challenges, reportedly less than five per cent of these can access treatment. Funding cuts and rules on who can be treated mean just 35 per cent of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is NHS funded, and the field is dominated by expensive private clinics. For lesbian couples, who have to use fertility treatments to have children using donor sperm, the problem is even worse. One British startup wants to change that. Béa Fertility, co-founded by David O’Rourke and Tess Cosad, are launching what they call the first at-home fertility treatment after netting $1 million (£700,000) in pre-seed funding in April. The aim is to make fertility treatment accessible to those locked out of the system. Béa’s kits, to be delivered through the post, will include pregnancy tests, fertility trackers and sperm donation pots, alongside its main product, an intracervical insemination (ICI) device – an insertion apparatus used to place a silicone cup filled with sperm onto the cervix, where it stays for four to 12 hours. “I’m a clinical embryologist, so I worked on Harley Street for a long time,” explains O’Rourke. “And a tiny amount of people got the opportunity to sit in
3D VISUALISATION: DANIEL OAKES
A NEW HOPE FOR BUDDING FAMILIES: THE DIY FERTILITY TOOLKIT
Béa Fertility’s kits, at £300 each, are a cheaper option to IVF and IUI, which can cost thousands
front of me. That was something I could only do for so long before I didn’t feel comfortable with it anymore.” Tackling that issue led him to work on an at-home device to “crack open” access. It was after three years of research and development – and over 90 prototypes – that O’Rourke connected in late 2019 with Cosad, a marketing specialist with experience working with technology companies. “I knew I was looking for something else,” Cosad explains. “And working on something that drives [fertility] access fits right in my wheelhouse.” Béa’s technology, ICI, is a long-established conception strategy, but it has been increasingly replaced by clinical choices such as IVF and intrauterine insemination
potential success rates – it predicts as high as 60 per cent after several months. “If you look at a lot of the innovation in the fertility sector today, it’s very easy to innovate digitally,” explains Cosad, citing the cycle-tracking apps, hormone tests and more in the booming fertility-tech scene. “We’re going right to the centre of the problem.” That hardware focus comes with challenges, such as stringent regulation for medical devices like Béa’s, but Cosad and O’Rourke expect to get UK and EU medical clearance by the end of this year, allowing them to fully launch by early 2022. As infertility rates have skyrocketed in recent decades, the Béa team is sure the issue isn’t going away. “We need more treatment options,” Cosad says. Andrew Kersley beafertility.com
For people experiencing infertility challenges, traditional routes such as IVF can be costly, time consuming, intrusive – and often heartbreaking. But one startup has gone back to basics to offer a kit-based therapy that can be used at home
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Based at the Francis Crick Institute, researcher Vivian Li is working with intestinal organoids such as this – they can be gene-edited to enable effective study of cancers.
CELL This is an intestinal organoid which has been labelled with markers showing the
One in two people will develop cancer in their lifetime, but the survival rate in the UK has doubled in the last 40 years, and 50 per cent of people with cancer survive for ten or more years according to research in England and Wales. That’s partly due to a greater understanding of the disease and how it develops and spreads through the body – which is the focus of a new exhibition from the Francis
different cell types. Stem cells are green, matured cells red and cell nuclei blue.
An oral squamous cell carcinoma. It’s the most common mouth cancer, and starts in the flat, thin cells that line the lips. It has a high survival rate if caught early.
FIES
Crick Institute, the renowned biomedical research centre. It brings together eight specially commissioned short films as well as soundscapes, events and talks, and is broken into three parts: evolution, which explores how cancer starts and why certain people get it; disruption, which looks at how it spreads and hijacks the body; and resilience, which explores the latest research that’s going on to fight it.
“We have seen discoveries about how cancers evolve and new approaches to treatment,” says Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute. “This exhibition will bring to life the journey our researchers are on to understand how cancer starts, spreads and responds to therapy.” AK Outwitting Cancer – Making Sense of Nature’s Enigma runs from September 25 until July 2022. crick.ac.uk
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KEEPING UP THE CHAOS IS THE BEST WAY TO STAY CREATIVE
taking the role was to take something of a break after directing his 2019 Oscar-winning Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit. “I was a little burned out,” he says, “and I wanted to do something a lot easier than directing – which is acting!” Two years on however, and Waititi is fizzing with energy once again. He has recently finished shooting Thor: Love and Thunder in Australia: “What I wanted to do from the beginning was to ask: ‘What are people expecting the least from this franchise?” he says. “Oh, I know – a full-blown love story!” He’s also advanced his use of cutting-edge technology. For Thor: Ragnarok, creative studio Satellite Lab developed DynamicLight, a technique which uses a special rig to move the lighting at eight times the speed of sound. It’s what allowed Waititi to create the striking Hela flashback sequence, in which light moves rapidly over footage shot at 1,200 frames per second. In Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi is excited about a new Satellite Lab technology called PlateLight, which uses the same principle (high-speed lights and slow-motion footage) to capture multiple lighting set-ups simultaneously within a single shot. “And then when you break down that footage into increments of 24 frames per second,” he says, “you have every single kind of lighting, all individually captured.” Waititi is also continuing his use of Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, which he first used while directing the finale of
From reinventing the superhero genre to charming us with inept vampires, Taika Waititi has long been at the forefront of many key genre-cultural moments – and he’s not done
It has been a busy few years for Taika Waititi. Until 2017, the writer, director and actor was best known for making small, silly, but endearingly big-hearted films such as the 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, or 2016 coming-of-age comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. But then came Thor: Ragnarok, the hugely successful Marvel film which reinvented Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder as a lovable goofball. It transformed Waititi’s career, and has since seen him linked to everything from his own Star Wars film to a live-action version of cult anime Akira. “People are like, ‘Oh you just popped out of nowhere’. Yeah, but I worked for ten years straight before Marvel gave me a call,” he says. “I was not just fucking around. I have evolved as a storyteller.” His latest project is a relatively rare return to actor-for-hire. He plays Antoine, the douchey tech-bro villain of new movie Free Guy, about a non-playable character (played by Ryan Reynolds) who begins to gain self-awareness in a huge Grand Theft Auto-style video game. Waititi admits he’s not hugely interested in video games himself. Or at least not in anything more sophisticated than Mario Kart. Instead, his main motivation for
Taika Waititi has a full schedule for the foreseeable, from Marvel to Star Wars
The Mandalorian’s first season. It essentially allows filmmakers to generate reactive digital backdrops in real time (in front of the camera), through LED screens wrapped around a set. Waititi is a fan because, counterintuitively, it harks back to a more “old school” way of making films. “The actors can be in the environment; they can see what everyone else can see.” With Thor: Love and Thunder wrapped, Waititi is focusing on his Star Wars film – but he is also tied to a sequel to What We Do in the Shadows, an animated remake of Flash Gordon, two animated series of Roald Dahl stories for Netflix and, of course, that live-action adaptation of Akira. “It’s my comfort zone to have a lot of things on,” he says. “That chaos is where my best work comes from.” Stephen Kelly Free Guy is in cinemas August 13
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WIRED x Amazon Launchpad
ILLUSTRATION: BRATISLAV MILENKOVIC
Giving innovative startups a boost will benefit everyone f the past year has taught us anything, it is that the world needs innovators, fresh thinking, original teams and groundbreaking technologies to solve some of our most intractable problems – so Amazon’s Launchpad Innovation Awards could not have come at a better time, supporting budding European startups and awarding a €100,000 prize to the “Startup of the Year”, alongside a grant of €10,000 to the other four winners. As WIRED’s editor, the reason I enjoyed being part of the Amazon Launchpad Innovation Awards shortlisting process was seeing so many innovative and exciting businesses solving a variety of consumer needs – and having an impact on the world by being potentially useful for a large number of people. In 2017, when British femcare startup Callaly launched its “tampliner” it singlehandedly changed the menstrual product landscape by combining the tampon with elements of the panty liner. Callaly’s edge, alongside its penchant for smart design, was its boldness in setting out to disrupt a sector that had long stayed undisrupted – tampons had remained essentially unchanged since their launch in the 1930s. It took a Callaly founder’s personal experience as a gynecologist to force change. And the scale of that change might be staggering: this innovative idea could revolutionise the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Personal experience, and a knack for reinventing ordinary tools to improve their users’ lives, is similarly at the core of another finalist, WeWALK. The team built upon their lived experience of visual impairment and blindness to innovate the white cane. By blending simple functionality with digital technology, the WeWALK team created a smart handle that can be attached to any cane and help users better navigate obstacles and unfamiliar locations, alongside providing information about public transport. Lycke von Schantz, founder of Swedish startup Påhoj, also a finalist, describes herself as a “parent and industrial designer”. In that double capacity, she designed and built a bicycle seat that can
This year’s Amazon Launchpad Innovation Awards have identified an upswing in fresh thinking with real purpose
also be used as a stroller, thus making it easier for parents to ride their bikes with their children. Påhoj’s convenience could potentially encourage more people to ride their bikes – and I found myself marvelling at how this eminently practical solution might enable cities to become more sustainable while offering a huge amount of practicality to families. The environment is also the driving purpose of two other finalists. Danish company CasusGrill is inspired by the founders’ camping trips in the mountains being spoiled by remnants of highly polluting aluminium single-use grills. To change that, they created portable single-use grills made up entirely of sustainable and mostly biodegradable materials – delivering the joy of outdoor
Innovation comes in many forms, from femcare to smarter mobility
cooking with none of the side effects. PlanetCare also seeks to face up to a little-spoken-of source of pollution: tiny microplastic fibres shed from clothes into washing machines during laundry, which then find their way to rivers and seas. The Slovenian company found that an average laundry load releases 700,000 such fragments, whose consequences for the environment, marine life and the food chain are potentially disastrous. The fix? A simple filter customers can install on their washing machines, which ensures the pernicious fibres are winnowed out. As several countries slowly find their way out of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of supporting emerging small and medium businesses cannot be overstated. But even more crucially, we have realised that we need visionaries: people ready to get their hands dirty and wield creativity and tech to crack the very hard nuts we are confronted with in our lives. The finalists of the Amazon Launchpad Innovation Awards are exactly that – and we need more of them.
Driving The Future Of Patient Care WIRED Health:Tech gathers the most compelling individuals and technology powering the future of health. Enjoy this one-day editorially curated programme from the comfort of your home.
A Virtual Conference
September 22, 2021
This live broadcast will cover: Artificial intelligence Telehealth Surgical robotics Next-gen systems VR / XR Self-tracking devices
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ILLUSTRATION: DOUG CHAYKA
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The US military is considering letting artificial intelligence control weapons – and even deploy deadly force – without having any humans involved
Last August, several dozen military drones and tank-like robots set off on an air and land drill 65 kilometres south of Seattle. The objective was to locate mock terrorists hiding among buildings. It was one of several exercises conducted last summer to test how artificial intelligence, with its ability to parse complex systems at lightning speed, could be deployed in combat zones. But the exercise served another, if not explicitly stated, purpose: to reflect the shift in the Pentagon’s “humans in the loop” thinking when it comes to operating autonomous weapons. US Military officials have begun to publicly push back against a reflexive discomfort with putting machines in charge of combat decisions. The policy remains that autonomous weapons must be designed “to allow commanders
and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,” but some higher-ups now question whether humans really need to OK every single trigger pull. General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that the ability to deploy swarms of autonomous robots will force military planners, policymakers and society as a whole to reconsider whether a person can – or should – make every decision about the use of lethal force. Referring to a hypothetical attack by an enemy drone swarm, Murray asked the attendees: “is it within a human’s ability to pick out which ones have to be engaged first and then make 100 individual engagement decisions? Is it even necessary to have a human in the loop?”
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Widespread use of AI without a human could be problematic, as the tech can harbour bias
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weapons was way back in November 2012. It stated that the systems need to have human oversight, but it did not explicitly mandate that soldiers intervene in every decision. Many people, however, believe that removing humans from decisions over deadly force crosses an ethical Rubicon. “Lethal autonomous weapons cheap enough that every terrorist can afford them are not in America’s national security interest,” says Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that opposes autonomous weapons. He says AI weapons should be “stigmatised and banned like biological weapons.” The Security Commission report’s opposition to a global ban is a strategic mistake, he adds: “I think we’ll one day regret it even more than we regret having armed the Taliban.” Will Knight
ILLUSTRATION: SASHA BARANOVSKAYA
Other comments from military commanders indicate support for giving autonomous weapons systems more agency. At a recent conference on AI in the Air Force, Michael Kanaan, director of operations for the Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator at MIT and a leading voice on AI within the US military, said AI should be used to identify and distinguish potential targets while humans make high-level, strategic decisions. “I think that’s where we’re going,” he added. At the same event, Lieutenant General Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements at the Pentagon, said that whether a person can be removed from the loop of a lethal autonomous system is “one of the most interesting debates that is coming, and it has not been settled yet.” Another data point: in May, a report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, an advisory group created by US Congress, recommended, among other things, that the US resist calls for an international ban on the development of autonomous weapons. (The UK Government said in November 2017 that “there must always be human oversight and authority in the decision to strike” and said that responsibility lies “with the commanders and operators.”) The August exercise, organised by Darpa, the Pentagon research division, involved so many bots that no human could possibly keep an eye on the whole troop. Instead, the bots were instructed to find – and eliminate when necessary – enemy combatants, all on their own.
Once the drones and land-based bots, each about the size of a large backpack, were given their objective, they relied on AI algorithms to devise a plan to achieve it. Co-ordinating autonomously, some of the machines surrounded buildings while others carried out surveillance sweeps inside. A few were destroyed by simulated explosives; some identified beacons representing enemies and chose to attack. Timothy Chung, the Darpa programme manager in charge of the AI weapons experiments, says last summer’s exercises were designed to explore when a human drone operator should, and should not, make decisions for the autonomous systems. For example, when faced with attacks on several fronts, human control can sometimes get in the way of a mission, because people are unable to react quickly enough. “Actually, the systems can do better from not having someone intervene,” Chung says. The US and other nations have employed different levels of autonomy in weapons systems for decades. Some missiles can, for instance, autonomously identify and attack enemies within a given area. But rapid advances in AI will change how the military uses such technology. AI code that’s capable of controlling robots and identifying landmarks and targets, often with high reliability, is now available off the shelf and will make it possible to deploy more autonomous weapons in a wider range of situations. But more widespread use of AI without a human in the loop could prove problematic, because the technology can harbour biases or behave unpredictably. A vision algorithm trained to recognise a particular uniform might mistakenly target a noncombatant in similar clothing – with disastrous consequences. Chung says the swarm project presumes that AI algorithms will improve to a point where they can pinpoint enemies with enough reliability to be trusted. The controversy over the use of AI in weapons systems has heated up in recent years. Google faced protests from employees and public outcry in 2018 after supplying AI technology to the US Air Force. The company chose not to renew the contract for that effort, known as Project Maven, and has developed a set of ethical principles that ban the use of its AI technology for weapons development. Paul Scharre, an expert at the Center for New American Security and author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, says it is time to have a more nuanced conversation about autonomous weapons technology. “The discussion surrounding ‘humans in the loop’ ought to be more sophisticated than simply a binary ‘are they or aren’t they?’” he says. “If a human makes a decision to engage a swarm of enemy drones, does the human need to individually select each target?” The last time the US Defense Department issued an official policy on human involvement in autonomous
October 12-13 2021
Find out more at wired.co.uk/events Save 10% with the discount code 10MAG when booking your ticket.
For 2021, WIRED is proud to offer the WIRED Smarter Festival, a two-day virtual symposium that focuses on the latest innovations and trends shaping the future of business in the Retail, Money and Security sectors. WIRED Retail (October 12, 2021) Uncover the most exciting trends and technologies shaping the future of retail and e-commerce. WIRED Money (October 13, 2021) Explore the emerging technologies that are disrupting the industry and driving the future of money. WIRED Security (October 12-13, 2021) Investigate potential threats and outline top priorities for protecting the digital and physical future of business.
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DJI AIR2S
WIRED reveals the inner workings of some of our favourite tech Edited by Jeremy White Photography: Nick Veasey
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Look beyond the plastic casing and the latest consumer drone from DJI becomes something altogether more... real. Anxious and inexperienced pilots will be pleased to hear it’s loaded with safety features, but hasn’t compromised when it comes to the almost prolevel photos and videos. The 1in CMOS Sensor and 20MP camera (video up to 5.7K resolution) is outstanding for a drone of this size, while the three-axis gimbal ensures output remains silky smooth. Admittedly, the 31-minute battery life won’t get you to the drone’s maximum range of 12km, but it’s still an aeronautical feat of engineering. £899 dji.com
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P S 5 D U A L S E N S E C O NTRO L L E R
Same shape, massive upgrade for the PS5 controller, as Sony has upped the realism with an altogether more lifelike and immersive experience, even if you are butchering alien nations. Starting with the speakers – allowing sound effects to burst into life in the palm of your hand – there’s also a microphone for in-game interactions. But it’s the replacing of the original rumble motors with enormous dual actuators placed either side that offer an astounding level of haptic feedback, with subtle differences in vibrations between weapons, vehicles and situations. £60 playstation.com
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PLUMEN BULB 001 LED
Originally conceived because it seemed unfeasible that light bulb design could have changed so little in 150 years, when it launched, the Plumen was the world’s first designer low-energy light bulb – and an instant design classic, gracing the most discerning ceilings. The sweeping screw-in style statement remains
as desirable as ever, especially as it has now been upgraded to use the latest LED technology instead of the short-lived, Mercury-filled CFL variety. The resulting revamped bulb is dimmable, has a lifetime of 20,000 hours and is available in warm white (2,700k) – and all while using 25 per cent less power (11W instead of 15W) than the first iteration. £49 plumen.com
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An inescapable presence in millions of homes, with its deliberately unobtrusive “don’t look at me” design, the latest Alexa is both an aesthetic improvement over its predecessors, and an upgrade in functionality, not least because it has a Zigbee smart hub built-in, greatly enhancing its
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control compatibility and capabilities for all manner of smart home devices. The brains driving the operation is a MediaTek 2GHz dual-core ARM CPU with Amazon AZ1 Neural Edge processor, which is getting better at not irritating us with daft answers. But the real champion here is the
audio quality, which sounds richer and fuller than it should for a diminutive orb not much taller than 13cm, in no small part because the 7.6cm woofer and two 2cm tweeters are mounted to a rigid recycled die-cast aluminium frame that minimises distortion and vibrations. £90 amazon.co.uk
A M A Z O N E C H O ( 4 T H G E N E R AT I O N )
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AETHER-EYEWEAR R1
B O S E F R A M E S A LT O
HUAWEI X GENTLE MONSTER EYEWEAR II (LANG-01)
Aether Eyewear’s R1 audio glasses bring sleek styling to its hand-finished Italian acetate, 40g frames – available with tinted or clear prescription lenses. The arms cram in custommade speakers which focus the sound waves towards your ears, while your connectivity comes via 5.1 aptX Bluetooth. €295 aether-eyewear.com
Bose were early to the audio eyewear party, and the Altos benefit from that experience, sounding far more immersive and musical than the competition. As you can see in our x-ray, the tradeoff for quality is, well, quantity, thanks to those chunky arms – but there’s a solid 3.5hr battery life tucked inside, too. £140 bose.co.uk
Huawei’s bold, Wayfarer-style glasses deploys angular extended arms that are designed to hide the tech – and there’s plenty of it: 128mm diaphragms, Bluetooth 5.2, a whole bunch of touch-enabled sensors and voice control. Its accompanying app also has a neat “find my glasses” feature. £310 consumer.huawei.com
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As significant to DJ culture as the Les Paul is to rock, Technics’ 7th-generation SL-1200 turntable looks virtually unchanged since it was launched 40 years ago, but it does hide a few welcome upgrades. The aluminium die-cast chassis has a two-layer construction featuring a mix of ABS and glass fibre – boosting rigidity and damping vibration – while a completely re-engineered direct-drive motor has ditched the traditional iron core. This, apparently, has eliminated the root cause of “cogging” – stuttering during slow rotations, a major complaint about direct-drive decks. Technics has also included starting-torque and brakespeed adjustments, and, using its newfound ability to play in reverse, Boomers among us can finally hear the hidden message on The Beatles’ “Revolution #9”. It’s shown here with the stereo DJ cartridge AudioTechnica AT-XP7 (£149 audiotechnica.com), which has an extended stylus tip for instant positioning. £800 technics.com
TECHNICS SL-1200MK7
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F E N D E R A C O U S TA S O N I C S T R AT O C A S T O R
Purists might baulk at Fender’s lessthan-authentic audacity, but thanks to some innovative audio technology that’s been elegantly hidden away, its Acoustasonic collection genuinely sounds like a host of classic fullbodied acoustic guitars, as well as a Fender electric. It’s a win-win for a gigging musician who can choose
from ten built-in guitar “voices” and three electric sounds, as well as those of us without the physical space for racks and racks of axes. And, remarkably for an electro-acoustic, the Fishman-designed Acoustic Engine enables you to stomp on some pedals and play heavy distortion without feedback. The full mahogany hollow
body features Fender’s “Stringed Instrument Resonance System” (SIRS) and transverse bracing that allows for the sort of sound resonance without amplification that shouldn’t be possible on such a slim-bodied guitar. What does this mean? You can practice un-amped and still hear your strumming clearly. £1,779 fender.com
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Thanks to the teardown specialists at iFixit, this isn’t the first time we’ve gazed deep into the soul of an Apple computer, but even still, it’s hard to not be a little underwhelmed with what is essentially a motherboard, some microchips and an LCD screen. But to create something so powerful yet remarkably svelte requires next-
level ingenuity. Take the Apple logo at the back – it doubles as a window for a patch antenna to improve Wi-Fi signal performance, while the impressively thin 1.5mm speakers maintain the svelte dimensions, but by using the spare casing volume, they can spread the surface area and still sound expansive. It’s also squeezed in 8GB of
APPLE iMAC M1
memory, 512GB of storage, four USB-C ports (two of which are Thunderbolt), plus the much-lauded M1 chip (seen just left of centre). But where’s the Ethernet port? Relegated to a separate power brick, the inclusion of which both removes a source of heat from the iMac, and allows the whole thing to be so darned skinny. £1,649 apple.com
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ORIGINAL 1227 ANGLEPOISE DESK LAMP
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Vehicle suspension engineer George Carwardine didn’t set out to design the most iconic desk lamp ever produced, but his spring and crank lever mechanism – that could be adjusted with the lightest of touch and, crucially, remain in your chosen position once you let go – worked so well it has barely changed since the Original 1227 task lamp was launched in 1935. Limited editions and designer collaborations now litter the expanded collection, but the bare bones of the design remain as tactile, usable and desirable as ever, especially when paired with the latest E27 smart bulb from Hue (from £24.99 philips-hue. com). £199 anglepoise.com
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A P P L E A I RP O DS P RO
A phenomenal piece of electrical engineering with barely a micrometre of space wasted, Apple’s AirPods Pro remain the most comfortable true wireless designs we’ve ever worn. They’re also not far off the best sounding either, thanks to the adaptive EQ that automatically tunes the lowand mid-frequencies to the shape
of your ear. The output is powered by a high-dynamic-range amplifier and high-excursion, low-distortion speaker driver, while also offering up decent ANC that adapts the sound signal 200 times per second. Its button-cell batteries can give up to 4.5 hours of listening before needing a top up in the case. £249 apple.com
The Future of Food out September 16. Other titles available now on Amazon and at major booksellers
ARTWORK: INA JANG. FOLLOWING THE POSITION OF THE SUN THROUGHOUT THE DAY, HAND-PAINTED CUT-OUTS WERE PLACED IMPROMPTU TO CREATE DATE-NUMBERS USING NATURE-INSPIRED FIGURES AND THEIR OWN SHADOWS IN AN ENIGMATIC LANDSCAPE
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“Barcelona has a very Shoreditch-ten-years-ago feel to it. But with less rain.” Jon Norris, p69
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LISBON DUBLIN BARCELONA LONDON PARIS AMSTERDAM BERLIN STOCKHOLM HELSINKI TEL AVIV
Edited by Victoria Turk & Natasha Bernal
H T TE ST
In partnership with
When Covid-19 locked down most of the world in early 2020, resourceful tech entrepreneurs in Europe and beyond adapted – and thrived. New startups sprang up and existing companies pivoted, all while attracting record investment. Recent figures published by London & Partners show that VC activity has barely been dented by the pandemic.
In 2020, investment in Europe totalled an unprecedented $43.1bn out of $272bn globally. For its part, London remained the leader for investment in Europe, attracting $10.5bn in funding. As we reflect on a decade of WIRED’s 100 Hottest Startups, these companies are a cohort like no other: they survived an unprecedented year, embodying what entrepreneurial spirit is all about.
Our 2021 Hottest Startups aren’t necessarily the largest, best-known or most-funded. We aim to identify the startups that are generating buzz – the companies that people are talking about and inspired by. To do this, we conduct our own research as well as speaking to people involved in the startup ecosystem of different cities to get their read on the local scene.
