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The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe

It all started with an asthma attack. Now Sadiq Khan finds himself at the center of a global conspiracy.

Peter Guest  March 26, 2024 03:00 AM

Photograph: Tom Cockram

It’s a slate-gray Tuesday morning in January, and Sadiq Khan is marching through Camden Market trailed by a caravan of officials, press officers, and the hulking presence of his Metropolitan Police protection unit.

The mayor of London bustles with a sleeves-rolled-up, CEOish energy. The 53-year-old is short—famously so—but bantamweight trim, sharp-suited but approachably tieless. When he pauses in front of a row of arcade claw machines to take questions from local media, he answers fast, in full sentences—lawyerly and reasonable—dropping his “t”s and “g”s in a way that was once a popular affectation of British politicians but which in Khan’s case is authentically South London.

In contrast to the shambolic upper-classness of his predecessor in City Hall, Boris Johnson, Khan is something of a throwback: a politico of the Tony Blair era. But the questions show how much has changed. The subjects are a jarring mix of the hyperlocal and the geopolitical: Can he comment on a fatal bus crash in Victoria? How will he help small businesses through the cost-of-living crisis? Should a “Chinese” transport company be allowed to run the Elizabeth Line? What is his view on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza?

Khan hangs around for an hour, swapping affable banalities with traders and colleagues—on vegan food, vinyl records, dogs—and recording a video to announce a new policy on small business funding. It’s a routine stop; mundane, even. Khan’s banter with jewelry designers and record stall owners has a scripted feel, the gentle fictions of small politics. It’s a sharp contrast to the Sadiq Khan discussed on social media and on the conspiracy-inflected right-wing channels that dominate political coverage in the UK.

Since the UK’s highly divisive 2016 vote to leave the European Union, the country’s political discourse has spun wildly off center. The economy is in deep decline, the cost of living has spiraled, and public services are collapsing—water deregulation has left Britain swimming in a moat of its own excrement. The national conversation has been dominated by the Conservative government’s cartoonish policies and culture wars over gender, “wokery,” and climate change. The ruling party has abandoned the political center ground to govern from the fringes. In doing so, it has thinned the membrane that separates the mainstream from the dark currents of far-right extremism and misinformation that flow online.

In that bullshit cinematic universe, Khan is a recurring character, a unifying figure for a dissonant global coalition of racists, conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. There’s a fictional Sadiq Khan who lives on the internet and in the heads of the far right, and a fictional London that he runs—a “Londonistan” given over to migrants, extremism, and knife crime; a dire warning of the cost of liberal leftist rule. This is partly why Khan needs that police protection. Threats to his life are routine now, part of the violence that has returned to British politics for the first time in decades.

Photograph: Tom Cockram

Last summer, one of Khan’s flagship policies—a benign pollution reduction measure—was fused with the global conspiracy, sucked into a nightmarish mass delusion about climate authoritarianism, and co-opted by populist culture warriors to justify a rollback of carbon emissions targets. The chaos that ensued shows how the drip of online conspiracy and radicalization, driven by algorithms and exploited by opportunists, has warped political discourse in democratic societies. It is now much harder for elected leaders to manage the compromises needed to keep cities—and countries—together and functioning. That battle is becoming ever more one-sided, fueled by conspiracy theorists and cheap and convincing deepfakes. Khan’s bid for reelection in May will be the UK’s first major vote in this strange new world, a precursor to a national election happening some time this year—and, quite possibly, a warning sign of how dangerous the merging of populism, extremism, and technology has become.

It started innocuously enough. In 2014, Khan ran the London Marathon. While in training, he found himself breathless and wheezing—more than a man in his forties should have been. His doctor diagnosed him with adult-onset asthma. Khan admits that he’d previously had little passion for environmental causes. The diagnosis started him on a journey of revelation.

At the time, he was in his second term as the Labour member of parliament for Tooting, the area of South London where he’d grown up—the son of a bus driver and a seamstress who had emigrated to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s. He’d already spent more than a decade combining his career as a human rights lawyer with an unglamorous, poorly paid role as a local councillor—the lowest rung of elected office.

In 2016, he ran for mayor. He leaned into his origins in his campaign—a local boy who reflected the diverse reality of London in the 21st century. While his Conservative opponent was accused of using racist dog whistles to try to turn Hindu and Jewish communities against the Muslim candidate, Khan’s message of consensus won him the mayorship. Six weeks later, the UK veered the other way, voting to leave the European Union. After Khan took office, he spoke out against then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the US, sparking a rolling spat with Trump that continued for years. Soon, Trump-supporting US media was amplifying stories about knife crime in London and mocking the mayor. Khan was more focused on something that was actually harming thousands of his constituents.

Air pollution contributes to the early deaths of an estimated 4,000 Londoners a year. According to City Hall, 99 percent of the capital’s residents live in areas that fail to meet the World Health Organization’s guidelines for pollution from small, dangerous particles known as PM2.5. Public health experts warn about a buildup of invisible conditions, limiting children’s development and causing early deaths. Kids exposed to high air pollution have smaller lungs and higher blood pressure. King’s College researchers estimate the economic cost to London in treatment and lost working hours to be as much as £3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) a year.

Most of the pollution comes from cars. The roots of the problem are in London’s geography and the compromises made by previous generations of politicians and urban planners. Since the 1920s, plans have been made and scrapped for an expressway around the city center. Instead of a single road, the capital’s main arteries—the North and South Circular—are a patchwork of urban streets where 21st century traffic is jammed onto aging infrastructure. Going clockwise, the southern half starts in the old docklands in the east of the city, running through warehouse districts now given over to the hipster overspill of Shoreditch and Deptford, to banker pads and “golden brick” investment properties. It loops southwest, heading through suburbs that have been slowly agglomerated into the urb, clusters of sewage works and bus depots and the low-rise residential hinterlands of South London: Lewisham, Dulwich, Streatham. At Brixton, in the south, an air monitor set up over the high street often hits the annual legal limits of nitrogen dioxide before the end of January.

“Everyone knows a kid with asthma. Everyone does,” says Jemima Hartshorn, founder and director of Mums for Lungs, which launched in Brixton in 2017 and campaigns to reduce the amount of traffic on inner-city roads. It was partly the group’s lobbying that inspired Khan’s administration to focus on schools in its attempts to understand and tackle air pollution. “A lot of our schools were built in Victorian times,” Khan says. “And subsequently, for the last 100 years roads have been built outside the schools. So when kids go and play in the playground they breathe in poison.”

So, starting in 2019, City Hall invested in new monitoring tools, including backpacks with air quality monitors and GPS tags that were handed out to primary school children. Pollution data was made publicly available so that citizens could see for themselves how bad things were.

The data revealed not just the scale of the problem but also how unevenly distributed it is, in a city where about half of households don’t own a car. “It’s those least responsible who are dying, those least likely to own a car: Black, Asian, minority ethnic, because they live on main roads rather than side roads,” Khan says. “These environmental issues are also health justice issues, social justice issues, and racial justice issues.”

Addressing the problem would mean asking or compelling generally wealthier, whiter people to change their behavior to benefit everyone. And it threatened the sanctity of car ownership, which has been associated with British reactionary conservatism since before the terms “culture war” and “woke” entered the country’s political lexicon. But Khan was hopeful that most people would be happy to compromise for the greater good. “It’s difficult because there’s a lot of noise being made from the extremes,” he says. “But people in the middle just want to know what’s going on, what the evidence is, and so forth.”

“It’s those least responsible who are dying. These environmental issues are health issues, social justice issues, racial justice issues.”

Khan dusted off an old proposal from his predecessor, Johnson, to charge the most polluting diesel and petrol vehicles a fee to enter the very center of the city—a small area that had already been covered by a congestion charge since 2003. When it was launched in 2019, the scheme was given the blandly descriptive title of the “Ultra Low Emissions Zone,” or ULEZ. Two years later, it was expanded to fill the area bounded by the North and South circulars. According to Transport for London, 1 million vehicles enter that zone daily, but TfL estimated that only 14 percent were old or polluting enough to actually be subject to the charge. Khan introduced a “scrappage” scheme to help drivers replace their old bangers with newer, cleaner vehicles. Mostly, he says, people were concerned until they realized they wouldn’t actually have to pay.

Photograph: Tom Cockram

By February 2023, nitrogen dioxide emissions had fallen by 46 percent in Central London and by 21 percent in the expanded ULEZ area. That, Khan says, means 4 million residents breathing cleaner air. There were protests—including one, in April 2023, attended by notable conspiracy theorists—but they were largely small, local affairs. Air pollution campaigners were almost unanimous in their support. The scheme was due to expand further to cover London’s outer limits in August 2023, encompassing another 5 million people. It felt like the battle had been won. But something weird and violent was simmering out of sight.

The reality of the mayorship is that crises are often thrust upon the city. Britain’s biggest political rupture of the century so far, Brexit, was imposed on London (largely against its will—a majority of Londoners voted Remain), disrupting communities, wrecking businesses, and cutting off a flow of young migrants from Europe. Khan calls Brexit “an aberration.” The reason the mayor needs a view on the war in Gaza is that its aftershocks play out on London’s streets—in protests and counterprotests, in rising antisemitism and Islamophobia.

At the same time, the UK’s decline is magnified on London’s streets. A cost-of-living crisis has sent households and companies to the wall. Homelessness is rising precipitously. Public services are crumbling. Holding the city together is hard enough without people trying to make the cracks bigger. But the nature of conspiracy and misinformation, and the binaries of modern politics, means things that should be unifying—like a quest for cleaner air—suddenly aren’t.

In June 2023, Boris Johnson, who had resigned as prime minister the previous September, also quit his seat in Parliament, jumping before he was pushed amid an investigation into his conduct in office. That triggered an election in his former seat, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, on the outer edge of London, and inside the soon to be expanded ULEZ area.

Polling suggested that Labour had a good chance of winning the seat from the ruling party. But the Conservative candidate, Steve Tuckwell, ran on a platform opposing the expansion of the ULEZ zone. He held on to the seat by just 500 votes, but in the circumstances it felt like a much bigger victory. The government’s media machine seized on the ULEZ narrative, taking the opportunity to divert attention from its rolling omnishambles. Right-wing commentators pushed the idea that emissions restriction was “wokeness”; the imposition of elite concerns on the embattled working class.

ULEZ found its way to conspiracy groups on Telegram, where it merged with well-established fantasies about elites using environmental concerns as cover to impose their will on the masses. The pandemic unleashed a cloud of virulent conspiracy theories centring on vaccines, 5G, mind control, and Bill Gates. These overlapped with older “elite control” and antisemitic tropes about shadow governments, with a racist conspiracy theory that alleges white Europeans are being deliberately displaced by immigrants, and with newer, internet-native conspiracy communities, like QAnon, whose central belief is that an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles runs the US via a “deep state.” By the middle of the pandemic, this new meta-conspiracy had a name: The Great Reset.

Online conspiracy groups habitually cross-pollinate in this way. Just as commercial brands try to jump on trends, conspiracy influencers work to attach their big idea to new conspiracy fads or to some news event that can be shoehorned into their narratives. Often, they’ll look for international examples that can provide what researchers call “social proof” for their ideas. American commentators looking for “proof” of social collapse will point to knife crime in the UK (despite the fact that London’s homicide rate is less than half that of New York’s); those looking to demonstrate the socially corrosive impact of emissions targets will highlight farmer protests in the Netherlands.

This can lead to some bizarre moments, where global figures suddenly direct their enormous audience to somewhere ill-prepared for the attention. In early 2023, influential alt-media commentators, including the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, boosted a conspiracy about “15-minute cities”—an innocuous urban planning concept based on providing services to residents close to where they live. In the bizarro world of the conspiracy theorist, the 15-minute city was reimagined as a plan by shadowy elites to force us all to stay in our neighborhoods, depriving us of our freedom of movement. Soon, protesters including members of the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred descended on Oxford to oppose the city’s traffic control measures on the basis that they were a gateway to tyranny.

Social media algorithms drive the madness. When mainstream media and politicians start using the same terminology as the conspiracy groups, it can drive a flywheel of attention. It also helps to have a unifying figure who brings together multiple conspiracy constituencies. Which is how Sadiq Khan—liberal, left-wing, Muslim—got sucked into the vortex.

“He is a tool that’s used as a way of eliding two battles that otherwise have very few things in common: The hatred of Muslims and the desire not to take action on climate change,” says Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group. “He’s an enemy, a figure they can use to bring them together. It allows them mutual amplification, succor, support … It’s a way of cross-fertilizing extremism.”

When mainstream media and politicians start using the same terminology as the conspiracy groups, it can drive a flywheel of attention.

ULEZ is now an established franchise of the conspiracy. A cursory search for the term on X brings up a parade of far-right and conspiracist accounts, pushing climate lockdown conspiracies related to the “Great Reset,” including restrictions on movement and bans on meat and car ownership. “If you saw some of the banners, there were some really disparate issues,” Khan says.

The fury wasn’t just online. Groups of vigilantes who call themselves “Blade Runners” now roam the outskirts of London, destroying the license-plate-recognition cameras that have been set up to monitor vehicles entering the ULEZ. By November 2023, the Metropolitan Police had investigated nearly 1,000 incidents of vandalism. In December, two men in their sixties were arrested for allegedly using an improvised explosive device to blow up a camera in the London suburb of Sidcup.

Campaigners against air pollution have been subjected to incredible levels of abuse. Supporters of ULEZ or 15-minute cities get sent images from Soviet gulags or Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied cities on social media. “It’s really scary,” says Hartshorn, the air pollution campaigner. “I am significantly more careful about who I tell where I live.”

Political violence is returning to the UK, bursting out of the morass of conspiracy and extremism online. There is at times a Blairish elusiveness to the way Khan talks—broadcastable sound bites, reversions to cliché, and a genial caution in the phrasing of his answers. But as we talk about the loss of the rational center, he leans in to interrupt. “Look, I was mates with Jo Cox,” he says. “She was one of my best friends.”

In 2016, Cox—a Labour member of parliament for the northern constituency of Batley and Spen—was murdered by a white supremacist who subscribed to the Great Replacement theory. In 2021, Conservative MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist who had become radicalized online. “I’ve got a protection team. I live it every day, the consequences of this, the violence,” Khan says. “What I will not allow is to be cowed by those threats, because that’s what they want. They want for me to be scared.”

Khan insists he’s an optimist. Despite the “hysteria” and the culture wars, he believes there’s still a middle ground where people can be persuaded with facts, where conflict can be resolved with discussion. Biden beat Trump in 2020, he points out; the moderate Emmanuel Macron saw off a far-right challenge from Marine Le Pen in France.

On the other hand, the Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders is close to power in the Netherlands after winning the most votes in elections in November, running on a nativist, anti-immigration, climate-skeptic platform. Trump is ascendant again in the US, and the British government has made clear that it’s planning to fight a general election in 2024 by doubling down on hard-right policies.

In fact, the UK government seemed to take inspiration from the ULEZ spin cycle. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced a list of “common sense” policies, which included rolling back a fictional “meat tax” and ruling out forcing households to divide their recycling into seven bins—something that had never been seriously under consideration. In September, Sunak announced he was “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists,” attacking speed limits and traffic reduction measures, before rolling back net-zero emissions targets, including delaying a planned phase-out of new diesel and petrol vehicle sales in the UK. In January, The Guardian reported that government ministers had cited 15-minute cities conspiracies around freedom of movement when making transport policy.

Nervous of the backlash, Khan’s own Labour party, which is likely to defeat the Conservatives in a general election this year, shelved climate spending targets after distancing itself from the ULEZ policy. “The misinformation was accepted by all the parties except the Green Party, and so it became normalized,” Khan says. “My concern with addressing climate change, or addressing air pollution, or these sorts of green issues, is that politicians may be vacating the pitch because they’ve learned the wrong lessons.”

It’s hard not to interpret this as a victory for bullshit. Populist politicians have co-opted the language of conspiracy—the Old Etonians and Oxbridge graduates who make up much of Britain’s ruling class now rail against elite control. In February, the former cabinet minister and Conservative Party grandee Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg gave a speech decrying the “international cabals and quangos telling hundreds of millions of people how to lead their lives.” Former prime minister Liz Truss shared a stage with Steve Bannon to attack the “deep state” that she claims brought her down after 44 disastrous days in office. Lee Anderson—a prominent Conservative MP and, until January, the party’s deputy chairperson—said in a TV interview that Islamists had “got control of Khan and got control of London.” Anderson was eventually suspended from the party.

Khan’s Conservative opponent in the mayoral election, Susan Hall (who has made scrapping ULEZ a major pillar of her campaign), is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, retweeted a post on X referring to London as “Londonistan,” and alleged that Jewish Londoners were frightened by Khan’s “divisive attitude,” sparking rebukes from Jewish groups and anti-racism charities.

Khan says it’s too early to call the fight. “If you vacate the pitch, then you’ve got people with messages that are basic lies who will occupy that space,” he says. He comes back to that slogan several times during our conversations. Asked what politicians can do to steer the discourse away from algorithmically driven rage cycles, he talks about his belief in the fundamental decency of people. All he needs to do to prevail in May’s election is to win the argument, he says—“The public is never wrong.”

But that optimism feels brittle. He has no agency—few levers to pull. Like many politicians, Khan is trying to reason with a maelstrom of unreason. The real decisions about the future of democratic discourse are being made in California, or not being made at all. The tech companies whose algorithms helped spread and popularize conspiracy theories have slashed thousands of jobs, including many responsible for protecting integrity. Increasingly, they’re following the lead of Elon Musk’s X and taking a noninterventionist approach to political misinformation.

At the same time, the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools has made it far easier to author massive bot campaigns or create convincing deepfakes. Research in January found more than 100 deepfake advertisements of Rishi Sunak being used to promote investment scams on Facebook. Faked audio of opposition leader Keir Starmer berating his staff spread on X in October last year. In November, the UK’s National Security Council warned that AI could amplify the existing dangers of misinformation during an election or help foreign powers interfere with the process. Khan says that the UK has to urgently consider new laws to confront the risks. “We need to act now, not once the horse has already bolted,” he says.

Although the UK government has occasionally said it would put in place rules to tackle misinformation on social media, it hasn’t. “I feel like I can’t overstate how bleak it is,” says Kyle Taylor, founder of Fair Vote UK, an NGO that works on election security and reform. “We had years and years and years for governments to do something. And they have just not done it.”

Disinformation isn’t always about favoring a particular side. It helps hostile authoritarian states like Russia—or domestic authoritarians like Trump—undermine the foundations of governance, causing people to lose faith in democracy itself. “The objective is to get a society to the point where nobody knows whether something is real or not, and therefore, that society cannot function,” says Taylor. Sometimes chaos is the only goal.

Photograph: Tom Cockram

There was an awful perfection to the Sadiq Khan deepfake when it inevitably arrived. It began circulating on X on November 10, the eve of Remembrance Day, a sacred event in British public life as the nation honors those killed in combat since the First World War.

The atmosphere leading into this solemn day was unusually tense. A march in support of Gaza had been scheduled for the same day. Government ministers wanted the Metropolitan Police to stop it from happening. Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, wrote a controversial op-ed that alleged the march was “an assertion of primacy by certain groups—particularly Islamists.” Far-right groups—emboldened by Braverman—announced their own march.

In the fake recording, an authentic-sounding version of Khan’s voice could be heard calling for the ceremony at the Cenotaph war memorial in London to be called off in favor of the Gaza rally. “I don’t give a flying shit about the Remembrance Weekend,” the voice said. The mayor, it said, controlled the police.

The message pressed every button on England’s paranoid fringes: an insinuation of support for Hamas, an apparent denigration of British history and memory by a Muslim left-winger, and a sense of backroom deals being done. A secret woke plot that plugged straight into the grand online conspiracy that unites the far right, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers.

On November 11, far-right groups gathered in Westminster, drinking, chanting, and preparing to “protect the Cenotaph” from a march happening a few miles away. When the attack never came, they took matters into their own hands, fighting the police for the right to defend a monument to peace from an anti-war protest. Large groups charged barricades; masked soccer hooligans shot fireworks into police lines at head height. Two officers were hospitalized. More than 120 people were arrested.

The Sadiq Khan deepfake didn’t cause the violence, but it added to a general sense of chaos—of control slipping away, the center crumbling. “We can’t overstate the grave danger this new technology poses to our politics and democratic freedoms,” Khan says. “The legitimacy of elections and the very viability of our democracy is at stake if we allow these deepfakes to be misused and weaponized.” But the grim truth about politics in the AI era is not that one deepfake will change the course of an election, but that the existence of sophisticated, commodified lies will unravel people’s trust in everything they see and hear. The triumph of bullshit over fact.

With an election in May, Khan’s support for ULEZ has left him at the mercy of powerful forces that he can’t control—a tornado of exhaust smoke and black mirrors, a cacophony of bullshit. It reverberates far beyond the South Circular. The UK will vote this year; so will India, Mexico, South Korea, Ghana, and four dozen other countries. The US goes to the polls in November. We’re all in the vortex now.

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

BACKCHANNEL

‘Over Time the Trust Will Come’: An Exclusive Interview With TikTok’s CEO

Dexter Thomas  February 01, 2024 11:00 AM

A few weeks ago, Shou Zi Chew sat down with WIRED to tell us how he’s trying to make TikTok better. Is the company’s CEO for real—or just a really good politician?

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at the company’s first-ever live music festival, in Mesa, Arizona, in December.Photograph: Lenne Chai

Before I sit down to talk to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, he apologizes for the noise. The evening’s guests have been doing sporadic sound checks all day: Peso Pluma running through his opening number, Offset ad-libbing over a backing track. I passed by throngs of One Direction fans to get into the park (Niall Horan for $25 is a solid deal). This isn’t where I imagined I’d be talking to the head of the most influential social media app on the planet, but the only way I could get on Chew’s calendar was by meeting him at TikTok’s first-ever music festival—a sold-out, two-stage program at the Cubs’ training facility in Mesa, Arizona.

The location makes no sense until you realize that for TikTok, location doesn’t matter. Only numbers do. The whole festival will be streamed exclusively on the app, for free (highlights would later air on Disney+ and Hulu); it’s the digits on the top left of everyone’s phone screen tonight that will be the ultimate metric of success or failure for this event.

I’m also here because it seems like Chew never really got to introduce himself on his own terms. When he stepped in as TikTok’s CEO in mid-2021, there was little fanfare; the official @TikTok account didn’t even make a TikTok about it. Instead, Chew’s introduction to the wider public took place during a barrage of questions at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC, last March. “It was a circus,” a TikTok employee tells me, speaking under condition of anonymity. “They didn’t even let him talk. They had the attitude of ‘You’re a Chinese spy, and we’re gonna beat the shit out of you.’”

This is a bit over-the-top, but the sentiment can’t be wholly dismissed. Three things can simultaneously be true: First, that China’s government openly watches its citizens and an app with origins there will naturally raise a red flag in many countries, especially in the US after parent company ByteDance was caught tracking journalists there in late 2022. Second, that people have been handing over increasing amounts of data for years, including to companies like Uber and Facebook (both of which have also reportedly tracked journalists), and any company collecting so much user data should be heavily scrutinized. And third, that thinly veiled anti-Chinese xenophobia has become a reliable part of the US political playbook.

TikTok has made a show of addressing the first two issues: During the hearings, anyone listening heard Chew promise to move all of its US data to US-based servers, though some TikTok employees say that some US data is still being shared with their parent company. At best, Chew's promise has been slow to deliver in full. The company has less control over the third issue: It is hard to imagine that the app will ever be “non-Chinese” enough for, say, the governor of Montana, whose reason for banning TikTok in the state was to “protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party.” (A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the ban.)

Chew seems to have the right temperament to keep TikTok in various governments’ good graces. He gives off none of the abrasive “tech bro” energy of his peers, instead exuding the folksy persona of someone perpetually running for town mayor: a handsome, charming man who seems genuinely curious about everyone he meets—savvy enough to know who evening headliner Cardi B is, but not quite savvy enough to know that he was supposed to remove the white baste stitches from his blazer before wearing it to the event.

He’s quick to steer any potentially dicey conversation to a story of a user he met in whatever locale suits the current situation—deftly rattling off how many followers one user or another gained overnight, how many items were sold after a shop went viral. He remembers faces and names, and he visits small businesses. He (or his comms team) even arranged for tacos from AZ Taco King, a local TikTok success story, to be conveniently delivered during our interview.

When I ask Chew who he looked up to as a kid, he doesn’t name music or sports stars, but Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Chew’s home, Singapore. Lee is widely credited with lifting the country from poverty into an economic powerhouse over his 31-year tenure. He has also been called a “benevolent dictator.” He’d be an obvious North Star for a certain sort of politician; less so for the head of a social media company that got started with selfie dance videos.

But let’s be clear: TikTok is no longer in competition with other social media companies, especially if your metric of success is immersion. It outclasses every other app in this regard. X is chasing away advertisers; TikTok integrates them. Meta has promised a metaverse where we create, work, shop, and play. With TikTok, it’s already here—no headset required. YouTube is a good place to post videos, but not to make them; TikTok not only lets you post videos, but its in-house editing app rivals expensive pro-level software.

An entire culture is rising up of users to whom it doesn’t occur to leave the app for, well, anything. TikTok’s true competition, then, is the politics of each territory in which it operates. And Chew’s newest strategy seems to be taking his stump speech on the road, virtually and IRL. ByteDance is spending millions on lobbying, yes, but Chew is also ramping up his charm offensive, making TikToks on his own account (@shou.time), encouraging users to tell everyone about how much they love the app.

I should mention that I was an early user of the app, downloading it right after it became available. I have covered TikTokkers who were using the app for positive impact, and I know people whose lives changed forever after a single post—whether an in-joke about local weather or humanizing stories about incarcerated people. Some of these same users also say that being TikTok-famous has made them anxious, that they feel obligated to make the same kind of videos over and over lest the algorithm punish them. This all makes me think about how, while Chew has been pressed on TikTok’s security practices, he hasn’t had much to say about how dependent global pop culture has become on the app. That’s something we should think about as TikTok continues to extend its influence over how we experience culture, including food, music, and fashion. [On Tuesday, Universal Music Group announced that it would not renew its licensing agreement with TikTok, which could result in music by artists like Taylor Swift and Drake vanishing from the platform.]

TikTok has irreversibly bent our culture’s trajectory, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be around to reap the benefits. (India banned the app long ago, and it’s under growing scrutiny in a handful of other countries.) It has walked the political tightrope this far, but any bad PR could knock it off. Maybe that’s why TikTok’s chief comms officer—who used to work in US politics herself—made a show of recording my conversation with Chew with her phone.

The overprotectiveness isn’t surprising, of course. TikTok knows Chew can’t play the game in quite the same way many of his Silicon Valley counterparts do (taunting the media, for example, will always be off-limits for him). Instead, he has chosen a gentler kind of evangelism, telling people that things really are nicer in his walled garden, if only they’ll give the app a chance. And that the garden will be even nicer if we all produce more content.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Shou Zi Chew: Almost every time I visit a new city, I try and meet a few creators. And then I follow them on my TikTok. So it becomes like a friendship, sending messages, and we just stay in touch.

Dexter Thomas: That is cool.

It’s really fun, yeah. [Chew pulls out his phone.] Follow me, I’m @shou.time. I’m going to follow you.

OK.

This is you, right? [reading from my first post] Uh, your caption says, “This is a terrible app.”

Well, I didn’t like it back then because it was all Musical.ly kids. My opinion has changed.

You have only two comments on this post. OK. You should post more.

I should. But right now, here we are in Mesa, Arizona, at the first live TikTok concert. Why Mesa?

Well, the weather is fantastic this time of the year.

I guess, but why not Los Angeles? Why not New York? Is this a soft launch to see if it works?

With the first time, you make sure you manage your expectations, right? It is important that the event goes smoothly. The whole point was, how do we make the best of technology offline, online?

I also hear you’re sponsoring the Met Gala.

Yeah.

Why?

Why not? Did you see the press release about it? It’s very cultural. Fashion is an incredibly important part of TikTok. Louis Vuitton has 12 million followers on our app.

I think the world doesn’t know much about you as a person. So let’s leave TikTok alone. Who is Shou Zi Chew?

Oh, who am I? I grew up in Singapore. I was born there, my great-grandfather moved there many years ago. I had a typical Singaporean childhood. I wanted to see the world, because Singapore is fantastic, but it’s tiny. So I went to the UK for college. I joined Goldman Sachs, worked there for a couple of years, met an internet entrepreneur who started an investment company to invest in Facebook. So I joined him, and through that I met the guy who founded ByteDance. And in his earliest iteration, the idea was so simple, but so powerful. So I met him in 2012, and … [The door opens and a couple walks in. They are the owners of AZ Taco King.]

Taco King: Sorry to interrupt. We’re dropping off food.

Chew: Oh, hello! Nice to see you. I promised you if I were in Phoenix, I was going to look you up. Thanks for bringing the food. I’m looking forward to trying this. And have you started using TikTok Shop?

Taco King: We’re trying. I’ve just been having a little bit of trouble, and obviously I’ve been really, really busy.

Chew: That’s awesome. If you need any help, just tell our team. [Turning to me] Sorry about that. Do you want to grab some food? It looks amazing, right? [We both start eating the tacos. They are pretty great.]

Did you play video games as a kid?

Oh, a lot. I still play video games.

Really? What do you play?

Well, I still play Clash of Clans. I recently played Diablo IV.

How are you awake right now? Every friend I know who plays Diablo IV, I don’t see them for days.

At some point you start to pace yourself a lot better. I had my first Nintendo set when I was maybe 5 years old, and my first 286 computer very shortly after that. I’m born in the ’80s, which means that—

We’re the same age.

We’re the same age. So you know what I’m talking about. When you were born, it was all analog. You still had that phone with that curly wire, you remember that? And then video games were sort of invented during that time. So I grew up digitally very native.

I would say you and I, maybe we’re more digitally fluent. We’re not native. We remember the time before the internet. People younger than us are native.

I consider myself native. I remember getting my first dialup internet connection. Remember that beep? I remember getting online for the first time. I remember that very clearly.

What did you do?

Oh, well, we started searching for … I think my first thing was to search for artists, the musicians that you care about. Sheryl Crow, I think.

Sheryl Crow?

She was popular at that time.

Well, we’re at a music festival, so let’s keep talking music. Who else were you listening to as a kid?

Back in the ’90s, the radio was the most important distribution channel, and the discoverability of music was more or less constrained to what you heard on the radio.

But did you have any favorite artists?

I really liked Green Day. It’s a ’90s band.

Chew at the music festival at the Chicago Cubs’ training facility in Mesa, Arizona.

Photograph: Lenne Chai

Right. I’m interested in how you see TikTok fitting into the music space. There are musicians who’ve blown up on TikTok overnight. But there are a lot of musicians who’ve publicly said things like, “My label is making me make TikToks. I used to be able to concentrate on albums; everything is being shortened to a 15-second clip.” Or that they feel pressure to put something in their song that will go viral.

The key thing the recommendation algorithm has done is lower the barriers of people discovering music. I think that in itself is the most fundamental and powerful change. So in the past, if you had a very good song, it was difficult for many people to hear it, to be honest. But now, there are so many examples of people just posting a song that they write on TikTok and it goes viral. I think the net positive that we bring to the industry, of course, is this lowering of the barrier of discoverability.

You think what you’re doing is a net positive?

Definitely. It means new talent coming into the market. They have a good song. The chances of you getting heard by many people now are much higher.

Remember the song “Video Killed the Radio Star”? This discussion reminds me of that. The perception is, it used to be if you were musically talented, that’s all you needed. With music videos, you needed to be talented and pretty. Now with TikTok, you need to be talented and pretty and social media savvy (or work with someone who is). I hear what you’re saying about it lowering the barriers. But what do you say to artists who say TikTok is ruining music?

I don’t think so. You mentioned you have to be social media savvy. It’s actually not really true. If you look at some of the songs that have taken off on our platform—I’ll show you a few examples. So if you look at the way Paul Russell did it …

Oh, I mean, I’ve seen people who have been successful at it.

Look, the cost of producing a TikTok like this is actually not very high. And to the point of whether we have truncated songs to 15 seconds, a lot of times it actually drives people to want to discover the music more. So I’m not very sure that it’s 100 percent cutting people’s attention span. A lot of these songs then become proper hits on Billboard charts, on the radio. There’s so many of these examples. I think Gayle had a huge hit last year as well. You know that song, “abcdefu”? Consumers are consuming things slightly differently. Of course that will mean that people have to adapt to this new way that the consumers are demanding to consume. But generally speaking, I think it unleashes more creativity. And if you look at the music industry as a result of TikTok, I think it’s thriving more than ever.

I think that’s the key there, what you just said: “have to.” Because this new platform exists, musicians and artists do have to adapt. This is the new norm. You have to.

TikTok Comms Officer: [interrupting] You don’t have to.

Chew: I think a lot of them are. So Cardi B’s going to perform today. She’s adapted very well. She had a number of campaign sessions she did on TikTok over the year, and it’s really, really successful. Charlie Puth as well, he’s performing here today. He shows people how he makes his music. It’s amazing how talented this guy is.

It is amazing.

Fans want to know how the music is made. They want to know about the thought process, the creative process. And this is the key thing. They don’t want this to be overproduced. They want this to be super authentic. And one of the key things that you will find on TikTok is that most of the content, everything I just told you about, has to be really authentic. If you try to make it very polished or very refined, it’s not going to be that organic. People will see through this.

I can see both sides. I definitely also hear the pressure from a label saying, “Fans want authenticity, but they want this specific kind of ‘authenticity.’” It creates pressure. I’ve seen a musician argue that we wouldn’t have had Radiohead if they had to come up in the TikTok era. Thom Yorke’s an unusual dude. I don’t think he would’ve been down to make a TikTok to say, “Hey everybody, join me on my musical journey to make this song.”

If you’re talking about the more classic songs, we have also had many examples. Remember the Ocean Spray guy a number of years ago?

Right, yeah.

What was that song? “Dreams.” Fleetwood Mac. It went back into the charts again as a result of that video.

But totally randomly. You can’t predict that.

It’s a feeling. It’s that moment in time, and it captures the feelings of the cultural zeitgeist. A lot of these things, you can’t engineer it. This is organic. Our role as a platform is to provide the three things: the window, the canvas, and the bridges to connect. And then these things will emerge organically. You have things like BookTok, people sharing about books, 200 billion views. You have people sharing science content. It’s this mesh of diversity. That’s what we’re trying to achieve. There’s so many people around the world with talent, and we have just opened up the pool for more people. For creativity to emerge, you need to have that kind of competitive, I guess, competitiveness of ideas.

Music is a tough business. It’s almost a cynical joke at this point, an artist posting something like, “Hey, I got a million streams on Spotify. Thanks, everybody, I’m going to go buy a burrito.” Somebody’s making money, but it doesn’t seem to be the artists. Where does TikTok fit into how artists are going to be able to continue to make their art?

That’s a great question. We are always thinking about providing more tools for musicians and other creators and users to be able to connect with their base. One of the reasons we’re doing this event—and by the way, super excited about this festival—it’s not only about the people who show up today, it’s about the livestreaming. I’m certain that we’re going to reach a lot more people online through the app.

Than in person?

Than we are offline, yeah. By a significant difference. Have you discovered a new song on TikTok?

A couple. I can think of one, specifically. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t make any money on it.

Well, we are also developing new tools that allow partnerships with Apple and others. Initially the focus was on discoverability, but then as that sort of becomes more and more established, we are creating new channels for artists to be able to find some monetization opportunities, including connecting directly to, say, Apple Music to do that.

It seems that, of all the social media platforms out there, TikTok is truly the one in the spotlight right now. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think we are probably one of the youngest ones. As in, we are the most recent ones to emerge onto the scene, and we do bring a different proposition with discoverability. I think trust has to be earned in every company. As you grow and have more and more users and nonusers who are looking at your platform, you just have to earn their trust. I actually see this as an opportunity for us to explain ourselves.

I don’t want to relitigate the congressional hearings. But I watched them, and the main topic, of course, was China. China, China, China. A lot of fans of TikTok thought it was unfair and posted TikToks making fun of it. Have you seen the edits of you answering questions and looking confused?

Yes. [laughs]

What do you think?

It was important that we showed up at the hearing. It was important that we answered the questions, which is what I tried to do. But some of these moments, you never know when the moment becomes a meme like that.

Did you have any inkling that a politician asking you about TikTok connecting to the home Wi-Fi was going to be funny to somebody out there?

No. I was genuinely trying to answer the question.

Have you felt that there is an unfairness or an extra scrutiny of TikTok because of the origins of the company?

To a large extent, yes. I think it’s one of the reasons we have a bigger trust deficit than most other companies. Maybe our trust starting line is behind other businesses, but I also think that there are very serious approaches that we’ve taken to try and earn that trust and to close that gap. I talked about this during the congressional hearing—you know all this, this is all public information, we built a project to address those concerns. We actually spent a lot of time understanding them. There were concerns about data security, there were concerns about transparency of our code. We have not only talked about it, we have actually put this into action. We built a project where we put all data into a third-party environment, through Oracle. It’s a setup that is unprecedented, and no other company that I know of has established this. If you’re fundamentally addressing all these concerns, then over time the trust will come.

Speaking of trust, let’s talk about moderation. There are truly terrible things on basically every app, because there are truly terrible things basically everywhere.

There are truly terrible things that people try to post.

Is there something that you think TikTok is doing better than other apps to address that?

I think I just want to focus on ourselves. We have invested a tremendous amount in terms of not only the technology to help us moderate content but also evolving the policies, the community guidelines. We have invested in a lot of people to help us with content moderation. We have worked with many experts out there.

Photograph: Lenne Chai

You’ve heard of Algospeak?

Yes, I’ve heard of it. Yes.

What do you think about it?

It’s difficult as a technical challenge. But I believe it’s something that can be overcome with advances in technology. I’m optimistic.

Algospeak exists, I’d argue, for good reasons. I can give you an example. [I show him a TikTok.] This is somebody talking about the conflict in Israel and Palestine. There’s a perception that TikTok won’t let him say this stuff, so to get around it, people are saying things in the comments like “Thanks for these beauty tips” or “That’s a great recipe” in order to fool the algorithm into thinking this TikTok is about something else. It seems like there’s a lot of people on the platform who are trying to fool the algorithm.

The overarching thing that we’re trying to do here is to keep the community safe and inclusive for everybody. There’s always freedom for users to express themselves if it doesn’t violate any of our guidelines. As you can imagine, this is a very complex role, and our trust and safety team is always looking into making sure that the content on the platform is not violative.

I suppose the question I’m asking here is, what do you think of the fact that a culture has arisen that is constantly trying to evade things?

I think as long as there have been rules, there have been people trying to bypass the rules. I think what is really important is to make sure that the spirit of what we’re trying to do is well understood, and the spirit is, “Look, we’re trying to create a platform for creativity and for joy.”

But to that end, both creators and commenters feel the need to dodge what they think are censors.

Right.

So how do you view that?

I need to understand specifically what you are trying to say. Look, what do we mean by “dodge the censors”? If they’re saying something that is actually hate speech and it violates the spirit of the platform …

Let’s say in this case it’s not. Somebody is saying, “Hey, I think this is really important. You all should pay attention to what’s happening out there.” But then feeling like TikTok won’t like this.

Oh, no, but I think the guidelines are clear on what we do and what we don’t do. If you’re talking about a small group of bad actors who are trying to find a loophole, then our role will always be to stop that. If you’re saying there are a lot of people who don’t understand our rules, well, I actually don’t think that’s the case.

I’m not sure that’s the problem here, that people don’t understand …

TikTok Comms Officer: You can appeal.

Chew: Yeah, you can appeal.

For an example, news outlets have had to, at times, avoid saying things like “Somebody was killed” when it’s a fact. You’ll see respected outlets avoiding certain words, or even using words like “unalived.” These aren’t people doing bad things. These are just people trying to communicate.

I think I understand the question better now. Clearly we prioritize safety very seriously, as you can imagine. And some of it could be us being overly protective, a mis-moderation leaning on the side of being careful. Sometimes we have taken something down as an abundance of caution. The position of moderation is very important. It’s not only getting the violation rates down, it’s reducing overmoderation, which happens. It’s a price you have to pay, and you have to find the right balance. You mentioned certain words like “kill” or “death” that will trigger the content moderation rules. It’s taken down out of abundance of caution first, and then if you appeal against it … it’s not a good user experience. I understand that. It gives users the wrong impression of what your guidelines are trying to achieve.

I think in particular, it gives a lot of users the impression that if they have a less popular or minority opinion, that opinion isn’t acceptable.

I just want to clarify that the community guidelines are comprehensive in covering what we think is OK or not OK. And a lot of times it will take time for people to understand that that is how we moderate. That is how policies are built, that is how tens of thousands of moderators are doing their jobs. You’ve got to give them something to do their jobs, and that’s the set of guidelines. Everything cascades from that.

Let’s move to the shift to longer videos. TikTok just ended the creators program, which is how a lot of people made a living; now it’s paying only for videos over a minute. There are creators who got very, very good at making short videos, and that skill set is not as applicable now. What’s your pitch to creators who are feeling like, “We made this, we made you what you are, and now you’ve changed the rules”?

There are a lot of users who want to see the amazing UGC [user-generated content] that everyone has been creating for the last five, six years. That doesn’t go away. But as more and more people join, there will be a diverse demand for new things, and that’s where some of our efforts in encouraging slightly longer videos come from. It doesn’t take away from the existing ones, because that’s the way the recommendation engine works. It just adds to more integration.

You’re paying only for the longer videos.

A lot of it is because longer videos require more investment in time to be created, and it is an area where it’s still relatively small compared to the rest of the UGC platform. But we are always thinking of ways forward. Not everybody is here to make money, to be clear.

Of course.

But for those who want to explore more opportunities, we’ve created a whole series of things to allow people to try that. Livestreaming is one of them.

Right.

I take, obviously, all this feedback very seriously. I’m not trying to diminish it, I’m just saying that I hear that feedback, and I think what’s important for us is that we don’t mistake launching a program for de-emphasis on anything else. It’s not like that. The community who has always been with us, creating all the wonderful dancing and singing content, this underpins everything we are. It underpins us because it’s creativity and it’s joy. I cannot emphasize enough how important the base is to us and how deeply we care about giving them the best experience possible. I’ve met many creators, by the way, across many countries, in France, in the UK, in this country, in Indonesia, Singapore, even as far as Kazakhstan. There’s always a group of users who’ve been there since 2017, 2018, 2019. In all our work internally, I want to assure that group that they’re incredibly important to us and we are not pursuing something at the expense of them.

Actually, the dancing reminds me of something. Have you seen that researchers from Alibaba have released a paper saying that they used data that had been scraped from videos of popular TikTok dances and used that information to create an engine that shows … [Chew looks puzzled] Oh my gosh, you haven’t seen this?

Nope.

Oh, you should see this.

OK.

The researchers at Alibaba used a data set of scraped TikTokkers doing dances and used that data to create an engine that will allow them to animate anything. These are users who have gotten big themselves, and they’ve given quite a lot to your platform, and now an outside actor is pulling data from your platform.

It’s public data, though.

It’s public data, but I bet a lot of people wouldn’t want their dance to be used in somebody else’s data set.

I think it’s a complex topic about how we deal with public data that’s been used for somebody’s private training sets. I’m paying a lot of attention to this topic. There are a lot of debates about this, as you can imagine. I don’t have any immediate response to this. This is something I need to go back and look into more deeply, because it’s an evolving discussion.

Is there some protection you can offer to users to say that the content you upload here will be used on this platform and not scraped by some third party?

I would need to look into that.

OK.

Because in the past, if you publish something publicly, it’s in the public domain. It’s out there.

[Note: After this conversation, a public relations staffer introduced me to TikTok’s head of security and asked me to repeat what I’d said about the scraping paper. He said this was the first he’d heard of it and thanked me for telling him about it.]

I know that our time here is limited, and the concert is going to start soon, so one more. You’ve had to answer a lot of criticism about your app and your practices. From your perspective, what do you think is the biggest thing that people have misunderstood about TikTok?

I think the biggest gap in understanding is between users and nonusers. This is the biggest gap.

Really?

Yeah, that’s the biggest gap. Every time I meet a user, I feel like the level of understanding and the conversations that we have are significantly different than with someone who’s never used it before. People who use it really understand it.

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

BACKCHANNEL

The Spy Who Dumped the CIA, Went to Therapy, and Now Makes Incredible Television

Laura Kipnis  December 05, 2023 11:00 AM

Joe Weisberg—the geopolitically entangled, heavily therapized creator of The Americans and The Patient—is the trickiest character he’s written (so far).