The capital of Portugal punches above its weight, thanks to startup-friendly policies and its workforce of young, educated and highly motivated entrepreneurs with a global outlook
In March 2021, Feedzai, a company that uses AI to fight financial fraud, announced a Series D funding round of $200 million, raising its valuation above the billion-dollar threshold. It became Portugal’s fourth tech startup to achieve this milestone, placing the country above Spain and Italy in the unicorn ranking. “It’s a unique tech hub in Europe with geographical similarities to San Francisco, and the global ambition of Israel,” says Miguel Santo Amaro, CEO of Coverflex. Lisbon is a hub for foreign tech entrepreneurs due to the quality of its engineering talent, wide English language proficiency and entrepreneurial culture. “Here, we have to think international from day one,” says André Jordão, CEO of Barkyn.
Barkyn “We’re not in the business of dog food. We’re reshaping and rethinking what pet care should look like,” says André Jordão, CEO of Barkyn. Founded in 2017 by Jordão and Ricardo Macedo, Barkyn provides a subscription service that delivers healthy pet food, personalised treats and online appointments with a dedicated veterinarian to over 56,000 families in Portugal, Spain and Italy. For every plan sold, they donate a meal to a shelter dog. “Every dog deserves to have the best meal in their bowl,” Jordão says. “I own two large dogs called Lupi and Misty, and I wanted to solve the issues I had taking care of them.” Barkyn has raised €10 million. barkyn.com
Coverflex (above) Coverflex is pioneering compensation-as-a-service. “One-size-fits-all no longer works,” says CEO Miguel Santo Amaro. “Employees want smarter, transparent and flexible compensation models.” For a monthly subscription that starts at €6 per employee, the startup provides clients including PwC, Bolt, Emma and Unbabel with a tool to easily personalise and manage employee compensation packages and benefits such as health insurance. The company, founded in 2019 by Amaro, Luis Rocha, Nuno Pinto and Rui Carvalho, has raised a pre-seed round of €5 million. “From our experiences in startups and traditional companies, we came across the same problems managing employee compensation,” Amaro says. “We had to fix it.” coverflex.com
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Above: Coverflex co-founders Rui Carvalho, Luis Rocha, Nuno Pinto and Miguel Santo Amaro
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By João Medeiros. Photography: Goncalo F Santos & Dan Burn-Forti.
EMOTAI (below) Founded in 2018, neurotech startup EMOTAI has developed a headband that tracks physiological data, such as stress and cognitive and emotional activity, and then provides guided exercises to improve performance during high-pressure situations – for example, when playing video games. “We invited participants to test our training methodology, and the results were great,” says CEO Carolina Amorim. “People considered their tasks to be 40 per cent easier to accomplish after one week of doing our training.” EMOTAI has also conducted four studies with professional esports teams and is currently studying how its technology can enhance wellness during remote working. emotai.tech
Apres
Kencko
ABtrace
Apres explains how
This smart-food
ABtrace applies
AI-based business
startup secures
machine learning
decisions, such
your five-a-day
to electronic
as deriving credit
via a monthly
health records
risk, are made.
subscription to
to automate the
“Credit models
packets of fruit
management
provide a risk
and veg powder
of long-term
score and agents
that you mix with
diseases. “We scan
delivering a loan
water to make
the entire patient
are expected to
a smoothie.
record to identify
trust the model,”
Launched in 2016
the multiple
says Matthew
by Tomás Froes
reasons why a
Waite, CEO of
and former head of
patient might
Apres. “We provide
growth at Spotify,
require monitoring
an explanation
Ricardo Vice Santos,
tests, and
of the credit
Kencko has staff
support clinicians
model results.”
in Lisbon and New
in delivering
Founded in 2019
York. kencko.com
these in a single
by Waite, Subbu
appointment,”
Balakrishnan and
says its CEO Umar
Mihovil Kovacevic,
Naeem Ahmad,
it has so far raised
who is also an NHS
$1.6m. apres.io
doctor. abtrace.co
Didimo
YData
Didimo uses AI and
Data scientists
computer vision
Gonçalo Ribeiro
to create life-like
and Fabiana
3D digital avatars
Clemente noticed
based on photos or
that many AI
selfies. Launched
projects failed
in 2016 by
because they
computer scientist
relied on poor-
Veronica Orvalho,
quality data.
the startup’s
“Eighty per cent
clients can create
of data scientists’
personalised
work is cleaning
characters for
datasets,” says
apps, games and
Ribeiro. YData’s
retail experiences.
tools help uncover
The software is
new data sources,
based on Orvalho’s
synthesise data,
Above: Carolina Amorim, CEO and
previous academic
and improve its
co-founder of EMOTAI
research on how
quality. ydata.ai
virtual avatars can be used to engage with people with autism. didimo.co
Thanks to the “Silicon Docks” drawing in many of tech’s biggest names, Dublin’s startups are perfectly placed to attract historic levels of attention and investment
Dublin’s business-friendly tax regime, favourable economy and educated workforce have proved alluring to big names in tech including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Twitter and Amazon, all of which have their EMEA HQs in the city. Their presence helped the city rank within the top ten of the most recent European Digital City Index, with the authors noting that, thanks to so many tech giants based at Dublin’s Silicon Docks, local startups are afforded “unprecedented collaborative opportunities”. TechIreland chief executive John O’Dea says that, in spite of the pandemic, Irish tech funding exceeded €1bn for the first time in 2020, with a record 264 companies raising investment – and more than two-thirds of that pouring into Dublin-based businesses. Above: Shane Curran, founder of encryption service Evervault, by Dublin’s “Red Sticks” artwork
Manna Manna founder Bobby Healy is no stranger to startups, having built and sold Eland Technologies and CarTrawler. Founded in 2018, Manna aims to use drones to turn the delivery sector on its head. Atlantic Bridge, Elkstone Partners, FF Venture Capital and Frontline Ventures were among its seed investors. Greenman Investments has since joined them, with Manna closing a further $25m Series A round in April. Healy says investors have been attracted by the “possibilities that drone delivery offers”, while customer feedback highlights its “safer, quieter, greener and more efficient delivery option”. Initially focused on delivering food from restaurants and dark kitchens, Manna has branched out into groceries and medicines. manna.aero
Evervault (above) Shane Curran was just 19 when he dropped out of his business law course to found data privacy startup Evervault. Dubbed an encryption solution for developers, Evervault helps businesses manage data protection by encrypting sensitive data before it lands on their apps. Before his product was even built, Curran had attracted $3.2m of seed funding, with California’s Sequoia Investments and Kleiner Perkins among early investors. A further $16m in 2020 came from backers including former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. Curran says the business has been able to show that encryption can be made easy. “Companies have always avoided encrypting data because they’re scared of getting it wrong,” he says. “When they see how Evervault makes it simple, they’re bewildered by how easy encryption can be.” evervault.com
Buymie
Change Donations
Grocery delivery
Digitisation may
business Buymie
be good news for
saw revenues and
consumers, but it’s
investment soar in
bad for charities
Q1/2 2020. The
that rely on spare
firm landed a
change in collection
delivery deal with
boxes. Founded by
Lidl after securing
Lizzy Hayashida and
€2.2m of funding
William Conaghan,
led by Act Venture
who came up with
Capital last April,
the idea while
followed by a
completing an
€5.8m round led by
MBA at Trinity
Wheatsheaf Group,
College Dublin, the
as well as expanding
Change Donations
into Bristol via a
app links users’
partnership with
debit cards with
Co-op. buymie.eu
charities, rounding up purchases to the nearest euro and donating the “spare change”. change donations.com
073
By Margaret Taylor. Photography: Laurence J.
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Boundless (below) Boundless lets employers compliantly hire people anywhere, something co-founder and CEO Dee Coakley says “solves an acute pain point” in the current environment. “We’re hearing from customers in sectors that would never previously have considered supporting international remote work for their teams,” she says. The business is early-stage, but already provides payroll and tax services in 13 countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the UK. A further 24 – including the US, Japan and Hong Kong – will be added this year. “We want to be the employment platform for your international team, which means expanding our product capabilities into other areas that are adjacent to employment compliance,” Coakley says. boundlesshq.com
Kinzen
Sweepr
Tines
Originally envisaged
Founded in 2017,
The founders of
as a digital news
Sweepr diagnoses
cybersecurity firm
subscription, Kinzen
problems with smart
Tines cut their teeth
morphed into a tool
home devices,
in organisations
that scrutinises audio
reducing the need
including eBay and
and video content to
for customer-
DocuSign, where
prevent the spread
support calls. Its
they learned how
of misinformation.
platform uses
to automate the
Founded in 2019 by
connected devices’
steps needed to
former journalists
diagnostic data to
respond to a range of
Mark Little and
deliver customised
online threats. The
Áine Kerr, its tech
in-app instructions
business caught the
combines AI with
that help solve
eye of heavyweight
human judgement
common problems.
investors Accel and
to identify organised
Amazon’s Alexa
Index Ventures, who
campaigns spreading
Fund, which provides
jointly invested €10m
disinformation.
VC funding for the
just six weeks after
Clients include
development of
it closed a Series A
online marketplaces
voice-controlled
round in 2019. The
and content
technology, is one
company is valued
platforms. kinzen.com
of its backers, last
at €300m after a
year joining its €9m
further €22m boost
round. sweepr.com
in funds. tines.com
Zipp Mobility
KeepAppy
Dockless scooter
Aimée-Louise
startup Zipp Mobility
Carton and Will
may be just two years
Ben Sims met at
old, but already it
Trinity College
is expanding out
Dublin and founded
of the Republic of
“mental health gym”
Ireland and into the
KeepAppy after
UK. Headquartered
Carton experienced
at the Centre for
a mental health
New Ventures and
crisis. The app helps
Entrepreneurs
users identify and act
at University
on triggers of poor
College Dublin, the
mental health. The
organisation last year
early-stage business
won UK Department
has raised €250,000
for Transport
in a pre-seed round,
approval to launch
as well as €30,000
e-scooter trials. The
through Kickstarter.
Above: Eamon Leonard and Dee Coakley,
business has created
keepappy.com
co-founders of Boundless
four jobs in Taunton and seven in High Wycombe as a result. zippmobility.com
The key to a thriving business: growing its digital presence he pandemic has caused huge upheaval in the way all of society operates – and one thing Covid has highlighted is the vital importance of education. Not just for children, but for workers and businesses of all sizes looking to realign themselves during the pandemic, or to adapt to this new normal. As some workers were left unemployed or just looking for a change of direction, many people started their own business – roughly 62 per cent more than in 2020 according to business and financial advisors Kreston Reeves1. Covid has accelerated the shift to digital for many companies as lockdowns restricted physical operations. One report from McKinsey2 found that 58 per cent of all customer interactions are now digital, compared to 36 per cent before the pandemic, a three-year acceleration on
As countless organisations are forced to adjust to the new normal, Vodafone Business is offering an array of tools and free support to help SMEs learn new skills and shift their businesses online
the normal rate of growth. Yet many new business owners aren’t aware of all the ways to make their businesses work online. To make sure all organisations can take part in this digital revolution, Vodafone Business has launched an array of new features to assist small and medium businesses to develop digital skills. First and foremost, there is business.connected. Partnering with Enterprise Nation, the new, free programme set to run until May
2022 offers online courses, webinars and interactive workshops where business owners can learn about all the ways to optimise their business – from social media and website management to cybersecurity. Alongside that, Vodafone Business also runs the V-Hub, an online ecosystem offering free insight and guidance, as well as tailored one-to-one support with their expert businesses advisors. Just one example of this help in action is Jayne Saunderson. Having spent a career working in recruitment, it was once the pandemic hit that she decided to start her
ILLUSTRATION: MUTI. SOURCES: 1 – KRESTONREEVES.COM; 2 – MCKINSEY.COM
WIRED x Vodafone
own business as a personal and business branding photographer. “I offer small businesses, particularly women entrepreneurs who have, like me, changed direction, a way to show their personality alongside their product or service,” she explains. Starting a new business is hard enough, but doing it alone can be truly daunting. “When I worked for large corporations, I just had to be good at a few things and there were other people to do the rest,” explains Saunderson. “Starting a business, you don’t know what you don’t know.” And that was where Vodafone Business’ support made a difference. The business.connected programme offered online webinars and classes to help her master the parts
of running a business she wasn’t used to. Saunderson also used the one-to-one V-Hub service, getting invaluable insight and ideas from the Vodafone Business team on setting up a website, optimising her SEO results and harnessing social media. “It was good to talk to someone looking at it from the outside,” she says. “To me that’s amazing – a support that is free to people and free to a lot of businesses.” But the programme isn’t just for new businesses or sole traders. “It doesn’t matter what size your organisation is, you’ll find useful information in the programme,” adds Saunderson. “The future of small business is to have an online presence, but so many business owners just don’t have the experience to make that happen,” says Andrew Stevens, head of small business at Vodafone UK. “We are providing a complete support
‘We’re providing a support service that helps businesses identify the right tools and use them to improve their operation’
service that helps businesses identify the right tools, activate them, and use them to improve their operation. We’re here to help Britain’s small business community.” Vodafone is also supporting education charities stopping the most vulnerable slipping through the cracks during Covid. Founded in 1903 as the Worker’s Education Association (WEA), the WEA empowers communities through offering lessons on everything from reading, writing and employability, to culture, English as a second language and technical skills. “We want to bring adult education within reach of everyone who needs it, fighting
Education goes on anywhere thanks to a reliable network and human support
inequality and promoting social justice,” explains Mary Jones, who handles communications for the WEA and says it’s helped around 40,000 learners last year alone. “We do this by bringing great teaching to local communities across England and Scotland.” Like much of the voluntary sector, the pandemic has had an impact on the WEA, which relied on in-person lessons in local communities. The charity shifted over 700 of its courses online in a matter of weeks during the first lockdown. One of the biggest challenges was making sure that lessons were accessible for the poorest and most vulnerable – those most in need of the WEA’s support, and most likely to not have access to the internet or devices like laptops. “Digital exclusion is the UK’s silent emergency,” says Jones. “The pandemic took this to another level, physically cutting people off from the outside world.” To support these people in accessing lessons, the WEA purchased a bulk supply of unlimited data SIMs from Vodafone as part of the company’s communities.connected programme, and then separately procured tablets. These were then distributed to their users with the least access to technology to let them attend WEA lessons remotely. The communities.connected project was a follow-up to the schools.connected programme run by Vodafone last year, which donated 350,000 SIMs to help connect in-need students. And the impact education can have is so much wider than just employability or learning a new skill. “Many go on these courses to escape isolation, and there’s the mental health aspects… I understand the importance of employability but it isn’t always about that,” says Jones. “We want to provide a lifeline to those in need.” See how Vodafone Business can help at https://vodafone.uk/TogetherWeCan-SME
The vibrant Catalan capital has an equally exciting startup scene, ranging from healthtech to fintech, foodtech to edtech, and green energy to sustainable fashion
Blessed with a creative heritage and the Mediterranean lifestyle, the Catalan capital is home to some of Europe’s most forward-thinking young companies. The rocketshaped skyscraper Torre Glòries marks the entry to Barcelona’s tech district, looming over the city’s Poblenou neighbourhood. Once an industrial centre, its former factories are now home to hipsters, designers and some of the continent’s most innovative technology startups. “It has a very ten-years-ago Shoreditch feel – but with less rain,” explains Jon Norris of local coding bootcamp Codeworks. “Barcelona has traditionally been a creative hub. Add a great quality of life which attracts global talent, then mix that in with technologists, and interesting things are bound to happen.”
X1 Wind Many of Barcelona’s companies are mission focused. Take energy firm X1 Wind: its floating buoy technology self-aligns with the sea breeze, reducing weight and helping to minimise installation and maintenance costs; its turbine blades bend away, making them lighter, longer and cheaper. In short, this sustainable energy startup is disrupting the multibillion pound offshore wind industry. Launched in 2017 by Alex Raventos and Carlos Casanovas, X1 Wind has so far secured more than €4m in funding through the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme. It’s now preparing to deploy its first fullyfunctional prototype, the X30, in the Canary Islands. Look out for the distinctive pyramidal structure: the traditional turbine tower has been eliminated to allow for more efficient deep water transmission. x1wind.com
Heura (below) Founded in 2017 under parent company Foods for Tomorrow by activists Marc Coloma and Bernat Añaños, Heura produces plant-based chicken and veal substitutes – taking up a fraction of the water, emissions and farmland of meat products. Alongside the environment, it’s saving waistlines: Heura technicians have discovered a fat analogue which means its Mediterranean burgers contain 85 per cent less saturated fat. It’s also grown from being in specialist supermarkets to launching in Chile, Hong Kong and Canada – plus Planet Organic stores in the UK. A Series A round in June 2021 landed €16m, on top of €4m from Equity Crowdfunding, with the company turning over €8m in 2020, triple its previous figures. Closer to home, it’s helping to pioneer veganism in Spain – no mean feat considering the traditional diet of jamón and cheese. heurafoods.com
Above: Marc Coloma and Bernat Añaños, co-founders of vegan food startup Heura
mediQuo
Amenitiz
Spain’s 24-7 medical
The travel industry
chat app has seen a
may be ravaged
seven-fold increase
by Covid, but this
in sales since the
all-in-one hospitality
pandemic. The
platform saw its
digital health startup
clients and revenue
– founded in 2018
quadruple in 2020.
by Albert Castells,
The aim of Amenitiz
Bruno Cuevas and
is to build a digital
Guillem Serra –
toolkit enabling
connects patients
small hoteliers
to 1,500 medical
to easily update
professionals,
websites and revamp
reducing travel
unintuitive booking
and in-person
engines. Launched
appointments. It’s
in 2017 by Alexandre
so far raised €6.3m
Guinefolleau,
in funding, including
Emmanuelle
a recent Series A
Guinefolleau and
round of €2.3 million.
Frederic Cadet, the
mediquo.com
startup has secured €820,000 in funding. amenitiz.io
077
By Alex Christian. Photography: Gregori Civera.
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Above: Inés Arroyo, co-founder and creative director of Laagam
Laagam (above) Riding the e-commerce surge, this eco-conscious brand aims to make affordable fashion a bit more sustainable. Purchases are handmade to order in Spain and Portugal and, importantly, in the right quantity, so reducing waste in production. Laagam delivers worldwide, but its manufacturing process means that no unsold units go to landfill. Launched by Diego Arroyo (formerly of food delivery service and WIRED 2019 Hottest Startups pick Glovo), Inés Arroyo and Cristian Badia, Laagam has raised more than €370,000 from investors which include Cabiedes & Partners. It now sells to 60,000 customers in 50 countries, with an annual average growth rate of 100 per cent. Going forward, the startup is working towards its zero-stock vision by developing a platform which connects audiences to independent labels. laagam.com
Koa Health
Hubtype
This digital wellbeing
Think of Hubtype as
service provides
chatbots 2.0: helping
workplace support
businesses automate
by connecting
communication
employees to mental
channels for the
health experts and
e-commerce age.
tackling issues such
Rather than develop
as stress, sleep and
new tools from
self-confidence.
scratch, Hubtype’s
Through contracts
open-source
with employers
framework means
and healthcare
teams can quickly
providers, Koa’s
launch their new
Foundations app is
customer service
available to more
on the likes of
than three million
WhatsApp and
people. Created
Twitter. Created
in 2016 by Oliver
by Eric Marcos and
Harrison, Koa has
Marc Caballé in 2016,
secured €44.1m total
the platform has
funding, including
raised €1.6 million
€30m in February.
in seed funding.
koahealth.com
hubtype.com
Factorial
Learnlife
Unnax
Founded in 2016
With a learning
Capitalising on
by Bernat Farrero,
centre in Barcelona’s
the neobank
Jordi Romero
Eixample district,
boom, this fintech
and Pau Ramon
this edtech startup
service offers open
of management
welcomes global
banking solutions so
software startup
students via its Home
innovators can build
Redbooth, this
Hub remote learning
their digital payment
HR platform lets
service. Founded in
products faster.
companies automate
2017 by Christopher
Having become the
processes like payroll
Pommerening,
first fintech to secure
and onboarding.
Blair MacLaren
a triple license from
It has raised a total
and Stephen
the Bank of Spain,
of €18.3 million –
Harris, Learnlife
Unnax is growing
including €15 million
secured €3.1m in
in Europe – and
during its recent
pre-Covid seed
expanding to Latin
Series A round.
funding. The end
America. Founded in
factorialhr.co.uk
goal? Digital nomad
2016, its most recent
parents enrolling
investment was a
their children
€7 million Series B
on purpose-led
round. unnax.com
courses, wherever they call home. learnlife.com
Despite the challenges of Brexit and a global pandemic, the capital of the UK has lost none of its appeal for investors looking to spend record-breaking amounts on home-grown startups
London’s startups have not only weathered a year that combined Brexit and a global pandemic, they attracted more investment than ever. According to Tech Nation’s annual report, UK startups hit a record $15 billion in VC funding in 2020, with London now fourth globally for tech VC funding, behind San Francisco, Beijing and New York. When the pandemic hit, there was panic, followed by a period of stability from the first lockdown through to the end of the year, says Gerard Grech, chief executive of Tech Nation. Entrepreneurial ecosystems and the government stepped up. “And clearly VCs invested,” he says. “But real investment has started to happen from this year on. We’re already seeing over half of what was invested last year in a quarter of the time.”
ZOE Jonathan Wolf, co-founder of nutrition biotech startup ZOE, declares that the company simply doesn’t believe in calories: “We think it’s nonsense.” Rather than dieting, ZOE leverages data so that people can adjust their nutrition and control their weight in a sustainable manner. Users are sent a kit and asked to provide a stool sample, use a continuous glucose monitor and perform a simple finger-prick blood test to gain insights into their gut microbes, blood sugar and blood fat. Wolf and his co-founders George Hadjigeorgiou and Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London, founded ZOE in 2017, but operated in stealth mode for three years before springing into action. In May, ZOE raised $20m in a Series B funding round. joinzoe.com
FabricNano
Whirli
Founded in 2018,
Why buy a new
biotech startup
toy when you can
FabricNano is
borrow one instead?
designing artificial
That’s the philosophy
cells that can
behind Whirli, a
produce chemicals
toy subscription
at up to 100 times
service founded
faster than the
in 2019 by Nigel
more common,
Phan which aims to
highly polluting
promote sustainable
chemical processes
consumerism. Whirli
that are involved in
purchases toys
manufacturing. Its
directly from leading
goal is to replace
manufacturers,
all fermented and
which subscribers
petrochemical
can borrow and then
products, such
swap for something
as plastics, with
new when their child
biomanufactured
gets bored. Whirli
alternatives.
has raised £4 million
fabricnano.com
in a 2020 seed round led by Octopus Ventures. whirli.com
Greyparrot (right) Sixty per cent of the two billion tonnes of municipal solid waste (AKA rubbish) produced globally each year ends up in open dumps and landfill, rather than being recycled. AI waste recognition startup Greyparrot provides software to monitor and sort waste at scale. The company was founded in 2019 by Mikela Druckman, Ambarish Mitra, Marco Paladini and Nikola Sivacki, and focuses on building software that can work on basic hardware that is accessible to emerging markets, where many items are sent for recycling. Its AI is accurate enough to distinguish between more than 40 categories of waste, including different types of plastics and fibres, and can alert operators if it detects hazardous substances. greyparrot.ai
Above: Greyparrot co-founders Mikela Druckman and Ambarish Mitra
07 9
By Natasha Bernal. Photography: Dan Burn-Forti.