Photograph: Vincent Tullo

“Did you learn things in CIA training about withstanding interrogation that are going to make it harder for me to interview you?” I asked Joe Weisberg, creator of the TV espionage drama The Americans and onetime CIA agent. He looked momentarily startled, as though he’d expected this to be easier. Good, I had him where I wanted him: off-balance. I saw him taking my measure. Then he laughed affably, but I mistrusted the affability, since I knew from his own books that affability is among the qualities the CIA recruits for: people who can get other people to trust them, or at least want to have lunch with them.

I suppose I had certain fantasies about interviewing an ex-spook (was he equally profiling me? more skillfully?), no doubt the result of having read too many John le Carré novels. As it happens, reading le Carré had a lot to do with propelling Weisberg himself to spycraft. Sure, he knew it was a fantasy world being depicted, but it was still a world he felt he belonged in. There was also his consuming obsession with bringing down the Soviet Union, which unfortunately for his career aspirations was soon to collapse on its own.

Weisberg, who is 57 and on the short side, has a sharp, possibly even hawkish visage along with an invitingly squishy-liberal midsection, which in combination externalize the essential duality in his being, one that’s both shaped his life story to date and yielded one of the most complex married couples in television history, the Russian sleeper agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings. The Americans aired on FX from 2013 to 2018, but everyone I know seems to be compulsively binge-streaming it lately—maybe the fear that your neighbors are plotting to bring down democracy somehow resonates again with the mental state of the country? Loosely based on the FBI’s 2010 arrest of a network of Soviet spies living under assumed identities in the US, the series springs at least as much from the depths of Weisberg’s psyche. Elizabeth, a cold warrior to her core, is, Weisberg says semi-jokingly, him pre-therapy; the détente-curious Philip is him after.

Therapy also figures significantly in his more recent limited-run series, The Patient, created with his writing partner Joel Fields (they were showrunners together on both series) and starring Steve Carell as a shrink horribly unlucky in his clientele. Something haunts me about both these shows, and not just because they feel like case studies in American paranoia. At a time when most scripted television specializes in moral preening—trafficking in sentimentality, pandering to liberal do-gooderism, leaving us feeling better about ourselves and the world—Weisberg’s shows put you through a merciless psychological and spiritual wringer. They’re willing to leave you floundering.

So what about those interrogation-evading techniques? I pressed Weisberg. We were chatting in his downtown apartment, the top two floors of a century-old building—gracious entryway, high-ceilinged rooms, also a rental and steep third-floor walkup with an inoperable buzzer. (“Joe doesn't have fancy taste, he’s not acquisitive, he's not super interested in money,” says his brother, Jacob.) Decorative touches include his late mother’s porcelain eggcup collection, a row of family photos (some “off the record”—Weisberg is divorced and has a teenage daughter), the residues of successive hobbies—photography, painting, cooking—and a wall of serious-looking books. The vestibule is devoted to an extensive high-tech backpack collection: his only consumerist passion is an unequivocally nerdy one.

What I really wanted to know was what he’d learned about getting inside people’s heads—knowing what your adversaries are thinking, using their desires against them. It’s what’s so seductive about le Carré: his operatives aren’t just spies, they’re master psychological strategists. As are Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, always knowing the precise right play: who’s dissembling, where’s the weak spot. Does CIA training give you a leg up at that kind of thing in later life? Does it make you better at grasping dark human complexities, thus at writing layered and contradictory characters?

It turned out I had it backward. The secret to writing success goes deeper than on-the-job training. It requires a willingness to pursue your monomanias wherever they lead. It requires, Weisberg eventually divulged, finding a good enemy. “When I was younger, having an enemy gave me a purpose, because the purpose is to fight the enemy,” he told me. “It’s hard to describe how alluring that was. If you have an enemy, everything makes sense.” There it was: scratch the affability, uncover a gladiator. If I wanted to understand Weisberg, and maybe human creativity generally, I realized I’d have to understand the symbolic function of The Enemy.

Photograph: Vincent Tullo

In the Cold War years, a good enemy wasn’t hard to locate. Though only 14 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and not especially political, Weisberg was outraged over the brutality and injustice of the war and saw the mujahideen (some factions of which would become the Taliban) as heroes. Maybe it had to do with his father reading aloud nightly from the Russian classics to Joe and Jacob—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky—from when he was 5 on, meaning that the romantic world of imperial Russia was lodged deep in his imagination. Maybe it was the Sunday school inculcations about the oppression of Soviet Jewry. Either way, his fantasy life—he’d been writing novels from the time he was 12—became devoted to saving innocents from repression, and what he knew more than anything was that America needed to liberate the freedom-loving people of Afghanistan.

In college, ever more convinced that the USSR imperiled world peace and ever more drawn to the thralls of absolutism, he became—despite having grown up in an ardently liberal household—a Reagan devotee. Switching his attentions from literature to become a history major focused on Russia, he wrote a senior thesis asking if the Soviet population supported their government’s leadership. (He now wonders if his entire career since has been devoted to rehashing that paper.) At Yale, conservatives were then in short supply, at least among the student population, and being vocally pro-Reagan had its social disadvantages. Even if he didn’t identify as a social conservative, rumors circulated among friends back home that he’d become a racist. In an office-hours meeting with a writing professor he’d thought he was on friendly terms with, she suddenly blurted out, “You can be such an asshole!” He was baffled, but maybe he also was a bit of an asshole. “You do nasty things,” he’d later write about his pre-therapy self. “You behave in strange ways when your feelings are obscured from you. You don’t have the tools to do anything else.”

The Soviet obsession continued post-graduation: he studied Russian, went to Leningrad to study more, got a job in Chicago helping Soviet émigrés find jobs. Bored, one day he called the CIA to request a job application. After 18 months of tests and interviews, he started training at the agency’s semisecret compound in Langley, learning to fire weapons and detect surveillance. (That was the exciting part; less thrilling was a six-week classroom slog memorizing the bureaucratic ins and outs of the CIA.) He met guys, rough guys, who while operating in Afghanistan had grown beards and donned traditional robes, riding around on horseback with the mujahideen. Though afraid of horses, and though the Soviets had by then left Afghanistan, this was the career Weisberg wanted.

As far as interrogation-withstanding, he recounted the day when trainees were kidnapped from their barracks, blindfolded, put in a truck, then taken into a room and questioned. If you wouldn't talk, they made you stand in awkward positions. He doesn’t think he really learned much, other than a phrase one of the trainers wore on his hat: “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.” “I may do that,” he said, apropos our interview. The other takeaway was to always have a cover story prepared.

Weisberg left the CIA after three and a half years, still feeling positively toward it, he says, though a review of his 2008 novel An Ordinary Spy in the CIA’s house organ, Studies in Intelligence, suggests otherwise. “A nasty and poorly executed look at our world,” snarls the reviewer, a veteran CIA agent specializing in counterintelligence. Quoting a le Carré character’s statement that what spies do—however unscrupulously—is vital to the “safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me,” the reviewer insists this is a truth “few people in the intelligence profession would dispute.”

An Ordinary Spy disputes precisely that. The first-person account of Mark Ruttenberg, a bookish, sweaty, newly minted CIA case officer not entirely unlike Weisberg, it’s also rather a takedown. Mark, though no Lothario (he hasn’t had sex for a year), ends up in bed with Daisy, an embassy worker he’d been trying and failing to recruit. And is then left in deep shit after she imparts a useful piece of postcoital intel. Unfortunately for Mark, this is not the daring world of sexy spies familiar from movies and airport paperbacks; the real CIA (as depicted in the novel) is a rule-bound bureaucracy where crossing lines or bedding a “developmental” gets you summarily fired. Weisberg’s other realist gesture was covering the pages with blacked-out redactions—his having worked at the CIA meant the book did actually have to be vetted by its publications review board (as would every Americans script)—the effect of which is a sly indictment of institutional ass-covering about a botched operation.

Overall, the novel struck me as far more cynical about the mission of the intelligence services than even le Carré tends to be. When I pressed Weisberg about the cynicism, he said he thinks le Carré is skeptical about the goals of espionage while still respecting his characters’ competence; his own book, he acknowledges, is cynical even about the competence. For both, the cost of intelligence gathering means not infrequently wrecking informants’ lives and livelihoods, and sometimes getting them killed. For le Carré it’s a necessary trade-off; in An Ordinary Spy the value of any intelligence gained is minuscule, also entirely unreliable. If you’re a case officer in the field, a shockingly high percentage of your informants are lying to you, and there’s frequently no way to tell. One of his main characters, another CIA agent, gets scammed by an 11-year-old.

The novel didn’t sell a lot of copies, but Hollywood loves spies, Weisberg had sort of been one and could also write dialog, which led to a well-known agent approaching him about writing for TV. Weisberg sold a show about a CIA station in Bulgaria to FX, which didn’t get made but led to relationships with producers at DreamWorks, which led to him writing some episodes of their sci-fi show Falling Skies. When the Russian illegals were arrested in 2010, the DreamWorks producers called and said, Do you want to do a show about this? Weisberg spent a couple of weeks wandering around and thinking about it, and decided the story should be set in the 1980s and be told from the point of view of the KGB spies. And it should be about a family. Weisberg was by then a father himself, and something that had stuck with him from his CIA days was how many people there lied to their kids about what they really did for a living.

After Weisberg wrote the Americans pilot and it got picked up, he joined forces with the more experienced Joel Fields to co-executive produce the series. Weisberg describes working with Fields—son of a rabbi, studied moral philosophy in college—as transformative. Fields is also the product of a lot of talk therapy; the two soon realized that they wanted to make a show where the drama derives less from plot twists than how the characters navigate them emotionally. When I asked Fields about their creative coupledom—what I really wanted to know was what they fight about—he said they used to joke on The Americans that like Philip and Elizabeth, they had an arranged marriage. They’re also both too conflict-averse to fight.

Photograph: Vincent Tullo

Among their goals was having the spycraft be as realistic as possible, and much of it is entirely real. One of their consultants, an expert on the Soviet illegals, had a personal collection of KGB gizmos and gadgets—the actual stuff that actual spies used. Even the props were marinated in history, the same history that had fired Weisberg’s obsessions, which I suspect somehow filters into the emotional texture of the show.

His political trajectory still puzzled me, though. In my youth, people who needed a geopolitical enemy looked for foes closer to home: US imperialism, capitalist pillage. They swung left, not right. Maybe Joe was wilier—it’s not like becoming a CIA agent was something kids of Chicago lakefront liberals were encouraged to do, especially when your parents are active in local Democratic politics and your lawyer-dad works part-time for the ACLU, and your mother …

Yes, let’s pause to discuss Joe’s mother—though I come late to the undertaking, as her story was previously related by Malcolm Gladwell in a 1999 New Yorker article (“Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg”) and his subsequent mega-bestseller The Tipping Point. “Everyone who knows Lois Weisberg has a story about meeting Lois Weisberg,” opens Gladwell. Chain-smoking, coffee-addicted, frizzy-haired, five-foot-nothing, Lois was the type of person Gladwell calls a “connector,” someone with a weird genius for sweeping people from entirely different worlds into their orbits. Somehow Lois knew everyone—Lenny Bruce, Dizzy Gillespie, Ralph Ellison, Isaac Asimov. Gladwell’s theory is that people like Lois may actually run the world.

I count myself a beneficiary of the Lois effect, having casually known Joe’s one-year-older brother Jacob since back when I used to write for Slate in the 2000s. As its boss, and being Lois’ offspring, Jacob regularly convened assorted Slate writers for meals and occasionally far-flung outings, which included once beckoning me, maybe 20 years ago, to Lois’ Chicago apartment for a family dinner when he was in town, where Joe was also in attendance. This was in his post-CIA malaise—he’d taken a leave to help care for his dying father, briefly returned, then resigned. (He didn’t want to live abroad, he says now.) I recall him being remote and difficult to talk to. Someone I know who met him around then describes him as “vaguely desperate.” His father’s death had torpedoed him; soon after, he entered therapy, urged by his brother and friends. (When I reminded Joe that we’d met once long ago, he claimed to remember, though I chalk this up to the Weisberg affability.) These days Jacob, alongside Gladwell, runs Pushkin Industries, a podcast company.

Now it was my turn to summon Jacob to dinner, to grill him about Joe. Joe was not a happy child, I learned, an outsider at school—“a little awkward or funny-looking,” said Jacob, quickly backtracking to add that “funny-looking” was unfair. He just wasn’t comfortable with kids his age, thus lonely, also the outlier in the family. All Joe wanted was to read comic books and watch TV; his bibliophile father hated television so much that he may have once said, depending on which Weisberg brother you ask, that it was worse than the atom bomb, and permitted only two hours of it per week.

Jacob, who describes himself as a far less interesting person than Joe, didn't have conflicts with their parents, and didn’t much want to watch TV. To him it seemed like a wonderful family life. “I accepted the terms of the imprisonment pretty well,” he said. When Joe went into therapy and started characterizing their homelife as difficult and repressive, Jacob’s initial reaction was, “What? I was there too. It wasn’t like that.”

Jacob told me that Lois was the kind of mother who’d say, “Why don’t you go join the circus?” I assumed she’d meant it in a cruel-mom way, as in “You don’t like your dinner, go join the circus.” No, she’d meant it literally, I learned from Joe. Lois was then in charge of special events for the city of Chicago, and when the Ringling Brothers circus came to town, Lois (being Lois) had gotten to know the guy in charge and one night during dinner said, “Joseph, I think you should join the circus.” He was in his teens. She said she’d introduce him to someone who could probably find him a job and take him with them when they left, which would be an amazing experience. “She was right that it would have been a great experience,” Joe says now, “though also wrong and crazy.” He’d always seen it as a funny and benevolent story, but later wondered if there was also a part of her that wanted to get rid of him. “I think one has to face that interpretation of the story too.”

One late summer afternoon, Weisberg and I met at a midtown tourist museum called Spyscape, which gauges its visitors’ potential spy abilities via a series of interactive exhibits and tests. Long on what’s known in writers’ rooms as “hangability,” Weisberg gamely played along, though barraged with a lot of whooshing sound effects and flashing lights upon entering asked, “Does the fact that these are making me nauseous mean I wouldn’t be a good spy?”

What was great about this field trip was that the museum promised to do my job for me: construct a profile of the person I was supposed to be profiling. We were tested about whether we were good liars, good at detecting lies, and willing to take risks. In “Special Ops” we were faced with an infernally complicated challenge involving pushing a lot of glowing white buttons on a wall while dodging a meshwork of laser beams. Weisberg leaped athletically to the task, determined to beat that day’s record, exclaiming afterward, “I thought that looked dumb, but it was great!” Squirting himself with Purell at one of the stations thoughtfully located around the museum, he joked, “Here’s where you really fall down in their assessment—if you use the hand sanitizer.” In the “Surveillance” exhibit we had our first fight, over Edward Snowden, about whom Weisberg was decidedly negative and I insisted had been a patriot.

Then it was time for Weisberg’s spy evaluation. “You have high emotional intelligence, which helps you understand people in social situations, and are empathetic,” pronounced a creepy omniscient robot. “You take risks after careful consideration,” it added. “Joe Weisberg, you are going to be an intelligence operative!” This didn’t thrill him. “The real question is, do I want for it to say that I’d be a good spy or a bad spy?” he mulled. “The truth is I don’t want to be a good spy anymore.” But maybe old habits die hard. On his personality assessment, when asked if he was willing to be unethical if it would help him succeed, he’d rated himself a 1, the lowest score. Asked if he’d say anything to get what he wants, he’d given himself a 2. “Obviously that’s what you’d say if you were saying anything to get what you want!” I pointed out.

After all, he was the one who’d earlier said that the whole thing you learn to do in the CIA is manipulate people. Is unlearning that really possible? The question of who was manipulating whom had been a meta thing in our conversations from the beginning, with jokey badinage about the power of interviewers and the vulnerability of their subjects. Not long after our field trip, Weisberg—a foodie who spends much of his free time patrolling lower Manhattan in quest of Chinatown’s most electrifying dumpling—suggested by email that we hop on the Long Island Rail Road to Flushing, Queens, for “sour fish”; he knew a restaurant that served a half dozen varieties. The accompanying photo displayed a bowl of lethal-looking chilies the size of hand grenades. I wrote back: “Fearing unflattering portrayal, profile subject poisons unwitting profiler with capsaicin overdose.” Weisberg rejoined a second later: “Pathologists were shocked to discover the poison delivered simultaneously with a subcutaneous patch and ingested along with, judging by the contents of the victim’s stomach, sour fish.”

He was funny, I was charmed, but then so was poor lonely Martha Hanson in The Americans—secretary to the head of the FBI’s DC counterintelligence unit—skillfully charmed by Philip in a great demonstration of what a powerful interpersonal weapon nerdy vulnerability can be. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for Martha.

The Americans rode to acclaim by enacting such interpersonal paranoias on the historical stage, the complication being that sometimes the enemies we create are indeed out to destroy us, and sometimes our side is worse. Just as Weisberg would become torn about who the geopolitical villains really are, so will viewers be torn about Philip and Elizabeth. Yes, they’re stealing American secrets, seducing and exploiting the locals, ruthlessly exterminating anyone who gets in their way, but they’re also idealists with hopes and depths. They love their kids. A friend I had breakfast with the other week, who was midway through watching the series, was agonized about how they could have gone through with one particular assassination (an elderly woman). He fretted about whether the show had finally crossed a line for him, then conceded that the line had already been crossed when Elizabeth murders a sympathetic Black woman whose life she’d already destroyed after fake-befriending her to get information, and the show just assumes you’ll go along with it.

Sometimes going along was tough. I myself argued with both Weisberg and Fields about Elizabeth pimping out her daughter to her KGB handlers. Happily, they’re entirely nonproprietary about their own interpretations of characters and plotlines, including when I queried them (separately) about how monstrous so many of the mothers and mother-surrogates seem. Fields joked that he needed a time-out to call his therapist; Weisberg pushed back a little, saying of the most supremely monstrous mother—Sam’s, the titular patient-kidnapper of The Patient—that though she’s definitely complicit in his crimes, he believed in a mother who couldn’t turn her kid in no matter what. (Or urge him to join the circus, I thought.)

Photograph: Vincent Tullo

When Weisberg and Fields came up with the idea for The Patient, it was Fields who was initially intrigued by serial killers. Weisberg wasn’t, but they kept talking about it, then figured out that Sam, played by Domhnall Gleeson, was in therapy: he wants to change. Then they had the idea that he kidnaps his therapist, and now it was a show—also a merciless examination of how unfree all us benighted humans are, manacled to our stupid psychologies and impediments, even when not literally manacled in a basement. “You hope your plot puts your characters into situations that bring things out that are surprising and you’ll see depths you get to plumb, and this was really like that,” Weisberg said. They have a shared ability to excavate a remarkable amount of submerged stuff from their psyches, and transpose it into commercially viable TV. Fields says that sometimes, months later, one of them will say of a plotline or twist, “Oh my God, our subconsciouses did that,” and the other will say, “That wasn’t subconscious on my part, I thought you knew we were doing that.” Then they’ll laugh.

It was therapy that gave Weisberg the ability to write characters with complex mental lives—he wouldn’t have been able to, he says, until realizing he had one himself. Which meant coming to terms with how much of a false front he’d put on throughout his life, and how much he’d been hiding from himself. He started thinking that his childhood identification with the repressed Soviet citizenry was a way of externalizing his anger about repression in his own family. Trained from the crib to quash all negative feelings, he couldn’t go to war against his parents, but he could work to destroy a Soviet leadership busy choking off the free expression of its citizenry. Having an enemy, in other words, helped him avoid facing his own dark side.

Not that it’s ever so easy to shelve an obsession. In his intermittently memoirish 2021 book, Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, Weisberg contends that he (and we) had fundamentally misunderstood the Soviets. The KGB was remarkably uncorrupt, the Bolsheviks were the party who’d put a stop to the pogroms, and the Soviets had ended the Holocaust, beating the Nazi army back through Eastern Europe. Yes, Jews suffered horribly under their rule, but many were also members of other groups that Stalin was purging and brutalizing, from intellectuals to party elites. These many reversals and correctings-of-the-record make an odd reading experience, like watching someone in an MMA bout with his own former beliefs and punching himself a lot in the face. This effort to get it right, intellectually and emotionally—to come to terms with history and its crimes, to see around your own blind spots—seems both noble and poignantly impossible.

Blind spots: what to do with them? Weisberg and I had disagreed in a friendly way about therapy. His idea is that you get to a more authentic version of yourself, mine is that you just come up with a better cover story. We’re always staging our personas, trying to get people to buy the latest one. He semi-concurred—our stories about ourselves change over time; we all want things from other people and try to get them. It’s what’s so interesting about Philip and Elizabeth, I said—that they’ve been trained to use that “authentic” part of themselves to manipulate people. That had been his own training, Weisberg reflected: Tell the truth as much as you possibly can, even with the foreigners you’re running as spies. Everyone he talked to at the agency said, about the people they were most manipulating, that their feelings for them were entirely genuine. They loved and cared about them.

But what about all the less palatable motives, the things you don’t say to your colleagues? Rewatching the Americans pilot, I was struck by the degree to which revenge figures in numerous plotlines and vignettes; The Patient too is fundamentally about Sam’s need for revenge. Is that a big theme for you? I asked Weisberg. “Not consciously,” he said after a pause. It was probably more that violence and terror were big things for him, that from a young age his isolation, sadness, loneliness, mixed with comic books and American culture generally, all funneled into a very violence-centered fantasy life. “And when there’s a lot of violence, you’re going to have vengeance plots, it’s going to be a part of how you tell those stories.”

“So revenge is just the occasion for violence?”

“I think that’s right,” he said. “Though I can’t rule out that in five years I’ll realize how vengeful I am.”

Weisberg remains convinced that every American’s ideas about Russia are psychological projections, though given recent events—the Ukraine invasion, the blatant assassinations and poisonings of Putin’s critics—he wonders if he’d seen the potential for rapprochement too optimistically. But he’s also over his former optimism about America as a beacon of hope for the world. Having once thought, “We don’t invade, take over, and colonize—we liberate,” the realization that he’d gotten it so wrong on Iraq (he was pro-invasion) was a painful turning point. He looks back now on those fantasies of fighting and nation-building and wonders what the fuck he was thinking. The US shoulders some not insignificant portion of responsibility for the Ukraine war, he also now says, given NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders: “Any nation would feel threatened and fight back. Certainly we would have.” This was startling to hear from an ex-cold warrior, but being susceptible to extreme political swings could also be, I was coming to understand, the putty of great creative bravura.