Beam (below) Social impact business Beam crowdfunds career opportunities for homeless people and supports them in finding and keeping jobs. Founded by Alex Stephany in 2017, it has helped secure work for more than 300 people, some in key worker positions, such as in supermarkets, delivery companies and the NHS. Stephany says he created Beam to build “world-class technology for the most disadvantaged people in the world”. In the last year, the problem of homelessness has become even more important, so Beam repurposed its crowdfunding tech to provide supplies such as sanitary products, food, textbooks and tablets for children. “Our most important KPIs are not financial. They’re our social KPIs: people starting jobs and being housed,” Stephany says. beam.org
Marshmallow
Hoxton Farms
Dija
Omnipresent
Founded by twins
As the race for the
Last-mile delivery
In the age of remote
Alexander and Oliver
perfect lab-made
startup Dija officially
working, talent
Kent-Braham in
steak continues,
launched its
can be found in
2018, Marshmallow
Hoxton Farms
on-demand grocery
all locations, but
brings affordable
co-founders Max
service in March 2021
employers are still
car insurance to
Jamilly and Ed
after raising £20m
put off employing
underserved groups
Steele think they
in seed funding in
remote teams
such as immigrants,
have the key to
December 2020.
because of red
low-income and
creating truly tasty
Founded by former
tape. Omnipresent
unemployed
meat alternatives:
Deliveroo employees
co-founders
people, or students,
cultivated animal fat
Alberto Menolascina
Matthew Wilson and
who pay above
made without using
and Yusuf Saban, the
Guenther Eisinger
average because
animals. To finance
startup offers fresh
say their tech leaves
they don’t fit into
the R&D, they’ve
food delivery using a
companies “more
traditional insurance
raised £2.7m in seed
“dark” convenience
time to do what
underwriting. At the
funding in a round led
store model in urban
matters, and less of
end of 2020, the
by Founders Fund,
areas. dijanow.com
the boring admin”.
insurtech company
the Silicon Valley
In January 2021, the
reached a $300m
VC firm founded by
company closed
(£231m) valuation
PayPal’s Peter Thiel.
a $15.8m Series A
following a $30m
hoxtonfarms.com
round to expand its
Series A round.
presence globally.
marshmallow.com
omnipresent.com
Hopin Demand for onlineevent services such as Hopin soared in 2020: “When the pandemic started, we had about 10,000 customers on a waitlist,” says founder Johnny Boufarhat. Hopin is now in 42 countries, employs over 500 people, and has ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
95,000 customers. It raised $150m in 2020 and has since raised a further $400m Series C round, cementing
Above: Alex Stephany, social entrepreneur and founder of Beam
its unicorn status. Hopin’s next project: events for the hybrid workplace. hopin.com
Getting businesses remote-work ready From helping children’s charities to ensuring business can happen anywhere, Vodafone’s reliable network has been crucial during Covid’s challenging times rom the densely populated Central Belt to the wide open glens of the Highlands and the remote western islands, Scotland is a massively diverse nation. It’s easy to forget sometimes that Scotland is roughly half the size of England, but has a population 11x smaller, making it a much less densely populated country. This national geography means that it’s vital that Scottish enterprises can access proper digital support and mobile connectivity – crucial at the best of times, let alone during a pandemic that dramatically impacted the way we function as a society and an economy. Supported by the government’s new Digital Strategy, an array of companies are working to help SMEs deal with the impact of Covid and the shift to digital – for example, fintech startups such as Striver, which offers vouchers for local shops, and bePayd, which enables even small businesses to access instant payments for invoices. Vodafone Business is doing its part to support SMEs as they scale and shift to digital by offering unrivalled mobile connections and support across Scotland, helping firms maintain a physical presence and overcome the nation’s challenging geography. “The real problem for Scotland is that, frankly, we’ve got mountains that get in the way. It’s that basic,” explains Iain Fiddes, who manages IT for Scottish charity Children’s Hospices Across Scotland (CHAS). “And the population is so distributed through the rural areas that just getting telephone and data services into those areas is problematic.” CHAS was founded in 1992 and provides full family care to children with life-shortening conditions and their families. The charity, which aims to reach the 16,700 children in Scotland who are living
A fast, stable data network is the key to providing critical remote support
with a life-shortening condition, offers services ranging from end of life care at its two hospices in East and West Scotland and in hospitals across the country, to at-home and virtual support for families. “Unfortunately, along comes Covid and makes things a little more complicated,” says Fiddes. The pandemic forced the charity to shift to almost entirely at-home or virtual services, as most of their users were forced to shield to protect their vulnerable child users from being infected by Covid. “It takes what’s already a difficult situation
for families and makes it almost impossible. They’re basically locked down in their houses,” explains Fiddes. “If you’re not in a situation with these kinds of issues to deal with on a daily basis, most people don’t have a clue what it’s like.” The charity now uses Vodafone Business, which Fiddes says has the best rural connectivity of any network, to support their at-home outreach work. They were also able to take advantage of Vodafone Business’ public sector framework pricing, which allows organisations to buy services in bulk,
WIRED x Vodafone
effectively cutting down time and cost. The terrible impact of lockdown meant offering the kind of medical, social and financial support CHAS gives to these families was all the more vital, but now most of it had to be done online. The charity now provides an array of online support sessions for the families,
the charity has been able to double the distanced services they provide during Covid as well as massively increase their at-home support. “And really it would not have been possible had we not been able to use the mobile capabilities that Vodafone is able to provide us.” And being able to run those services offers a lifeline for those families already going through an unthinkably painful experience. “CHAS has helped us in so many ways throughout. From the weekly kindness calls made to us for a chat to
ILLUSTRATION: MUTI
‘Providing at-home support would not have been possible had we not been able to use the mobile capabilities of Vodafone’
such as clown doctors, where the doctors that these kids may see every day are dressed up as clowns and having fun. On top of that, the hospice also had to adjust to sending far more care or medical staff to visit homes in rural parts of Scotland for families who were now struggling to visit the in-person hospices due to Covid. As a result, CHAS needed stable mobile and internet connections to read the medical files of the children they were visiting, as well as make real-time adjustments to their care. “A nurse or a doctor going into a family home needs to be able to connect to our IT systems to immediately know about the treatment they’re receiving,” says Fiddes, who explains
see that we were okay, to the Virtual Hospice activities that brightened all our days,” explains one of the families being supported by the service. “We are more grateful than you could know, for all you do for families like ours.” As another put it: “It was nice to know someone was thinking of us and it helped to reduce our feelings of isolation.
As a family, this was very powerful.” Vodafone Business provides more than just a stable connection for their services says Fiddes. The company also offers unrivalled personalised support for whatever their users need. “We need our partners to be interested in our success… What we’re doing is critically important and if they don’t get that, they don’t have the same sense of value that we do,” he explains. “Our relationship with Vodafone really embodies that shared sense of value… [Our Vodafone contact] is responsive, he listens and is there for us when we’ve needed him, and, most of all, he’s interested.” As a result of it all, Fiddes says CHAS is now moving to exclusively using Vodafone Business for all their telephony and connectivity needs and will continue to conduct many services online and at patients’ homes in future. And it is just one of countless other organisations across Scotland and the UK being helped by Vodafone Business’s tech solutions. “We know businesses of all sizes face challenges when it comes to integrating technology, and we’re here to make that process easier,” says Andrew Stevens, head of small business at Vodafone UK. “Whether it’s understanding how technology can help them or what they should use, we have the options and support to guide them.” See how Vodafone Business can help at https://vodafone.uk/TogetherWeCan-SME
The French capital is reaping the rewards of a programme of forward-looking government initiatives and shrewd inward investment, and is steadily moving up the VC rankings
In 2020, Paris edged Berlin out of second place in the European VC stakes, attracting $3.4bn in investment. Paris’s rise is rooted in government strategy – the tech visa; the establishment of a public investment bank; changes in tax codes – as well as founders reinvesting in the ecosystem; a generation of highly-educated students from the grand ecoles choosing not to go into private industry but start their own business; and projects such as Station F, Europe’s biggest startup incubator. “When I was appointed, President Macron decided that France needed 25 unicorns by 2025 – we had three,” says Kat Borlongan, director of La French Tech, the governmentsupported agency that oversees national startup strategy. “We see it as a pipeline – and the goal is to build the biggest possible talent pool.”
Alan
Strapi
Back Market
“Healthcare is
“Headless” might
This marketplace
expensive, complex
sound like an
for refurbished
to navigate and
aristocrat in 18th
electronics offers
unadapted to our
century France, but
devices at varying
individual needs. It’s
it also describes the
price points. The
built to be reactive,
tech architecture
startup, which
when what we really
that separates
has five million
need is prevention,”
the front-end and
customers, closed
says Jean-Charles
back-end. The two
a Series D round of
Samuelian-Werve,
parts communicate
$335m in May 2021.
who co-founded Alan
through an API,
It aims to expand to
with Charles Gorintin
meaning the
the US and wants
in 2016. Alan offers
front-end is platform
to make previously
online consultations
agnostic. Strapi’s
owned products
and symptom
clients, such as Nasa,
the first choice
checking, while also
Walmart and Toyota,
for consumers.
managing back-end
use the startup’s
backmarket.co.uk
paperwork and
content delivery
post-care services.
structure which,
In April, Alan raised
it claims, creates
Series D funding of
rich, multi-device
€185m at a valuation
experiences for
of €1.4bn. alan.com
consumers. strapi.io
Ankorstore If you’re an independent retailer, you need to find inventory: Ankorstore, founded in 2019 by Mathieu Alengrin, Nicolas Cohen, Nicolas d’Audiffret and Pierre Louis Lacoste acts as a marketplace connecting 6,000 brands to 65,000 retailers. “Ankorstore levels the playing field for independent retailers by reducing the cost and time required to sell their products,” says Lacoste. “We believe independent brands are the future of retail.” The online marketplace, which has just raised a Series B round of $100m – the largest for a Parisian startup in 2021 at the time of publication – led by Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures, is opening local offices across Europe, including Berlin, Amsterdam, London and Stockholm. ankorstore.com
Pennylane
Sunday
Meero
Ÿnsect
Founded by
The payments space
Founded in 2016
On the back of
Alexandre Roquoplo,
is competitive, but
by entrepreneur
raising a Series
Arthur Waller,
Sunday, founded
Thomas Rebaud,
C round of $372
Edouard Mascré,
in 2020 by Victor
Meero is an online
million in October
Félix Blossier,
Lugger, Tigrane
marketplace that
2020, Ÿnsect aims to
Quentin de Metz,
Seydoux and
brings together
tackle the resource-
Tancrède Besnard
Christine de Wendel,
photographers
intensive production
and Thierry Déo
has focused on
and clients,
of animal feed by
in January 2020,
restaurants, and
matching them for
building the world’s
Pennylane is
it raised $24m in a
commercial projects
largest insect farm in
a back-office
seed round in April
and handling the
Amiens in northern
platform that
2021. Users scan QR
creative, production
France. By harvesting
offers automatable
codes for menus and
and invoicing. With
mealworms that can
full-stack financial
to make contactless
31,000 clients,
be used in animal
management. In
payments, speeding
including L’Oréal,
feed, fertilizer
January 2021, it
up the process and
Uber and Sotheby’s,
and pet food, the
raised a Series A
helping restaurants
Meero automates
startup says it can
round from Partech,
by increasing the
back-end processes,
produce protein in a
Kima Ventures and
turnover of tables.
such as retouching
sustainable manner.
Global Founders
sundayapp.com
and grading, and
Ÿnsect is the most
Capital, taking its
claims to deliver a
highly funded agtech
total funding to €19m.
photoshoot every 25
business outside of
pennylane.tech
seconds. meero.com
the US. ynsect.com
083
By Greg Williams. Photography: Julien Faure.
Resilience (left) While there has been significant progress in methods of treatment and therapeutics in cancer care, not all practitioners are aware of the latest research. Resilience wants to make sure specialists are up to speed on new ways of treating patients – while also educating those patients about their treatment in order to improve quality of life. Co-CEOs Céline Lazorthes (who has a solid track record in fintech startups, having also founded both Leetchi and MangoPay) and Jonathan Benhamou (previously founder of PeopleDoc, a cloudbased HR service) have raised $6 million from some notable founders and investors in the French startup ecosystem, including the generalist VC firm, Singular. en.resilience.care
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Above: Céline Lazorthes, co-CEO of Resilience, a digital oncology startup
Sorare (right) Schoolchildren have long traded Panini stickers during major football tournaments. Sorare is moving this market online using blockchain – supply of rare “cards” is done by making them NFTs, which fans can trade as part of a fantasy football experience.“Our mission is to build ‘the game within the game’ and to give fans the platform to celebrate, share and own their football passion,” says co-founder Nicolas Julia. Sorare currently has 140 partner clubs – including Real Madrid, Juventus, Paris Saint Germain and Liverpool – as well as the German and French football associations. A recently announced partnership will enable it to scale on Ethereum, with an aim of facilitating more than $200m of trading card volume through 2021. sorare.com
Above: Nicolas Julia, co-founder of NFT-trading game Sorare
The laid-back city is anything but when it comes to entrepreneurialism, with a tech ecosystem valued at €73 billion and an international outlook baked in to every startup
The Dutch capital provides the perfect backdrop to innovation, with easy-to-navigate business laws, a favourable fiscal climate and advanced infrastructure, including a network of coworking spaces and incubators. “With over 180 nationalities, Amsterdam, next to New York, is probably the most international city for entrepreneurs I’ve ever seen,” says Oscar Kneppers, founder and CEO of Rockstart, one of the city’s leading accelerators. “And with a tiny home-market, people here by default think and act global when building a startup.” According to a recent Dealroom report, Amsterdam’s tech ecosystem now has a total value of €73 billion, up from €10 billion in 2015, making it the third-ranked in Europe. Above: Anne Marie Drost and Ling Lin, co-founders of fertility testing startup Grip
CodeSandbox With the world working from home, there’s never been a better time for CodeSandbox, founded by software developer Ives van Hoorne and industrial designer Bas Buursma. Launched in 2016, the company’s browser-based cloud environment lets developers collaborate simply by sharing a link to what they’re working on. Projects are presented in a way that allows other people in the team, even those without coding skills, to directly make changes. The company, which raised a $12.7 million Series A round in October 2020, hosts more than 2.5 million people on its platform each month. “It feels like everything from design to management has moved to a remote-first world, but development has been lagging behind. We’re here to change that,” van Hoorne says. codesandbox.io
Grip (above) In 2020, Grip co-founders Anne Marie Droste, Noor Teulings and Ling Lin teamed up with Frank Broekmans, head of reproductive science at the University Medical Center Utrecht, on a take-home test based on hormones that provides information about fertility. The test measures the risk of irregular ovulation, blocked tubes, thyroid issues and early menopause – four common conditions that can be obstacles to conception – and generates an individual user profile. Many women can face challenges becoming pregnant because they wait too long, says Droste, and while Grip won’t solve any health issues, the data might help inform their life choices. Grip is available across the Netherlands and the UK, and the team plans to launch in Germany this year. heygrip.com
Dyme
Clear
This subscription
By measuring
management tool
blood glucose
aims to give people
levels using a
better control over
chip-implanted
their finances. By
arm patch,
connecting the app
Clear delivers
to a bank account,
data-driven
users can manage,
personalised
cancel or change
nutrition
subs with a click.
programmes
“With Dyme, people
based on the
can enjoy life while
user’s biological
their admin is taken
response to what
care of,” explains
they eat and drink,
its co-founder and
“because your
CEO, Joran Iedema.
reaction to food
dyme.app
is personal,” says co-founder and CEO Piet Hein van Dam. The company raised €780,000 in February last year. clear.bio
085
By William Ralston.
Photography: Jussi Puikkonen.
Hiber
Avy
In March 2021,
Avy makes fixed-
Hiber secured €26
wing, autonomous
million in an EU
aircraft, some
grant and private
solar powered. Like
funding to bring
many drones, they
affordable internet
take off vertically
connectivity to
– but they can
remote areas of
also cover longer
the world via a
distances by
constellation of
flying horizontally,
cost-effective and
while on-board
energy-efficient
instruments mean
nano-satellites. It
the aircraft can fly
hopes to address
beyond line of sight
key geoeconomic
of a controller.
challenges, such
They’re deployed
as allowing users
across emergency
to monitor and
services, urgent
manage crop
medical transport
production from
and environmental
afar. hiber.global
protection. avy.eu
Dott
Kinder
Overstory
It doesn’t yet have
This donation
By analysing
a licence for the
platform gives
high-resolution
Netherlands, but
charities a quality
satellite imagery
Dott still operates
mark, to ensure
using machine-
a fleet of 30,000
donors can be
learning software,
scooters across
confident in
Overstory
cities in Belgium,
their donation’s
helps electric
France, Poland
impact, or help
utilities, forestry
and Germany. By
them donate to
companies and
using swappable
the most effective
NGOs mitigate
batteries and
ones. “It became
power outages and
electric trucks, the
my mission to help
wildfires caused by
e-mobility startup
find organisations
vegetation striking
minimises its waste
focused on maximal
power cables. This
and emissions –
impact,” says
provides a view on
key to it winning
founder Mathys
current and future
permits to operate
van Abbe. Kinder
risks – and how
in Paris and Lyon.
raised €525,000 in
to prevent them.
The company has
September 2020.
The company is
also unveiled plans
kinder.world
monitoring areas in
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Above: Eric Klaassen, co-founder of online supermarket, Crisp
Crisp (above) Crisp is “fundamentally unbundling the supermarket,” says co-founder Eric Klaassen. Instead of storing its produce in brick-and-mortar stores or large warehouses, the online supermarket, founded in 2018, relies on a bespoke digital supply chain that allows groceries to be aggregated directly from more than 650 small, high-quality producers and delivered to the customer within 24 hours of an order. As with most e-commerce businesses, Crisp has prospered during Covid19. Through 2021, it’s set to extend its fleet of electric delivery trucks, develop its product range and continue digitising the supply chain. In March, the company raised a €30 million Series B round. crisp.nl
for bike-sharing in
64 countries for 11
London and Paris.
paying customers.
ridedott.com
overstory.ai
It’s slipped a notch to number three in European VC funding, but don’t count out the German capital just yet – entrepreneurs are flocking there for its quality of life and continent-leading economy
According to Atomico’s 2020 State of European Tech report, Berlin has seen $12.6 billion of investment since 2016, attracting $2.4 billion in 2020 alone (though it still slipped into third place, behind Paris). It also boasts one of the “densest networks of startups, the deepest pools of experienced talent and many of the most sophisticated investors,” says Pawel Chudzinski, a partner at Point Nine Capital. It’s the capital city of the biggest European economy, with a developed tech ecosystem celebrating bountiful IPOs and repeat founders, but remains affordable to live and work in compared to other cities. (It also has the best night-life, Chudzinski adds.) This year’s list demonstrates Berlin’s breadth of talent, with startups in sectors as diverse as fintech, food and gaming. Above: Felix Schulte and Christine Kiefer, co-founders of RIDE Capital
Gorillas Love or loathe the dark store model, Gorillas has become one of the most talked-about names in Berlin and beyond – it’s expanded into seven markets, including south London. Founded in 2020, the app-based grocery delivery service promises to get your essentials order zipped to you via e-bike in under ten minutes. Supermarkets are outdated, says Angharad Probert, Gorillas’ global brand director: the app lets you avoid a weekly shop and the waste that comes with forgetting to cook that mouldy cauliflower, and instead order food as you need it. To date, Gorillas has raised $335.4 million over three rounds, with Coatue Management, DST Global, Tencent and Atlantic Food Labs making up the main investors. gorillas.io
RIDE Capital (above) Founded by Christine Kiefer (who is also a member of the Fintech Council, the German government and ministry advisory on digitisation and finance) and Felix Schulte in 2018, RIDE Capital aims to be the “digital private bank of the 21st century”. Currently, Kiefer says, professional wealth management is reserved for the very wealthy, and is a kind of “black box” that most people never have access to. RIDE Capital aims to demystify it: “We strive to democratise wealth planning and structuring by providing professional wealth management services as a software for the everyday investor,” she says. To date, RIDE Capital has raised just over €3 million in VC funding. ride.capital
Wonder
SellerX
Founded in 2020,
SellerX acquires
Wonder taps into the
businesses that
trend for advanced
sell products in
videoconferencing.
the “evergreen”
Thousands of users
category on Amazon
can converse – and
– household goods,
instead of all facing
kitchen, garden and
each other like in
pet supplies, health
a Zoom call, they
and beauty, fitness,
can jump between
baby products –
conversations in
and then grows
video, audio or
and develops them
text. “There had
both on and off
already been a
Amazon’s platform.
steady movement
Founded in 2020 by
towards a more
Philipp Triebel and
remote world, and
Malte Horeyseck,
when the pandemic
SellerX has raised
hit, this process
over €130 million.
was propelled 10-15
sellerx.com
years forward,” says co-founder Leonard Witteler. wonder.me
087
By Will Bedingfield. Photography: Gene Glover.
Planetly (below) Planetly builds software to help businesses manage their carbon footprint: it’s a “holistic carbon management system,” says co-founder and chief customer officer Anna Alex. She came up with the idea when trying to offset the carbon footprint of a previous company. “I quickly dealt with a consultant with an Excel sheet who ran around the company and asked us for a lot of data,” she says. “The carbon footprint is the most important KPI for humanity this century; why don’t we use the best technology to make it easy for businesses to calculate this?” Planetly, founded in 2019, is the result. Climate tech is currently flooded with talent, says Alex, and her company is focused on growth to meet the scale of the climate challenge. So far, the company says it has raised €7m in seed investment with Speedinvest, Cavalry Ventures and 468 Capital. planetly.com
Pitch
Popcore
Charles
Founded in January
Popcore creates
This conversational-
2018, with a product
hyper-casual
commerce company
publicly launched in
mobile games
helps businesses sell
October 2020, Pitch
such as Sandwich!,
on WhatsApp and
makes collaborative
where you make
other chat apps.
presentation
sandwiches, and
Founders Artjem
software that lets
Wrecking Ball, where
Weissbeck and
teams create and
(you guessed it) you
Andreas Tussing say
deliver presentations
swing a wrecking
that in 2019 they
together. “Pitch can
ball – its games have
launched Europe’s
help companies
been downloaded
first WhatsApp store,
unlock their best
400 million times.
where you could
thinking,” says
Brothers Thomas
buy clothing. “While
co-founder and CEO
and Johannes
customers loved
Christian Reber.
Heinze launched
the experience,
Thousands of teams
Popcore in mid-2018
we couldn’t find
use the product,
and it has raised
software that met
including at brands
€4.5m. popcore.com
our requirements
such as Intercom,
for the back-end,”
Superhuman and
they say. They
Notion. Pitch has
decided to pivot;
raised $135 million in
Charles is the result.
funding. pitch.com
hello-charles.com
BRYTER
Theion develops
BRYTER provides a
rechargeable
“no-code service
batteries based on
automation
crystal technology,
platform” that allows
using sulphur and
business experts to
lithium as the main
build and run digital
raw materials.
applications. It was
Founded in 2020
founded in 2018
by Florian Ruess
by Michael Grupp,
and Marek Slavik,
Micha-Manuel Bues
it aims to boost
and Michael Hübl,
rechargeable
who noticed a lack
batteries’ climate
of easy-to-use
and environmental
automation software
friendliness – its
in their previous
battery production
roles as lawyers and
boasts net zero
entrepreneurs. It’s
emissions – as well as
used by McDonalds,
Above: Anna Alex, co-founder of carbon
their performance,
Telefónica and ING
footprint-analysis startup, Planetly
safety and cost. The
Bank. bryter.com
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Theion
company says it has raised several million euros. theion.de
Scaling your business begins with speed here are a lot of misconceptions about Birmingham – it’s the UK’s secondlargest city, yet its diverse population of 1.1 million people is caricatured as living in the shadow of the factories and foundries that once defined it in its industrial heyday. For many, it’s perceived as being in decline, an ageing powerhouse falling behind other big English cities such as Leeds and Manchester; “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” as one local put it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Birmingham is increasingly becoming a hub for new startups and entrepreneurs looking to establish themselves outside of the capital.
A whopping 18,394 new businesses were founded in the city last year1, the highest volume of startups outside London, and founders are representing a wide variety of sectors and services. It’s home to tech startups such as Kaido, a mental and physical wellbeing platform designed for companies to use to support employees; and Tonik Energy, a renewable energy company with €15.2 million of funding; not to mention Whisk, whose recipesharing app has recently partnered with social video platform TikTok and supermarket behemoth Sainsbury’s. The UK’s second largest city is awash with new enterprises both big and small that are helping reshape the face of the West Midlands. Between 2011 and 2016, there was a 130 per cent increase in the number of tech startups in the city2, and the knock-on effect of that growing SME and startup
scene is evident in every part of the city. “It’s much smaller than London but it feels very cosmopolitan here… the city has got a nice feel to it,” explains David Brimson, who runs the West Midlands franchise of upmarket Danish customisable furniture and interior design firm, BoConcept. “People don’t really associate Birmingham with that, but there’s no difference from any other major European city.” Brimson first realised the potential for the city while working as European Director of McLaren’s automotive division several years ago. The Birmingham store selling the company’s high-end supercars in the region went on to be one of the largest and most successful outlets for the brand globally. “It was a real indicator of the not-obvious depth of wealth that’s in the wider region here,” explains Brimson. That – and the fact he was born in Birmingham – was a key
ILLUSTRATION: MUTI. SOURCES: 1 – THEBUSINESSDESK.COM; 2 – TECHNATION.IO
To thrive, we believe that new businesses need versatile, fast connections – Vodafone Business has the technology to get them up and running
WIRED x Vodafone
motivator for Brimson to choose the city when he was looking to establish his own outlet for BoConcept. But starting a business comes with an array of challenges – ones that can be amplified during a situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic. For Brimson, it was all about space: while searching for a new location at the end of 2019, he was forced to take on a less-thanideal short-term space while waiting to move into a planned site just around the corner. “Literally, it was a box halfway through development,” explains Brimson. Part of the problem was that there wasn’t any internet connection and many conventional broadband offerings wouldn’t offer short-term contracts to cover the few months they would be occupying the temporary space. “The biggest thing in our business is internet connectivity. Though we’re a bricks and mortar business, probably 80 per cent of our customers come in from finding us online,” he says. “We needed to be able to talk to people, but that was a problem.” And that’s where Vodafone Business came in. As part of their array of packages to support UK SMEs, the technology communications company offers the 5G GigaCube, which works in a similar way to a conventional broadband connection, but instead uses a SIM card and connects to Vodafone’s 5G network. The GigaCube generally offers an average speed of around 250Mbps, far faster than the average internet speed in the UK of roughly 80 Mbps. But more than that, it offers versatility – it just needs to be plugged in where there is mobile coverage and can work without the need for engineers, complex installation or any other interference. It also allows users to choose from 24-month fixed or 30-day rolling contracts, allowing them to tailor their contract to suit their needs. “The thing that arrived
was a white box, I plugged it in and it worked within five minutes from the get-go,” says Brimson. “It sounds silly, but since then, we never looked back.” The GigaCube was able to support every part of the virtual side of the BoConcept business – from online consultations to 3D interior design rendering, while offering unrivalled download speeds for staff as well as streaming promotional material on in-store TVs – all at once, without any loss in speed. According to Brimson, the value of working with Vodafone Business went beyond just the GigaCube tech itself, praising the service for its quality and responsiveness to any challenges he might face. In fact, Brimson was so impressed with the GigaCube that he continued to use it when his company moved to their permanent BoConcept site in Edgbaston, and said he “wouldn’t hesitate” to use another GigaCube for any future expansions they might do
‘I think the biggest compliment I can give Vodafone’s 5G service is that it simply does its job, just as they explained it would’
in the region. They were even able to install and use it while the store was still being renovated by contractors, conducting their online business while workers patrolled in and out of the building. “In this age of internet connectivity, it’s more important than the physical space, in some ways,” he explains. “I think the biggest compliment I can give Vodafone’s 5G service is that it simply does its job, just as they explained it would.” As 5G increasingly rolls out across the entire country, the quality and versatility it can offer to SMEs looking to stay connected is staggering. “I remember dial-up modems, ADSL, then moving to proper broadband,” says Brimson. “This is the next generational step.”
The 5G GigaCube gives businessclass connections, without the cables
But the support Brimson received is just one of a huge suite of features that can support thriving SMEs in cities like Birmingham. Vodafone has a number of initiatives to help businesses adapt to moving online; the V-Hub by Vodafone website offers free insight and one-to-one tailored support for those businesses working remotely and building an online presence, and their free business.connected programme, in partnership with Enterprise Nation, offers a variety of e-learning classes and wider training to help entrepreneurs become more tech savvy. On top of that, the company is offering an array of security and collaboration tools including Office 365 and Trend Micro Security, which finds and eliminates security gaps in user activity across your business, as well as business-boosting packages which enable you to build your own website. All of this allows UK SMEs to upgrade their digital skills and security while maintaining unrivalled connectivity. “Every day we’re amazed by the different business owners we meet – the passion and commitment we see. But we also very often hear the same challenges when it comes to integrating technology,” says Anne Sheehan, business director of Vodafone UK. “We want to help businesses grow, and to enable communities to thrive. So whether businesses are looking at how technology can help them, or what specific technology they should use, we’re here to help.” See how Vodafone Business can help at https://vodafone.uk/TogetherWeCan-SME
Sweden’s rising startups have a rock-solid foundation of world-class education and engineering talent – not to mention inspiration in the form of global trailblazers such as Spotify and Klarna
As sustainable battery maker Northvolt joins the list of major Stockholm success stories with its $3.9 billion valuation, and Candela’s all-electric C-7 speedboat takes on the US, the next cohort of Stockholm startups is navigating how to make an impact. You’ll find the Swedish version of Instacart (Vembla) and a European rival to Cameo (Memmo) alongside ambitious experiments in food, climate, health and business. “We benefit a lot from worldclass free education, with stellar engineering universities that are producing great talent,” says Joel Hellermark, CEO of AI education startup Sana Labs, “as well as the ratio of talent to companies, and an increasing number of executives who have gone through this journey at the likes of Klarna and Spotify.”
Anyone Got five minutes? That’s the premise behind Anyone, a one-to-one audio calling app, founded in 2020 and looking to solve “the advice problem”. “You can achieve so much more in a short period of time than you think,” says CEO David Orlic, “as long as you set the context correctly.” The invite-only app caps calls at five minutes and lets its advisers set prices (taking a 20 per cent cut). The result? A 10,000+ waitlist and advisers offering micro-mentoring on anything from business to long-distance running. Transcription is in development, and Anyone is exploring subscriptions, free call-fellowships and bundles. Every caller has the chance to become an adviser, too. “It lowers the barriers for you to admit to yourself that you know a ton,” says Orlic. callinganyone.com
Curb
Leetify
Carl Tengberg and
Esports gamers
Felipe Gutierre
should have Leetify
run four delivery-
firmly in their
first kitchens in
crosshairs. Its AI
Stockholm and
coaching tool,
Copenhagen
launched in 2019,
serving nine “food
already has 50,000
concepts”, and
users a month.
want to make dark
Why? They want to
kitchens transparent.
go pro, of course.
Tengberg’s focus is
Leetify analyses your
data and efficiency;
CS:GO gameplay
he’s looking toward
and spits out
semi-automation
actionable guidance
– but has ensured
on everything
collective bargaining
from positioning
agreements with
to recoil controls.
Curb’s kitchen staff:
Co-founder Anders
“increasing margins
Ekman is planning on
by decreasing labour
expanding to more
standards is the
titles. leetify.com
wrong way to go.” curbfood.com
Grace Health (right) Period-tracking apps are nothing new to the startup space, but Grace Health is going a step further, offering the first iteration of an accessible, digital women’s health clinic. Starting out as a Facebook Messenger chatbot offering tracking and advice on menstrual cycles, Grace Health is now a low-storage 5.3MB Android app aimed at women in emerging markets. In fact, it’s already the most-downloaded health app in Nigeria and the second in Kenya and Ghana. “We’ve seen strong organic interest in conception here, as well as prevention,” says co-founder Thérèse Mannheimer, former head of R&D at health app Lifesum. Assisted telehealth is on the roadmap, but for the next year, the team will build out its guided health assistance with audio, a forum to connect users and a push to engage male partners in discussions where appropriate. grace.health
Above: Grace Health’s Estelle Joubert Westling and Thérèse Mannheimer
09 1
By Sophie Charara. Photography: Christopher Hunt.
Above: Volta Greentech co-founders Frederick Åkerman and Angelo Demeter
Off Script
Sana Labs
“People trust
During the global
other people, not
pandemic, Sana
companies,” says
Labs’ AI-powered
Pontus Karlsson, one
upskilling and
of the co-founders
reskilling platform
of social commerce
trained over 80,000
startup Off Script,
health workers in
which allows
2,000 hospitals on
influencers to build
Covid-19 treatment
their own shop in
and prevention. “We
minutes out of a
reduced onboarding
virtual inventory of
time by 37 per cent,
direct-to-consumer
and 98 per cent
brands. Off Script
of the learners
takes an average
improved,” says CEO
20-25 per cent
Joel Hellermark.
commission per
Following an $18m
sale, with two thirds
Series A round,
of this going to the
it’s working with
creator. Next up:
Novartis and Amgen.
expansion across
sanalabs.com
Europe and the US.
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
offscript.io
Volta Greentech (above) Inside a 500-square-metre factory in Lysekil, on Sweden’s Stångenäs peninsula, the red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis is growing. When fed to cows as a 100g daily feed supplement, its bioactive compounds can block the production of methane, reducing emissions by up to 80 per cent. Volta Greentech is tweaking conditions, such as nitrogen sources, in its Stockholm labs; in Lysekil, the seaweed is growing in tanks of up to 15,000 litres. “We’re developing a blueprint for seaweed factories that can be replicated,” says CEO Fredrik Åkerman. With €2.5m in funding and testing underway on a commercial farm, the startup plans to launch its first emission-reducing-certified products by autumn. voltagreentech.com
Lassie
Stockeld Dreamery
Teemyco
“The idea is the
In the race to create
This virtual office
first proactive and
a tasty plant-based
for Windows and
preventive pet
cheese, many
Mac (a mobile
insurance,” says
eyes are turned to
version is on the
Lassie co-founder
Stockeld Dreamery’s
way) is clean and
Hedda Båverud
first product,
customisable
Olsson. With funding
the feta-inspired
with the ability
from J12 Ventures,
Chunk. Two years
to hop in and out
Lassie is focusing on
in development,
of rooms, switch
cat and dog owners,
Chunk is based on
to video-only, or
post pandemic-
peas, fava beans and
use walkie-talkie
pet-boom. Users get
secret flavouring.
features. It’s about
advice on their pets;
Chunk is already
recreating the
the data feeds its
in a few Stockholm
“togetherness
risk profiling model,
cafés, while the
feeling,” says CEO
allowing the startup
spreadable Spread
Charlotte Ekelund.
to offer discounts on
and meltable Melt
“Our team of ten
insurance. lassie.co
are in the works. “We
people in four
have very promising
countries has never
prototypes for
met.” teemyco.com
both,” says head of R&D Anja Leissner. stockeld.com
A quality of life that’s the envy of Europe has brought many entrepreneurs to Finland’s capital – but there’s more than enough home-grown talent to ensure a steady stream of investment
Infinited Fiber (left) Following circular economy principles, Infinited Fiber takes textile waste and other rubbish and turns it into new textile fibres with the look and feel of cotton. It’s less about recycling, more about “regeneration”, says co-founder and CEO Petri Alava. To make its material, the company shreds and chemically cleans the waste before turning it into liquid cellulose, which can be remade into new fibres for clothes. At the end of the new textile’s life, it can be put back into the system. Founded in 2016, the company is now looking for a location in Finland to build its flagship factory. Collaborating with the likes of H&M, Patagonia and adidas, it aims to renew excitement in fashion for environmentally-conscious customers. “We want to bring back joy to the closet,” Alava says. infinitedfiber.com Above: Petri Alava, CEO and founder of textile “regeneration” startup Infinited Fiber
Finland was one of a few European countries to see growth in the amount of capital pouring into tech startups in 2020, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with both Helsinki and nearby Espoo reaping the rewards. The country’s ecosystem builds on past successes from the likes of gaming giants Rovio and Supercell, as well as more recent triumphs such as that of food delivery service Wolt. “Success creates success,” says Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen. He believes that Finland is “the best place in the world” to found a startup, thanks to its high quality of living – international talent is increasingly seeing its appeal. This year’s cohort spans a range of sectors, but many focus on sustainability.
Flowrite
Enfuce
Aaro Isosaari was
Enfuce co-founder
working as CEO of
and CEO Monika
Finnish accelerator
Liikamaa wanted to
Kiuas when he
use her experience
realised how much
in IT and banking
of his work was
to work with both
sending repetitive
neobanks and
emails – “a lot of
incumbents, and so
my days, I used to
created a payment
spend multiple
service provider
hours on writing.”
with clients
He founded
including Swedish
Flowrite with CTO
neobank Rocker,
Karolus Sariola in
Danish fintech Pleo
September 2020,
and Swedish energy
creating a browser
company St1.
extension that
Enfuce’s My Carbon
turns bullet-point
Action calculator
prompts into full
also helps users
emails, making use
track their carbon
of OpenAI’s GPT-3
footprint based on
language model.
transaction data.
flowrite.com
enfuce.com
IQM A spinout from Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, IQM makes quantum computing hardware using superconducting technology, and has ambitions to be a European quantum competitor to the likes of Google in the US and Huawei in China. To reach quantum advantage faster, IQM takes what it calls a “co-design” approach, building processors aimed at specific use cases. Co-founder and CEO Jan Goetz says that initial commercial applications will target “low-hanging fruit” such as new financial algorithms. “Step by step we will open up new markets, until we reach a stage of having a generalpurpose machine,” he says. Founded in 2018, IQM has raised €71m in private and public funding. meetiqm.com
09 3
By Victoria Turk. Photography: Jussi Puikkonen.
Above: Meri-Tuuli Laaksonen and Sandra Lounamaa, founders of elderly-care startup Gubbe
Varjo
Swappie
A veteran of
Jiri Heinonen and
WIRED’s hottest
Sami Marttinen
startups list, Varjo
founded Swappie
started shipping its
after running into
latest “human-eye
scammers while
resolution” virtual-
trying to buy a used
and mixed-reality
iPhone online.
headsets, the VR-3
Their solution: a
and XR-3, in March
marketplace that
2021. The company
professionally
counts the likes
refurbishes
of Audi, Siemens
iPhones so that
and Boeing among
people can buy
its clients and has
and sell second-
now raised more
hand without the
than $100 million
stress. A Series B
since its inception
round in June 2020
in 2016, including a
brings Swappie’s
$54 million Series
total funding to
C round in 2020.
€40m and cements
varjo.com
its place as a startup success.
ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
swappie.com
Gubbe (above) A pandemic poses challenges for a business that involves visiting the elderly, but Gubbe co-founders Meri-Tuuli Laaksonen and Sandra Lounamaa believe that our experiences under Covid-19 have only highlighted the importance of companionship for older people’s wellbeing. Founded in 2018, Gubbe connects families of elderly people with students who visit and help out with tasks such as housework. “Our mission from the very start has been to give meaningful work to students and also create happier elderly people,” Lounamaa says. The students are paid, and Gubbe takes a commission (Lounamaa describes it as like Wolt, but for elderly care). Part of its success to date, Laaksonen says, is down to branding: Gubbe has made elderly care “trendy”, with young people on the platform keen to show off their work on social media. gubbe.io
Solar Foods
Aiven
Sulapac
Founded in 2017
Founded by four
Sulapac makes
as a spinout
software engineers
sustainable,
from VTT, it uses
in 2016, Aiven
biodegradable
fermentation
builds cloud-based
packaging, which
to make protein
data infrastructure
ranges from
from microbes. Its
so that developers
single-use straws
powder, Solein,
can shift their
to containers for
can be used in
focus to building
luxury beauty
meat alternatives
applications. It
products. They’re
– but also bread,
now has 1,000
also suitable
noodles and dairy.
customers and
for industrial
With total funding
a global team of
composting and
of around €35m,
almost 200, and
can be made using
Solar Foods plans
closed a $100m
existing plastic
to have its first
Series C funding
product machinery.
production plant
round earlier this
Founded in 2016 by
operational in
year. Investing
Suvi Haimi, Laura
2023. solarfoods.fi
further in open
Kyllönen and Antti
source is a priority,
Passinen, Sulapac
explains Aiven
has raised a total of
co-founder
€17m, with investors
and CEO Oskari
including Chanel.
Saarenmaa. aiven.io
sulapac.com
Branching out from its traditional tech specialisms of fintech and cybersecurity, this coastal city has an enviable track record for building unicorn-status startups with a global reach
Year in and year out, Tel Aviv’s startup community has proven that it can achieve more than whole countries within its 52km2, thanks to investment in world-class research facilities, robust government support, and an ever-reliable influx of investment from within and abroad totalling $9.93 billion in 2020. In the first three months of 2021, nine Israeli startups reached unicorn status – more than any country in Europe – compared to 15 in all of 2020, and 12 in 2019. Tel Aviv has long been known as a place where founders have built innovative companies in verticals such as fintech and cybersecurity. But increasingly, entrepreneurs are growing startups in “deep tech” – technologies based on scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Above: Ron Gura and Yonatan Bergman, co-founders of Empathy
Empathy (above) “Death and dying is the single largest consumer sector that is still untouched by innovation,” says Ron Gura, co-founder and CEO of Empathy. “We don’t want to talk about end of life.” With Empathy, Gura – who made this list in 2011 as co-founder of social e-commerce startup The Gifts Project – aims to start that conversation. Launched in April with CTO Yonatan Bergman, the app supports bereaved families by sharing guidance related to challenges like organising a funeral, settling debts and coping with grief, and automating bureaucratic and financial processes. Gura adds: “This is not a magical concierge that’s going to make the problem go away… However, we can let technology do the things technology is just better at doing.” empathy.com
Soos Technology Each year, about seven billion male chicks are culled because they aren’t able to lay eggs. But biotech startup Soos, founded by Yael Alter and Nashat Haj Mohammad in 2017, has found a solution: by exposing eggs to specific sound vibrations during incubation, they can transform unwanted male embryos into productive egg-laying females. The next step is figuring out how to guarantee consistent results at scale in commercial hatcheries. So far, the company says it’s averaging about 60 per cent female chicks per batch. But Alter is optimistic they can get to 100 per cent – and as of May 2021, they’d raised $2.4 million in funding to make it happen. “It will take between a year and a half to two years until we’ll be able to say ‘OK, the product is ready to implement’,” Alter says. “That’s the golden egg.” soos.org.il
Artlist
GuardKnox
Launched by Ira
Israeli Air Force
Belsky, Itzik Elbaz,
veterans Moshe
Eyal Raz and Assaf
Shlisel, Dionis
Ayalon in 2016, Artlist
Teshler and Idan
is a one-stop shop
Nadav are bringing
for content creators,
cybersecurity
providing access to
innovations for
royalty-free video,
the skies back
sound effects
down to Earth
and music. Artlist
with GuardKnox.
acquired multimedia
Founded in 2016,
marketplace Motion
it provides auto
Array for $65m last
industry suppliers
December, a move
with adaptable
bringing the total
computing solutions
number of digital
that cater to
assets in its library to
software-enabled
800,000. artlist.io
cars, with a focus on on-the-road protection against hackers. To date, it has raised $24m. guardknox.com
09 5
By Allyssia Alleyne. Photography: Jonathan Bloom.
Theator (below) “The fundamentals of education, training and practice of surgery haven’t really changed since the 1600s,” says Theator CEO Tamir Wolf. “It’s an apprenticeship model, so ultimately the set of experiences that you learn from vary greatly from one place to another.” Wolf launched Theator with Dotan Asselmann in 2018 to make best practices more accessible. In Theator’s database, surgeons can find videos of specific surgeries, and filter for factors such as complications, co-morbidities and competency to see how others have performed in similar situations. Afterwards, surgeons can watch footage of their own procedures cut down to key moments and annotated using AI, enabling continuous learning and improvement. theator.io
Papaya Global
Amai Proteins
Melio
VAST Data
In March, Papaya
In a bid to address
Melio enables
Flash storage is
Global became
obesity, food
small businesses to
faster, more flexible
Israel’s first
tech startup Amai
send and receive
and more compact
woman-led unicorn.
Proteins is using
payments using
than traditional hard
Established in
computational
an integrated
drives. But these
2016 by CEO Eynat
design and
digital dashboard.
benefits have long
Guez, Ofer Herman
fermentation to
Launched by Matan
come at a premium.
and Ruben Drong,
develop zero-calorie
Bar, Ilan Atias and
Founded in 2016
Papaya’s AI-based
“designer proteins”
Ziv Paz in 2018,
by Renen Hallak,
human resources
that are cheaper,
the free tool lets
Shachar Fienblit, and
platform allows
healthier and
clients upload
Jeff Denworth, VAST
companies to
thousands of times
vendor invoices and
Data has introduced
automate processes
sweeter than sugar.
schedule payments
a new infrastructure
related to hiring,
Founded by CEO Ilan
from debit and
that will make
onboarding,
Samish in 2016, Amai
credit cards, which
enterprise-wide
payroll and people
has partnered with
Melio then issues
flash use more
management. Clients
Danone, PepsiCo
via bank transfer or
affordable and
include Microsoft,
and OceanSpray
cheque. Backed by
accessible. In May,
Toyota, and
during its R&D phase,
American Express
VAST Data was
Johnson & Johnson.
and hopes to bring
and Salesforce, Melio
valued at $3.7bn –
papayaglobal.com
its first products
became a certified
more than triple its
to market in 2022.
unicorn in January.
April 2020 valuation.
amaiproteins.com
meliopayments.com
vastdata.com
Deci Deci is using AI to improve other AIs – engineers upload their AI models to the startup’s proprietary AutoNAC (Automated Neural Architecture Construction) platform, which then optimises them. Founded by Yonatan Geifman, Jonathan Elial and Ran El-Yaniv in 2019, Deci was a participant in Intel’s ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
Ignite accelerator programme, and the companies are
Above: Dotan Asselmann, co-founder of
now partnering to
surgical-training startup Theator
optimise models that run on Intel’s hardware. deci.ai
09 6
WIRED’s Hottest Startups: ten years on...
Klarna
WeTransfer
SoundCloud
Klarna co-founder and CEO
Founded in 2009, WeTransfer
When we featured Berlin-based
Sebastian Siemiatkowski laid out
got a very brief mention in our
SoundCloud in 2011, it was
his hopes in 2011: “Our vision is
2011 Amsterdam list as a “simple
already celebrating a $12.5m
WIRED published its very
for you to be able to click ‘buy’
platform for transferring up to
Series B round. It’s now raised
first Hottest Startups list
anywhere on the internet, and
2GB for $120 a year”. Today,
more than $500m (but not
back in 2011, covering nine
for us to assess on that click
there are free and pro versions,
without difficulties along the
cities: Stockholm, Paris,
whether we should approve
plus a suite of other tools
way). The company’s influence
Berlin, Barcelona, Moscow,
you.” Klarna’s buy-now-pay-
aimed at creative professionals.
on music has been solidified in
Tel Aviv, Tallinn, Helsinki
later option is a regular sight on
WeTransfer reports 80 million
the past decade – take the rise
and Amsterdam. (London
e-commerce sites – oh, and it’s
monthly users, with two billion
of a hip-hop genre that some
wasn’t included – no, we’re
now been valued at $31 billion.
files shared every month.
came to call “SoundCloud rap”.
either.) In the decade since
Supercell
iZettle
Special mentions:
it was compiled, some of our
Finnish gaming startup Supercell
iZettle was just preparing to
Sorosh Tavakoli appeared in
selected startups have gone
was just a year old in 2011. A year
launch its smartphone card
our 2011 issue as co-founder
quiet, but a great many have
later, it had released Hay Day
payment tech in the UK when it
of Stockholm adtech startup
enjoyed ongoing success. In
and Clash of Clans, dominating
made our 2011 list. In 2018, it was
Videoplaza. That company was
fact, quite a few have made
mobile gaming. Reflecting on
acquired for $2.2bn by PayPal,
acquired by Ooyala in 2014, but
such a name for themselves
the Helsinki startup scene in
which later renamed it Zettle.
Tavakoli’s plant-based cheese
by now that it’s hard to
2021, co-founder and CEO Ilkka
You’ve likely used its portable
startup Stockeld Dreamery,
remember them as the
Paananen is bullish. “In the next
card readers shopping with small
now finds itself in our 2021 list.
bright-eyed young hopefuls
year or two, I think we’re going
businesses; during the Covid-19
Ron Gura, in this year’s list with
they once were. Here are a
to see so many new unicorns,”
pandemic, Zettle worked with
Empathy, also made our 2011 list
few of our 2011 alumni that
he says. Tencent is now a
The Big Issue to get its vendors
with his earlier startup The Gifts
you may have heard of…
majority owner of Supercell.
access to the contactless tech.
Project, now owned by eBay.