We’d been talking during the writers’ strike, so Weisberg and Fields weren’t working on anything together at the moment. Weisberg was using the downtime to work on a novel. When I asked if he was cultivating any new obsessions for his next act, he said there was something he kept pitching but had so far gone nowhere. The backpacks.

He wouldn’t say more about the idea but agreed to walk me through his collection, pointing out the pockets on one, the mesh on another, the special sunglasses holder. “Look at that material and the color scheme!” He reeled off the manufacturers of various zippers and buckles. “Just try that zipper pull,” he enthused, zipping a zipper back and forth. I agreed it was a very smooth pull.

I asked how many backpacks he had in total. He said he didn’t want to answer that, but also he didn’t know. I tried surreptitiously counting them but gave up after discovering a second layer underneath the first, along with a bunch of smaller ones. “Don’t you lose stuff in all these pockets?” I asked. “I don’t really use them,” he replied. “I just like having them. I want to feel that I could use them.”

I did my best impersonation of a shrink: “That’s quite suggestive.”

“Yes, it’s odd,” said Weisberg. “What does it suggest to you? Is it obvious what it suggests?”

“Well … like ‘baggage’?” I was thinking of those mental health fascists on dating sites who demand “No baggage” of potential mates. Yet here was someone who loves his baggage and its many secret compartments (even when empty) and plumbs them for a living, I thought enviously, wondering if I should try to love mine more.

“So that’s it for the backpacks?” I said.

“Well, that’s as much as I’m going to show you,” he replied.

Later I asked Weisberg whether he still needed enemies or if therapy had cured him of all that. He said he’d never thought he had enemies in real life (this seemed like a 180!), then rethought the question: “There’s a lot of passion. And a lot of hatred. And, of course, a lot of judgment. And a lot of effort to destroy.” I could have said “Destroy what?” but left it there, thinking that, as with his riveting onscreen alter egos, people are most profusely themselves when their cover stories are a little glitchy.

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

BACKCHANNEL

Rebel Moon Director Zack Snyder on Violence, Loss, and Extreme Fandom

Hemal Jhaveri  November 28, 2023 11:00 AM

The director manages to game the system and keep his soul while doing pretty much whatever he wants. Right now that means trying to make his Rebel Moon space opera into a Netflix mega-franchise.

Photograph: Dan Winters

more taxidermied animals live in Zack Snyder’s office than seems normal. A lioness. A beaver. A duck. Also a wide collection of axes, swords, and guns—the weapons used to fell the wild beasts, maybe? The effect should be unsettling, but it isn’t, because Snyder himself is warm, chatty, accommodating. And the space, tucked into a mountainside in Pasadena, California, turns out to be less a man cave than a fan cave: Snyder’s shrine to his creative life. The swords and guns are merely props from his movies, like Babydoll’s katanas from Sucker Punch. The photo of Wonder Woman above the sofa, where she’s holding a few severed heads? Huge and sepia-toned, it’s oddly alluring.

Being in Snyder’s office, in fact, is a bit like watching one of his many stylized shockfests: The violence is so exaggerated it ends up feeling not only harmless, but fun. That is, of course, why his legions of fans show up. Think of the 300-style bloodbaths, the discomfiting opening of Watchmen. Or any number of scenes from the director’s cut of Justice League—which, at four hours long and wrapped up in tragedy both personal and professional, ranks among the most authentic, auteurist comic book movies to date.

Now, Snyder is adding to his canon of large-scale sci-fi with Rebel Moon, a galaxy-spanning space opera about a band of misfit outlaws. His first franchise movie as a director since Justice League, the film marks the start of a new era for Snyder. Well, newish: It’ll still be big, bloody, and violent. With comic book sagas no longer the assured juggernauts they once were, Snyder has an opportunity to move unencumbered by the chains of existing IP. Rebel Moon will launch on Netflix with a two-hour PG-13 version, to be followed at a later date by, yes, a three-hour, hard-R director’s cut. This is the sweet spot, Snyder tells me. He’s happy to play the studio game if it means he also gets what he wants.

It’s a vision for his career he’s happy to dig into, and we do, but as much as Snyder likes looking ahead, he also has a habit of flicking back to the past. As we talk, he jumps up repeatedly to show me one piece of memorabilia after another. We flip through the sleeves of a rare vinyl Justice League soundtrack ($400 on eBay). We page through Snyder’s carefully bound, unproduced screenplay for The Fountainhead. (We talk about Ayn Rand way more than expected.) Then it’s on to the original storyboards for Watchmen, which are crisp, artfully clean. When we get to the scene where Rorschach fights the guys in the hallway, Snyder does a little pink-pink-pink sound as he mimes shooting a gun.

The longer we talk, the more old themes resurface, and by the time Snyder comes across his high school yearbook (“Never forget who you are and never neglect to express it,” writes Mr. Brown, his algebra teacher), I am deep into a Snyder nostalgia tour—even as he insists he’s not the nostalgic type. Somehow, I know what he means. Snyder is reflective about his career, but he’s not weighed down by it. There’s no Martin Scorsese–style hand-wringing about the old days of cinema or the sanctity of movie theaters. He just makes cool shit and wants to talk about it. Snyder is a businessman as much as he’s an auteur, clear-eyed, calm. If there’s violence in him, it’s artfully buried.

Hemal Jhaveri: I want to take a minute to acknowledge that, for a lot of people, I am in the inner sanctum. [Points to Wonder Woman photo on the wall.] Holy moly. That is gorgeous.

Zack Snyder: That’s the original. My friend Steve Berkman took this before we hired Patty [Patty Jenkins, who directed the two Wonder Woman films].

Wow, do people know this exists?

The dorks know it exists. When I started it, I wanted a Wonder Woman that was not necessarily naive. Not necessarily, like, a virgin. Actually, there’s one line in the Wonder Woman movie that I originally wrote. When they’re on the boat and talking about, like, the treatises on sexual pleasure, she says [to Steve Trevor], “You wouldn’t like it because it concludes that men, though important for reproduction, are not necessary for pleasure.” That was my contribution.

Zack Snyder at his home in Pasadena, California.Photograph: Dan Winters

Rebel Moon also has a strong female lead—Kora, this former soldier. Who is she, to you?

The movie is not a naive fantasy. She’s a soldier. The trauma of being a soldier is a big part of who she is, and the trauma is really a lot of what shapes her. She’s a powerful female character, but she does have a lot of flaws. In this case, she’s got a lot to discover about herself. She’s powerful, she’s savvy in the universe. But emotionally, that’s where she needs to grow.

Does she grow?

There is this whole thing of her feeling unworthy of redemption, but she has a taste of it, and she gets to this place where she can live a life.

What was crucial here about taking Rebel Moon to Netflix?

They understood from the beginning, “Oh, you’re gonna want to do a director’s cut.” The director’s cut was a prerequisite for making the movie for the first time ever, so my joy at making the two-hour PG-13 version was much greater.

Is there maybe even an advantage to having that separate PG-13 version?

It allowed the R-rated version to be more out there. It’s an interesting, mythological sort of place that I have found for myself. The way I make the movies now is that I have this concept of the director’s cut. I think nearly every movie I’ve made, except for Man of Steel, has a director’s cut, maybe two director’s cuts. Unlike my friends who make movies—

Name names.

Well, like Chris [Nolan] and, I don’t know, maybe Todd Phillips. These are the people that I run into. Chris, as a filmmaker, is probably the person I would be closest to, as far as like, you know, calling them up.

Is it because you both make really long movies?

He produced Man of Steel. I worked with him closely through that process, and that kind of just bonded us.

Sure, but how is it that you get to make two versions of your films while Christopher Nolan never gets to put out his extended cut of Oppenheimer?

Well, and Chris doesn’t need to. I have cultivated this other system where I, in a lot of ways with the director’s cut, asked for more than I have any business asking for. I realized that there was a commodity in just, “You know what I really wanted to do?” Then I do that. It’s been my experience that all the director’s cuts I’ve ever done are considered better movies than the theatrical versions. Critics or whoever, they’re just like, “Well, the director’s cut is better.”

That was certainly the case with Justice League.

To be honest, I have never seen the theatrical Warner Bros. cut of Justice League. I’ve heard a lot about it. My wife [the movie’s producer, Deborah Snyder] was forced to watch it.

Has streaming changed how you make films, then?

It’s a different sort of vibe. On the streamer, though, you have to be careful with the opening of the movies because the barrier for entry is really easy. But also the barrier for leaving is very easy. The balance is a lot more difficult on a streamer than in a theater. I normally open the movies with a very hard opening, right? I want to break the barrier. All those movies, Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead, have very intense openings.

You’re clearly trying to unsettle people with your work.

I am and I love it. I believe the most satisfying sort of cinematic journey is the one that you don’t expect. It’s the turn you didn’t see coming. It’s being a little uncomfortable or being taken to a place that you wouldn’t normally get to.

A common complaint about your movies is that they’re always so dark and violent. Is that valid?

Maybe, but it’s just because that’s the art I like, I guess? The things that make me excited or interested, it tends to be a little bit more hard-hitting. My favorite movies, you know, really kind of fucked me up.

Speaking of, I see a lot of katanas and axes on the wall. There’s also, like, a bearskin over there.

That’s a lion.

Oh my God.

[Snyder gets up and we walk over to it.] I pulled her out of a dumpster. We found her, and she was behind this woodshop.

So you didn’t skin her yourself.

I didn’t, no. They had thrown it away. And I was like, wow, this is so rude. You put a lioness in the trash? I pulled it out and I found another taxidermist, had it cleaned and washed and refelted and everything. So she has a second life.

You also have a lot of guns.

Those are fake. That’s a prop. This musket is real. My wife got me this brown Bess, it’s from the Revolutionary War.

Do you think filmmaking has become too sanitized?

I do. I do.

You think we’re getting a little too conservative?

I do. But you know, movies cost a lot of money. It’s hard to do.

You’re such a realist.

The whole thing to me is like, how do I trick the system?

So you’re just gaming it.

You have to game it. If you don’t, you end up with nothing. You end up really having to bury your soul, you just rip your heart out. Then you put it on the auction block. You put the movie out, it becomes a consumer product. You yourself become a consumer product. That’s the thing that I think can be really difficult for filmmakers. That’s the price of the transaction. That can be painful.

Photograph: Dan Winters

You had such a strong hold on the DC Extended Universe, you had your whole plan, and it didn’t really work out the way you wanted it to—they’ve handed the keys over to James Gunn. How do you process letting something that was so meaningful to you go?

The big, the most cathartic thing was Justice League. My Justice League experience was the hardest in what was happening with me personally and what was happening professionally. All of it was really painful and difficult and made me wonder about the why of the whole thing. Like, what’s the end game?

There was a real crisis. Like, I was trying to make something as best I can. I was called upon for a skill set, but in the end there was all that second-guessing. Also in my personal life, I’m confronted with, you know, probably the most painful thing I can think of.

Your daughter Autumn’s death by suicide. Which happened at the tail end of Justice League, right?

Yeah, during postproduction, and I found no solace in the work. The life I created for myself was of no comfort to this other experience. You know, if we’re honest with ourselves, in what we pursue, we hope that pursuit will have some catharsis for us in the struggles that we have in our lives. And I just think that was the darkest time, because I felt like I turned to the thing that I love and it turned its back on me as well.

Do you mean the work wasn’t giving you solace? Or are you referring to your relationship with the studio?

I think it might have been the studio, but also it was the work itself. Where I was with the project, and my relationship with the studio, that experience offered me nothing. Any kind of healing was impossible, and so therefore I had no interest in continuing with it.

That was a real break for me. You live under this illusion that your art, and the way you express yourself, is a kind of therapy that you can always rely on. And then when the rubber hits the road, you’re like, oh, no, it’s not helpful at all.

Grief is deeply debilitating. What actually brought you back to moviemaking?

The fan movement of wanting to know what Justice League was supposed to be, that was cathartic. Because [the making of Justice League] was that exact same thing that had betrayed me. And then being able to dedicate the movie to Autumn.

Let me pull at that thread, because your name now is associated with the downsides of extreme fandom. These days, internet shorthand for aggressive bullying in fandom is, like, “Snyder Cut fans”—many of whom actually were harassing people and posting vitriol online.

Look, there’s tons of toxic fans, and I don’t condone that behavior. But for every toxic fan, there were legitimate and ridiculous and really, incredibly dark attacks on me, my family. I’m not justifying any bad behavior, but also, I’m in this conversation with this fandom, where I have tried to make the work as best I can.

On top of everything, your work is so polarizing. Nearly every article about you says something to the effect of, “whether you love or hate his movies.” How do you make sense of that?

It’s weird that people care that much. That they would hate the movies. I’m more interested in the analysis of what draws that kind of ire. The fandom has emerged in this strong way. They’re not casual. I make movies with the motivation to create something for the fans where they get to care about it as much as possible. That’s the sort of bargain that I’ve struck.

Are you somebody who’s hopeful about the future?

Very much so. Yeah, very, very hopeful. I try to live for the moment as much as I can, but I really—I’m always excited.

It sounds like you’ve figured out how to exist as an artist while still understanding the commercial nature of what it is you do.

I think that a lot of people don’t realize that there’s kind of two worlds that exist for us. It really has taken a while for me to really understand that. You can have it both ways and not compromise one way or the other. You know what I mean?

I think so, yeah …

Do you see The Fountainhead over there? My way is not the Howard Roark-ian way of doing it. [Snyder gets back up and grabs a beautiful custom-bound copy of his unproduced Fountainhead screenplay. It looks very, very long.] Do you know the Ayn Rand novel?

I know it.

Howard Roark would never have built two buildings. One for you, one for me. He’s about no compromises. To make a studio movie is a compromise. But I’ve gotten to this place where I can, wide-eyed, create a bespoke experience for two different markets at the same time. I don’t know of any other filmmaker who can do it. I can do both.

Zack Snyder at his home in Pasadena, California.Photograph: Dan Winters

Are you still interested in theatrical releases?

I am. I don’t know that having a movie in the theaters necessarily serves a streaming release. I think the verdict is out on that.

What’s your verdict?

I don’t think it does. But I do think, obviously, if you make a movie for the theaters, that’s an incredible experience. I saw Barbie in the theater. I saw Oppenheimer. Those were great. I want to do that. I like that.

You seem to have no work-life balance.

There is no work-life balance. Absolutely you’re right. Deb and I don’t try for it.

Don’t you ever feel the need to tap out for a little while?

I haven’t yet.

Your wife said that she nudged you in the direction of pottery.

Yeah, I was playing too much Fortnite. I’m pretty good at Fortnite, actually. But it was also, you know, 3 in the morning, and my wife is like, “Are you seriously playing Fortnite at 3 in the morning against some 12-year-olds?”

Do they know that you’re Zack Snyder?

No, I don’t think so. My skin is Mr. Meeseeks, from Rick and Morty. Anyway, if you’ve been killed by Meeseeks, that could have been Zack Snyder.

This article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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BACKCHANNEL

The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story

Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Slack. All down for millions of people. How a group of teen friends plunged into an underworld of cybercrime and broke the internet—then went to work for the FBI.

Andy Greenberg  November 13, 2023 11:00 AM

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES JUNK, MATTHEW MILLER; GETTY IMAGES

Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken.

Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection and his router. The internet.

The New York Times website was offline, as was Twitter. So too were the websites of The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the BBC, and Fox News. (And WIRED.) When Twitter intermittently sputtered back online, users cataloged an alarming, untold number of other digital services that were also victims of the outage. Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Airbnb, Slack, SoundCloud, HBO, and Netflix were all, to varying degrees, crippled for most of the East Coast of the United States and other patches of the country.

Shapiro, a very online professor at Yale Law School who was teaching a new class on cyber conflict that year, found the blackout deeply disorienting and isolating. A presidential election unlike any other in US history loomed in just under three weeks. “October surprises” seemed to be piling up: Earlier that month, US intelligence agencies had jointly announced that hacker breaches of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign had in fact been carried out by the Russian government. Meanwhile, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks had been publishing the leaked emails from those hacks, pounding out a drumbeat of scandalous headlines. Spooked cybersecurity analysts feared that a more climactic cyberattack might strike on Election Day itself, throwing the country into chaos.

Those anxieties had been acutely primed just a month earlier by a blog post written by the famed cryptographer and security guru Bruce Schneier. It was titled “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet.”

“Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet,” Schneier, one of the most highly respected voices in the cybersecurity community, had warned. He described how an unknown force appeared to be repeatedly barraging this key infrastructure with relentless waves of malicious traffic at a scale that had never been seen before. “These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation-state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.”

Now it seemed to Shapiro that Schneier’s warning was coming to fruition, right on schedule. “This is the attack,” he remembers thinking. Was it “the big one?” he asked himself. Or was it perhaps a test for the true “big one” that would hit on November 8? “Obviously, it has to be a nation-state,” Shapiro thought. “It has to be the Russians.”

For Shapiro, the internet outage was a kind of turning point: In the months and years that followed, he would become obsessed with trying to understand how someone could simply stamp out such a large swath of digital connectivity across the world, who would do such a thing, and why. But meanwhile, a little less than 500 miles west of Shapiro’s Connecticut home, in the town of Washington, Pennsylvania, another sort of observer was watching the attack unfold.

After a typical sleepless night at his keyboard, 19-year-old Josiah White sat staring at the three flatscreen monitors he’d set up on a workbench in a messy basement storage area connected to the bedroom he shared with his brother in their parents’ house. He was surrounded by computer equipment—old hard drives and a friend’s desktop machine he had offered to fix—and boxes of his family’s toys and Christmas tree ornaments.

For weeks, a cyber weapon that he’d built with two of his young friends, Paras Jha and Dalton Norman, had wreaked havoc across the internet, blasting victims offline in one unprecedented attack after another. As the damage mounted, Josiah had grown accustomed to the thrills, the anxiety, the guilt, the sense that it had all gotten so absurdly out of hand—and the thought that he was now probably being hunted by law enforcement agencies around the world.

He’d reached a state of numbness, compartmentalizing his dread even as he read Bruce Schneier’s doomsday post and understood that it was describing his own work—and now, even as a White House press secretary assured reporters in a streamed press conference that the Department of Homeland Security was investigating the mass outage that had resulted directly from his actions.

But what Josiah remembers feeling above all else was simply awe—awe at the scale and chaotic power of the Frankenstein’s monster that he and his friends had unleashed. Awe at how thoroughly it had now escaped their control. Awe that the internet itself was being shaken to its foundations by this thing that three young hackers had built in a flurry of adolescent emotions, whims, rivalries, rationalizations, and mistakes. A thing called Mirai.

Part One

None of the three young men who built Mirai fit the profile of a cybercriminal, least of all Josiah White, who could lay perhaps the most direct claim to being its inventor. Josiah had grown up in a rural county an hour south of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of four children in a close-knit Christian family, all homeschooled, as his mom put it, to better “find out how God had created them and what he had created them to pursue.” She describes the thin, dark-haired baby of the family as a stubborn and independent but unusually kind child, who would sit beside the new kid in Sunday school to make them feel welcome.

Josiah’s father was an engineer turned insurance salesman, and the family lived in a fixer-upper surrounded by woods and farmland. As early as he can remember, Josiah followed his father around the house while he tinkered and made repairs. In 2002, when he was 5, Josiah was delighted to receive for Christmas the components of an electrical socket. Later his parents gave him a book called 101 Electronics Projects, and he would beg his mother to drive him to RadioShack, arriving with a shopping list of breadboard componentry. Before he was 10, he was advising his father on how to wire three-way switches.

Josiah’s father would take him along to their church’s “car ministry,” where they’d repair congregants’ cars for free and refurbish donated vehicles for missionaries. Josiah would stand in the corner of the shop, waiting for the foreman to give him a task, like reassembling a car’s broken water pump.

Josiah reveled in impressing the adults with his technical abilities. But he was always drawn to computers, cleaner and more logical than any car component. “You give it an input, you get an output,” he says. “It’s something that gave me more control.” After years of vying for time on his family’s computer, he got his own PC when he was close to his 13th birthday, a tower with a Pentium III processor.

Around the same time, Josiah’s brother, seven years older than him, figured out how to reprogram cell phones so they could be transferred from one telephone carrier to another. Josiah’s brother started to perform this kind of unlocking as a service, and soon it was so in demand that their father used it to launch a computer repair business.

By the time he was 15, Josiah would work in the family’s shop after school, setting up Windows for customers and installing antivirus software on their machines. From there, he got curious about how HTML worked, then began teaching himself to program, then started exploring web-hosting and network protocols and learning Visual Basic.

As wholesome as Josiah’s childhood was, he felt at times that he was being raised “on rails,” as he puts it, shepherded from homeschooling to church to the family computer shop. But the only rules he really chafed against were those set by his mother to limit his computer time or force him to earn internet access through schoolwork and household chores. Eventually, on these points, she gave up. “I sort of wore her out,” he says. She relented in part because a hands-on understanding of the minutiae of computing was quickly becoming essential to the family business. Josiah, now with near-unlimited computer time, dreamed of a day when he’d use his skills to start a business of his own, just as his brother had.

In fact, like most kids his age, much of Josiah’s time at the keyboard was spent on games. One of them was called Uplink. In it, the protagonist is a freelance hacker who can choose between two warring online movements, each of which has built a powerful piece of self-spreading code. One hacker group is bent on using its creation to destroy the internet. The other on stopping them. Josiah, not the sort of kid to do things in half measures, played through the game on both sides.

immersing himself in that cyberpunk simulation—and learning about famous hackers like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick, who had evaded the FBI in a cat-and-mouse pursuit in the 1990s—cultivated in Josiah’s teenage mind a notion of hacking as a kind of secret, countercultural craft. The challenge of understanding technical systems better than even their designers appealed to him. So did the subversive, exploratory freedom it offered to a teenager with strict Christian parents. When he googled a few hacking terms to learn more, he ended up on a site called Hack Forums, a free-for-all of young digital misfits: innocent explorers, wannabes, and full-blown delinquents, all vying for clout and money.

On the internet of 2011, the most basic trick in the playbook of every unskilled hacker was the denial-of-service attack, a brute-force technique that exploits a kind of eternal, fundamental limitation of the internet: Write a program that can send enough junk data at an internet-connected computer, and you can knock it offline.

The previous year, for instance, the hacker group Anonymous had responded to the refusal by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Bank of America to allow donations to WikiLeaks by urging its plebes to bombard the companies’ servers with data requests, creating so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks that briefly took down the companies’ online services. But most DDoS attacks were less principled: the constant AK-47 cross fire of the cybercriminal internet’s internecine wars and vandalism.