Lisbon
Barcelona
Amsterdam
Helsinki
Andreia Campos; Sofia Campos;
Cecilia MoSze Tham; Wesley
Ronald Jan Shuurs; Youri
Ilkka Paananen; Miki Kuusi; Patrik
Alexandre Barbosa; Stephan
Henshall; Fanny Pujol; Thomas
Doeleman; Robert Gaal; Paul
Holopainen; Ilkka Kivimäki; Timo
Morais; Cristina Fonseca; Carlos
Ohr; Jon Norris; Irina Popa;
Veugen; Micha Hernandez van
Toikkanen; Katja Toropainen;
Oliveira; Liliana Castro; Inês
David Monreal; Maria Girbau;
Leuffen; Christina Calje; Freerk
Harri Iisakka; Juhani Polkko; Miika
Santos Silva; Pedro Rocha Vieira;
Albert Domingo Vilar; Josemaria
Bischop; Constantijn van Oranje;
Huttunen; Rudi Skogman; Mona
Ricardo Marcao; Alisson Avila;
Siota; Albert Bosch; James
Thomas Vles; Oscar Kneppers;
Ismail; Ville Simola; Suvi Haimi
Jaime Jorge; Catarina Peyroteo
McKenna; Clemens Rychlik;
Boris Veldhuijzen Van Zanten;
Salteiro; Daniela Braga; Vasco
JC Taunay-Bucalo; Oscar
Sophie op de Kamp; Bas Beekman;
Berlin
Pedro; Virgilio Bento; Mariana
Sala; Carlos San Isidro; Gerard
Minouche Cramer; Manon Klein;
Lisa Lang; Luis Hanemann; Pawel
Barbosa; Pedro do Carmo Costa
Callejón; Jonàs Sala
Ilse Kwaaitaal; Koen Bok
Chudzinski; Ciarán O’Leary;
not entirely sure why,
Jan Miczaika; Fabian Heilemann; Dublin
London
Stockholm
Christian O Edler; Jens Lapinski;
Claire McHugh; Kevin Maughan;
Tessa Clarke; Stan Boland;
Maria Webjörn; Hans Aspgren;
Axel Bard Bringéus
Alan Costello; Denis Canty;
Suranga Chandratillake; James
Peter Carlsson; Paolo
John Phelan; Mark Lenahen;
Wise; Hussein Kanji; Ed Lascelles;
Cerruti; Shahan Lilja; Anders
Paris
Kevin O’Shaughnessy;
Jean de Fougerolles; Hannah
Hammerbäck; Oscar Westergård;
Jean-Charles Samuelian; Cédric
Alison Treacy; Gavan Drohan;
Seal; Cecilia Manduca; the
Livia Moore; Sandra Malmberg;
Dessaigne; Jade Francine; Renaud
John O’Dea; Aislinn Mahon;
TechUK team; Gerard Grech;
Marcus Gners; Staffan Helgesson;
Visage; Marc Sudreau; Oussama
Helen McBreen; Anna Scally;
Esme Caulfield; Rob Kniaz;
Fredrik Cassel; Carl Fritjofsson;
Ammar; Martin Mignot; Roxanne Varza;
James Badgett; Mike Lebus;
Jamie Andrew; Herbert Swaniker;
Beata Klein; Petra Stenvall
Alice Zagury; Nicolas Colin; Julien
Patricia Scanlon; Una Fitzpatrick
Clifford Chance; Bryce Keane
Thompson; Kim Fai Kok
Trosdorf; Cedric Giorgi; La French Tech Tel Aviv Alona Stein; Amir Guttman; Amir Jerbi; Amos Haggiag; Avishai Abrahami; Carmit Oron; Chaim Meir Tessler; Daniel Cohen; Daniel Guez; Fay Goldstein; Ido Susan; Merav Oren; Micha Kaufman; Moshe Zilberstein; Oren Kaniel; Roger Ordman; Shelly Hod Moyal; Sivan Shamri Dahan; Uri Marchand; Yoav Levy; Yonatan Adiri; Yoni
Above: Carolina Amorim, CEO and co-founder of EMOTAI
Assia; Yuval Kaminka; Zvika Orron
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI
Morgan; Eyal Gura; Eyal Niv; Eynat
Te n ye a r s o n f r o m the A r a b Sp r i ng, i nte r ne t shutd o wns a r e i nc r e a s i ngly use d to st i f le de m o c r a cy. And, a s i n Myanma r , i t’s o fte n a p r e lude f o r g o ve r nme nt v i o le nce a g a i nst c i v i l i a ns . B y G i a n V o lpice ll i _______ Typ o g r a ph y & Illust r a ti o n: The r e i s Studi o
100
hen Lu woke up early on February 1, 2021, he noticed that his Wi-Fi had stopped working. He turned his router off and on again. Nothing changed: there was no internet. Worse, it now looked like his smartphone couldn’t get online either: Facebook’s app loaded endlessly, WhatsApp texts stayed stuck in predelivery limbo. Lu stepped out onto the balcony of his flat and spied the glimmer of a TV screen through his neighbour’s window. Lu shouted, asking whether he knew what was going on. “It’s strange,” the neighbour shouted back. “On the news, they officially announced that the military took over the country.” This is how Lu, a trade union worker based in Myanmar’s capital Yangon who asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons, realised that his country’s democracy had been upended by an army coup d’état. For months, Myanmar’s armed forces had been questioning the legitimacy of the November 2020 general election, which had resulted in a landslide for the incumbent governing party, the National League for Democracy, and its leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. On February 1, hours before the new parliament was due to be sworn in, troops swooped on Yangon, arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and other political leaders, and installed bespectacled general Min Aung Hlaing as the country’s ruler. In an act of textbook military subversion, the coup played out in darkness: at night, and amid a systematic information blackout. Monash University’s IP Observatory, an academic project based in Australia that monitors global internet traffic, first clocked a decrease in Myanmar’s connectivity around 1am local time. Another such project, Internet Outage Detection Analysis (IODA) at the University of California San Diego, detected a substantial slump around 3am. The shutdown was piecemeal: different internet service providers discontinued network services at different times, and the loss of signal was not uniform across the country – the southernmost Tanintharyi region, for instance, remained
had been using to organise. A day later, Instagram and Twitter were blocked. Following that, the internet went dark again from the early morning of February 6 until the afternoon of February 7. This time, orders from the telecom regulator reached internet service providers in unison, and the drop in connectivity was synchronised and all-encompassing – traffic coming out of Myanmar was snuffed to negligible levels. This turned out to be a dress rehearsal: unaffected. This pattern makes sense if one pictures jeep-loads of soldiers on February 15, Myanmar experienced the barging into the offices of Myanmar’s first of a long string of internet curfews. telecom companies at different hours, Every night at 1am until 9am, the country was cut off from the global internet – demanding the shutdown at gunpoint. Judging by a further collapse in “as if swallowed by a snake”, Lu says. connectivity registered by IODA, by Simon Angus, who works as a researcher 6:50am most of Myanmar was offline. at the IP Observatory, describes it as Voice and text cellular services were “a precise, metronomic shutdown.” On March 15, the mobile internet was switched off across the country and the national broadcaster went off-air. switched off completely; on April 2, As armoured vehicles rolled down the wireless broadband was discontinued. streets and military checkpoints popped Those who still managed to connect via up along thoroughfares, Myanmar’s fixed broadband were confronted with a husk of the network they remembered: population was left blindsided. “We couldn’t communicate with each sluggish, heavily censored and hard to other, and people freaked out. The entire navigate without relying on software country was blocked,” Lu says. He and his such as virtual private networks (VPNs). For people like Lu and his wife, who wife idled time away at home, waiting for something to happen. “Nobody dared go works as a software developer, it was a out, nobody knew what was happening professional catastrophe. “She used to on the next street, or what was happen- have late meetings, even at midnight – now she cannot work, she ing in another township.” can’t go to meetings,” he Connectivity began to Myanmar, Feb 2021 says. Lu knows university slowly and patchily inch The record-holder for students who used to up around 10am. Lu says the longest shutdown that his Wi-Fi connection is Myanmar, which kept attend lessons remotely amid the Covid-19 crisis, came back before mobile towns in Rakhine and data, and that he got online Chin State intermittently and now feel educationally stranded; he knows food earlier than friends living in offline for 19 months, delivery workers who, with other parts of the country. before unplugging the But things were not back to whole country in Feb 2021. no mobile internet, cannot take orders. “A lot of people normal. Over the following days, thousands of citizens took to the lost their jobs because they needed to streets and social media to protest and work with the internet,” he says. Even denounce the military’s power grab. The though the curfew ended and fixed-cable junta’s response was to come down hard connectivity was reinstated on April on protesters, in the form of physical 27, mobile and fixed wireless remained inaccessible as of June 2021. violence and digital muzzles. There is a grislier element to the Mass arrests and nightly raids against dissidents multiplied; journalists and shutdown, in the wider context of democracy watchdogs were intimidated; brutality and repression. A Burmese security forces turned water cannon, human rights activist, who asked not to tear gas and rubber bullets against be named for fear of retaliation, is filled peaceful protesters waving three fingers with dread whenever her connection as a gesture of defiance. Live ammunition dies. “This internet shutdown doesn’t would follow. On February 4, Telenor happen in a situation where everything is Myanmar – a subsidiary of a Norwegian going well,” she says. “They are cracking telco, and the country’s most popular down on the protests, killing civilians. You mobile operator – announced that the live in fear that something can happen to junta had ordered mobile operators you at night. And you think: if there is no and internet service providers to block internet, you cannot talk to your friends access to Facebook, which protesters or colleagues about what is happening.”
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PHOTOGRAPHY: STRINGR/GETTY IMAGES
Anti-coup demonstrators in March 2021, sheltering from Myanmar’s military Junta, which was cracking down on protesters it claimed were inspired by online propaganda he situation in Myanmar is not unique. Other countries, including India, Ethiopia, Belarus and Venezuela have used internet shutdowns as a method of crushing dissent and obfuscating the truth. The internet as a tool of knowledge-sharing, connection and bottom-up democracy is effectively being bludgeoned with an off-switch. The first major precursor to today’s internet shutdowns was the Arab Spring. Starting in December 2010, as people across North Africa and the Middle East rose against authoritarian rulers, the internet emerged on the world stage as a force for political mobilisation. Protest movements were hatched in Facebook groups, spotlighted on Twitter and chronicled on YouTube, regime brutality and extrajudicial killings included. English-speaking newspapers started talking of “Twitter revolutions”. How key a role social media played many young Egyptians, who may never in the turmoil – which touched over ten have joined the protests otherwise. countries, brought down four dictators, By the end of the year, former president triggered at least two civil wars and Mubarak would be standing trial in a destabilised the area to this day – is Cairo courtroom and Gaddafi would be a matter of debate, but it seems clear dead at the hands of Misrata militia. that some beleaguered tyrants felt Access Now, a digital rights advocacy threatened by it. On January 27, 2011, group founded in 2009 in the aftermath two days after protesters had started of a spate of internet disruptions in Iran, amassing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, has been keeping a tally of internet Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak took the country shutdowns from 2016 onwards. Put offline, and continued to block services the numbers on a chart, and you can for five days. In Libya, Colonel Muammar see a line hopping upwards year after Gaddafi followed suit, reacting to a year. In 2016, Access Now reported 75 budding uprising with a barrage of shutdowns; in 2017, 106; in 2018, 198; internet disruptions, eventually culmi- in 2019, 213. In 2020, for the first time nating in a four-day-long shutdown in half a decade, the group noticed a on March 3. The move drew interna- decrease from the previous year, down to tional condemnation, prompting the 155 internet shutdowns in 29 countries. United Nations to speak up against But, once you remember that 2020 was a the suppression of freedom of speech. pandemic year – a period of lockdowns, For the dictators, it working-from-home, and arguably backfired. Jared extreme reliance on the Russia, 2012 Cohen, a former US State internet to do everything Monash University’s Department staffer who from buying groceries to Klaus Ackerman says had gone on to join Google’s attending school – that Russia throttled the “think-do tank” Google Ideas internet in some regions year’s number nevertheless and was in Egypt during the ahead of their elections seems enormous. “It was revolution, said in a July 2011 in 2012. In those regions, surprising to see governinterview that Mubarak’s Vladimir Putin secured ments – and we continue to shutdown had motivated see them – shutting down 3.2% more votes.
the internet during a time when, increasingly, we have all realised the importance of staying connected,” Felicia Anthonio, a campaign co-ordinator at Access Now based in Ghana, says. The rise in confirmed shutdowns may partly be a consequence of increased awareness and reporting. Observers and diplomats, however, believe that turning off the internet has become an increasingly common tactic. “It’s really a crisis for freedom of expression in many respects. And it’s definitely a crisis that’s expanding around the world,” says David Kaye, a professor of law at University of California, Irvine and the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression between 2014 and 2020. “What’s worse, this tool is becoming almost normalised, even in places where the rule of law really should exist.” Although shutdowns might seem a hallmark of autocracy, the worst offender is actually the world’s largest democracy: according to Access Now, India accounted for 109 internet shutdowns throughout 2020 – all of them enforced at a local level, such as in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region, which went through 18 months of on-off shutdown. The record-holder
for the longest shutdown ever is Myanmar, which kept several towns in Rakhine and Chin State – two northern states torn apart by ethnic violence and armed clashes – offline for 19 months; in February, the junta made a point of putting an end to the situation, and then unplugged the whole country. The majority of governments do not acknowledge that an internet shutdown is underway, variously blaming the disruption on technical problems or foreign cyberattacks – or simply lying about the reality on the ground. When a rationale is provided, shutdowns are described as last-ditch measures to prevent violence, defend national security and, increasingly, to stem the spread of “fake news” online. (On February 6, Telenor cited the “circulation of fake news, stability of the nation and interest of the public” as It is telling that, alongside mass the Myanmar government’s legal ground protests, the kinds of events that seem for the country-wide shutdown.) There is a genuine debate to be to be most associated with internet had about how much power govern- shutdowns are elections. A blocked or ments in poorer countries have when limited internet in the lead-up to an asking Silicon Valley giants to more election means that the opposition will proactively counter propaganda, hate be less able to co-ordinate, canvas and speech and disinformation targeting campaign; no internet during an election their citizens. A western diplomat who means that irregularities won’t be was in Ethiopia in June 2020 – when immediately reported; and no internet the government imposed a three-week in the aftermath of a rigged vote makes internet shutdown after the murder it harder for citizens to voice their of a musician sparked riots and ethnic discontent. In certain African countries, conflict – says that the risk coming from election-day shutdowns have become so Ethiopian diaspora members calling for commonplace that internet-watchers put reminders in their calendars. violence on social media was real. Doug Madory, director of internet Yet, Anthonio says, there is no evidence that shutdowns have a positive analysis at network analytics company effect against disinformation or inter- Kentik, has been monitoring shutdowns net-incited violence. Quite the opposite. for over a decade. He had expected that, Myanmar’s military is infamous for after the disasters of Egypt and Libya, running disinformation campaigns full-out shutdowns would be replaced by on Facebook encouraging genocidal less disruptive strategies – censorship, violence against the Muslim Rohingya blocking, targeted removal of websites. minority; following the February coup, But many of the countries implementing it kept flooding Facebook – theoretically shutdowns do not have the experience blocked in the country – with falsehoods, or capabilities to act more elegantly. until the social network booted military- Myanmar had just over 495,000 internet linked accounts from the platform. users in 2011; now it has over 20 million. “What they wanted to accomplish Across Africa, the percentage of people was getting people not to see the kind connected to the internet nearly trebled of brutality that was going on around from 2010 to 2019. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the country,” says Harish encrypted messengers, VPNs Nair, managing editor of Ethiopia, Nov 2020 FactCrescendo, an Indian The Ethiopian government and other tools for bypassing internet restrictions have fact-checking outlet that cut off connectivity to also covers Myanmar. “They the Tigray region – the b e c o m e m o r e w i d e l y wanted to add their own location of a bloody civil available, prompting governments to come down heavily. ‘fake news’, and show that war – from November “It seems like we’ve regressed pro-democracy supporters 2020 until at least are causing chaos and June 2021, amid claims of a little,” Madory says. “Or maybe we never progressed.” commotion everywhere.” ethnic cleansing.
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he internet wasn’t designed with measurements in mind,” says Alberto Dainotti, a research scientist and founder of the internet outage tracking project IODA. The internet is a kludge – a tangled network grown through spontaneous expansion and shaped by makeshift fixes ossified into structural features. There’s no simple system to track whether a government has taken a country offline. Observers such as IODA have to come up with proxies, ways to detect the fire of an internet shutdown by spotting a sort of digital smoke. One of the most rudimentary methods to enforce a shutdown is called BGP manipulation. BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, has been variously described as the internet’s post office, satnav or air traffic control tower. It is the system that allows a packet of information to find its way from point A to point B through the tangle of nodes and connections making up the internet. Through BGP, every node in the network – representing the entry point for a group of internet addresses, which in turn represent users – constantly advertises which addresses it gives access to. These announcements are picked up
ACCESS DENIED Digital civil rights group Access Now reports that at least 155 internet shutdowns took place in 29 countries throughout 2020. The region with most offending countries is sub-Saharan Africa (10), followed by the Middle East (8) and Asia Pacific (6). Latin America accounted for three incidents, and Europe for two – in
PHOTOGRAPHY: TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Belarus and Azerbaijan.
by the most immediate neighbours and echoed through the whole internet, blazing a trail between two points in the network. This is how a user in one location can load a website from a server based in another location. Governments can order whoever is in charge of the nodes advertising entry to a cluster of addresses – typically an internet service provider or telecom company – to withdraw those announcements, effectively wiping those users off the global internet map. Withdrawing BGP routes is convenient as, to an extent, it can allow for select groups of addresses – those of government officials, say – to retain their internet connection while everyone else is in the dark. Cutting the internet cables or powering down the country’s networking hardware – the crudest methods to carry out a shutdown – risk affecting other countries’ connectivity. One Syrian telecoms specialist, who was employed by government-owned Syrian Telecom throughout several shutdowns that took place in the country from 2011 onwards, says he was asked to use “BGP techniques” to ensure that a few select people could still get online while citizens protesting against the al-Assad regime were cut off. The specialist, speaking anonymously out of security concerns, recalls removing every set of addresses from the company’s BGP announcement, except for those linked to what he calls “VIP customers”. In one sense, he considered the technique a way to put a target on those people’s backs. “Anyone who looked to Syrian Telecom’s BGP table [would have seen that] it just contained VIP customers’ [IP addresses],” he says. “It was like a message to hackers and
researchers: ‘please attack them!’” He used BGP manipulation again when Syria started enforcing nation-wide internet shutdowns to prevent cheating during school finals (a practice that’s also become popular in Iraq and Ethiopia). For a government, one downside of BGP manipulation is that it can be easily detected by researchers. Its targeting is also rough: addresses are taken offline in gross bunches. Firewalls – systems able to filter inbound and outbound traffic – are a more refined alternative, able to narrow their scope down to the individual address if necessary. They are usually built by grafting devices known as middleboxes onto a network’s cables. Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, a researcher with IODA, explains that middleboxes can be programmed to block all traffic going to a specific destination address or coming from a particular source address, or else entire internet protocols or classes of content such as video, voice or email. “It’s a fairly computing-intensive process,” Padmanabhan says. Middleboxes also have legitimate applications, which makes it all the more difficult to control exports of this technology. Middleboxes can block access to individual popular websites – a move that does not qualify technically as a shutdown, but the impact of which
can still be staggering in countries like Myanmar, where much online activity takes place on Facebook. Done with systematic completism – with the exclusion of all social networks, search engines, news websites, app stores and video sharing platforms – this method can be as effective at disconnecting a country’s populace as sawing off a submarine cable. The blocking of specific sites can theoretically be circumvented by using VPN apps, which tunnel traffic through servers in other countries, but governments can also block websites where these apps are downloaded, or try to identify and winnow out VPN traffic. Firewalls are subtler than BGP manipulation: to verify filtering by firewalls, IODA uses “active probing” – essentially pinging networks known to be at a certain geographic location. Most networks are designed to automatically respond to pings by echoing them back to the sender, unless something prevents them from doing so. No pong after the ping indicates that a system may be firewalled. Except, Dainotti says, most networks are not all of them: it is perfectly possible for a network to be connected to the internet and yet not return a ping. To verify, IODA uses pings in concert with BGP observations and another proxy. Called a “network telescope”, it is a
Journalists in Indian-administered Kashmir protesting the restrictions on internet and mobile phone networks in October 2019, which was affecting their ability to do their jobs
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Below: a student leads chants during demonstrations in Cairo, Egypt in 2013. Right: anti-shutdown protesters in Rakhine state in Myanmar, February 2020
router at the University of California San Diego that continuously advertises itself as open for internet traffic. Inevitably, it receives a deluge of unsolicited rubbish. “A large part of it is malware,” Dainotti says. “A large part of it is traffic sent to it due to misconfiguration. A large part of it – we found out in 2016 – was BitTorrent clients mistakenly sending traffic to our offices.” That spontaneous stream of uninterrupted pollution – spread by infected computers, botnets scanning the web for prey and accidental connections – is known as “internet background radiation”, and it can be parsed to different geographic locations. A drop in the amount of radiation emanating from a specific country suggests that a shutdown may be occurring. Other internet measurement outfits contribute other techniques. International nonprofit OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference) detects the blocking of specific websites and messaging services: users download OONI’s app to confirm whether it is impossible to connect to a given website from where they are. From his listening post at Kentik, Doug Madory pores over aggregate data to spot shutdowns, including at the level of the mobile
imon Angus, the IP Observatory r e s e a r c h e r, c o m p a r e s i n t e r n e t measurement to the detection of illegal nuclear tests. “Agencies measure different tell-tale signs of a nuclear explosion – some will focus on sonic booms, others on earthquakes, others on radiation and so on – and then they triangulate.” While the parallel may seem over the top, many researchers think about internet shutdowns as an arms race. Shutdowns pit governments against their citizens, with the latter constantly taking up tools to try to circumvent disruptions. When governments feel they’re losing the battle, they hastily turn to the nuclear option – just shutting everything down. But, in the long run, this is not a tenable position. Shutdowns are painful and very expensive: even if you don’t end up like Mubarak or Gaddafi, you might still have to deal with an economy in tatters. A Brookings Institution study estimates the internet – which is harder to pick up global cost of the 81 shutdowns carried with pings and BGP tables. The IP-Obout worldwide between July 2015 and servatory in Australia pings millions of June 2016 at $2.4 billion. In the age of internet-connected devices across the real-time communication, virtually no planet to pinpoint shutdowns and gauge business can thrive without reliable internet throttling – a variation on the internet. In January 2020, a Reuters story shutdown theme in which connection described how thousands of Kashmiris – speed is toggled down to transform left jobless after the shutdown devastated internet navigation into an infernal slog. the region’s tourism industry – travelled In 2016, Access Now spearheaded each morning on a train known as the the creation of the Keep it On coalition, “Internet Express” to towns unaffected a loose alliance of over 240 groups by internet restrictions, in order to fill out collecting and sharing information about online job applications and check emails. shutdowns, and providing assistance to Belarus, once a thriving startup scene, the people affected by them. Their goal is is now haemorrhaging tech founders keeping up the pressure on governments, after president Alexander Lukashenko through courtroom battles, awareness wielded shutdowns to cling to power campaigns and technical aid to people on amid mass protests in summer 2020. the ground, so that internet shutdowns One Belarusian technology entrepreneur, are taken off the table as a political tool. speaking anonymously out of security “In the long term, in my ideal world, concerns, says that, in the I would love to see governwake of the shutdown – and ments recognise the need India, 2020 of the government-sancto stop using shutdowns India enforced 109 tioned violence – Belarus’s against their own citizens internet shutdowns in and rather invest in internet 2020, the most notable reputation as a high-tech hub was “just destroyed”. infrastructure and ensure taking place in the “The whole brand of Belarus that the internet is accesdisputed Jammu and as a great place to build sible for everyone,” says Kashmir region, which Access Now’s Anthonio. “But underwent 18 months of software or set up a startup’s office – that evaporated. that is the ideal scenario.” on-off disruptions.
PHOTOGRAPHY: MOHAMMED ELSHAMY/ ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES; MYO KYAW SOE
lance-ridden apps while It was gone,” he says. “Most silencing critical voices. The of the highly-skilled profesBelarus, Aug 2020 network was put to the test sionals, be that engineers, Belarus shut down or product managers, or internet connectivity to during a weeklong shutdown marketers, packed their crack down on protests in November 2019, as the country was awash with suitcases and left.” against a controversial This is why the Myanmar election. The only form protesters. “Iran is smart: military kept what little was of communication that they wanted to kill the protesters, but they didn’t left of the internet running kept working was the during business hours, and messaging app Telegram. want to anger people even more,” says Iranian digital why business districts are usually spared from shutdowns in India. rights activist Amir Rashidi. “Which is Over time, governments may consider why when they shut down the internet, alternatives to the prolonged curfews the local net kept working.” (Russia has or outright outages seen in Myanmar, developed a similar domestic network Belarus or Ethiopia. Some researchers but has only unplugged from the global believe that shutdowns may actually internet during a short pilot trial in 2019.) And China, of course, has spent almost become less frequent, as more countries move towards creating a permanent two decades perfecting its Great Firewall, internet-censorship apparatus instead a prodigy of fine-tuned censorship of blocking access every now and then. technology that rejects the internet as Their ideal end-state would probably a venue for self-expression and political look somewhat like Iran or China, two action while harnessing its potential for business and totalitarian control. pioneers of internet censorship. Shutdowns, then, may be only the first Iran has perfected the art of severing itself from the global internet while step on the path. “You start by going maintaining internal connectivity by into the tool shed and you pull out the creating the National Information large axe,” Angus says. “Eventually you Network, a country-wide intranet that realise, ‘Maybe I don’t need an axe, maybe lets everyday activities go on relatively I need something like a screwdriver, or a unperturbed on Iran-built, surveil- watchmaker’s tool.’ You can have supp-
ression – but not crush the economy.” China is exporting its model to other countries. In November 2020, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on Chinese state-owned electronics manufacturer CEIEC for selling a commercialised version of China’s Great Firewall to Venezuela, a serial shutdown perpetrator. Others may follow: reports in early May 2021 suggest that Myanmar’s military is planning to create an “intranet”. Shutdowns mostly affect countries that only recently experienced massive internet adoption, and which are now at a crossroads between competing conceptions of the internet. The risk is that millions of budding internet users may end up using something that is little like the internet most countries know today. The age of the shutdown may become the age of the splinternet – the fragmentation of the internet into national networks in the grip of their respective governments. “We’re headed for the balkanisation of the internet,” says Harry Halpin, a visiting professor at Belgian research university KU Leuven. “This will hurt the internet as a space of universal communication and information-sharing, which has saved many people’s lives. That still is a thing worth fighting for.” �
Gian Volpicelli is a senior editor at WIRED and co-edits the Start section
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groups such as Frost’s cycling course, but also music lessons, gardening projects, nature walks or even assistance in finding employment or securing housing. Though the idea of social prescribing has existed in the UK for a couple of decades, the cascading health consequences of a year spent by many of us in mandatory isolation has energised interest in the practice. And, as Covid-19 rapidly burns both ends of the healthcare candle – more patients in need of care, and a health service stretched to capacity – more health workers, policymakers and patients see social prescribing as part of the answer.
When the now-retired lorry driver would ask GPs for help managing his diabetes and obesity, most – as Frost recalls – would “tell him off” for not eating more healthily. Often, they suggested his problems were permanent. “They told me I’d be on insulin for the rest of my life,” he says. Discouraged, he didn’t think he could improve his health, and for many years he didn’t try. His divorce didn’t help, nor did his always-on-the-road lifestyle. “For 30 years, I’d have 1215-hour days, living on takeaways and sandwiches six days a week. At weekends, I’d just want to get drunk,” he says. But five years ago, Frost had an encounter that would change how he managed his health. When he moved to Sheffield and found Ollie Hart – a tall, youthful, chiselled-jaw GP – he also found a new understanding of what healthcare could be. Instead of reciting clinical answers, Hart asked Frost personal questions. Instead of suggesting a prescription drug, he talked about the next local park run. Frost still had reservations about doctors; when he started a controversial diet that – according to a book he had read – could reverse his diabetes, he was nervous to tell Hart. “I didn’t want him to say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that, you don’t know what you’re doing,’” he says. But Hart offered non-judgemental support. “He even read the same book as me,” Frost says, smiling through grey beard bristles. After spending a few sessions on Frost’s interests, Hart started revealing some of his own, like cycling. And when he intuited that Frost was “sort of bored and fed up with his life,” he offered him an unusual prescription: a cycling course in his neighbourhood. “It wasn’t really about controlling his diabetes as much as it was about helping him to get out and do something,” he says. Frost found Hart’s enthusiasm contagious, but he still had some doubts. He was new to the area, didn’t know the roads, and was worried his fellow cyclists would be too advanced for him. But he soon found refuge in his cycling prescription, which was led by Pedal Ready, an organisation that largely caters to adults who are just starting to get on a bike again. Over time, beyond cycling skills and new friends, Frost also saw tangible health benefits. He lost 20kg and got to a point where he could do what other GPs had once deemed impossible: he came off his insulin. There’s a term for the kind of prescription Hart offered Frost: a social prescription. Social prescribing doesn’t just serve patients with obviously “social” issues, such as loneliness or social anxiety, but can also help those with physical issues, like dementia or cancer. The name comes from foundational research by Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson that suggests a person’s health is largely determined by social factors, like their work, environment and relationships. Social prescribing aims to address these factors, known as “social determinants”, by offering people prescriptions not in the form of a pill bottle, but as activities in their local community. These can include exercise
In 1938, with the world still reeling from an economic depression, a group of Harvard University researchers wondered: what makes a healthy and happy life? It’s a question that has captivated the earliest philosophers, artists and faith leaders – but for the first time, psychiatrists sought empirical answers. In their lab, they gathered 268 second-year students (then all men), and analysed their health through a series of exams and questionnaires. The process was diligently repeated every two years, and eventually expanded to recruit the men’s children (and more than one thousand others) to take part, too. In its 80-plus years observing 1,300 people, the Harvard Study of Adult Development repeatedly found that the greatest predictor of a person’s long-term wellbeing is their social relationships. The then-dominant view credited “genetics” for healthy adult development, but the study found that the people who were healthiest at age 80 were the ones most satisfied in their relationships at age 50. It also found that ageing adults who had strong social support experi-
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enced less mental deterioration than those who lacked it. integrated health institution, the Bromley-by-Bow Centre, In 1984, a young clergyman named Andrew Mawson in his church. The centre had two radical premises: it would discovered first-hand the roles that social relationships be run by, for and with the local community; and it would have in maintaining good health. He had been called to Tower address social determinants of health, not just the physical Hamlets in London, one of the UK’s most deprived commu- consequences. His first priority was to make sure Bromley’s nities, to take over as minister of the United Reformed Church. architecture reflected its founding premises. Instead of a He didn’t have much initial support, or much of an idea of “boring NHS box”, the centre was constructed like a castle where to begin. “We had £400, some run-down buildings, – made of the same handmade bricks used at Glyndea derelict park behind us, and about a dozen people – all bourne opera house, and filled with finely crafted wooden over 70 – there greeting me in the congregation,” he recalls. chairs. In lieu of a lifeless waiting room there was a café, But Mawson says he gained a sense of clarity – and a garden, a dance studio, an art gallery. outrage – when he met a woman from the community named There was just one thing Bromley-by-Bow’s commuJean Vialls, a 35-year-old cancer patient who additionally nity-run doctors’ office didn’t have when Mawson first suffered, he says, from “all of the complications that poverty conceived it: actual doctors. That changed in 1997, when brings.” Mawson intuited that Vialls needed a more patient- GP Sam Everington joined Bromley’s cause. centred approach to treat the many sources of suffering in Everington, a self-proclaimed rebel against the convenher life, not just the cancer. And when he saw that the support tional GP doctrine, says Bromley’s patient-first approach she was receiving from health and social services was not resonated with him immediately. “I used my first name, I enough, he summoned Vialls’ friends to give her nature’s never wore a tie, I shared my notes with my patients, which, oldest and simplest form of care: companionship. 30 years ago, was pretty unheard of,” he says. Efforts from Vialls’ friends may have helped make He had grown up in a family of seven children her numbered days more liveable, but she soon and spent summers picking mushrooms, succumbed to her cancer. What followed, Mawson climbing mountains and swimming in the lakes remembers, was a tense boardroom meeting held in on his grandfather’s farm in Norway. “When the Royal London Hospital, where health and policy you’ve had family getting together your whole officials blamed Vialls’ death on administrative negli- Previous and below: life, you think it’s normal, but actually it’s not gence and poor internal communication. But for him, Frank Frost and the normal for a lot of people,” he says. “So my it was indicative of something bigger. “Human beings Chain Gang cycle group. parents taught me, if you’re lucky in life, you are social creatures, and health is about human Joining it was a social have a duty to help other people.” relationships,” he says. The conventional medical prescription from his He initially pursued a career in law, but model – diagnose, treat, repeat – wasn’t enough. GP, Ollie Hart, which soon decided the barrister life wasn’t for him. Driven by that conviction, Mawson spent the changed his life – and Still, when he started his medical career in 1990s creating what would become the UK’s first health – for the better the 1980s, he never lost his eye for justice. When he was a junior doctor at Royal London Hospital, he spent Christmas Day sleeping on the streets to protest long working hours. A few years later, he co-wrote a paper for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on racism in the field’s hiring practices. Along with fellow doctor Aneez Esmail, now a professor of general practice at the University of Manchester, he submitted applications identical in experience and qualifications to nearly two dozen senior NHS positions, and found that those with English-sounding names were twice as likely to be shortlisted than those with Asian-sounding ones. The act earned Everington and Esmail charges and threats, albeit unpursued, from the General Medical Council. But his reputation as a GP remained and eventually reached the ears of Mawson. “You need the best GPs in tough communities, and someone eventually said, ‘You need to go talk to Dr. Sam Everington’,” Mawson says. For Everington, Bromley’s radical directive to address the social determinants of someone’s health was common sense. “I’d always felt that what we learned in medical school was a bit wrong – to label someone a diabetic and to focus so little on who that patient is and what they care about,” he says. Plus, he adds, most patients forget much of what their doctors tell them (a study found 40 to 80 per cent of medical information given to patients is “forgotten immediately”). And so, Everington says, a better approach – one which Bromley has used to treat 43,000 patients since its opening, and which has inspired thousands of other Bromley-style centres around the nation and the world – is to offer treatments that respond to a patient’s individual passions. He describes it as less “what’s the matter with you?” and more “what matters to you?” On a practical level, it means GPs helping patients to fulfil both their basic needs: health, but also food, shelter, employment, and their more personal ones: friendship, community, a sense of purpose.
His initial social prescription was for a specific cycling course, but when he made friends with his fellow trainees, the crew evolved into “the Chain Gang” – a 20-strong group that regularly organises rides around Sheffield’s Peak District, usually following the area’s disused railway tracks. Frost says that the sense of community the group provides has held each of them accountable to carry on cycling. “We all look out for each other – if someone needs to go slower, we never leave them. If someone needs their bike fixed, there’s a guy who’s a mechanic,” he says. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, they kept in touch, even when they couldn’t go on rides. “It’s turned into quite a friendship group as well.” All of these changes, Frost says, are thanks to Hart inspiring him, and generally being “a really great bloke.” But Hart says there is a real science to social prescribing. “We know that a person’s sense of self-worth and meaning in their life has a really big part to play in their health,” he says. Recognising the growing body of research linking health to social factors, NHS England recently committed to direct 900,000 people to social prescribing channels by 2024. So far, the NHS estimates, 60 per cent of clinical commissioning groups in England currently have social prescribing schemes. Hart works with South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Integrated Care System. He says he’ll often ask patients what they’re doing to look after themselves, and try to detect both verbal and nonverbal cues in their response. Are they “buzzing” to share what they’ve been up to? Or do they seem overwhelmed, lost or lonely? James Sanderson, the CEO of the National Academy for Social Prescribing, an independent organisation supporting local social prescriptions, says GPs are well-suited to direct social prescribing. “It’s that professional knowledge that combines with the individual’s own likes and interests that creates that magical opportunity of connection,” he says. He points out that surveys often reveal GPs to be among the most trusted people in their community. But not all GPs have the community infrastructure or bandwidth to integrate social prescribing the way that Hart does. “You’ve only got ten minutes with [a patient], and that’s not enough time to really go through those social issues around isolation and loneliness,” says Mohan Sekeram, a GP in East Merton. “So you end up looking at the medical aspect, because that’s what we’re trained at doing, and often the patient doesn’t get the treatment they need, we don’t give them the treatment they deserve, and they come back a few weeks later.” That cycle bodes poorly for an already overstressed NHS, especially since lonely people are nearly twice as likely to visit a GP. To address this shortfall, Sekeram, who helped facilitate a social prescribing pilot in his practice, says having access to “link workers” – community experts who facilitate social prescribing – has made a tangible difference. GPs can refer patients to link workers, or in some schemes,
patients can refer themselves directly. “[Link workers] can spend an hour with the patient and really see the root cause issues to come up with a plan,” he says. Beyond helping patients, research suggests that having link workers available to offer and manage social prescriptions could also help alleviate the burden on the health system. In a 2018 survey by the Royal College of General Practitioners, 59 per cent of GPs agreed that social prescribing would reduce their workload; one evidence review showed demand for GP services dropped among patients who were given social prescriptions. NHS England recently decided to fund the salary of two link workers for every 30,000-50,000 patients in each primary care network of local health and social care providers. Still, the NHS has a tall order in addressing the unprecedented, overlapping health crises sparked by the pandemic. One 2020 study found soaring rates of anxiety and depression during early social distancing measures. Alcoholism also appears to be on the rise, with the British Liver Trust receiving a 500 per cent increase in support calls since last March. And perhaps the nation’s most ubiquitous lockdown byproduct is its ever-worsening epidemic of loneliness – a condition studies have linked to dementia,
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stroke, cardiovascular disease, chronic stress, poor sleep and even premature death. The solution is not as simple as just putting people together with other people; a recent 55,000-person survey on loneliness suggests the quality of those relationships, not quantity, is what matters. Akeela Shaikh knows what it’s like to be lonely, but not alone. Four years ago, the Bolton-based mother of two stopped feeling like her “cheeky, loving self” and started becoming defensive and depressed. Though she had plenty of people supporting her – friends urging her to socialise, her husband and children encouraging her to cheer up – she ignored them. “I couldn’t get out of bed… It was a nightmare,” she says. Shaikh had a number of stressors in her life at that time: a sick mother and mother-in-law, a painful back injury. But she wouldn’t gain clarity until 2018, when a nurse connected her with Joanne Gavin, then a link worker with Bolton Community and Voluntary Services. “She cried the first time I ever met her,” Gavin remembers of that first appointment. As Gavin got to know Shaikh, she learned some details about the woman behind the tears, such as the fact that she’d been working since she was 16 years old. So when Shaikh was forced to give up her job as a healthcare aide because of her back injury, that absence – Gavin intuited – hurt her even more than the physical pain. “I don’t think people realise how badly not working affects some of us,” says Gavin, who now works in a similar prescribing role with employment and health service provider Ingeus. Looking back on that time, Shaikh agrees. “I just felt like I couldn’t do anything for anybody, and there were days where I’d look out the window and think about ending it all,” Shaikh says. Her husband and daughter “went behind her back” to get every form of care possible: dozens of doctors, medication for depression and different forms of therapy. But nothing clicked until Gavin helped Shaikh to see that what she really needed was a chance to feel like herself again. Gavin offered Shaikh a social prescription aimed at helping her to do just that: a volunteer office administrator post at Lagan’s Foundation, a charity supporting children with feeding and heart troubles, where Shaikh could channel her care for others into something bigger. She loved it immediately; it was a chance to use her people skills without putting physical stress on her back. Lagan’s Foundation ultimately created a position for her to work there full-time. “If I hadn’t been referred to Joanne, I don’t know what I would have done,” Shaikh says of the experience. The two remain friends and keep in close contact. “She totally changed my life, and it just shows how a person that wanted to kill herself is now living a normal life like everybody else.” Frank Frost and Akeela Shaikh are not anomalies. Dozens of anonymous beneficiaries have success stories to share: “Lucy”, a lonely woman in her 60s from outside of Cork found much-needed companionship through a local crafting group; “Susan”, a 27-year-old single mother from Manchester, “got her life back on track” when her prescriber helped her to find safe housing and employment; “Ray”, a 50-year-old man struggling with alcoholism and anxiety, found comfort through Above: Akeela Shaikh, the YMCA and his prescriber’s listening ear. who was experiencing But the very different circumstances – and depression and isolation prescriptions – of the Lucys and Susans and after a back injury. Rays make it difficult to measure the large- Left: Ollie Hart, a GP scale impact of social prescribing. Studies and based in Sheffield and reports have linked social prescribing with lower an advocate of using A&E admissions, fewer subsequent GP visits social prescriptions
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and better patient outcomes. One two-year pilot in Rotherham only to link workers – and definitely not what he calls the reported a 50p return on investment for each £1 invested, “expensive assurance documents no-one reads.” but forecast that this would increase with every year as This local autonomy can become particularly crucial if, benefits would likely persist long-term, with costs recouped for example, a pandemic completely disrupts businessafter two years and greater savings made thereafter. as-usual. Eithne Foley, a social prescriber with Le Cheile But while local pilots show promise, multiple systematic Family Resource Centre near Cork, Ireland, had only been in reviews suggest the approach needs more robust and her role for two months before Covid-19 uprooted her usual uniform evidence to be considered truly effective and invest- routine of meeting people – in-person, over six sessions – ment-worthy. When it comes to showing results, one of before connecting them with a local social group. social prescribing’s greatest virtues – its intensely individual When Covid-19 shut down those groups, Foley and her nature – may also be its greatest flaw. “Social prescribing is colleagues got creative, offering “Health and Wellbeing widely advocated and implemented, but current evidence Zoom cafés”, each week a different theme, to help stimulate fails to provide sufficient detail to judge either success or bonding online. She says the Zoom offering has also value for money,” concludes a widely-cited BMJ review from encouraged new people to join, including some who were 2017. “If social prescribing is to realise its potential, future too self-conscious to show up in person, or who lived too far evaluations must be comparative by design and consider away. “If there were a knitting group, it used to be only people within driving distance could attend,” she says. Still, Foley when, by whom, for whom, how well and at what cost.” Everington and Mawson, however, warn against compro- knows online-only events attract a self-selecting group, mising the integrity of the approach in the push to get and that nothing replaces in-person connection. And then there’s the fact that nearly three million consistent data. “People in government always people in the UK don’t use the internet. want to see something that’s neat and replicable, In August 2020, the UK government and they don’t understand that what you’re actually awarded the National Academy for Social replicating is a value set of helping people follow their Prescribing £5 million to help tackle Covid’s passions,” Everington says. Mawson argues that psychological toll. In December, it gave getting good data and retaining local control aren’t another £5.5 million to seven sites facilimutually exclusive. He imagines an Uber or Airbnb- Below: Akeela Shaikh style database, through which social prescribing (left) and Joanne Gavin tating nature-based social prescriptions – everything from tree-planting projects to beneficiaries could rate their experiences. “In this (right), the link worker way, the local community gets empowered and who helped her recover. community gardening and environmental arts and crafts – with pilots launching throughout funded to look after itself, and you get real-time Opposite: GP Sam data on what activity is funded and what impact Everington outside the 2021. It aims to help people hit hardest by it has,” Mawson says. He believes funding should Bromley-by-Bow Health the coronavirus pandemic, including those go directly to the socially prescribed activity – not Centre in east London living in deprived areas, people with chronic
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and mental health conditions, and BAME communities. In South Yorkshire, home to one of the seven winning sites, Madvee Seechunder understands what that connection to nature – and other people – can do. She says the pandemic made her feel lonelier than ever, as she had no access to the internet, no phone service and limited English. But what she did have was a longing to meet people and learn new things. Her social prescriber, Debbie Bishop, who works with the South Yorkshire Housing Association, promptly connected her with a free internet phone and an introduction to the local women’s activity centre, where she could take English language and IT classes. She also found her a free spot on a local “Empowered in Nature” excursion, where she joined a mindfulness workshop offering crafts, cooking and discussions in the forest. “I got to see parts of Yorkshire I’d never seen before, and meet other people who also experience anxiety and depression,” Seechunder says. “It made me realise we can all experience mental health issues, and I felt normal.” Frank Frost now leads the cycling group he linked up with through his social prescription, and he even occasionally helps Hart to teach incoming medical students about social prescribing. “I was awful to my body when I was younger, and if I can do it, anybody can do it,” he says. But he acknowledges that it took years before he realised what was possible. “I’m not blaming anybody, but the NHS is a huge monolith,” he says. “It takes them a long time to understand when there’s a new thing. I wish everyone in the NHS were like Ollie.” Now, Hart – along with Sekeram, Everington and other UK social prescribing experts – advises schemes around the nation and the world. One such place is Ontario, Canada, where the Alliance for Healthier Communities launched a year-long social prescribing pilot in 2018 and saw a 49 per cent decrease in loneliness among the 1,100+ participants. Kate Mulligan, who oversaw the pilot and directs the centre’s policy and communications, says those insights inspired the “wrap-around supports” now offered at Covid testing pop-up sites. “When you’re being tested, you’re also being screened for social isolation and other social determinants of health,” she says. “It’s like ‘you’re here for an emergency, but while you’re here, let’s make sure you have what you need,’ and that can be very material determinants of health, like food, but it can also be a connection to a supportive community.” Australia has had similar successes. Jayne Nelson, CEO of community health service IPC Health, says she was inspired by Mulligan’s work, and modelled a pilot after it in Melbourne. Though smaller in scale, the pilot found all 200 participants that were referred to a social prescription felt more optimistic about the future, more closely connected to others and more able to deal with their problems. Social prescribing has also spread to Finland, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Philippines and other places. As more
local and global leaders try to implement it, founding doctor Everington urges them to come and see social prescribing in action, through the stories of patients experiencing it. His go-to story is about a patient he treated four years ago, where a social prescription took them both to a train station. “Stratford station, Platform 8,” he recalls. The patient had terminal cancer. But instead of being preoccupied with “what was the matter”, Everington spent the man’s remaining days focused on what mattered to him: his family, his career and his personal artefacts (Everington recalls his particular pride for a 50-year-old bottle of whisky). “He told me he was a great trainspotter, and wanted one last attempt to trainspot,” he says. And so, Everington followed that passion with a prescription his medical school days had never trained him for. He and the patient’s daughter found a wheelchair, and gave her father his last wish: a final chance to trainspot there on platform 8, in front of his loved ones, before he died a few days later. The trainspotting trip may not have been able to help with the physical illness, but it did something else. “Part of it is understanding that we’re all going to die,” Everington says. ”It’s the quality of life that counts.” � Julia Hotz is a writer specialising in mental health issues, and is communities manager at the Solutions Journalism Network
We are living in the Exponential Age, one that is defined by constant technological acceleration. Entrepreneur and analyst Azeem Azhar explains why it’s so hard for us to fathom exponential change – and why our inability to do so has the potential to tear apart businesses, economies and the fabric of society By Azeem Azhar _______ Photography: Nadav Kander
take advantage of the Exponential Age. If Amazon’s early recognition of this trend helped transform it into one of the most valuable companies in history, it was not alone. Many of the new digital giants that emerged, from Uber to Alibaba, Spotify to TikTok, took a similar path. Companies that didn’t adapt to exponential technology shifts, like much of the newspaper publishing industry, didn’t stand a chance. We can visualise the gap by looking at an exponential curve. Technological development roughly follows this shape. It starts off looking a bit humdrum. In those early days, exponential change is distinctly boring, and most people and organisations ignore it. At this point in the curve, the industry producing an exponential technology looks exciting to those in it, but like an irrelevant backwater to everyone else outside it. But at some point, the line of exponential change crosses that of linear change. And soon it reaches an inflection point. That shift in gear, which is both rapid and subtle, is hard to fathom. (Fig. 4) Because, for all the visibility of exponential change, most of the institutions that make up our society follow a linear trajectory. Codified laws and unspoken social norms; legacy companies and NGOs; political systems and intergovernmental bodies – all have only ever known how to adapt incrementally. Stability is an important force within institutions. In fact, it’s built into them. The gap between our institutions’ capacity to change and our new technologies’ accelerating speed is the defining consequence of our shift to the Exponential Age. On the one side, you have the new behaviours, relationships and structures that are enabled by exponentially improving technologies, and the new products and services built from them. On the other, you have the norms that have evolved or been designed to suit the needs of earlier configurations of technology. The gap leads to extreme tension. In the Exponential Age this divergence is ongoing – and it is everywhere.
(Fig. 1) Linear institutions, exponential
(Fig. 2) Transistors per
technologies and the exponential gap
microprocessor (billions) 20 The exponential gap
Amazon turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213bn (£150bn), it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Group, America’s Costco and every British retailer. Only Walmart, with more than half-a-trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon remained by far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was also a lot more than just an online shop, however. Its huge businesses covering fast-growing areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media and hardware added a further $172bn in sales. At the heart of its success is a staggering research and development budget – $36 billion in 2019 – which is used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum leaves other companies – and many governments – behind. It is not far off the UK government’s annual budget for research and development. Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain – with annual sales in excess of £50 billion – had a research lab whose budget was merely in the “six figures” region in 2016. Perhaps more remarkable was the rate at which Amazon had grown this budget. Ten years earlier, Amazon’s research budget had been $1.2 billion. Over the course of the next decade, the firm increased its annual R&D budget by about 44 per cent every year. As the 2010s went on, Amazon doubled down on its investments in research. In the words of Werner Vogels, the firm’s Chief Technology Officer, if they stopped innovating they “would be out of business in 10-15 years”. In the process, Amazon created a chasm between the old world and the new. The approach of traditional
business was to rely on models that had succeeded yesterday. They were based on a strategy that tomorrow might be a little different to now, but not markedly so. This kind of linear thinking, rooted in the assumption that change would take decades rather than months, may have worked in the past – but that’s not the case any more. Amazon’s advantage was that it understood the nature of the Exponential Age. The pace of change was accelerating. The companies that could harness the technologies of the new era would take off – and those that couldn’t keep up would be undone at remarkable speed. This divergence between the old and the new is one example of what I call the exponential gap (Fig. 1). The emergence of this gap is a consequence of exponential technology. Until the early 2010s, most companies assumed the cost of their inputs would remain pretty similar from year-to-year, perhaps with a nudge for inflation. The raw materials might fluctuate based on commodity markets; but their planning processes, institutionalised in management orthodoxy, could manage such volatility. But in the Exponential Age, one primary input for a company is its ability to process information. One of the main costs to process that data is computation. And the cost of computation didn’t rise each year, it declined rapidly. The underlying dynamics of how companies operate had shifted. Moore’s Law (Fig. 2) amounts to a halving of the underlying cost of computation every couple of years. It means that every ten years, the cost of the processing that can be done by a computer will decline by a factor of 100. But the implications of this process stretch far beyond our personal laptop use. In general, if an organisation needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won’t be too expensive in a couple of years. For companies, this realisation has deep significance. Organisations that understood this deflation was inevitable and had planned for it, became well-positioned to
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Consider the economy. When an Exponential Age company is able to grow to an unprecedented scale and establish huge market power, it may fundamentally undermine the dynamism of a market. Yet Industrial Age rules of monopoly may not recognise this behaviour as damaging. This is the exponential gap. Or take the nature of work. When new technologies allow firms and workers to offer and bid on short-term tasks through gig-working platforms (Fig. 3), it creates a vibrant market for small jobs, but potentially at the cost of more secure, dependable employment. When workers compete for work on task-sharing platforms, by bidding via mobile apps, what is their employment status? What rights do they have? Does this process empower them or dehumanise them? Nobody is quite sure: our approach to work was developed in the nineteenth and twentieth century. What can it tell us about semi-automated gig work? This is the exponential gap.