On Hack Forums, many hackers ran their own “booter” services that, for a few dollars a month, would launch denial-of-service attacks against anyone a customer chose—often online gaming services, to troll or sabotage rival players. Users and admins of booters talked casually of “hitting off” targets, or worse, “holding off” a service or a single user’s connection, repeatedly bombarding it to prevent it from coming back online.

Some booters launched attacks from botnets, collections of thousands of unwitting users’ PCs, hijacked with hidden malware to form a lemming-like swarm of machines pummeling a target with data. Other booters used “reflection” or “amplification” attacks: If a hacker could find an online service that would respond to a query by sending back a larger chunk of data than the request itself, they could spoof the origin of their question so the service would send its answer to a victim. By bouncing a stream of thousands of questions off a server, the hacker could bombard the victim with its responses and vastly multiply their attack’s firepower.

Josiah, fascinated by the cleverness of those tricks, was naturally determined to understand them at their deepest level. He stumbled upon a blog post from a cybersecurity blogger describing a reflection attack that used the servers of the online first-person-shooter game Quake III Arena. Ping them with a simple “getinfo” or “getstatus” request, and the servers would send back information that included the usernames of the players on the server and the map of the level they were playing on—an answer that was nearly 10 times as big as the question and could be directed at any spoofed IP address a hacker chose.

The post was intended as a warning. It cautioned that this kind of attack could be used to take down a service with as much as 23 megabits per second of bandwidth, a pipe that seemed enormous to Josiah on his 1.5-megabits-per-second home DSL connection. A competent programmer exploiting the problem, the blog post’s author wrote, “can easily create a full-fledged attack suite in a lazy afternoon.”

Josiah took this as a challenge. He cobbled together a simple script to perform the attack and posted it to Hack Forums under his handle, “Ohnoes1479.” He asked only for anyone who used it to give him an upvote “if its good ✌” to increase the prestige of his forum profile.

Josiah didn’t think too much about the morality of his creation. After all, it took a computer offline only temporarily, right? More of a mischievous hiccup than a crime, he figured. He couldn’t use it himself anyway, because his home internet connection didn’t allow the IP spoofing the attack required. Still, as other hackers on the forum—some of whom he suspected ran their own booter services—asked questions about how to use the program and even requested feature updates, he was happy to help.

Mostly, like the technical wunderkind he’d once been in his church’s auto shop, he aimed to impress. “I wanted to make something cool,” he says. “And I wanted respect.”

in that anarchic Hack Forums scene, Josiah soon found a kindred spirit, a user who called himself “moldjelly.” In the offline world, his name was Dalton Norman. He was a teenage hacker just a year older than Josiah who was far more in touch with his rebellious side.

Like Josiah, Dalton had grown up with an engineer for a father. His dad led the maintenance team for a skyscraper in New Orleans, where the family lived. And like Josiah, Dalton had a natural technical talent. As a preteen, he wrote cheating mods for video games that he presented on his own YouTube channel in a squeaky voice. He and his father would work in their spare time on his dad’s souped-up Chevrolet Monte Carlo, which had so much horsepower that Dalton remembers the feeling of its exterior twisting as it accelerated. He says he inherited that same drive to push technology to its limits.

But far more than Josiah’s, Dalton’s childhood was tinged with adversity. As a small child, he had struggled with a stutter that deeply scarred him. He remembers his family laughing at him at the dinner table as he labored in vain to pronounce his younger sister’s name. “It was awful and kind of contributed to me just being in my room and having low self-esteem and trying to raise it by being super good at something,” Dalton says.

By the end of elementary school, to Dalton’s relief, the stutter had faded away. But just as it seemed like he might enjoy a normal adolescence, his life was disrupted by misfortune on a far larger scale: Hurricane Katrina. Dalton’s family evacuated to Mississippi and didn’t return for more than five years. In exile one state over, Dalton found himself at a “culty” Christian private school, where students prayed before class and, as he remembers it, a math teacher assured him that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. “When I wouldn’t pray or do any of that,” he says, “I would get shit for it.”

Dalton wrote his first program when he was 12. It was a spam tool that he used to torture a teacher he disliked, wrecking her inbox. He says he carried out his first denial-of-service attack not long after, targeting his school’s network from within.

While connected to the school’s Wi-Fi, he flooded its router with junk requests until the entire intranet collapsed. “It’s easy to take down a network when you’re inside of it,” he says. Ironically, as Dalton describes it, he had gotten enough of a reputation for IT know-how that school staff asked for his help fixing the problem. He stopped his attack script, unplugged the router, plugged it back in, and showed the school administrators that it magically worked again. During another attack, however, he says he overheated the router so badly in its poorly ventilated closet that it was fried.

In his early teens, he remembers watching The Social Network and taking exactly the wrong message from the movie: Rather than feeling cautioned by the film’s fictionalized origin story of an icily amoral Mark Zuckerberg, Dalton was profoundly inspired. “That movie basically changed how I viewed the world,” he says. “It’s like, with a laptop and a great idea, you can take control of your life and build something cool.”

After a failed attempt to launch his own social network—he had no idea how to gain users and no budget to advertise it—he returned to hacking: He wrote a keylogger program, designed to snoop on a victim’s keystrokes after infecting their PC via thumb drive. He also found his way onto Hack Forums. Soon he was running his own booter service, hiring other hackers to handle customer service so he could focus on finding new methods to amplify his attack traffic.

It was around this time that Dalton encountered Josiah, who was, he says, the smartest hacker he’d ever met. The two teens soon moved off Hack Forums to talk regularly on Skype and then later TeamSpeak, another internet conferencing service. In those conversations, Dalton eventually used his real name, while Josiah went by “Joey,” a thin veneer of a pseudonym. They enjoyed competing with each other to find new denial-of-service amplification tricks. In a friendly rivalry, they’d stay up into the early morning hours, plumbing the internet for eclectic servers that they could use to multiply their attack traffic dozens and eventually hundreds of times over.

In those late-night cyberattack sessions, the two hackers say, they would typically set up their own website for target practice, or use a friend’s, so that they could measure the size of the traffic they were blasting at it. At times they would clock attacks of more than 100 gigabits a second, they say—more than 4,000 times as big as the 23-megabit attack that had initially amazed Josiah. Very often they would knock their target website offline, along with the server of the hosting service it ran on, causing downtime for an untold number of other websites too.

By this time, Josiah admits, he’d become mildly intoxicated by the power of the tools they’d learned to wield, though he still considered himself a kind of innocent, exploratory hacker. “I was stupid, and I was just angry sometimes, and I wanted to see damage, at points,” he says. “But it wasn’t my primary motivator—for a while.”

Dalton, who was already running a for-profit attack service, had no such illusions of innocence and admits—a little proudly—to using his growing arsenal of booter artillery on any Hack Forums rival who sufficiently annoyed him. In some cases, he boasts, he would “hit people off so hard” that their internet service providers would cut the victim’s connection for 24 hours to avoid further collateral damage. “It was a lot of power,” he says. “If someone was bullying or being an asshole, then yeah, they went offline for a while.”

both teenagers managed to hide these dalliances with illegal hacking from their families. But for Dalton, the consequences soon spilled violently into his physical world.

It began when he discovered that someone who worked for his booter service, an older kid to whom he’d foolishly given his real name, had been stealing their profits. He fired the guy. A few days later, Dalton and his family were sitting around the dinner table when a team of police officers in bulletproof vests burst through the door, screaming at everyone to get on the ground. The cops pointed shotguns at Dalton and his terrified parents and siblings, barking orders and questions.

It turned out that the police had received a spoofed 911 call. The caller had warned that Dalton had shot his mother and was now holding the rest of the family hostage. Dalton had been “swatted,” targeted with the most dangerous retaliatory measure in the toolkit of nihilist teen hackers. When the police realized there was no hostage crisis, Dalton explained to the cops and his parents that an angry kid online had inflicted this situation on them—leaving out the part about his booter service. As a measure of the skewed risk assessments of his teenager’s brain, his biggest fear during the entire incident was how his furious parents would punish him. He was grounded.

Dalton says the real lesson he drew from the incident was to tighten his operational security, no longer telling anyone in the hacking world his real name—except Josiah. “I trusted no one except for Joey,” he says.

In the midst of all this, when Dalton was 15, another kind of calamity struck: His stutter came back. He says it happened when he met another stutterer at his high school. Somehow, the event triggered his brain to start tripping up his speech all over again. And the change seemed to be permanent. All the difficulty he’d had speaking as a small child, along with all the anxiety and shame that came with it, flooded back. It was, he says, “a nightmare.”

Like many stutterers, Dalton found workarounds for the arbitrary lexicon of words that would halt his speech, substituting others to hide his disability. But names, which allowed no substitutions, were particularly tough. At one point, to get out of gym class, he volunteered with his high school’s tech office and found that the job included delivering laptops to students. He remembers standing in front of a classroom trying to say a student’s name as the entire class laughed at him. Even his own name was often impossible to get out. “It broke me,” he says. “But afterward, I was just like, ‘I don’t care what other people think. Fuck it.’”

Dalton’s stutter, he says, drove him into cybercrime with a renewed fervor. He cut ties with real-world friends, retreated to his computer, and focused his energy on hacking. His skewed teenage logic kicked in again, telling him to abandon any hope of a normal life or legitimate career. “I thought, ‘No one’s gonna hire me because I can’t talk. How am I going to get past an interview when I can barely say my name?’” Dalton remembers.

He had, he told himself, no other option. “I have to find a way to make this blackhat thing work out.”

Of the Three young hackers who would go on, together, to be responsible for the biggest DDoS attacks in history, Paras Jha came to that path from the most innocent and childlike place of all: a love of Minecraft.

Born in Mumbai, Paras was less than a year old when his family emigrated to the US, where they eventually settled near central New Jersey. His parents demanded academic perfection, and Paras was gifted enough to easily deliver. Too easily, in fact: For years of elementary and middle school, he would read entire textbooks as soon as he got them, he says, then never study them again and ace every test.

At the same time, Paras was aware that he had a paradoxical problem with focus. He remembers being in third grade and disassociating as a teacher spoke to him, tracing out her face in the air with his finger. That teacher later suggested to Paras’ parents that he be tested for attention deficit disorder. Coming from a culture that stigmatized such a diagnosis, Paras says, his family was skeptical of the teacher’s warning. His mother and father filled out the school’s evaluation for learning disabilities; it came back negative, and he was never treated.

Over Skype, Josiah told the others that he was launching the attack. Across the internet, Paras could hear the tap of the Enter key on Josiah’s keyboard. And the world stopped.

As Paras grew older, his scattered mental state meant he often forgot school assignments, and his strict parents would respond by grounding him. To pass the time, he gravitated to computers. His beloved video games were forbidden on weekdays, so he would spend hours playing with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, teaching himself to program.

By his early years of high school, Paras had become obsessed with Minecraft, an immersive online world that essentially presents a blocky, lo-res, nearly infinite metaverse. More than playing the game, however, Paras was drawn to the possibilities of running his own Minecraft world on an online server. He would host mini-games of tag or capture the flag, endlessly tinkering with his server’s code to modify the rules. He loved to join his own world, turn himself invisible, and then observe how players responded within the universe he controlled and changed at will. It was like watching 8-bit ants with human intelligence move around his very own ant farm.

Paras soon discovered he could make thousands of dollars using his coding skills to build modifications and mini-games for other Minecraft administrators. In fact, it turned out that the Minecraft ecosystem supported its own surprisingly high-stakes industry. Players paid small fees for access to perks and upgrades on their favorite servers, and administrators of the most popular worlds within that decentralized metaverse made as much as six figures a year in revenue. All of that money meant this innocent-seeming industry had developed a surprisingly ruthless dark side. Minecraft servers came under constant barrage from booters’ DDoS attacks, launched by aggrieved players, competitors, and trolls. Many paid thousands of dollars a month to DDoS protection firms that promised to filter or absorb the attack traffic.

One day, Paras found himself in a Skype group chat with an acquaintance who also ran a Minecraft server. This person was determined, for reasons Paras can no longer remember, to take down a particular rival’s world. Paras read along as the acquaintance asked another member of the chat for help—a figure by the name of LiteSpeed, who had attained a certain infamy for his denial-of-service wizardry.

Josiah had changed his handle on Hack Forums from Ohnoes1479 to this less-cute moniker about nine months after he’d joined the site, and these days he carried himself online with significantly more swagger. He was happy to oblige.

Josiah, Paras, and a few friends all entered the target Minecraft world, apparating into its blocky landscape full of hundreds of other players’ lo-res figures. Then, over Skype, now in a voice chat, Josiah told the others that he was launching the attack. Across the internet, Paras could hear the tap of the Enter key on Josiah’s keyboard. And the world stopped.

Instead of going dark or returning an error message, the universe hosted on the server that Josiah had knocked offline simply froze, as each player was suddenly disconnected and confined to their own computer’s splintered version of it. Paras marveled at how he could move through that world and see other players paralyzed where they stood, or floating in midair.

That frozen state lasted for 30 seconds before the world crashed entirely. To Paras, it was a hilarious magic trick. “It felt like a secret superpower almost,” he says. “Even though it wasn’t me who did it, it was cool to just be in the know about what’s going on.”

He became friendly with Josiah and found that this talented hacker was happy to take down practically any target server that Paras asked him to, mostly just for sheer amusement. Josiah also seemed to be surprisingly open to sharing his knowledge. Having moved on from the amplification attacks he and Dalton had experimented with early on, Josiah now carried out his attacks with a botnet of thousands of computers around the internet that he’d infected with his own malware, exploiting a security flaw in the web-hosting software phpMyAdmin to turn the underlying servers into his personal army.

Later Josiah would switch to wielding an even more powerful collection of Supermicro servers that he’d hacked via a vulnerability in their baseboard management controllers, chips meant to allow an administrator to remotely connect to a server and monitor its performance. The attacks he was triggering were soon so powerful that he and his friends had difficulty even gauging their strength: Everything they’d hit with it—the best-protected Minecraft servers, even their own measurement tools—would immediately fall offline.

Paras wanted this superpower too. Josiah was happy to help him troubleshoot his DDoS attack code and even offered thousands of computers from his own botnet for Paras to test it on. “Instead of just pressing the button, I wanted to say I had made the button,” says Paras. Soon he was a relatively sophisticated botnet herder with his own DDoS zombie horde.

By 10th grade, to his parents’ dismay, Paras had begun to struggle in school as subjects became more complex and his disaffected-prodigy tactics reached their limits. But online, where he went by the handle “dreadiscool,” he embraced his new godlike capabilities with roguish abandon, knocking off targets on the slightest whim. He and another friend would even sometimes find the phone number for a company that hosted certain Minecraft servers, call their business line from a burner number, and verbally taunt them as Paras launched a DDoS attack that ripped their machines offline.

Somehow, the rule-following, high-achieving kid from a strict immigrant household had become a rampant online vandal. But at that point, Paras says, it was never quite clear to him—or Josiah, or Dalton—how serious the consequences of their attacks might be. They were, after all, still just taking some computers off the internet, right? “Like, the servers come back online,” Paras says. “You wake up the next day and you go to school.”

At other times he would almost check himself, coming to grips with his spiraling behavior. He remembers sitting in the bathroom of his parents’ house just after taking down one of the biggest Minecraft servers, Hypixel, and realizing that if he kept going, he was bound, sooner or later, to get arrested. “Don’t get sucked into it,” he told himself. “Don’t get sucked into it.”

paras got sucked into it. They all did. In particular, Josiah, the Christian homeschooler who’d once kidded himself that he was a harmless hacker-explorer or a Wozniak-style prankster, had taken a rapid, step-by-step slide into moneymaking cybercrime. Under his LiteSpeed handle, he’d begun selling his amplification techniques to known booter service operators for a few hundred dollars a customer, spending most of the money to rent servers in remote data centers to further his hacking. He reverse engineered Skype’s code to find ways of extracting users’ IP addresses, the identifiers for their home internet connections that could allow them to be directly DDoSed. Soon he was selling this IP-extraction tool on a per-use basis to his fellow hackers and booters.

When one of his friend’s would-be victims bragged that he couldn’t be hit offline because he had a dynamic IP address that changed every time he rebooted his home router, Josiah figured out he could use a traceroute command to see the IP address of every router between that target and his internet service provider. So he and the friend started hitting the computers farther upstream in that network, going after the bigger arteries that fed data to and from his computer instead of the capillaries that linked to his home machine, until all of those routers were unresponsive too. This indiscriminate tactic, as far as they could tell, took out the internet service for the target’s entire town, all just to prevent him from dodging their attack.

Each step, Josiah says, felt small enough that, like the mythical boiling frog, he barely noticed the change in moral temperature. He’d found something he was very good at—better than perhaps anyone he knew. And he wasn’t, he told himself, carrying out hardcore cybercrime like breaching networks or stealing credit card data. Another Hack Forums user reassured him that the FBI cared only about botnets bigger than 10,000 computers, a story he naively accepted. “I rationalized a lot of it away,” Josiah says. “The pot was boiling.”

in early 2014, when Josiah was still 16 years old, he dialed the temperature up another fateful degree with the creation of a powerful new form of botnet. It began when a friend pointed out to him that home routers, aside from making good targets for DDoS attacks, could themselves be hacked and potentially turned into botnets’ zombie conscripts. In fact, many routers still used an old protocol called telnet that allowed administrators to remotely configure them, sometimes without the need for any authentication or else requiring only default credentials, like the password “admin.” All those routers represented countless thousands of hackable devices, in other words, waiting to be taken over and added into Josiah’s army.

The catch was that the routers were small, simple gadgets that used cheap, low-performance embedded-device chips—not the kind of system that most hackers were accustomed to exploiting. But Josiah was never one to be daunted by the task of learning the arcane details of a new machine. He started from scratch, learned to write the native language of routers’ ARM chips, and built a compact piece of malware that could be installed over telnet onto the relatively dumb devices to make them obey his attack commands.

The routers’ operating systems didn’t normally allow software to be installed on them. But Josiah figured out that they did have an “echo” command that could write out any line of text that you typed into a new file. He used that command to copy his code, line by line, into a file small enough to fit into the routers’ few megabytes of memory. The feat was the equivalent of assembling a model ship inside a 12-ounce bottle. He called the code Qbot.

Qbot was Josiah’s first foray into hacking the so-called internet of things, the vast universe of internet-connected devices beyond traditional computers, from security camera systems to smart appliances, that would turn out to be ripe for exploitation. Even in this first, crude attempt, it was immediately clear that Qbot was a potent new weapon.

Josiah could see the power he’d stumbled into: There seemed to be many thousands of vulnerable routers online that Qbot could commandeer. He was initially more careful with this creation than he’d been with his previous coding projects, keeping Qbot’s code private and sharing it only with his friends: Dalton, Paras, and a few other young hackers who had formed a loose network and hung out on Skype and TeamSpeak. But Josiah made the mistake of also giving the code to one other contact. The guy went by the name “vypor” and, Josiah says, had a reputation for trading in other hackers’ secrets as a means of impressing more talented acquaintances. Vypor immediately began trading Qbot for favors and clout with, it soon seemed, his entire contact list.

When that betrayal became clear, Dalton retaliated on Josiah’s behalf by hiring a rapper through the gig-work service Fiverr to record a profanity-laden track brutally mocking vypor’s lack of coding skills. The diss track was uploaded to YouTube. Vypor immediately responded by threatening to swat all of them: Dalton, Josiah, even Paras, who had only recently joined the group.

All three of the young hackers were terrified of being swatted—or swatted again, in Dalton’s case. They agreed that their best bet to protect themselves was to knock vypor offline and hold him off as long as possible. If he couldn’t reach a VoIP service to spoof a call to the police, their short-term reasoning told them, he couldn’t swat anyone. Maybe they could at least enjoy the weekend before he brought armed police to their doorsteps.

So all of them, together, bombed vypor with every DDoS tool they had. For days, they repeatedly hit not only his home connection but also routers two and three steps upstream, using Qbot and every other botnet and amplification technique they’d learned to wield. The three believe they probably blasted vypor’s entire town off the internet, though they never got confirmation aside from seeing the entire chain of network devices stop responding to their pings.

Regardless, the attack seemed to serve its purpose. Vypor disappeared from the scene and never bothered them again.

allison nixon, who would become one of the first security researchers in the world to fully understand the dangers posed by weaponized routers and internet-of-things appliances, had no idea who Josiah White was. But she knew LiteSpeed.

At the beginning of her career in New York a few years earlier, Nixon had worked the night shift in the Security Operations Center of Dell’s SecureWorks subsidiary, essentially as the cybersecurity equivalent of a patrolling night watchman. A petite, hoodie-wearing security analyst in her early twenties, she monitored the company’s clients’ networks for attacks in real time and investigated them just enough to know whether to escalate to someone more senior. “Kind of a grind,” she remembers.

But she was curious about where all these daily, wide-ranging hacking attempts were coming from. So in the long stretches of downtime between alerts, she started googling and was amazed to discover Hack Forums, a platform on the open web where young digital deviants were bragging about their attacks and brazenly selling their toolkits. She found booter services especially shocking: how publicly, and cheaply, these miscreants sold a kind of cyberattack that could cost companies millions of dollars a year and often made her and her colleagues’ lives hell. Many of the young hackers doing this damage could even be identified, thanks to their rash public posting, sloppy operational security, and the frequent “doxing” of rivals—digging up and outing another hacker’s real identity. But no one seemed to be doing anything to stop them.

As Nixon lurked longer on the forum, she could see that most hackers on the site weren’t actually developing their own techniques. Instead, almost all of their tools seemed to trickle down from just a few skilled individuals. LiteSpeed was one of them. His attack amplification tricks and bot infection tools had established him as a kind of Hack Forums alpha, an unmistakable standout in the scrum. “Sometimes you kind of get a gut feeling when you’re tracking someone that they’re going to blow up in one way or another,” she says. “I knew I wanted to keep an eye on him.”

Nixon says the more senior researchers on SecureWorks’ counterthreat team had little interest in DDoS attacks, which were considered primitive compared to the cutting-edge intrusion methods that they focused on. But Nixon was fascinated by the anarchic Lord of the Flies world of young hackers building an entire cyberattack industry, seemingly with no repercussions or even notice from law enforcement.

Nixon partnered with a university researcher and began testing out booter services on Hack Forums, barraging a guinea-pig target server with waves of junk traffic. Some of the attacks topped 30 gigabits a second, easily enough to knock someone offline or cripple a website.