(Fig. 3) The gig economy has exposed an exponential gap between workers’ rights and semi-automated gig work
A further example: look at the relationship between markets and citizens. As companies develop new services using breakthrough technologies, ever more aspects of our lives will become mediated by private companies. What we once considered to be private to us will increasingly be bought and sold by an Exponential Age company. This creates a dissonance: the systems we have in place to safeguard our privacy are suddenly inadequate; we struggle to come up with a new, more apt set of regulations. This is the exponential gap. The most basic cause of the exponential gap is simple: we are bad at maths. Let’s consider for a moment what it actually feels like to live in the Exponential Age – the answer, as many readers will know, is bewildering. Someone like me, born in the early 1970s, has experienced wave after wave of innovations. From the landline to the mobile phone, dial-up internet to mobile internet, vinyl records to CDs to MP3s to streaming. At this point, I’ve owned the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever on
at least five different formats: vinyl record, cassette tape, compact disc, MP3 download and, now, streaming access. Human cognitive machinery does not naturally process such rapid change. The calculations bewilder us. Take the case of an atypical London rainstorm. Wembley Stadium is England’s national football venue. It is about eight kilometres north-west of my home, and I see it out of my window when I go to visit my in-laws. Its steel arch, spanning 315 metres and reaching 133 metres at its peak, soars above the silver-grey roof. It is an enormous edifice, seating some 90,000 people at capacity. Imagine sitting at the highest row of level three, the furthest above the pitch you can be – some 40m or so above the ground. Rain starts to fall, but you are sheltered by the partial roof above you. Yet this is no ordinary rain. This is exponential rain. The raindrops are going to gradually increase in frequency, doubling with each passing minute. One drop, then a minute later two drops, then a minute later four drops. By the fourth minute, eight drops. If it takes 30 minutes to get out of your seats and out of the stadium, how soon should you get moving to avoid being drenched? To be safe, you should start moving by no later than minute 17 – to give yourself 30 minutes to be clear of the stadium. By the 47th minute, the exponential rain will be falling at a rate of 141 trillion drops per minute. Assuming a raindrop is about four cubic millimetres, by the 47th minute the deluge would be 600 million litres of water. Of course, the rain in the 48th minute will be twice as large, so you are likely to get soaked in the car park. And if you make it to the car, the deluge in the 50th minute will comprise five billion litres of water. It would weigh five million tonnes. Frankly, if exponential rain is forecast, you’re best off staying at home. These exponential processes are counterintuitive. Psychologists who study how people save for the future have identified the “exponential growth bias” – which makes us underestimate the future size of something growing at a compounded rate. Studies in this area demonstrate how people are consistently befuddled by the compound growth of our savings, loans and pension plans. If you started investing in your pension a little bit late, you, like many of us, may have had a persistent bout of exponential growth bias. One study tested how well Swedish adults could understand compounding growth processes. Researchers asked an apparently rather muted question: how much 100 Swedish kroner, if left in
‘Amazon’s annual R&D budget had been $1.2bn. Over the next decade, it increased this by about 44 per cent every year’ a bank account to earn seven per cent interest a year for 30 years, would grow to. Even that simple growth rate baffled respondents. The median answer was 410. The correct answer, 761 kroner, was almost double that. More than 60 per cent of the respondents underestimated the answer. And that was people’s underestimate of an annual compounding rate of seven per cent. Imagine our predictions of an exponential technology that improves at ten per cent or more per annum. Three decades of compounded seven per cent change results in an increase of a factor of seven. A growth rate of around 40 per cent – which is roughly what Moore’s Law describes – would see a 32,000-fold increase in that same period. One peer-reviewed summary from 1975 pithily summarised the issue: underestimation of exponential growth was a “general effect which [was] not reduced by daily experience with growing processes.” This blindspot has a close relative – the “anchoring bias”. The Nobel Prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have explored how people make decisions amidst uncertainty. They find that when presented with a numerical challenge, people tend to fix upon some readily available number and adjust their
(Fig. 4) At A, the exponential growth is barely noticeable. At B, it is obvious
B A
responses around it. It’s a trick salespeople frequently use: by starting at a particular price, they anchor our expectations about what the real value of something might be. But it fails when it encounters exponential growth. As the growth curve takes off, people’s expectations remain anchored around small figures from early in the process. What happens when we try to make predictions about exponential change in the real world – rather than just in psychologists’ experiments? I’ve seen the trouble this poses first-hand. Over the course of my career, I’ve watched well-informed people pooh-pooh mobile phones, the internet, social networks, online shopping and electric vehicles as niche playthings destined for eternal obscurity. Over two decades, I’ve observed executives in established industries regularly, perhaps deliberately, look at the spread of a new product or service and dismiss it. Often, it was because the absolute numbers were small, in spite of signs of hockey-stick growth. Like spectators at Wembley Stadium during a period of exponential rain, they didn’t leave their seats until it was too late. For example, in the early 1980s, companies started to operate the first
(Fig. 5) The chunky Motorola DynaTAC cost $3,995 in 1984. The price and size of components have been falling ever since
cellular phone services. At the time, handsets were clunky, calls filled with static, data services non-existent and coverage patchy. Yet it was becoming clear that mobile telephony had clear, practical benefits. The giant American phone company AT&T asked the world’s top management consultancy firm, McKinsey, to estimate the future market size for this product. McKinsey put together a 20-year forecast: the US mobile phone market would approach 900,000 subscribers by 2000. Not quite. The first commercially available mobile phone, the cement brick-sized Motorola DynaTAC (Fig. 5), cost $3,995 in 1984. The core components were getting cheaper every year, and phones followed suit: becoming better, smaller and cheaper. But in the year 2000, you could find a new phone
for a couple of hundred dollars. And the capabilities of the networks were growing, too. In 1991, mobile networks were just starting to introduce data services – until then phones had been used almost exclusively for voice calls. In those days, if you bought a device to connect your computer to the phone network, you could use it to send data at a rate of 9,600 bits (or about 1,000 words) per second. Had digital cameras been widespread at the time (they weren’t), sending a single photo would have taken several minutes. By 2020, common 4G phone networks could deliver 30,000,000 bits per second or more to handsets. Mobile tariffs collapsed in line with the growing speed of the networks. Between 2005 and 2014, the average cost of delivering one megabyte of data, the equivalent of about 150,000 words, dropped from $8 to a few cents. In short: McKinsey had miscalled it. In the year 2000, more than 100m Americans owned a mobile phone. The most storied management consultants in the world had been wrong by a factor of 100. Predicting the future is hard – predicting it against an exponential curve is harder still. (Fig. 7) This is not a problem limited to the private sector. The International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1974, in the wake of the global oil crisis of the previous year. The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook has, for years, predicted the amount of electricity generated by solar power (Fig. 6). In one of its forecasts, made in 2009, the IEA predicted five gigawatts of global solar power by 2015. They were wrong. The actual number in 2009 – yes, the year in which they made that prediction – was eight gigawatts. In 2010, they upgraded that 2015 forecast to eight gigawatts. In 2011, they upped it again to 11 gigawatts. In 2012, they predicted 24 gigawatts. By 2014, they were predicting 35 gigawatts of solar capacity by the next year. The real capacity for 2015: 56 gigawatts. This global group of experts systematically misread the market for six years straight, right up until the year beforehand. But it didn’t stop there. After six years of hopeless forecasts, they continued the trend for several more. In 2018, the IEA estimated global solar capacity was 90 gigawatts. And they predicted a rough stand-still for the next year, an estimate of 90 gigawatts for 2019. In reality, 2019’s output exceeded 105 gigawatts. In that year, the annual growth they forecast was off by 100 per cent – or infinity, depending on how you do that maths. It was a decade of looking at an exponential technology dropping in price and increasing in scale – and systematically getting it wrong.
The problem is not just that we underestimate exponential growth. Experts who are mindful of the power of exponentiality can also be prone to overestimate its power. In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2019 a $1,000 computer would be “approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain.” This proved to be optimistic. When trying to square rapid, exponential growth with an inordinately complex issue, even a slight error in your basic assumptions can badly throw off your whole prediction. And with a neural network as complex as the human brain, it’s near impossible to get these assumptions right. Our best current guess is that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron is connected, on average, to a thousand others, leading scientists to estimate there are around 100 trillion connections in the human brain. If these estimates prove correct, and if we have properly understood the functions of the neurons, a machine that mimics the complexity of the brain could conceivably be built within a couple of decades. But those are big ifs. When our scientific understanding of a subject is still developing, predictions are sometimes little better than guesswork.
(Fig. 6) Energy produced globally by solar panels has been growing exponentially, in quantities that are often underestimated
And these problems of underestimation and overestimation are confounded by a third difficulty – which we might call “mis-estimation”. Exponentiality often has unexpected, arguably unpredictable effects. Take chewing gum. In the decade from 2007, American chewing-gum sales fell 15 per cent – just as 220 million American adults bought their first smartphones. This was no coincidence. When people got into a shop’s queue, they would once have spent the time browsing the goodies for sale at the counter – and gum was the obvious choice. Suddenly, they were spending that time playing with their phones. So gum sales plummeted. Nobody saw that one coming. Predicting the impact of the iPhone on grocery store chewing-gum sales would have needed a modern-day Nostradamus.
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‘The problem is not just that we underestimate exponential growth – experts can be prone to overestimating its power’
(Fig. 7) Penetration of major technologies in the United States, showing the number of years taken to grow from 10% to 75% penetration 100 Telephone 75
Electric power ICE automobile
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primary cause of the exponential gap is our failure to predict the cadence of exponential change, the secondary cause is our consequent failure to adapt to it. As the speed of change increases, our society remoulds itself at a slower pace. Our institutions have an in-built tendency towards incrementalism. The way fast technology runs ahead of our slow institutions is nothing new. This is arguably one of the key, inevitable consequences of innovation. In the 19th century, breakthroughs in industrial machinery catapulted the British economy into a position of global dominance. But there was a hitch: a 50-year period where British GDP expanded rapidly, but workers’ wages remained the same. Those with capital to invest in new machinery did well initially, because it was technology that was driving the growth. It took decades for workers’ wages to catch up. The problem was not just wages. The Industrial Revolution eventually meant more wealth, a longer life span and a better quality of life for all. But for most labourers, the first effect of industrialisation was an often unwelcome change in working conditions. Starting in the late 18th century, technology moved millions of people from fields, farms and
workshops into factories. In the 1760s, before the Industrial Revolution really took off, the average British worker toiled for 41.5 hours a week. By 1830, this had risen to 53.6 hours – an extra hour-anda-half each day. By the 1870s, when the Victorian economy had largely completed its transition from agriculture to industry, the typical worker was at 57 hours a week. One way to make sense of the social problems brought by industrialisation is as a gap – between the speed of technological and social change, and of institutional and political adaptation. The state’s failure to regulate working practices reflected the preoccupations of a pre-modern, agrarian and aristocratic elite; Britain had a modern economy, but a distinctly pre-modern political order. As the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told me, “There was a time lag between the change and the policymakers catching up with it”. Like our Victorian forebears, today’s institutions face the conundrum of keeping up with rapidly changing technologies. But now, the gap will grow bigger and more quickly. In the Exponential Age, radical change takes place not over decades, but over years or months. It’s worth pausing to reflect on what these “institutions” actually are. The word conjures up a sense of solidity: an imposing police building, a large church, or the UN headquarters in New York. For our purposes, I consider an institution to be any kind of arrangement between groups of actors in society that helps them relate to each other. Some institutions might be obviously “institutional” in nature: a business is an arrangement between employees, bosses and owners; a state between its citizens and the machinery of government. Others, like the notion of the rule of law, or the body of international agreements and domestic legislation that makes up intellectual property law, are not groups of people, but are institutional nonetheless. And not all institutions need to be so formal. There are unwritten rules – the habits and practices that guide our behaviour. All these institutions have something in common. They are largely not cut out to develop at an exponential pace, and in the face of rapid societal change. In some cases, they’re not cut out to adapt at all. Take one of the most institutional institutions in history: the Catholic Church. Nearly 2,000 years old, claiming divine origin, the Church is one of the longest standing organisations in existence. In 1633, it got into a dispute with the astronomer Galileo Galilei (Fig. 8) and his conclusions about the Solar System. Yet it was not until 1979, 346 years after the astronomer was condemned to house
‘Many of the most urgent issues of our time can only be solved by exponential technolog y: the climate crisis, food, healthcare…’
arrest until his death – and 22 years after the Sputnik satellite orbited the planet – that Pope John Paul II ordered a Papal commission into Galileo’s conviction. Some 13 years later the findings of the 17th-century inquisition that denounced Galileo’s ideas were finally overturned. This is an extreme example. But if few institutions are as slow to adapt as the Catholic Church, almost none are particularly fast-moving. This is the inverse of the difficulty of predicting exponential change: even when our predictions are
(Fig. 8) Galileo had to wait 346 years for the Catholic Church to accept his subversive ideas on the Solar System
correct, our institutional responses can still be lackadaisical. Take the Kodak Corporation. In 1975, a Kodak engineer called Steve Sasson put together a device, about the size of a toaster, that could save images electronically (Fig. 9). A 23-second process transferred the images to a tape where they could be viewed on a TV screen. At the time it was astonishing. Personal computers barely existed as a category. Kodak sold 90 per cent of the photographic film in the US and 85 per cent of its cameras. A couple of years later, Sasson was awarded US Patent 4131919A for an “electronic still camera”. He figured at the time, by extrapolating from Moore’s Law, that it would take 15-20 years for digital cameras to start to compete with film. His estimate was bang on. But Kodak, with a two-decade head start, did not clutch the oppor-
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PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY; ALAMY; COVER IMAGES
tunity. “When you’re talking to a bunch of corporate guys about 18 to 20 years in the future, when none of those guys will still be in the company, they don’t get too excited about it”, recalls Sasson. Kodak did go on to develop a range of digital cameras; in fact, it was one of the first to market. The company even recognised the power of the internet, buying Ofoto, a photo-sharing site, in 2001, nine years before Instagram was founded. But institutional knowledge, the established consensus about what their business was about, held them back from attaining anything near Instagram’s reach. Kodak’s execs viewed Ofoto as an opportunity to sell more physical prints (their old business), not as a chance to connect people via photos of their shared experiences. Indeed, the rationale to hamstring Ofoto by linking the site to Kodak’s traditional film-and-prints business was the same wrong-headed decision the firm took more than a decade earlier with the digital camera. Yet the market for film cameras had peaked in the late 90s – the world had moved on, propelled by technology. Kodak had not: the institutional memory was strong. Eventually, the firm hit the buffers, struggling and eventually folding in 2012. Kodak sold Ofoto as part of its bankruptcy process. There are exceptions to this institutional slowness, of course. On occasion, institutions can lend themselves to very rapid change. Wars and revolutions help. It took less than a year to create the International Monetary Fund after it was proposed at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944. The visceral shock of WW2 and the need to find a solid base for international co-operation provided the impetus to establish many other institutions, like the United Nations and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These are, in the language of institutional theory, moments of “punctuated equilibrium”. But on one level, this caveat merely reveals the sheer scale of the disaster needed to shock institutions into rapid change. In the absence of a catastrophe, institutions tend to adapt more like the Catholic Church than the frantic establishment of the UN.
Put together these two forces – the inherent difficulty of making predictions in the exponential age, and the inherent slowness of institutional change – and you have the makings of the exponential gap. As technology takes off, our businesses, governments and social norms remain almost static. Our society cannot keep up. In the early years of the 21st century, this exponential gap was relatively trivial. The demise of Kodak is not a society-threatening problem. A company’s failure to adapt is bad news for its shareholders, but it’s not the end of the world. However, as the Exponential Age takes off, the gap will pose an ever more existential problem. At the turn of the 2020s, exponential technology has become systemically important. Every service we access, whether in the richest country or the poorest, is likely to be mediated by a smartphone. Every interaction with a company or our government will be handled by a machine learning algorithm. Our education and healthcare will be delivered through AI-enabled technologies (Fig. 10). Our manufactured products, be they household conveniences or our houses, will be produced by 3D printers (Fig. 11). Exponential technologies will increasingly be the medium through which we interact with each other, the state and the economy. For the people and companies who understand this shift, the exponential gap creates a huge opportunity. Those who harness the power of exponentiality will do better than those who don’t. This isn’t simply about personal wealth. Our rules and norms are shaped by the technologies of the time – those who design essential technologies get a chance to shape how we all live. And these people are in the minority. We are witnessing the emergence of a two-tier society – between those who have harnessed the power of new technology, and those who haven’t. What is to be done? On the one hand, we can close the gap by slowing the rise of the top line. But this acceleration is already baked into the structure of our economies. The process
(Fig. 10) Moore’s law (black) vs growth in computation for AI (blue) over 5 years 200
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(Fig. 9) Kodak had a two-decade lead on digital camera technology, but failed
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through which technologies improve and accelerate is not centrally controlled. It emerges from needs of individual firms, and is met by a coalition of players across the economy. The virologist benefits from faster genome sequencing, and so seeks out better electrochemistry, faster processors and quicker storage for genomic data. The householder wants more efficient solar cells, the farmer more precision methods to fertilise her crops. The Exponential Age is a near-inevitable consequence of human ambition. Even if we could slow the pace of exponential change, it’s not clear this would be desirable. Many of the most urgent issues of our time can only be solved with exponential technology. Take climate change: in order to decarbonise our economies, we will need to rapidly shift to renewable sources of energy, develop alternatives to animal proteins for food, and scale building materials that have a zero carbon footprint. Figuring out how to deliver good quality healthcare, education, sanitation and power to the poorest billions of the planet is another problem that technological innovation can address. The expensive (and resource intensive) way that the developed world has achieved those outcomes is just not practical for poor countries during a time of environmental crisis.
(Fig. 11) Manufactured goods will be produced largely by 3D printers – a key exponential technology
So putting a brake on the development of technologies is hard to justify. On the other hand, we can close the gap by making the lower line rise faster. That means equipping our social institutions – from governments, to companies, to cultural norms – to adapt at pace. It would allow us to harness the power of exponentiality, and the rules and norms that can shape it, for the needs of our society. This is urgent. In the Exponential Age the institutions that govern our economies will cease to be fit for purpose. New technologies will clash with our existing expectations, rules and systems. We need radical thinking to prevent the exponential gap eroding the fabric of our society. �
to capitalise on it by looking ahead 0 1
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This is an extract from Exponential, Azeem Azhar’s new book, which is on sale in September (Penguin Random House)
The E u te l e s c r o p e a n S p o and s pe will be a c e A g e n cy o l ve o s n e o f e nt into s ’s E u c l i d my s te pa th r i es o f t h e e g re a t u c e t o t r y n u ni ve r s e : d ex p l a i n e d ark e n e rg y Por tf olio b BENE y DICT REDG ROVE Jonat Words: ha n O ’Calla g ha n
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A mysterious force known as dark energy pervades the Universe
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And we have no idea what exactly it is. Launching in the second half of 2022, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope will be sent into space with the aim of solving some of the secrets of dark energy, which is causing the expansion of our Universe to accelerate, resulting in galaxies moving away from each other at faster speeds. “There is no single compelling theory at the moment of what dark energy is,” says Catherine Heymans, professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland and a member of the Euclid consortium, a group of thousands of scientists that will pore over data collected by the telescope. Euclid will build on the work of previous instruments such as ESA’s Planck telescope, which studied cosmic microwave background radiation – the remnant heat from the Big Bang – from 2009 to 2013. But by using infrared and visible light instead, Euclid’s measurement of the acceleration caused by dark energy is expected to be “five to ten times better” than we have now, says René Laureijs, Euclid’s project scientist at ESA. Euclid will also measure dark matter, refining our understanding of the Universe’s structure. “By looking at how gravity is changing those structures, we can actually test Einstein’s theory of general relativity across the Universe,” Heymans says.
Previous spread _____ The Euclid telescope is being assembled in a clean room at an Airbus facility in Toulouse, France. It is 4.5m tall, 3.1m across and weighs 2,160kg, and its 1.2m-wide mirror is made of silicon carbide and coated in silver. The mirror shown opposite it is used for calibration: “It’s used to align the telescope’s mirrors,” says Paolo Musi, the project manager for industry on the telescope from Thales Alenia Space.
Left page _____ In the course of its six-year primary mission, “our target is to observe two billion galaxies” at a rate of about 30 galaxies per image, says Laureijs. Scientists will study the shape and motion of these galaxies – the former showing hidden dark matter obscuring our view of the galaxies; the latter showing how fast they have been accelerated by dark energy – at a scale never before possible. No single telescope has attempted to image so many galaxies before. The telescope’s matrix of 6 x 6 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) will capture the faint light from these galaxies.
Left below _____ Located in the payload module are the Visual Imaging Channel (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). While the image quality of the telescope will technically be worse than Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, it is the sheer volume of imagery taken by Euclid – revealing galaxies back to the early Universe – that will be so groundbreaking. “We can map the 3D distribution of dark matter to about ten billion years ago,” says Laureijs. “And with the distribution of galaxies, we can measure the expansion of our Universe, which is governed by dark energy.”
Above _____ To make sure the telescope survives its journey to space on a Russian Soyuz rocket, it is shaken to see how its components respond. These cables connect to accelerometers that cause these vibrations. “They are glued to several pieces of the telescope, and the acceleration in each individual part of the telescope is monitored and analysed,” says Musi. Following these tests in Toulouse, Euclid was sent to the Liège Space Centre in Belgium, where it was placed in a thermal vacuum to check it will survive the frozen expanse of space.
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Previous spread _____ The telescope will be positioned about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, in a region known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), where the gravity of the Sun and Earth effectively cancel out, allowing the telescope to remain in a stable position with minimal fuel usage. A flat rectangle of carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic known as a Sun shield will protect the side of the telescope that is facing the Sun, so that it is unhindered by the light of our star. The telescope’s temperature must be kept extremely cool to operate, down to about -190 degrees Celsius, so the side of the telescope that is against the Sun shield is covered in a gold-coloured thermal blanket, made of Mylar and Kapton, to keep the temperature low.
Left _____ The other two mirrors of the telescope, also made of silvercoated silicon carbide, direct the light gathered by the primary mirror into the telescope’s two instruments. The blue object seen here is called a dichroic filter, and its job is to split the incoming light into its visible and near-infrared wavelengths, while a yellow folding mirror directs the light. All of this enables the telescope to take its accurate images of galaxies and their shapes. “If you want to image something which has a shape, you have to be really sure your image quality hasn’t got a deformation itself,” says Giuseppe Racca, the agency project manager for Euclid at ESA. “That’s why Euclid has to have this perfection.”
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Above _____ Euclid’s instruments – such as the VIS, seen here wrapped in aluminium foil, which will be removed prior to flight – will produce vast quantities of data, in the order of 800 gigabytes per day. The data will be sent to Earth to antennas on the ground, where it will then be distributed to Euclid consortium scientists for analysis. “The way we do this is being tested now,” says Laureijs, “because we’re trying to avoid bottlenecks.”
Previous spread _____ Development of the telescope’s components began in 2013, with assembly starting in February 2019. Mounting the telescope on a trolley system allowed it to be rotated while different areas were worked on. “People also [dressed] in a special way with white suits, to avoid contamination of the optics,” says Musi. “This could become noisy elements in an image.” In 2022, the telescope will finally be secured in the payload bay of its rocket, ready to launch from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Top _____ A wide range of specialised tools and components are used throughout the telescope’s testing phase, a few of which are subsequently removed and stowed away, such as some of the items shown in this work area. “During the mechanical tests, you need a lot of tools,” says Laurent Brouard, Euclid’s programme manager at Airbus. Some components, for example, simply keep parts of the telescope in place while work is carried out, with no need for them to actually launch with the completed craft.
Above _____ Cables can cause problems during image capture, generating noise and interference, while their heat can create distortions. So, they must be run far from the telescope’s mirrors. Pictured here is an electromagnetic compatibility test, which is ensuring the cables are not causing any issues with one another. “You want as few electronics as possible inside [the telescope],” Brouard says. This helps give Euclid the high level of precision it needs to transform our understanding of the Universe.
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Top _____ Radiators get rid of excess heat while Euclid is in space, taking warmth from the instruments and then pumping it out into the vacuum, a method commonly used on other space missions – even the International Space Station – in order to prevent them overheating as they are bathed in sunlight. “There is no air to take out the heat,” says Musi. “You can only radiate it.” The radiator is connected to the instruments to ensure the temperature doesn’t interfere with measurements of the distant galaxies.
Above _____ The payload module of Euclid, containing the mirrors and instruments, is mounted to its service module, containing the electronics, via six mounting feet – one of which is seen here, behind its thermal blanket. It is no small achievement creating a machine that is sensitive enough to survey two billion galaxies, many of which are incredibly faint, but the work of scientists and engineers has made this possible. “I’m really excited,” Heymans says. “My whole career has been building up to this point.” �
INSIDE ROBLOX, THOUSANDS OF PLAYERS JOINED A FULL-FLEDGED FASCIST STATE MODELLED AFTER THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Did that make them Fashies IRL? By CECILIA D’ANASTASIO Illustration: LEO NATSUME
IN ONTARIO, CANADA, HAD BEEN TAPPING OUT THE SAME FOUR-LETTER SEQUENCE ON HIS KEYBOARD FOR HOURS.