By 2014, Nixon had quit the security operations center and taken a job hunting hackers full time, but she couldn’t let go of her DDoS obsession. At a meeting in Pittsburgh of cybercrime fighters, called the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, she stood before a room of several dozen researchers, academics, and law enforcement officials. With the participation of an internet service provider that had just presented its DDoS protection plan, she demonstrated that she could click a button on a booter website and launch a cyberattack at will—a daring move in front of a crowd of federal agents and prosecutors.

One agent from the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, named Elliott Peterson—a former Marine from Alaska who’d recently led the landmark takedown of a Russian-origin cybercriminal malware and botnet known as GameOver ZeuS—was particularly impressed. He and Nixon talked about the booter problem. She pointed out how freely the services operated, how many of the culprits were identifiable, and how powerful any intervention in that world might be. And she shared her growing sense that, if the larger problem were left unchecked, it would pose a serious threat to the operation of the internet.

for josiah, the conflict with vypor was a wake-up call. He felt he’d narrowly avoided watching his secret hacking hobby burst into his peaceful family life. For more than a year, he backed away from Hack Forums and let his LiteSpeed handle go dormant. But he continued to chat with his friends Paras and Dalton, and the three of them began sharing a rented server for coding experiments and internet scanning, which they referred to as the Fun Box.

Paras, meanwhile, continued his free fall into hacker nihilism. In the fall of 2014, he started college at Rutgers and found himself alone and unmoored. He had looked forward to delving into the study of computer science and was appalled to learn that he would have to enroll in other kinds of courses that, to him, seemed like months of wasted time and tuition. Even the computer science exams, to his horror, had to be taken with pencil and paper. “I absolutely hate college,” he texted a friend. “There is absolutely nothing for me here.”

He sank into a malaise and gained weight, sometimes eating a large Papa Johns pizza in one sitting. He couldn’t sleep at night and often couldn’t find the motivation to get out of bed, much less go to class. Aside from his roommate, he had little social contact in the real world—certainly nothing that could compare to the rich, battle-tested friendships he’d built online.

“We’ll do it a few times,” Josiah remembers thinking. “We’ll cause trouble for a little bit, and then we’ll just forget about it. We’ll stop.”

Paras was particularly frustrated to find he couldn’t even get into some of the computer science courses he wanted to register for: Third- and fourth-years got first dibs, and only once their registration round was over did second- and first-years get a chance to choose from the leftovers.

But Paras soon realized he had just the superpower to right this injustice: He could use one of his botnets, built mostly of vulnerable home routers, to blast the entire registration system offline until it was his turn.

He took a trollish delight in tormenting the institution that he felt was tormenting him. Under the Twitter handle @ogexfocus, accompanied by a picture of a ghostly mask, Paras publicly taunted his target. “Rutgers IT department is a joke,” he wrote in a public manifesto, bragging, after three attacks in succession, about crushing the university’s network “like a tin can under the heel of my boot … I’m fairly certain I could run circles around all of you with my eyes closed and one leg amputated.”

When dreaded exams rolled around, he tore down Rutgers’ network again to delay them, buying himself a few more days of miserable procrastination. Later, he took the network down to prevent his parents from seeing his increasingly horrendous grades. “I was feeling very frustrated—I guess with myself—and lashing out,” he says.

On one occasion in the spring of 2015, Paras totaled the Rutgers network so thoroughly that he had to text Josiah to ask him to continue the attacks on his behalf. “Admiral can you execute my command?” he wrote in the jokey, naval-themed slang they’d developed. The outages persisted long enough that some Rutgers students later demanded a tuition refund.

Paras enjoyed the sense of control the attacks gave him, watching their cascading effects on the university the same way he’d invisibly watched players respond to his tweaks of Minecraft worlds years earlier. But when the attacks were over, his problems were still there. By his second year, it was clear to Paras that college wasn’t working for him.

Around the same time, he had started batting around an idea with Josiah that seemed like a way out: What if they founded their own startup offering DDoS protection, to defend paying customers from exactly the sort of attacks that they had become so expert at launching?

To Josiah, it made perfect sense. He understood DDoS attacks on a deep technical level—he had, in fact, built or at least used many of the attack tools that other DDoS protection firms were combating daily—and Paras had built a reputation as a skilled programmer, particularly among Minecraft server administrators, who might be a good initial customer base.

Paras borrowed $10,000 from his father, and he and Josiah used it to cofound a company: ProTraf Solutions, short for “protected traffic.” They had seen other firms struggle to defend customers from new forms of DDoS, and they were sure they could do better.

It wasn’t so simple. After launching ProTraf, they realized their potential customers didn’t often shop around for DDoS protection. Typically, they didn’t feel the need to switch providers unless the one they already had was failing to shield them from an attack, which occurred only rarely. Meanwhile, the bandwidth Josiah and Paras had rented on servers around the world—the cushion they would use to absorb attack traffic aimed at customers—was quickly eating through their capital.

Soon they came to an idea. Only when customers were actually knocked offline would they consider switching to ProTraf. Maybe the two young partners just needed to hurry this process along. “We could wait for one of these outages,” Josiah says, “or we could cause one of these outages.”

They agreed: They would use their own DDoS attacks to hit off their competitors’ customers—just enough to get their own fully legitimate business on its feet, of course. “We’ll do it a few times,” Josiah remembers thinking. “We’ll cause trouble for a little bit, and then we’ll just forget about it. We’ll stop.”

josiah and paras began building the new attack botnet they’d use in what would become—whatever story they told themselves—a kind of DDoS protection racket.

The two teenagers used Josiah’s old Qbot code to reinfect a new army of thousands of routers and started wielding it to target their rivals’ clients—all Minecraft servers—easily obliterating their protections. For a while, this veiled extortion scheme actually worked. More than a dozen Minecraft administrators, desperate to get back online, did switch to ProTraf, paying $150 or $200 a month each.

It still wasn’t enough. They’d expanded too quickly, buying infrastructure that was eating up their capital faster than their revenue could replenish it. And they found that when their attacks stopped, some customers switched back to their competitors—perhaps because they sensed that the attacks, timed so closely to the launch of this new startup, had been a little too convenient. “People had their suspicions,” Josiah says.

Josiah was still working at his family’s computer repair business as he struggled to get ProTraf on its feet. When he wasn’t helping customers there, he resorted to making phone calls to drum up sales. He figured if his father and brother could pitch customers and build a business, so could he. But no one who picked up the phone wanted to listen to this fast-talking teenager selling a mission-critical security service. The calls were dead ends, and Josiah came to loathe making them.

Just around a year after launching, in the late spring of 2016, ProTraf was flaming out. For Josiah in particular, the company’s looming death was hard to accept. His parents had been so proud of his business ambitions: He seemed to be making good on his enormous potential, following in his family’s entrepreneurial footsteps. Was he really going to admit that he’d already failed? He felt trapped and ashamed.

So Josiah began to consider other sources of cash flow. A friend from the hacker scene had been impressed with his rebuilt collection of Qbot-infected routers. He asked whether Josiah might be willing to build a new DDoS botnet. If so, he would have customers lined up to pay thousands of dollars in bitcoin for access to it.

Josiah suggested to Paras that they could accept the offer and build a new, even bigger botnet, renting slices of its attack power to the highest bidder in a last-ditch attempt to keep ProTraf alive. It would essentially mean turning the company from a protection racket into a front for their new, real business: selling cyberattacks as a service.

“Sounds ill ey gahl,” Paras joked. Sounds illegal.

“Eh,” Josiah wrote back. “Kinda.”

to build the chief weapon of their secret DDoS-for-hire sideline, Josiah and Paras started from scratch. A few years had passed since Qbot’s creation, and they both had a few new ideas of how to infect and commandeer a vastly larger collection of internet-of-things devices.

In the time since Josiah’s original Qbot code had leaked—thanks to Josiah’s old friend vypor—the hacker community had been steadily upgrading it. Some versions had now been redesigned into “worms”: Infected routers would automatically scan for other vulnerable devices and try to hack and infect them, too, in a self-spreading cycle. But when Josiah and Paras examined those newer botnet systems, they seemed inefficient and unreliable. Someone else’s hacked router was an unwieldy vantage point from which to find vulnerabilities in new machines. Plus, that decentralized setup made it slow and difficult to upgrade their bot software.

So instead, they designed a more centralized, three-step structure. Their infected machines would scan for other hackable devices—using a new system they say was as much as a hundred times faster than the bootleg Qbot worms they’d previously seen—and then report the vulnerable gadgets they found to a “loader” server, which would hack the machines via telnet to install their malware. Then a separate command-and-control server would shepherd those malware-infected bots, periodically sending new commands for which targets to attack.

Paras and Josiah were surprised to discover just how powerful this new automated zombie recruitment process turned out to be. Josiah remembers leaving the system running overnight and waking up to find 160,000 freshly brainwashed routers ready to do his bidding—far more than he’d ever controlled before.

When he saw the scale of what they were building, Josiah’s plan—raise some money with a few cyberattacks, then return to ProTraf and go straight—began to seem like a wasted opportunity, a waste of his talents. “This is cool,” he remembers thinking. “This is innovative. No one else is doing this.”

As their botnet’s size exploded, Josiah suggested to Paras that they would be able to rent even small fractions of their firepower to attackers for $2,000 or $3,000 a month, easily topping $10,000 in monthly revenue.

“Lol,” Paras wrote back. “And how big does the armada have to be.”

“That wont be a problem,” Josiah responded.

seeing their botnet grow so deliriously large so quickly had now triggered in Josiah an old impulse, purer than any profit motive. “What are the limits here?” he began to ask himself. “How far can we spread this thing?”

Naturally, he turned to his old friend Dalton, who had always shared that urge to push the technological envelope. Josiah and Paras agreed to cut Dalton in on shared control of their growing creation, letting him sell access to a part of it through his own booter service. In return, Dalton would contribute his hacking skills to finding new populations of devices to add to their horde.

To maximize their malware’s footprint, Dalton began to plumb the teeming vulnerabilities of the internet of things. He dug up tens of thousands more gadgets across the world with unpatched flaws, machines that went far beyond home routers: Smart appliances such as online fridges, toasters, and light bulbs all became part of their agglomerated mass of raw computing power. All these eclectic digital objects had the advantage of being relatively greenfield territory. While countless hackers vied for control of traditional computing devices, like PCs and even routers, many of these newer devices remained untouched by malware and uncontested.

Surveillance cameras’ digital video recorder systems, with hardware capable of processing large video files, turned out to be especially strong new recruits. Some scans even turned up more exotic hackable devices, like internet-connected industrial cement mixers and municipal water utilities’ control systems. (The three hackers say they did avoid hacking those industrial devices for fear of being mistaken for cyberterrorists.)

They settled into a workflow. Dalton would scan for new species of exploitable devices and write code to infect them. Josiah would refine Dalton’s code and create software to take control of new additions to their menagerie of networked gadgets.

Paras, meanwhile, focused on the administration software that ran on their command-and-control server—its own complex programming task as their botnet grew to nearly 650,000 devices. He sensed that the scale of their creation would soon draw attention, and he took it upon himself to create a trail of misdirection to hide their identities from public scrutiny. To advertise the botnet, Paras created new sock-puppet accounts with names like OGMemes and Ristorini on Hack Forums, Skype, Reddit, and Jabber. He then created a collection of fake “dox” linked to those handles—the posts that hackers typically use to out rivals’ real identities, but in this case all pointing at people whom Paras had chosen as patsies.

To make their connection to the botnet’s command-and-control server harder to trace, Josiah found a vulnerable server in France that they could hack and use as a jump point, connecting to that hacked machine only through the anonymity software Tor, which made it look like that computer’s owner was the real mastermind. The machine was actually a “seed box,” a server left online to continuously trade in pirated movies over the BitTorrent protocol.

The French server, in fact, was filled with anime videos, a subject Paras knew something about. He was a fan of the psychedelic animated Japanese show Mirai Nikki, in which a teenage outcast discovers he’s part of a battle royal among 12 owners of magical cell phones, and eventually—spoiler alert—uses his phone’s powers to become the god of all space and time. The show, Paras had texted a friend, “literally defines the genre of psychological thrillers.”

Paras knew that the file name for their program, now running on an ever-increasing base of hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide, would soon be a subject of notoriety. So in keeping with their work to pin the botnet’s creation on a random anime collector, he chose a suitable name. All the better that it also evoked a cyberpunk superweapon brought back to the present by a time-traveler, an instrument for which the world was wholly unprepared: Mirai. In Japanese, it meant “the future.”

to allison nixon and any other security researcher observing it from the outside, the advent of Mirai initially looked less like the rise of a new superpower than the start of a world war—one where the battlefield was the internet’s multitudes of insecure gadgets.

In 2014 and 2015, the years leading up to what she would call “the battle of the botnets,” Nixon began noticing that groups of nihilistic young blackhats with names like Lizard Squad and vDOS were picking up LiteSpeed’s leaked Qbot code and then selling access to their own hordes of zombie devices, or using them to terrorize and extort online gaming services. So Nixon, who around this time started working at the security firm Flashpoint, created “honeypots”—internet-connected simulations of vulnerable devices designed to be infected by the hackers’ bot software, acting as her own spies amid the botnets’ ranks. The result was a real-time intelligence feed revealing the booters’ commands and intended targets.

It was in early September 2016, while monitoring those botnet honeypots, that Nixon and some colleagues spotted an intriguing new sample of code that was infecting routers and internet-of-things gadgets: the one the world would come to know as Mirai.

This new code seemed capable of detecting when it was running on a honeypot instead of a real device and would immediately terminate itself when it did. So Nixon and her coworker ordered a cheap DVR machine off of eBay, connected it to the internet, and watched the device—they nicknamed it the “sad DVR” due to its life of victimization—get infected over and over again by Mirai and its competitors.

In fact, unbeknownst to Nixon, Mirai’s creators were by then locked in an escalating turf war with vDOS, a competing botnet crew, which had built an especially large army of hacked machines using an updated version of Qbot. Both the Mirai and vDOS teams had designed their bot software to identify and kill any program that appeared to be their rivals’, and the two botnets began vying for control of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable machines, like warlords repeatedly conquering and reconquering the same strip of no-man’s-land.

Soon the Mirai crew and vDOS resorted to anonymously filing abuse complaints with the companies hosting each other’s command-and-control servers, forcing them to build new infrastructure. At one point, a company called BackConnect, which had been hosting Mirai’s server and was run by acquaintances of the Mirai team, came under a DDoS attack from the vDOS crew. To Nixon’s shock, BackConnect responded by using a so-called BGP hijack—the highly controversial tactic of essentially lying to other internet service providers to misdirect a wide swath of traffic—to effectively pull vDOS’s command-and-control server offline.

Soon, Paras, Josiah, and Dalton got tired of the endless tit for tat. They reprogrammed Mirai, allowing it to sever the telnet connections on the victim devices—thus making them harder to update but shutting out vDOS and any other rival from easily reinfecting those machines. That seemed to do the trick: To the Mirai team, it appeared vDOS had given up. (In reality, their adversaries had been questioned by law enforcement and later arrested.)

Nixon remembers the feeling she and her team of researchers had as they watched Mirai win that war and come to dominate the internet’s mass of vulnerable devices. Once, that messy landscape had been infected with a rich diversity of malware species. Now, for the first time she had ever witnessed, all of that malevolent code seemed to go quiet as Mirai’s superior infection techniques took hold of hundreds of thousands of networked devices across the globe. “From our perspective, it was like this new apex predator was prowling the savanna, and all of the other animals had disappeared,” says Nixon. “From that point forward, we were on the hunt for this monster.”

For much of the cybersecurity research community, the purpose of this gargantuan botnet still remained unclear. They couldn’t know that Josiah, Dalton, and Paras had opened Mirai for business and put its services up for sale—that the monster Nixon was hunting was, itself, on the hunt for its first victims.

Part Two

For brian krebs, September 22, 2016, was an inconvenient day to become the target of the most powerful DDoS botnet in history.

A construction crew had been replacing the siding on Krebs’ rural house in Northern Virginia all morning. The incessant hammering was freaking out his dog, who responded as if barbarians were laying siege to their home. Krebs worked as an independent investigative reporter and security researcher—one of the best known in the cybersecurity industry. He had no workplace to escape to. “I was already losing my mind,” Krebs says.

It was only a little later that day, Krebs says, that it started to become clear that his dog was not wrong. He was, in fact, under siege. And the barbarians were winning.

Two nights before, Prolexic, the service that provided his DDoS protection, had warned him that something was amiss. His website, KrebsonSecurity, had been hit with an attack that peaked at a mind-boggling 623 gigabits a second, according to Prolexic’s measurements. The company had never seen an attack even half that big. But it had heroically managed to absorb the traffic, the Prolexic rep told Krebs, and his site had stayed online.

“Holy moly. Prolexic reports my site was just hit with the largest DDOS the internet has ever seen,” Krebs tweeted that night. “Site’s still up. #FAIL.”

Krebs prided himself on his work hunting cybercriminals, a role in which he was nearly peerless in the world of journalism and one that had made him plenty of enemies. He’d been swatted by a target of his investigations and once had someone ship dark-web heroin to his house in an attempt to frame him. DDoS attacks from aggrieved subjects of his reporting were nothing new. But taunting the source of this particular attack, he now realized, had perhaps been ill-advised.

For two days, he continued to get notices from Prolexic that the massive DDoS was still going. In fact, whoever was barraging his server had persistently switched tactics throughout that time, firing new forms of data designed to be harder for Prolexic to filter out, or targeting machines further upstream. “These guys were real bastards,” Krebs says. “They were throwing the kitchen sink.”

Amid all this, more than 36 hours after the attack had begun, a member of the work crew at Krebs’ house managed to kick his satellite dish, knocking out his home’s internet connection. He tried to tether his computer to his cell phone, but its bandwidth was too spotty. And the attack kept coming, an overwhelming, sustained tsunami of malicious ones and zeros.

Krebs was still struggling to get online on the afternoon of the 22nd when he got another call from Prolexic. This time the company told him, in polite but clear terms, that he’d better find a new source of DDoS protection. They were dropping him. One of the biggest DDoS defense firms in the world could no longer handle the scale of the data torrent barraging his site.

Krebs got in his car and drove to a local business’s parking lot to try to find a stable Wi-Fi connection for his laptop. From there, he called his web-hosting provider to warn that, without Prolexic’s layer of defense, it was about to get hit with an unfathomable wall of digital pain. He suggested that rather than allow all its customers to be taken offline, it should instead configure his website to point to a nonexistent IP address, essentially routing the attack traffic—and anyone trying to visit his site—into “a hole in the ground.”

The hosting company took his advice. KrebsonSecurity.com instantly dropped offline. It would remain that way for days to come, as Mirai loomed, seemingly ready to obliterate the site again the moment it resurfaced.

For Krebs, being successfully censored by cybercriminals was a wholly new experience. “Someone just took my site offline,” Krebs remembers marveling. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

josiah, dalton, and Paras had unlocked their superweapon, and already it seemed there was almost nothing on the internet that could withstand it.

When Krebs tweeted that his website had been hit with “the largest DDoS the internet has ever seen,” he was almost right. Mirai had actually struck the French internet provider OVH around the same time with an attack that had reached the even more shocking volume of a terabit per second. The botnet’s hundreds of thousands of hacked devices had also quietly KO’d a web-hosting firm and a Minecraft service in August with attacks that were nearly as large but had gone mostly unnoticed by the security world.

Within just a few months of launching their fully operational Death Star and making it available for hire, the three hackers—all still too young to legally drink alcohol—had assembled a small but devoted collection of clients. A fellow hacker who went by the handle “Drake” allegedly acted as a kind of sales rep: He would periodically hit off arbitrary targets as a form of marketing, to demonstrate Mirai’s bristling firepower to potential paying customers. One such patron, who claimed to be in Russia, had rented Mirai to launch attacks against rivals in the cybercriminal web-hosting world, knocking out his adversaries’ sites. Their most frequent user seemed to be a hacker in Brazil, who repeatedly and inexplicably rented access to Mirai to fire off attacks at the network of the Rio Olympics, at one point bombing it with more than a half-terabit per second of traffic.

Paras himself used Mirai a couple of times against his old whipping boy, the Rutgers IT department, mostly just for vengeful fun. On another occasion he briefly tried using it for straightforward extortion against one of their former ProTraf customers, slamming a Minecraft server with a Mirai attack and then demanding a bitcoin payment. In an attempt to make the connection to ProTraf less suspect, he even copied his own ProTraf email address as a recipient of the ransom note. The company didn’t pay. Josiah disapproved of Paras’ extortion attempt, and they never tried it again.

It was their Brazilian customer, Paras says, who had decided to DDoS Krebs into oblivion. Paras woke up that day, read news stories about the monumental attack on Krebs—by far the most high-profile Mirai victim to date—and instantly felt a mix of excitement and dread in the pit of his stomach. “This had better not have been our botnet,” he remembers thinking. He checked their user logs. “It was our freaking botnet.”

After the Brazilian’s earlier attacks on the Olympics, Paras and Josiah had decided this user was perhaps a little too reckless in his targeting. They’d attempted to limit his access to Mirai, ending his sessions after just 10 minutes. But Paras saw that the nihilistic Brazilian had simply manually restarted the attack on Krebs’ site again and again throughout the night—and he was still going.

Paras messaged Josiah and Dalton, and they jumped onto an emergency call on a private, encrypted VoIP server. They all agreed: Annihilating the website of a very well-known journalist had crossed the line beyond helpful marketing into a kind of attention they didn’t need—the kind that got you arrested. “You don’t want to poke the bear,” says Josiah. “This was a pretty big poke.”

By this point, too, they were all 19 or older. They were adults, carrying out an extremely visible criminal conspiracy. The heat Mirai was now bringing them, they began to realize, wasn’t worth it. And despite all the chaos it had caused in its early months of life, Mirai had made only a small fraction of the money Josiah hoped it would: about $14,000 worth of cryptocurrency in total. Even the biggest DDoS attacks in the world were, for their perpetrators, a relatively cheap commodity.

They had only just launched this world-shaking creation. Now they already needed an exit strategy. It was Paras who, a day or two later, suggested a new idea. Their “Russian” customer had, despite renting occasional access to Mirai, suggested to him that DDoS was a bad business. Not enough money. Far too noisy. He’d advised they instead consider partnering with him to use their botnet-building skills for a much stealthier and more lucrative opportunity: click fraud.

Put all those hijacked machines to use quietly clicking on pay-per-click web ads instead of pummeling victims, Paras explained, and they could make tens of thousands of dollars a month by invisibly defrauding advertisers, a far less disruptive form of cybercrime. Josiah and Dalton agreed they should start to transition away from the cyberattack-for-hire industry and into this more respectable black-market business.