W, A, S, D. W, A, S, D. He was steering his digital avatar, a LEGO-man-like military grunt, in laps around a futuristic airfield. Although his fingers ached, he would gladly have gone on for hours more. Every keystroke brought the 11-year-old closer to his goal: scaling the ranks of a group in the video game Roblox. The group had rules. Strict rules. Players dressed as pilots and marines went around barking out orders in little speech bubbles. The only three words Ferguson could say during training were “YES”, “NO” and “SIR”. And “SIR” generally applied to one person, Malcolm, the domineering adolescent who ruled the group. “His thing was the winky face,” Ferguson says. “He was charming. He was funny. He always had a response; it was instant. He was a dick.” At the time, in 2009, Roblox was just over two years old, but several million people – mostly kids and teens – were already playing it. The game isn’t really a game; it is a hub of interconnected virtual worlds, more like a sprawling mall video arcade than a stand-alone Street Fighter II machine. Roblox gives players a simple set of tools to create any environment they want, from Naruto’s anime village to a high school for mermaids. Players have built games about beekeeping, managing a theme park, flipping pizzas. They have also built spaces to role-play different characters and scenarios. Ferguson was attracted to the more organised, militaristic role-plays. (Now 23, he asked that I refer to him only by his online name. He says he hears it more often than his given name; also, he doesn’t want to be doxed.) Growing up, he says, he was an annoying kid. He was checked out of school, had no hobbies or goals or friends. “Literally, like, zero,” he says. Self-esteem issues and social anxiety made him listless, hard to relate to. It didn’t matter. When he got home from school every day, he’d load up Roblox. There, he says, “I could be king of the fucking world.” Or at least the king’s errand boy. In that early group he was in with Malcolm – a role-play based on the sci-fi military
game Halo – Ferguson proved his loyalty, drill after drill, lap after lap. Malcolm (not his real name) didn’t demand control; he simply behaved with the total assurance that he would always have it. “It very much was like being in a small military team,” Ferguson says. “You value that person’s opinion. You strive to do the best. You have to constantly check up to their standards.” Eventually, Ferguson became one of Malcolm’s trusted lieutenants. To grow their influence, the boys would invade other groups, charging in as Malcolm shouted the lyrics to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” over Skype. They funnelled new followers into their own role-plays – one based on Star Wars, where they were the Sith; another based on Vietnam, where they were the Americans; and one based on World War II, where they were the Nazis. Ferguson says that Malcolm’s interest in Nazism began with his discovery of the edgelord messaging board 4chan. From there, he fixated on antisemitic memes and inversions of history. He built a German village where they could host re-enactments – capture the flag, but with guns and SS uniforms. Malcolm’s title would be Führer. Ferguson describes himself as an “anarchist shit-head”. At first, this sensibility expressed itself as irreverence. Then it became cruelty. He had finally found his community and established some authority within it. He didn’t mind punching down to fit in. At the same time, he believed that Malcolm was attracted to contrarianism, not out-and-out fascism. He says he chafed at Malcolm’s “oven talk”, the antisemitic jokes he made over late-night voice calls. Malcolm’s favourite refrain was “muh 6 million,” a mocking reference to the victims of the Holocaust. “It was at a point in the internet where it’s like, OK, does he mean it?” Ferguson recalls. “He can’t mean it, right? Like, he’d be crazy.” (Malcolm says it was “a little bit of typical trolling, nothing too serious.”) In 2014, according to Ferguson, Malcolm watched HBO’s Rome, which depicts the Roman Republic’s violent transformation into an empire. Inspired, he told Ferguson they would be swapping their uniforms for togas. Together, they forged Malcolm’s proudest achievement within Roblox – a group called the Senate and People of Rome. The name conjured high-minded ideals of representative democracy, but this was a true fascist state, complete with shock troops, slavery and degeneracy laws. Malcolm took the title Your Caesar. In 2015, at the height of the group’s popularity, he and Ferguson claim they and their red-pilled enforcers held sway over some 20,000 players. Roblox is no longer the lightly policed sandbox it once was. The company that owns it went public in March and is valued at $55 billion. Tens of millions of people play the game daily, thanks in part to a recent pandemic surge. It has stronger moderation policies, enforced by a team of humans and AIs: You can’t call people your slaves. You can’t have swastikas. In fact, you can’t have any German regalia at all from between 1939 and 1945.
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Still, present-day Robloxisn’t all mermaids and pizzaiolos. Three former members of the Senate and People of Rome say the game still has a problem with far-right extremists. In early May, the associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, Daniel Kelley, found two Roblox re-creations of the Christchurch mosque shooting. (They have since been taken down.) And there are still Nazi role-plays. One, called Innsbruck Border Simulator, received more than a million visits between mid-2019 and late May or early June of this year, when Roblox removed it. But how do these communities shape who young players become? Dungeons & Dragons was supposedly going to turn kids into devil worshippers. Call of Duty was going to make them feral warhounds. “It’s the same thing you see in relation to alt-right recruitment,” says Rachel Kowert, the director of research at Take This, a nonprofit that supports the mental health of game developers and players. “‘And they play video games’ or ‘And this happened in video games.’” It’s harder to pin down because. “There’s a line of research talking about how games are socially reinforcing,” she says. “There’s this process of othering in some games, us versus them. All of these things do seem to make a cocktail that would be prime for people to recruit to extreme causes. But whether it does or not is a totally different question. Because nobody knows.” Ferguson claims he is penitent for his role in the Senate and People of Rome, and says he wants people to know about it, to learn something, and hopefully, eventually, make it stop. They just have to get it first. “I say, ‘Oh, when I was a kid, I started playing this game. Suddenly, I’m hanging out with Nazis, learning how to build a republic on the back of slavery,’” he says. “But no one understands how. ‘It’s just a game.’”
“Your Caesar” – aka “Malcolm” – ran the Senate and People of Rome with an iron fist, enacting antisemitic and racist rules
Earlier this year, Ferguson took me to Rome. Or rather, he took me to a dusty, far-flung Roman outpost called Parthia, which, for complex reasons involving a catfish and some stolen source code, is the most Malcolm ever got around to building. My avatar materialised beyond the settlement’s walls, beside some concrete storehouses. The label “Outsider” appeared next to my username. Ferguson was pacing toward me in a cowboy hat with antlers, and I hopped over a line of wooden looms to meet him. The area appeared deserted. On a typical day in 2014 or 2015, he explained over Discord voice chat, this was where “random children” would craft weapons and tools. He gestured toward some stone bar-racks in the distance. “Over there,” he said, “there would be legionaries watching the barbarians and practicing formations.” A barbarian was any player who hadn’t yet been admitted into Parthia’s rigid hierarchy. Inside the outpost, the rankings got more granular – commoner, foreigner, servant, patrician, legionary, commander, senator, magistrate. Ferguson, whose title was aedile , was in charge of the markets and the slaves. “They’re not technically slaves,” he explained. “They’re, in a sense, submitting their free will to participate in a system they’re told everything to do.” (W, A, S, D.) Slaves could earn their citizenship over time, either through service or by signing up to be gladiators. When a Roblox employee visited the group once, he says, Ferguson helped stage a battle between two slaves in the amphitheatre. As Ferguson and I walked the rust-coloured pathways toward Parthia’s towering gate, he described the exhaustive spreadsheets that he and others had kept about the group’s economic system, military strategy, governance policies and citizenry. Unlike other Roblox role-plays of its era, Parthia stored your inventory between login sessions, which meant that whatever you crafted or mined would still be there the next time. This apparently cutting-edge development enticed some players, but what kept them logging in day after day was the culture. Another of Malcolm’s former followers, a player I’ll call Chip, joined when he was 14. He says he liked the structured social interactions, the definite ranks, how knowable it all was. “I’ve always been the kind of gamer who prefers a serious environment,” he says. As a middle schooler in Texas, he felt like a computer missing part of its code – never quite sure “how to be normal, how to interact with people, how to not be weird.” Parthian society was a product of Malcolm’s increasingly bigoted politics and his fierce need for control, three former members say. The outpost’s laws classified support for race-mixing, feminism, and gay people as “degeneracy”. They also required one player in the group, who is Jewish in real life, to wear “the Judea tunic or be arrested on sight.” Inside Parthia, vigiles patrolled the streets. We’d be
stopped, Ferguson said, for having the wrong skin tone. (My avatar’s skin was olive.) The players voted overwhelmingly to allow Malcolm to execute whomever he wanted. We approached Parthia’s gate, which was on the other side of a wooden bridge. Ferguson faced me and stuck his hand out. “If you’re an outsider, they’d go like this to you,” he said, blocking my avatar’s path. A bubble with the words “Outsiders not allowed” appeared above his head. The gate itself was closed, so Ferguson and I took turns double-jumping off each other’s heads to scale the wall. On the other side, I got my first glimpse inside Parthia. Ferguson and Malcolm had talked a talented Roblox architect into designing it. Everything was big, big, big – columned public buildings, looming aqueducts, a mud-brown sprawl of rectangular buildings stocked with endless tiny rooms. After a brief tour, we ascended a ladder into a half-dome cupola. “If you had wealth or a name, you were standing here,” Ferguson said. “You’re supposed to be admiring yourself, your success, and looking down on the barbarians.” Romans would hang out, talk, collect social status, and, in Ferguson’s words, “smell their own farts all day.” One of the most exclusive cliques in Parthia was the Praetorian Guard, Malcolm’s personal army. According to several former members, he sometimes asked high-ranking members to read SS manuals and listen to a far-right podcast about a school shooter. (“Simple friendly banter among friends,” Malcolm says.) Chip started an Einsatzgruppen division, a reference to the Nazis’ mobile death squads – partly because he thought it would get laughs, he says, and partly to please the Caesar. In one case, memorialised on YouTube, Malcolm’s henchmen executed someone for saying they didn’t “care about” the architect’s girlfriend, Cleopatra. Chip still thinks that, for a lot of people, fascism started as a joke. “Until one day it’s not ironic to them,” he says. “One day they are arguing and fully believe what they’re saying.” When it comes to Malcolm’s fascist leanings, Chip says, “On the stand, under oath, I would say yes, I believe he actually thought these things.” Malcolm, who says he is “just a libertarian on the books,” disagrees. “It’s always been just trolling or role-playing,” he says. “I’m just a history buff. I don’t care for the application of any of it in a real-world setting.” Chip and Ferguson estimate that a third of the 200 players who ran the Senate and People of Rome – most of them young adults – were IRL fascists. Enforcing the group’s draconian rules was “a gameplay function to them,” Ferguson says. In other words, they enjoyed it.
Here is one vision of how far-right recruitment is supposed to work: Bobby queues up for a Fortnite match and gets paired with big, bad skinhead Ryland. Ryland has between two and 20 minutes to make his pitch to Bobby over voice or text chat before enemy player Sally shotguns them both in the face. If Ryland’s vibe is intriguing, maybe Bobby accepts his Fortnite friend request; they catch some more games and continue their friendship on Discord. Over time, weeks or months, Ryland normalises extremist ideology for Bobby, and eventually the kid becomes radicalised.
Right : for most, Roblox is a kid-friendly build-your-own-world sandbox – but some players have created far darker visions
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Or, just as likely: Bobby thinks that this guy is wack and totally sucks at Fortnite, and he doesn’t accept Ryland’s friend request. Next game, he’ll go for the shotgun. Radical recruitment in games is a tricky subject to study. For one thing, all the useful data on Ryland and Bobby is locked away in private corporate databases. Also, this is an illness with a bewildering array of causes. In March, the US Department of Homeland Security hosted a digital forum called Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention in Online Gaming and Esports Engagement, designed to highlight how “violent extremists maliciously manipulate the online gaming environment to recruit and radicalise.” The ADL’s Daniel Kelley, who gave a keynote address, struck a more cautious note than the event’s name would suggest. He pointed to the New Zealand government’s official report on the Christchurch mosque attack. The shooter played games, yes. But he also used Facebook and Reddit and 4chan and 8chan, and he told the Kiwi authorities that YouTube was, as the report put it, a “significant source of information and inspiration.” Earlier this year, I asked Rabindra Ratan, an associate professor of media and information at Michigan State University, what the latest research said about far-right recruitment in games. Curious himself, he put it to GamesNetwork, a listserv he’s on that goes out to some 2,000 game scholars and researchers. Responses trickled in. A couple of scholars pointed to the ADL’s survey on harassment and racism in online games, in which nearly a quarter of adult gamers said they’d been exposed to talk of white supremacy while playing. Others noted the existence of alt-right messaging boards for gamers, the deep links between edgelord internet culture and white supremacy, and the popularity of Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, a gaming YouTuber who has made several antisemitic jokes to his audience. When one designer questioned the idea that radicalisation in games is widespread, someone else shot them down: “I think it’s a dangerous mistake to dismiss radicalisation in gaming communities and culture as merely ‘urban legend,’” they wrote. Then a switch seemed to flip. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Florida’s Stetson University, brought up the lack of data. “To the best of my knowledge, there is not evidence to suggest that the ‘alt right’ is any more prevalent in gaming communities than anywhere else,” he wrote. Further, he said, there doesn’t seem to be evidence that recruitment in games is happening on a large scale. “I do worry that some of this borders on Satanic panics from the ’80s and ’90s,” he said. Chris Ferguson is known as a bit of a brawler. In the book Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong, he and a colleague tear into the now mostly debunked
‘I think it’s a dangerous mistake to dismiss radicalisation in gaming communities and culture as merely urban legend’
idea that, say, Grand Theft Auto could turn a kid into a hardened carjacker or an armed robber. Last July, with researchers in New Zealand and Tasmania, he published a peer-reviewed analysis of 28 previous studies involving some 21,000 young gamers in total. “Current research is unable to support the hypothesis that violent video games have a meaningful long-term predictive impact on youth aggression,” the paper concluded. On the listserv, some researchers bristled. Was Chris Ferguson dismissing their more qualitative approach to the work, which they considered equally valid? Someone dropped a Trump meme: “Very fine people on both sides.” The reply: “Can you not.” The thread exploded. There were ad hominem attacks, pointed uses of the word “boomer”. “Casting aspersions such as these crosses a line into the unacceptably unprofessional,” one researcher wrote. “For shame.” Several scholars quit the listserv in a fury. Nearly 100 messages were sent before the thread eventually petered out. Nobody could reconcile the lack of data on extremist recruitment in games with the fact that so many signs seemed to point in that direction. In the very broadest sense, the qualities associated with gamers – young, white, male, middle class-ish, outsider – overlap with the qualities associated with people who might be candidates for radicalisation. Of course, most of the nearly three billion people who play games don’t fit that stereotype. The word “gamer” summons these qualities because, for a long time, this was the consumer class that corporations like Nintendo marketed to. Over the decades, that consumer class became a passionate, even obsessive cultural faction. And in 2014, with the Gamergate controversy, a sexist harassment campaign founded on a lie, parts of it curdled into a reactionary identity. Right-wing provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos spurred it on, seeing in the “frustrated male stereotype” a chance to transform resentment into cultural power. Gaming and gamer culture belonged to a particular type of person, and that type of person was under attack, Gamergate’s adherents held. “Social justice warriors” were parachuting into their games to change their culture. Nongamers, or gamers who didn’t resemble them, became “normies”, “e-girls”, “Chads”, “NPCs” (non-playable characters). “It’s a good target audience, mostly male, that’s often been very susceptible to radicalisation,” says Julia Ebner, a counterterrorism expert for the United Nations. Ebner has gone undercover in a number of extremist groups, both online and offline, including jihadists, neo-Nazis, and an antifeminist collective. She watched as subcultures that grew out of 4chan – initially trolling, not explicitly political – slowly became more political, and then radical. Gradually, inherently extremist content camouflaged as satire became normalised. Then it became real. The vectors, she says, were people like Malcolm. “Recruitment” isn’t always the right word, Ebner told me. Sometimes “grooming” is a better descriptor. “It’s often not really clear to the people who are recruited what they’re actually recruited into,” she says. Ebner does not believe that video games are radicalising people on any large scale. But she has seen extremists use gamification or video games as a method of recruitment, partly because of those qualities associated with capital-G gamers. “There is a big loneliness issue in parts of the gaming
community,” she explains. “And there’s also a certain desire for excitement, for entertainment.” Ebner argues that there should be more intervention programmes targeting fringe communities on the internet, staffed by trained psychologists and recovered extremists. But first, she says, society needs to change the way it talks about far-right recruitment and gaming. People write off entire communities as being “completely extremist, being alt, being radical,” she says. But extremists “lure individuals from those subcultures into their political networks.” It’s a complex, diffuse problem, and the conversation about it, she says, “isn’t nuanced enough.”
The Senate and People of Rome fell in 2015. It wasn’t sacked by LEGOman Visigoths or brought down by the parasitic forces of degeneracy. Parthia’s architect fell in love with Cleopatra, whom he married in-game and gave his login credentials. But Cleopatra was a catfish, and the dude behind the account leaked Parthia’s source code. Anyone could copy Malcolm’s empire and rule over it themselves. The increasingly paranoid Caesar began exiling players. He tried to forge a new fascist dystopia, but the attempt fizzled. Rome was dead. By 2016, he and Ferguson had stopped spending time in the same groups. A year after that, though, 4chan users on the infamous /pol/ board would reminisce about the Senate and People of Rome in its heyday. /Pol/, short for “politically incorrect”, is infamous specifically for hate speech and political trolling, and as an engine of extremism. One person wrote that most of the high-ranking members of Parthia were “/pol/tards” – frequent commenters on the board. User after user thanked Malcolm for red-pilling them. One said that after “simulating life under Fascism” as a 14-year-old, he had since become even “more supportive” of it. (Malcolm says that his “cult of personality is strictly built off of trolls.”) After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the left-wing activist collective Unicorn Riot obtained hundreds of thousands of messages from white supremacist Discord servers. They suggested that communities like Parthia existed elsewhere in Roblox. In a /pol/ gaming server, a user named Lazia Cus welcomed new arrivals. “Currently,” they wrote, “we have started a
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Below: Roblox has strict rules banning Nazi regalia and imagery, but this hasn’t stopped players from embracing fascist ideology
‘Redpill’ the Youth project which is going on in ‘Roblox’. We’ve created a clan in which we will operate Raids/Defences and expand on this project into other platforms.” (The clan was a “futuristic Roman legion,” though not necessarily modelled after Malcolm’s Rome or one of its many offshoots.) Ferguson still isn’t sure whether he participated in a fascist recruitment campaign. Sure, the structure of the Senate and People of Rome normalised and even gamified fascism. And there were people like Malcolm who browbeat kids into adopting extremist beliefs. “I’ve never interacted with people who were like, ‘OK, we’re going to make more neo-Nazis,’” he says. “But I feel like it’s inevitable. It’s indirect.” Ferguson pointed out a Roblox role-play of the US-Mexico border in which players are Border Patrol agents. Nearly 1.1 million people had visited the game. “It’s not racially motivated,” Ferguson says, dripping with irony. “They’re just pretending to be a law enforcement agency that has a long history of extremely racist and xenophobic tendencies.” (A Roblox spokesperson said the company reviews “every single image, audio file and video before it is uploaded.”) Members of Malcolm’s Praetorian Guard have gone on to join the military and the TSA and to become police officers, or what Ferguson calls “actual Nazis”. Malcolm himself now owns a 16,000-member Star Wars role-play group. To become citizens, players must follow the group’s social media accounts. “Hail the Empire,” one winky-faced commenter wrote. Earlier this year, back in Roblox, Ferguson took me to the Group Recruiting Plaza. Booths manned by avatars lined the perimeter. Next to a Star Wars group was a red, white, and blue booth and a bearded man in a suit. The poster above him featured a Confederate flag. It read:
(Were not racist, were just a war group) 5th Texas Infantry Regiment, Confederate States. We’re at war with a USA Group. When I approached, the avatar behind the booth explained to me that they role-play the Confederacy. “Why does your sign say ‘We’re not racist’?” I asked. “It’s just Southern pride, and a war group,” he responded. A human-sized scorpion walked through me. A boxy gentleman with aviators and a blue Napoleon jacket came over to offer support to his friend in the suit. “But how is that not racist?” I asked. The booth operator hopped over the counter and stood in front of me. “You can’t call a nation racist,” he responded. “That’s just unfair.” Ferguson and I decamped to another role-play: Washington, District of Columbia. The server was nearly full, 60 players. I spawned inches from the National World War II Memorial honouring Americans who served in the armed forces. “Visitor” appeared above my avatar’s head. Ferguson was sitting in a police car. The officer had a gun on him. “You should hop in,” Ferguson said. On our way to federal prison, Ferguson explained that, like the Senate and People of Rome, this role-play had a strict hierarchy – senators, FBI and NSA agents, and so on. We exited the car as it did a mid-air triple-flip beside a mob of people just standing around talking. As I was escorted in, a Department of Justice official with beaded hair asked a man in a headscarf what he thought about Black Lives Matter. We were forced into an interrogation room. The interrogator, our driver, jumped on the table. He demanded to know what race we were. Washington, DC, was apparently at war with South Korea. In his real life these days, Ferguson travels around Ontario, sometimes living with his dad, sometimes living elsewhere, picking up manual labour jobs when he can. He has taught infiltration methods to the youth, he says, so they can investigate Roblox groups for extremist behaviour. They then report the groups or take them over. And for years, he has been growing his own online group, the Cult, which he calls “a family of friends to protect younger people” – particularly over Roblox. Right now, members of the Cult pay him between $100 and $1,000 a month for his efforts. He says he’s closer to them than to his family. Ferguson is sorry, he says, for his role in connecting so many people to Malcolm, and for his own bigotry. The Cult’s values are the antithesis of all of that, he says. He made his followers read “Desiderata” (Latin for “things desired”), a prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann about how to be “kind, nurturing souls”. Right now he’s on a farm, growing arugula, he says. He hopes to one day buy a plot of land and till it with the Cult’s most dedicated members. At some point, he says, he had a realisation: “If we took all of what we did online and slowly shifted it toward real life, we’d never be alone.” �
Cecilia D’Anastasio is a senior writer at WIRED US, where she covers the games industry and gaming culture
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REFINED SUPPLY Refined Superior Matte Clay is an essential for achieving a natural, suave appearance. Designed to provide a strong hold and matte finish, it works perfectly for both short and long hair. The water-soluble formula allows this superior styling product to firmly grip the hair whilst remaining versatile throughout the day. Visit refinedsupply.com IG @refinedsupply
STEPHANIE DILLON Stephanie Dillon is a Minneapolis based multi-disciplinary artist who paints what she feels. She works with reclaimed objects, paints, canvas, collage, found images, plus creates digital and crypto art. Her abstract artworks are vibrant, bold, and frequently reflect social justice issues. “Music” is a digitally manipulated photo of a collage painting, with acrylic, aerosol, and a vinyl record album from her own collection. The original is available as an NFT on her OpenSea account. Visit stephaniedillonart.com
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The proportion of Danish respondents polled by YouGov who were strongly opposed to the police using face recognition in public places – the highest of the 17 countries participating. In the UAE, only 2% objected
The instances of internet censorship or shutdown that took place in the first six months of 2021, according to digital rights advocacy group Access Now and the global #KeepItOn coalition. In 2020, the total documented shutdowns was 155 in 29 countries – India accounted for 109
Rate of reciprocal interest for women on Tinder across all sexual orientations
The age at which the West Indian Ocean coelacanth, a rare, two-metre-long “living fossil” fish, reaches sexual maturity
Money flowing through the Russian-language dark web marketplace Hydra in 2016
Money flowing through Hydra by the end of 2020, according to Chainalysis
Sum that the Biden administration has devoted to the search for an antiviral drug or “Covid pill” that could treat Covid-19
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The average number of electric-car chargers per 100,000 people in the UK. London has the highest proportion, with 80 per 100,000; Northern Ireland has the lowest at just 17
Percentage of UK respondents that are “not interested at all” in cryptocurrency as of May 2021, according to a poll conducted for WIRED UK by YouGov
Money donated by (former Mrs Bezos) MacKenzie Scott to 286 charities and nonprofits during the first quarter of 2021
The percentage of Indonesians who are “not interested” in cryptocurrency. Twothirds of Indonesian respondents were apparently “very” or “somewhat” interested
ILLUSTRATION: GIACOMO GAMBINERI. SOURCES: MACKENZIE-SCOTT.MEDIUM.COM; CELL.COM; ACCESS NOW; HHS.GOV; TWITTER.COM; FLASHPOINT-INTEL.COM; GOV.UK; QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY
The number of tweets currently in former UK government advisor Dominic Cummings’s thread venting on England’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic, as of June 20, 2021
Should your business be a B-Corp? • How can your employer support your mental health? • How to quit your job – and do it well • What will the post-Covid office look like? • Why hot-desking isn’t the solution…
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