But they couldn’t quite bring themselves to kill their monster just yet. Instead, Paras and Josiah, who held more control of Mirai’s targeting than Dalton, attempted to add the IP address for KrebsonSecurity.com to a block list that would at least end the attack—though they’d find in the days to come that their efforts to restrain their least predictable customer had failed again.

Regardless, by that point it was too late. Josiah was right. They had poked the bear. Now it was wide awake.

elliott peterson was sitting thousands of miles to the northwest in the FBI’s Anchorage, Alaska, office when he read the news that Brian Krebs, a journalist whose work he knew well, had been wiped off the face of the web.

He was shocked to learn that an attack could hit Prolexic—a firm owned by the internet giant Akamai, whose entire business model depended on handling giant flows of traffic—so hard that it could essentially jam one of the biggest digital conduits in the world. And all to silence a journalist. Peterson knew that he’d just witnessed the start of a new era. “All of a sudden, the world woke up to the fact that someone’s throwing around a terabit of traffic,” he says. “No one was ready for that.”

Two years had passed since Peterson had seen Allison Nixon’s live booter demonstration at a Pittsburgh cybercrime conference. He’d since returned to his native Alaska, taken up an assignment at the FBI’s smallest field office, and turned it into an unlikely hub for takedowns of botnet and booter operations. Just days earlier, he’d learned of the detainment in Israel of vDOS’s two administrators, the rival hackers with whom the Mirai crew had recently been at war. Peterson had been involved in the investigation of vDOS for months. The resulting bust was, in fact, the real reason that Mirai had definitively won that rivalry.

Now Peterson was disturbed to see that the takedown had only cleared the field for someone wielding an even bigger weapon. He knew he would need to take on this case, too.

Working from his cubicle in the “cyber atrium”—a glass-roofed enclosure that houses the handful of FBI agents focused on cybercrime inside Anchorage’s brutalist, red-brick federal building—he started digging. He and Nixon had helped create an industry working group called Big Pipes that dealt with DDoS attacks, and he immediately learned from contacts there that Akamai had been hit by a mysterious new botnet called Mirai.

Even in the midst of Krebs’ unfolding crisis, Peterson understood that for the Anchorage office to take on this new monster, he’d first have to get over a legalistic hurdle: He needed to prove that either its victims or creators were in Alaska. Krebs and Akamai were thousands of miles away. So he realized that he would have to somehow find Mirai-infected devices in his own state. Luckily, by this point, there were hundreds of thousands of those infected devices online, a digital pandemic that reached nearly every country in the world.

Meanwhile, Peterson could only watch helplessly as Krebs’ website was held offline by Mirai for more than 48 hours. Only then did Krebs finally manage to get it back up with the help of a new DDoS defender: Google. The web giant had recently expanded a pro bono DDoS protection service called Project Shield to a wider array of users, and it was eager to prove that it could withstand the internet’s biggest attacks.

Within two hours of KrebsonSecurity coming back up, it received another blast from Mirai. The site’s IP address had changed, Paras says, so his and Josiah’s block list didn’t prevent their Brazilian customer from relaunching his attack. But this time the site stayed online.

Google reached out to the FBI, and with Krebs’ permission, the company eventually shared a list of IPs that had been the sources of the Mirai attack traffic. Peterson and his four-person team began to comb through it. Sure enough, he could see in the data that Mirai had infected devices across Alaska, along with practically every other state in the country. He started tracking down the Alaskan device owners, trying to explain to them in phone calls that their routers and security camera systems had been unwittingly turned into cannon fodder. Finally, Peterson got a break: He managed to persuade the owner of a hunting lodge in the town of Ketchikan to unplug its malware-infected security camera DVR and ship it to Anchorage to be dissected and used as evidence.

Peterson had found his Alaska victim. He launched an investigation to hunt for the hackers behind Mirai.

after serving in the Marines but before joining the FBI, Elliott Peterson had served as a “dean of men” at a college in Michigan. In that job, he had helped kids with emotional problems and substance abuse issues, essentially acting as a guidance counselor and mentor. It was an unusual role for a future federal agent, but the two jobs reflected Peterson’s strange hybrid personality: half by-the-book, buzz-cut G-man, and half well-meaning, friendly Midwestern youth pastor.

Peterson brought that same peculiar cordiality into his Mirai manhunt. He began politely asking around among the Hack Forums crowd and their ilk, a scene he’d become familiar with over his years of tracking booter services: Who might know any of the pseudonymous hackers selling access to Mirai?

Not long after starting the investigation, his team in the Anchorage office got a lead on one good source. They’d managed to obtain a complete sample of the Mirai code from an infected device and found that it phoned home to a command-and-control server hosted by the DDoS mitigation firm BackConnect. Peterson knew that name. He’d been hunting the vDOS crew when BackConnect came under attack from Mirai’s rival; in an apparent act of self-defense, the company had used a BGP hijack to pull vDOS’s infrastructure offline—a rogue move that had nearly derailed Peterson’s vDOS investigation.

So he made a few calls to BackConnect’s management to ask about the company’s BGP hijack and the Mirai server they were hosting—which had since moved elsewhere—and whether they had any contact with whoever controlled it. BackConnect’s staff said they didn’t, but suggested someone who might: One of their acquaintances from a company called ProTraf Solutions, Paras Jha, seemed to have had contact with whoever was behind Mirai.

After all, Paras had received an extortion email from someone launching the Mirai attacks—neither Peterson nor BackConnect knew that Paras had sent that email himself—and they’d heard he’d chatted with a Mirai handler known as Ristorini.

So Peterson called ProTraf’s phone number and left a voicemail. Paras called him back. Peterson remembers that Paras matched his polite, friendly tone and calmly explained that yes, he had been in touch with Ristorini in online chats. But he had no idea of the real identity of the person who’d tried extorting one of his former customers.

Paras kept the conversation short but said he’d be sure to keep asking around and would be in touch soon to help in any way he could when he’d learned more. Then he hung up and immediately called Dalton and Josiah to tell them the FBI was on their trail.

this time, their emergency meeting was steeped in panic: They needed to ditch Mirai, now.

Dalton suggested they simply take down Mirai’s infrastructure, wipe the command-and-control and loader servers, and destroy the hard drive of every computer they’d ever used to manage it. “Lay as low as possible, kill the whole thing, shred our drives,” as he put it. Then they could quietly move on to their more promising click fraud business.

Paras had another idea: How about they release the Mirai source code into the wild? If they posted it publicly on Hack Forums, it would be adopted by every DDoS-happy hacker in the world, just as Qbot had once been. They could disappear into that crowd, making it vastly harder for this nosy Alaskan FBI agent or anyone else to identify the original Mirai amid the flood of copycat attacks.

Dalton vehemently disagreed. He argued that releasing the source code would only draw more attention to Mirai, cause more damage, and make law enforcement all the more intent on finding the botnet’s original creators.

The call devolved into a full-blown shouting match, the first the three friends had ever really had. Dalton screamed at Paras not to release the code. Paras remained unmoved. Josiah, meanwhile, listened impassively, stuck between his friends, unable to break the tie.

When they hung up, they had agreed that their Mirai adventure was over. But they remained split on what to do with its source code.

So Paras acted on his own. A couple of months earlier, he had created a new sock-puppet account on Hack Forums as another potential profile for Mirai’s mastermind: He’d called this one Anna-Senpai, named after the villain of the Japanese animated show Shimoneta, or “Dirty Joke,” in keeping with Mirai’s anime-loving cover persona.

Now, in late September, he logged in again as Anna-Senpai to post a stunning announcement. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO,” he wrote. “So today, I have an amazing release for you.” The post then linked to download pages for Mirai’s source code, along with a tutorial detailing how anyone could use it to create their own massive, self-spreading, internet-of-things attack tool. He added in a separate post that Anna-Senpai was now on the run, fleeing their home in France for a non-extradition country.

Someone was using a copycat botnet to troll a video game company—and the collateral damage was the worst internet outage the world had ever seen.

Paras had just dumped the recipe for a superweapon into a mosh pit. Beyond throwing up a smoke screen to ward off the FBI, it was also a final, epic troll: a way to shake the internet ant farm, this time on a global scale, and watch the ants scramble.

The Hack Forums community responded accordingly, showering him with praise and admiring Mirai’s polished programming. Several users wrote that it had to be the work of professionals, not the forum’s typical teenage wannabes. “Your a fucking legend,” one user wrote. “Leak of the year,” wrote another.

Within days, one user responded that they’d successfully used the source code to create their own Mirai botnet of 30,000 devices. Another chimed in to say theirs had reached 86,000 machines. “The glorious copy paste will happen,” wrote another appreciative hacker. “IoT botnets will spread like wildfire.”

“Best haxoring tool of all time! Gonna take down eribody!” wrote another Hack Forums fan, summing up the gleeful mood. “I’ve always wanted a botnet that can DDoS de planet!”

peterson was deeply dismayed to see the Mirai code dumped online, a move he saw as appallingly reckless. But rather than be thrown off, as Paras had intended, Peterson had the immediate thought: Had his poking around inspired this? Did his conversation with Paras have something to do with it?

Not long after Anna-Senpai’s Mirai release, Peterson got another break in the case: Some university researchers working with the anti-DDoS group Big Pipes told him they’d found a clue in the logs of their honeypot machines, designed to monitor internet scanning. Two months earlier, on August 1, they’d been able to see that a kind of proto-Mirai scanning tool, perhaps the earliest version of the botnet’s reconnaissance code, had probed their devices from a US-based IP address.

Peterson contacted the IP’s hosting company to request the identity behind it and got a subscriber name: Josiah White. The other cofounder of ProTraf solutions.

The FBI agent called ProTraf again and this time spoke to Josiah on the phone, projecting his same friendly tone. Josiah, trying to sound professional but caught off guard by Peterson’s discovery, nervously admitted that yes, he’d “done some scanning.” Scanning the internet, after all, isn’t a crime. Then he begged off answering any more questions and hung up the phone.

Peterson had been fascinated and even impressed by the Mirai team’s operational security: the careful layering of proxies, the dead ends he reached as he traced those connections, the “doxes” he found for Mirai’s handler accounts, all of which seemed to lead him astray. But now, just weeks into his investigation, he knew that Josiah’s early scanning slipup had allowed him to sidestep all of that obfuscation and misdirection. His team began sending a flurry of legal requests to the email and internet service providers for every account associated with the throwaway profiles Paras had created for Mirai, as well as those of Paras and Josiah themselves and ProTraf Solutions.

As Peterson dug through Hack Forums, he noticed, too, that there was another interesting account that sometimes chimed in on Anna-Senpai’s posts—someone called Fireswap. Often they seemed to be defending Mirai’s creators and taking shots at critics of their source code. So Peterson sent a legal request to Hack Forums for Fireswap’s email address—fireswap1337@gmail.com—and then asked Google for that user’s subscriber metadata.

Looking through logins on Fireswap’s Google account, registered to someone named Bob Jenkins, he could see they came from the same VPN or proxy server IP address that had carefully been used to create the fake Mirai doxes—sometimes just minutes apart. But then, in some cases, “Jenkins” had a different IP: the same one that Paras had used to connect to his ProTraf email account.

Paras had never suspected that an investigator would think to look into the burner account he’d created solely to cheerlead for himself on Hack Forums and take swipes at detractors. Now it had become the missing link tying him to Mirai.

Peterson still hadn’t heard of Dalton Norman. But he now believed he’d found Mirai’s two creators. The end of their cybercriminal careers was already in sight. But the chaos they’d invited onto the internet was just beginning.

once it was fully unleashed and reproducing in the wild, Mirai didn’t immediately break the internet. It took three weeks.

On the morning of October 21, 2016, Allison Nixon was just getting down to work in Flashpoint’s office, an old garment factory on the desolate western edge of Midtown Manhattan, when a colleague pointed out to her that something was seriously wrong with the internet.

Specifically, its phone book was broken. The domain name system is the mechanism that translates human readable domain names into the IP addresses that actually route internet traffic to the computers where services are hosted. DNS is what allows you to remember “Google.com” instead of 2001:4860:4000:0:0:0:0:0, for instance, as the way to tell your browser to load up a search engine.

On that morning, the DNS of dozens of websites seemed to be crippled. Internet users across the US were typing names into browsers that needed to be translated into numbers, and the translators had been knocked out cold. “Something big is happening,” Nixon remembers a colleague saying to her. “We need to figure out what’s going on.”

As Nixon’s team tried sending DNS requests to some of the affected sites—the same sprawling collection of news sites, social media, streaming services, banking sites, and dozens of other major services that Scott Shapiro and millions of other users were trying in vain to reach—they saw that all the sites used the same New Hampshire–based DNS provider, a firm called Dyn. Although it wasn’t yet clear to Nixon at the time, no fewer than 175,000 websites were offline.

Searching for a root cause for this unfolding internet collapse, she checked the attack logs generated by her “sad” DVRs—by now her team had several of them serving as bait. Sure enough, she could see that a Mirai variant, one of the many copycats that had sprouted in the weeks since Paras leaked the source code, had been relentlessly bombarding the Dyn DNS server for Sony’s PlayStation gaming network. The attack’s effects had apparently spilled over to take down Dyn’s entire DNS system. Someone was using their copycat botnet to troll a video game company—typical Hack Forums behavior—and the collateral damage was the worst internet outage the world had ever seen.

The nihilistic, teen-angst-fueled, mega-DDoS that Nixon had always warned about had finally arrived. “We had worked for such a long time in preparation for that day that it was kind of vindicating,” Nixon says. “On another level, it was super, super stressful.”

Shortly after the attack on Dyn started, Nixon managed to reach someone at Dyn and share the evidence pointing to Mirai, a suspect Dyn only had an inkling of until that point. Dyn staffers, at that moment, were anxious but still confident that they could handle the problem and get their servers back online.

It was around the same time, still before 9 am eastern, that Dyn truly began to implode.

DNS records are designed to work like a kind of hierarchical phone tree. Major services like Google and Comcast have their own DNS servers ready to answer computers requesting the IP address of a domain, and they only periodically check in with an “authoritative” DNS provider—in this case, Dyn—to make sure the addresses they’re handing out haven’t changed. Some services check in multiple times a minute, while others refer to their last update of DNS data for hours before refreshing it.

Within minutes of the Mirai attack striking, Dyn was already in trouble, as DNS servers set to check in every 15, 30, or 60 seconds for new DNS records pounded the company’s overwhelmed authoritative servers. When they didn’t get an answer, they’d ask again—and again and again. They were designed to expect answers, after all: An authoritative DNS provider as large as Dyn had never gone down before.

But as time passed and Dyn’s servers stayed down, the chorus of DNS requests began to include major services that check in only every hour. And then the ones that check in every two hours. And three. All now joining the mob incessantly hammering on Dyn’s doors. Some internet services had even designed their DNS systems to automatically spin up new DNS servers to ask for answers when their existing ones didn’t get a response, multiplying the barrage of queries.

“Once the cascading failure started, that’s when everyone got very, very nervous,” says one person who was working at Dyn on the day of the attack. “Before that, the graphs looked awkward, but they didn’t look catastrophic. But then they tipped over an edge as major services couldn’t get responses, and the numbers started shooting up to the right.”

The Mirai attack, in other words, had set off a chain reaction. The internet’s IP address directory system was DDoSing itself.

At the same time, Dyn began to experience a kind of parallel, human DDoS attack, as people began demanding answers in almost the same cascading structure. Angry corporate customers with comatose websites started bombarding Dyn’s phone lines. When management couldn’t answer their questions, they echoed them down the org chart to engineers who were already entirely overwhelmed. “When the ratio of management and client services people looking for answers versus the number of people who can provide any answers starts to explode,” the Dyn staffer remembers, “that’s when it really starts to feel like chaos.”

Compounding the problem was a coincidence of almost comic timing: A team of Dyn staffers was, on that very day, waiting for Oracle to sign the paperwork to close a deal to acquire their company, reportedly for more than $600 million. No one wanted to be remembered as the middle manager who failed to keep the internet online on this momentous occasion—the first day that the new bosses were watching. And through all of this corporate panic ran an undercurrent of rumors that China or Russia was responsible, that they were up against an all-powerful state-sponsored hacking operation.

Josiah was walking through a dark hallway, still trying to get a shirt over his head, when he found a flashlight—and a gun—pointing at his face.

Those rumors were short-lived. So, by some measures, was the outage. By that afternoon, Dyn had managed to get the attack under control and had started sending DNS responses piecemeal to its clients, quieting the different networks clamoring for answers from its servers, one by one.

But the damage left in the wake of the Dyn outage lasted longer. The total economic cost of a major fraction of the global internet falling offline for half a day is difficult to measure. Sony, whose PlayStation Network was the attack’s original target, reported an estimated net revenue loss of $2.7 million. Following the attack, there were projections that, for a time, Dyn lost roughly 8 percent of its contracted web domains—more than 14,000 total—and millions in future revenue.

As Paras, Dalton, and Josiah watched a botnet built with their code break the internet’s backbone, they had an array of reactions. Paras remembers being shocked that it was so easy: The Mirai clone that had carried out the attack had hit Dyn with fewer than 100,000 devices, just a fraction of the size of their original botnet. Dalton felt a grim “I told you so” sense of confirmation that he’d been right about the hazards of releasing the source code, along with the stress of knowing it was sure to draw more heat—but he also noted, with a hint of pride, that whoever carried out this internet-shaking attack hadn’t even updated their code. “There was no innovation at all,” he says.

Josiah, who had already had the closest brush with the FBI among the three young men, was perhaps the most troubled. By then, his family had moved out of the Pennsylvania countryside into a three-story house in the nearby town of Washington. That’s where, from the basement-level storage room he now used as his work area, he read about the Dyn disaster, silent with dread and amazement.

As for Elliott Peterson, he spent the day in the FBI’s Anchorage office, fielding calls from every agency and official imaginable. Over the course of a month, his case had grown from a cybersecurity industry curiosity into an international clusterfuck, a subject of urgent interest for the Department of Homeland Security and for reporters asking questions in a White House press conference.

No one yet knew who had made the copycat Mirai that had attacked Dyn. But Peterson was confident he already knew who had created Mirai and handed the code to those attackers. It was time to pay Josiah and Paras a visit.

it was just before 6 am, long before the sun would rise on that mid-January morning, when Josiah heard the banging on his front door.

For two months, he had been waiting for the raid. He was now keeping a nocturnal schedule, working at his computer with Paras and Dalton until 3 or 4 in the morning before sleeping until 8 am and then heading into his father’s computer repair shop. But that night, having finally gone to bed after 4 am, he still lay awake, his mind racing with anxiety.

As the banging started and his older brother hurried upstairs from their shared basement-level bedroom, Josiah went into the storage room and quickly switched off his computers. All three of the Mirai creators had been careful to do their hacking on remote servers and to connect to them only from ephemeral virtual machines that ran on their own PCs. So he figured that switching the computers off would erase any lingering data in memory. Then, before turning off his phone, he sent a message to Paras using the encrypted messaging app Signal: “911.”

Josiah slipped on a pair of sweatpants and grabbed a T-shirt. He climbed the stairs and was walking through a dark hallway, still trying to get the shirt over his head, when he found a flashlight—or rather, he’d later learn, a gun with a flashlight attached to it—pointing at his face. “Drop the shirt,” he remembers an agent saying.

Josiah was herded onto his front porch, still shirtless, in the cold Western Pennsylvania winter air, where the rest of his family was already being held. Black Suburbans filled the street. And there was Elliott Peterson, on the porch, greeting Josiah in his weirdly gregarious tone. “Oh hi, Josiah. I was hoping we wouldn’t meet under these circumstances,” Josiah remembers him saying. “But here I am.”

After leaving Josiah’s flabbergasted family shivering in the cold for several long minutes, the agents brought them all back inside. As they searched the house, Josiah managed to get fully dressed and sat in the living room. But even once he’d warmed up, he still couldn’t stop shaking. As his secret life finally came crashing into his family life, he remembers feeling especially embarrassed that he’d left the storage room the FBI was searching so untidy.

Aside from Peterson, Josiah could see that local Pittsburgh FBI officials had joined the raid—as had French special intelligence officers. He’d later learn that French law enforcement had also raided the home of a certain innocent patsy in France with a server filled with anime.

After a couple hours of searching, the agents hauled away Josiah’s computers, hard drives, and phone, and Peterson asked Josiah and his parents to come into the dining room to talk. “You probably know why I’m here,” Peterson said. Josiah responded that he could guess.

The conversation lasted about half an hour. Peterson brought up the Mirai scanning server, and Josiah deflected again, confessing to nothing. The FBI agent warned Josiah not to tell anyone about the search—not knowing that Josiah had already sent his “911” warning to Paras. Then he left.

In the silence that followed, Josiah’s parents told him it was time to come clean. During an excruciating 30-minute car ride to their computer repair shop to start the workday, Josiah confessed everything. His parents listened, stone-faced, too scared for their son’s future to even be angry.

Finally, his father responded: They would have to entrust Josiah’s fate to God.

the raid on Paras’ home came the next day. Peterson had hoped for simultaneous searches but decided he should be present at both, so he spent the hours after leaving Josiah’s house driving more than 350 miles across Pennsylvania into New Jersey.

At 6 am, Paras heard the same banging on the front door of his family’s house, where he was home from Rutgers for winter break. Thanks to Josiah’s warning, this second raid had far less of an intimidating effect than the first: Paras had carefully cleaned up any evidence on his computers and turned them off long before the FBI agents arrived. In an attempt to find any storage devices Paras had hidden, the agents brought along an electronics-sniffing dog—trained to smell the glue used in computer hardware components. Paras remembers it wanted to play with his family’s dog, a comical moment that helped dispel any shock and awe.

When Paras saw Peterson in person, his first response was annoyance that this chipper FBI agent had come all the way from Alaska to turn his home upside down. Peterson asked Paras whether Josiah had told him about his search of Josiah’s house the previous day. Peterson assumed Josiah had stayed silent, as instructed, and he hoped to plant a sense of betrayal in Paras that his friend hadn’t given him a heads-up.

But Paras instead smiled and said that yes, Josiah had warned him, surprising Peterson. And like his friend the day before, Paras refused to confess to anything related to Mirai.

Paras’ family was deeply shaken by the intrusion. But when the agents left, he assured his parents that it was all a misunderstanding, that he had no idea why this Alaskan FBI agent seemed so fixated on him. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

paras, josiah, and Dalton discussed the raids, and they came to an extremely optimistic conclusion: that the feds didn’t seem to have anything on them. The searches had been a scare tactic, they agreed, and they had failed.

On the same day the FBI searched Paras’ home, Brian Krebs had published a bombshell article suggesting that Paras, potentially with Josiah’s help, was the most likely identity behind Anna-Senpai. Krebs was working his own sources to piece together many of the same connections the FBI had drawn. But Paras had denied the accusation in a response to Krebs, and the three hackers, armed with the incredible hubris of youth, blew off the article as circumstantial evidence. After all, the FBI had already taken their shot and seemed to have gotten nothing that could prove their guilt.

As the months passed and they remained free, they made a brazen decision: They would continue their pivot into the click fraud scheme.

This new venture was turning out to be far more lucrative than Mirai, to a degree that even they had never imagined. To avoid ties to their overexposed botnet, they had begun building a new one, this time focused on devices primarily in the US, given that they could make the most money selling access to American computers to generate clicks on American ads. By the spring of 2017, they were quietly pulling in $50,000 a month in revenue, paid out in cryptocurrency by a business partner who seemed to be Eastern European.

Paras and Josiah mostly socked away the money, waiting for an opportunity to try to launder it through a legitimate business—though by then they’d finally given up and killed ProTraf. Dalton was less careful. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on splurges like a 70-inch flatscreen TV for his parents—he told them he’d made the money trading crypto—and upgrades to his home computer, a gaming desktop surrounded by transparent tubes of red coolant to prevent it from overheating as he supercharged its performance.

Even as the three hackers left Mirai behind, their code continued to plague the global internet. Mirai attacks hit the UK banks Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays, intermittently tearing Lloyds offline while Barclays repelled the onslaught. Another struck the primary mobile telecom provider for Liberia with about 500 gigabits a second of traffic, taking down much of the West African country’s connectivity.

But Mirai, and its many malicious progeny, were no longer its creators’ problem. The three young men had now, finally, hit their stride with a truly profitable and stealthy form of cybercrime. Dalton made a prediction to himself: “In a year, we’ll either be rich,” he thought, “or we’ll be in jail.”

only months later did Josiah hear from Elliott Peterson again. The FBI agent asked him to come to Anchorage to talk. Prosecutors were suggesting a reverse proffer session, where they would lay out the evidence against him. By this point Josiah had a lawyer, who recommended that he take the meeting—and not tell his friends. This time he didn’t.

In the summer of 2017, Josiah and his mother flew to Anchorage. The 10-hour flight was only the second time he’d ever been on a plane. On the morning of the meeting with prosecutors, he arrived at the Anchorage Department of Justice building in a suit, his mind nearly paralyzed with anxiety. Peterson was there, and he greeted Josiah and his mother, suggesting fun activities they should check out while they were in town, as if this were a family vacation.

The Alaskan assistant US attorney who had taken on the Mirai case, a young prosecutor named Adam Alexander with a background in charging violent crimes and child exploitation, launched into a PowerPoint presentation projected on a screen in the front of the conference room. He began by displaying the sentencing guidelines for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, showing how the prison time scaled up based on the amount of damage caused.

For the millions of dollars in damage Josiah might be held responsible for, Alexander suggested, he was facing as much as six or seven years in prison for his first offense.

Alexander began to detail the evidence they had against him. First, they had his connection to the early Mirai scanning server. Then it went further: On occasion, it turned out, Josiah had let his guard down in small but revealing ways, checking on the IP address of another Mirai server directly from his home computer rather than using a remote virtual machine that would leave no trace on his PC.

And then there were text messages he and Paras had exchanged during his pre-Mirai DDoS takedowns of Rutgers’ network.

“Were you still smashing?” Josiah had written to Paras at one point.

“No. Phone is insecure,” Paras had wisely responded. But then, minutes later, he had asked for Josiah’s help in launching another attack: the barely coded “Admiral can you execute my command?” message.

After more than an hour, they took a break. Josiah’s lawyer told him and his mother that he strongly advised they seek a plea deal and that Josiah cooperate with the FBI—that he “shouldn’t push his luck.” Josiah, terrified by the looming threat of years in prison that had been slowly materializing since his first call with Peterson, immediately agreed.

When they reconvened in a different, much smaller conference room, Josiah told Peterson and Alexander he was ready to negotiate a deal. They responded that he’d first need to tell them the full, true story of his crimes. To their relief, he began to detail the entire Mirai conspiracy. The FBI agent and prosecutor were intrigued to learn more about the key role played by Dalton, who hadn’t until then been a target of their investigation. And they were amazed to hear that the Mirai crew was now, even after their raids, engaged in an entirely new click fraud botnet scheme. They had known nothing about it.

Peterson and Alexander told Josiah that if he wanted any chance of a plea deal—still without any promise of avoiding prison—he’d have to fully cooperate. That meant helping to collect evidence on his friends.

Josiah, now in survival mode, was ready to do what it took to stay out of prison. By the time he flew back to Pennsylvania, he was a federal informant.

dalton and paras could tell Josiah was acting strangely. He’d never been aloof or a step behind on any technical questions before. Now, on their group calls, he was quieter and would inexplicably ask them to break down how their criminal enterprise worked in unusual detail.

They had their suspicions and did their best to discuss their conspiracy using only convoluted code words and hypotheticals. But they couldn’t bring themselves to violate the unspoken terms of their friendship by confronting Josiah or cutting him out of their deal. “We both knew something was up,” Dalton says. “But we didn’t have any proof. I didn’t want to fuck him over just because I was sketched out.” After all, this was their old friend, the legendary LiteSpeed, the one to whom they owed so much for advancing their careers as botnet masters.

As for Josiah, he says his years of working in his family’s computer repair shop had helped prepare him for his new role as a double agent. “When you work in retail, you’re used to putting on a face,” he says, “talking to people how they want to be talked to.”

When the feds finally arrived before dawn, Dalton was relieved. They found him in his boxer shorts, wrapped in a pink blanket on a beanbag, watching Star Wars.

A few weeks later, Paras got his own call from Peterson, with his own offer of a meeting in Anchorage. Paras told Dalton about the invitation—but not Josiah, whom he’d begun to distrust. They agreed that it made sense for Paras to meet with this FBI agent and see exactly what the feds had on them.

Over the six months since the raid of his home, Paras had remained in denial, putting on a defiant face but quietly living in a state of latent terror. His family had never again discussed the traumatic violation of their home by federal agents, instead pretending it had never happened. They were “going through the motions of being a family,” as Paras puts it, “but there’s this cloud hanging over everyone’s head.”

The cloud of silence remained in place as Paras and his father flew to Anchorage. Along with Paras’ lawyer, they met with Peterson and Alexander in the same Department of Justice conference room and got the same cheery hiking tips from Peterson. Paras tried to maintain an implacable expression as the prosecutor threw one damning piece of evidence after another onto the screen, laying out his crimes in front of his father. They showed Paras’ connections to the Mirai handles and to Anna-Senpai, and his Fireswap burner account.

Still, Paras told himself that the case was far from clear-cut. Then Alexander played for the room a series of audio recordings of the three hackers explicitly discussing their new click fraud venture. One conversation, from a night when Paras and Dalton had been drinking and let down their guard, was particularly incriminating. For Paras, it was the first confirmation of Josiah’s betrayal.

Just as with Josiah, the meeting paused for a break after an hour. Paras, his father, and his lawyer walked across the street from the prosecutor’s office into a small park of paper birch trees in front of the Anchorage Museum. It was a dismally cold, cloudy day, though Paras says his anxiety had reached a degree where he was disassociating, barely aware of his surroundings.

Paras’ lawyer leveled with him: It sounded very much like he was guilty of the crimes that he had, until then, denied even to his own attorney. Standing there in the park, Paras finally broke. Huddling with his father and lawyer, he confessed, tears flowing as he unlocked the shame, guilt, and fear that he’d kept bottled for months.

He asked his father to cut ties with him, begged him to let him face whatever punishment he had brought on himself alone. His father responded in a voice as broken as Paras’ own: He could never do that.

Instead, he and the lawyer both told Paras that there was no other way out now. His only chance to save himself was to do whatever the FBI and the prosecutors asked of him.

Unbeknownst to them, Peterson and Alexander had watched the three men speaking from the window across the street. From Paras’ body language, they could tell they’d made a breakthrough.

When Paras came back inside, he was a different person, his defenses down. “You’re in a hole, Paras,” Peterson told him. “It’s time to stop digging.” He was ready to cooperate.

Alexander asked him whether he had told anyone that he was coming to Alaska, and he admitted that he’d told Dalton. So Alexander and Peterson asked Paras to call Dalton now, on the spot, on speakerphone, and tell him that he had nothing to worry about.

Paras did as he was told. Dalton picked up the call. And as the FBI and prosecutors sat around the table intently listening, Paras assured Dalton that it was just as they’d thought: The feds had nothing on them.

when it was Dalton’s turn to be raided, Peterson practically scheduled it with him. A few weeks before the bang on the door, Yahoo had mistakenly sent Dalton a letter stating that his old email address had been the subject of a legal request. For more information, it read, he should contact FBI special agent Elliott Peterson.

So Dalton preemptively called the FBI agent who’d now been stalking them for nearly a year. Josiah and Paras, playing their roles as supportive friends, listened in. Peterson picked up the phone, said hello, and immediately apologized. “I wasn’t planning on us talking for a couple weeks,” he explained.

When Dalton claimed not to know who Peterson was or why his emails were being read, the FBI agent laughed out loud. “We’re going to have a great opportunity to have a chat,” he said in the most aggressive version of his usual genial tone. He ended the call by confirming with Dalton that he was still living at home, despite having now started college, implying he didn’t want to search Dalton’s parents’ house if he had moved into a dormitory. “We try to be minimally invasive.”

Dalton hung up with Peterson. “What the fuck was that?” he said to Josiah and Paras, who were still on the group call.

“Your ass,” Paras responded.

For the next three weeks, Dalton was stricken with nausea-inducing anxiety and a sense of “impending doom.” When the feds finally arrived before dawn, he says, he was actually relieved. They found him in his boxer shorts, wrapped in a pink blanket on a beanbag, watching Star Wars.

During the search, Dalton says, his anxiety evaporated—thanks to his early swatting experience, it wasn’t his first time having law enforcement point a gun at him—and he did his best to show the feds that he wasn’t impressed. He napped on a couch during the FBI’s search. When Peterson tried to interview him, he gave him nothing.

In fact, with plenty of time to prepare before they arrived, Dalton had physically destroyed all his most sensitive hard drives. The agents found his beloved water-cooled PC torn apart, its red coolant spilled across his bedroom floor like blood. He’d carefully cached another drive that stored all the bitcoins earned from their click fraud scheme inside a cat food container, fully hidden by kibble. Since the container was transparent, the searching agents didn’t think to look inside.

Just as with Paras and Josiah, Peterson told Dalton not to tell anyone about the search. But Dalton, loyal to the end, tried to send a coded message to Paras that he’d been raided, too: He repeatedly toggled the status of his account on the Steam video game network on and off in Morse code, spelling “FBI.”

Paras saw Dalton’s account blinking. But he never got the message. Of course, even if he had, he’d already been working with the FBI for months to collect evidence on his friend.

dalton soon took his own trip to Anchorage, where he and his parents sat through Peterson and Alexander’s third and final Mirai reverse proffer presentation. Through an hour of damning chat logs and audio recordings, Dalton showed no emotion. But when it was over, he knew there was no use resisting. They had everything.

When Dalton reluctantly agreed to cooperate, Peterson didn’t ask him to keep their arrangement secret from Josiah and Paras. This time, he phoned the other two. All four of them joined the call.

After months of paranoia, Peterson wanted to clear the air, to tell them that they were no longer cooperating against one another. They would now all be working together. Josiah remembers it almost like a reunion: meeting each other again now that they were all on the other side.

In the call, Josiah and Paras seemed relieved to finally be able to speak honestly to each other and Dalton after months of subterfuge. Dalton agreed, in a defeated tone, that yes, he was on board. They would give up all their hacking tools and dismantle the click fraud botnet, and Dalton would forfeit the hidden hard drive full of their bitcoins. But Peterson remembers that Dalton remained quiet and formal, seemingly still processing his anger and shame at having been cornered by the FBI and surveilled by his friends.

It was only late one night, a few days after Dalton got home to New Orleans, that he allowed the full reality of his situation to catch up with him. He was facing a felony conviction. He was going to have to work as a federal informant. And he was still likely to end up in prison. It felt hopeless.

The person he chose to call to talk this over with, strangely, wasn’t Josiah or Paras, but Peterson. He was trapped, he told the FBI agent in tears. His life was over.

For the next hour, Peterson, sitting in his living room in Anchorage, found himself back in his “dean of men” role, comforting and counseling the young cybercriminal who’d so recently been the target of his investigation.

Peterson asked Dalton about his hopes for the future—the “where do you see yourself in five years” question of every guidance counselor. Dalton confessed that beneath his old, secret belief that cybercrime could be his only path in life, he still hoped that someday he might be able to have a normal, successful job in technology. Peterson told him that was still possible.

“He was super nice,” Dalton says. “Far nicer than he ever needed to be.”

Peterson said he couldn’t promise Dalton that it would all be OK. There was still the possibility of spending years in prison. Regardless, Peterson reassured Dalton, he could still go to college. He could still do something rewarding with his talents. His life was not over.

the young men’s lawyers had each warned them that, to have any hope of avoiding prison, they would need to go above and beyond in their cooperation with the FBI and prosecutors. So once they found themselves on the same team again, Josiah, Dalton, and Paras threw themselves into working with law enforcement with the same obsessive energy that they’d once put into conquering the internet of things.

All three were still deeply embedded in the cybercriminal community—in fact, Mirai had turned the personae that Paras had created into celebrities. So to start, they began helping the FBI target their old associates. It was Paras, the Mirai creator who had opened Pandora’s box by publishing the botnet’s source code, who found himself most actively working undercover to take down Mirai’s copycats.

Because he still controlled the Anna-Senpai handle, Paras was tasked with reaching out to the creator of one especially prolific Mirai knockoff. The copycat botnet was controlled by a hacker who lived near Portland, Oregon. He’d been brash enough to reveal his location to Anna-Senpai in their chats, and even to invite Mirai’s creator to hang out if he were ever in town. Paras took him up on the offer.

At that point, Peterson and Alexander had been tracking the suspect and believed they knew his identity. But he appeared to have no fixed address—he seemed to have developed a serious drug problem and had admitted to using meth in his chats with Anna-Senpai—and instead roamed around the city from house to house with little more than a backpack and the laptop he used to manage his botnet.

After Paras flew to Portland, he suggested to the target of their sting that they meet at his hotel. Sure enough, the hacker turned up, and the two botnet admins spent a few hours in Paras’ room there, swapping stories and hacking tricks, and even inviting other hacker associates to join the conversation via Skype. Meanwhile, Peterson and other FBI agents recorded the meeting—with eavesdropping techniques they declined to describe—from another room across the hallway.

Eventually the young Portland hacker suggested they head to a nearby Little Caesars to eat. When he and Paras walked out of the room, he carelessly left his laptop open and didn’t even bother to close the video chat session with his hacker friends. Those friends were still watching through the laptop’s webcam when Peterson and another agent came into the room and seized the computer as evidence. Less than an hour later, the agents stepped out of a black van in the hotel parking lot and arrested their target as he and Paras returned from their lunch.

After that Portland sting, some of the hackers who had just watched the accidental livestream of the hotel raid accused Paras of acting as the FBI’s snitch. But Paras pointed out that it hadn’t been his idea to meet up—or even to conveniently go out for pizza—arguing that maybe he was in fact the one who had been set up.

The explanation was convincing enough that Paras managed to pull off subsequent undercover operations against multiple other cybercriminal suspects across the country. He says he hardly relished his role in those stings. But nor did he feel much guilt. “I mean, honestly, it was exhilarating,” he says. “It felt like something out of a movie.”

The FBI and the Justice Department declined to share all of the details of the investigations that Paras and the other two Mirai creators helped them pursue. But Peterson summarizes them: “We arrested people, and we worked other cases against IoT botnets, and we shut down other botnets where arrests weren’t feasible,” he says. “We just did really interesting work.”

after a few months, when they had run out of undercover cases, Peterson began to give the team different kinds of tasks, many of them with no direct relationship to Mirai or their old contacts. They were grateful to find they were no longer acting as informants, so much as Peterson’s new group of technical analysts.

They started helping the FBI agent with jobs like reverse engineering malware and analyzing logs to identify botnet victims. They built a software tool that parsed the blockchain to trace cybercriminal cryptocurrency. In early 2018, when hackers began to exploit server software known as Memcached to amplify their DDoS attacks, the Mirai team figured out how to scan for vulnerable servers that enabled those attacks so that the FBI could warn the servers’ owners and help remove a new kind of DDoS ammunition from the internet.

Josiah says that, in this new role, he couldn’t help but apply the same technical perfectionism he had always prided himself on. “I enjoy being the best at this sort of stuff,” he says. “I thought, ‘If we’re going to work on this, it damn well better work right.’”

Paras says that, at first, he had immersed himself in Peterson’s assignments—even the harrowing undercover ones—mostly on his lawyer’s advice and as a distraction from his lingering guilt and shame.“To prevent myself from feeling things,” as Paras puts it. But over time, he found that he was able to look at the work more squarely—and to even get some gratification from the good he felt he was now doing. Peterson’s comment to him in Alaska, that he should stop digging the hole he was in, had stuck. The work for Peterson felt like “the opposite of digging,” as he puts it. “I wanted to put as much distance as possible between who I am now and who I was then,” he says.

Eventually, when the Mirai crew talked among themselves about their motivation to work with Peterson, Paras says, it went beyond self-interested survival to a sense of actual atonement for the harm they’d done. “It was like, OK, what is our path to redemption?” he says. “Maybe this is the start.”

The FBI, of course, has a long, unsavory record of exploiting informants and cooperating defendants—many of whom are put in dangerous situations, made to entrap innocent associates, or end up feeling abandoned or used by their handlers. The three Mirai hackers felt they were an exception.

As the months passed, they say, they came to see Peterson as a kind of mentor. He seemed to show real concern for their futures. The strange friendliness he’d displayed while hunting them, they felt, was not an aggressive front but an actual expression of his humanity. “We were very lucky that we got Elliott,” says Dalton. “He literally saved my life.”

the us criminal justice system has a history of notoriously harsh sentences for hackers. In 2010, Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stealing tens of millions of debit and credit card numbers from retailer networks when he was in his mid-twenties. In 2017, Russian cybercriminal Roman Seleznev, arrested on vacation at the Maldives airport, was sentenced to 27 years for his own massive theft of credit card data. Even Hector Monsegur, a front man for the rampaging hacktivist group LulzSec who flipped on his friends and served as a federal informant for more than two years, was jailed for seven months—longer than some other members of LulzSec in the United Kingdom he had informed on.

So it was almost a radical act when the prosecutors in the case of Mirai, the botnet behind several of the biggest cyberattacks in history, asked the judge to sentence its creators to a total of zero days in prison.

Adam Alexander, the Alaskan assistant US attorney who had flipped each of the three hackers with PowerPoint presentations full of evidence against them, explains that his decision was based in part on the fact that none of them had prior criminal history or substance abuse problems that might have led them to fall back into old habits. Unlike many defendants, they had strong family support networks holding them accountable. Most importantly, by the time their sentencing was approaching in the fall of 2018, they had done more than a thousand hours of work for Peterson, what Alexander described in a letter to the judge as “extensive and exceptional” cooperation. “They were kind of gleefully willing to break the internet,” Alexander says. “But would putting any of the three of these young men in prison for 18 to 36 months, and then wiping our hands of them, have more meaningfully assured that we could prevent future criminal conduct? I didn’t actually think so then, and I still don’t think so today.”

Instead, he asked the court to sentence Josiah, Dalton, and Paras to 2,500 hours of community service each over the following five years. They would carry out that work with the same FBI agent who had supervised their presentence cooperation period: Elliott Peterson.

In an Anchorage courtroom roughly two years after Mirai had obliterated Brian Krebs’ website, a judge handed down that sentence—community service, no prison time—to the three 21- and 22-year-olds, along with debts of between $115,000 and $127,000 each in restitution. “You’re young, you have a lot to give to society … and you have a lot of talent and skill,” a judge told the three men in his Anchorage courtroom that fall day. “I hope you use it for good.” (Paras would face separate charges in New Jersey for his attacks on Rutgers, where prosecutors vehemently argued that he deserved prison time. Alexander intervened, countering that Paras’ cooperation with prosecutors and the FBI in Alaska should be factored into his sentencing in that case, too. The New Jersey judge ultimately agreed, sentencing Paras to nearly $9 million more in restitution and six months of confinement at his parents’ home, but no jail time.)

On this visit to Alaska, when Peterson again suggested local activities, the Mirai crew actually took him up on it. That evening they ate together at a local indie theater restaurant, the Bear Tooth Grill, where they also caught a screening of a documentary about Google’s Go-playing AI—just some notorious hackers and the FBI agent who hunted them down, out for dinner and a movie.

not long into their five-year community service stint, Peterson says he began to sense that his three unlikely protégés were beginning to outgrow him—that he couldn’t find enough technical tasks worthy of their talents. So he asked the Big Pipes anti-DDoS group he’d helped create with Allison Nixon if anyone there had work for them to do. Nixon raised her hand.

When Peterson had first started overseeing “the kids”—as they came to be known within Big Pipes—Nixon had wanted nothing to do with them. She’d spent long enough lurking in the Hack Forums cesspool to be familiar with the toxicity that flowed freely there and had even been personally harassed by some of the Mirai team’s old associates. “They’re not nice people,” she says of that scene. “You don’t want them to know your name.”

But after seeing that Peterson had worked with Paras, Josiah, and Dalton for more than a year and was still willing to vouch for them, she decided to take a chance and met them on a video call. She found the three young hackers—including the notorious Josiah “LiteSpeed” White, whom she’d tracked for nearly his entire career—polite and eager to please.

She did, in fact, need their programming help: She had an idea for a new kind of honeypot that would be far more versatile than her “sad DVR.” She wanted to create a system where security researchers or analysts could load up any internet-of-thing device’s firmware in a virtual environment to catch new malware variants.

The tool they built together was called Watchtower. It used a newer technology called QEMU containerization to spin up quarantined, full-fledged simulations of DVRs, waiting to be infected. The Mirai team had designed their internet-of-things malware to detect when it loaded on a software simulation of a gadget rather than the real thing and to kill its processes rather than give a researcher any information. But WatchTower’s honeypot was designed to look like a real device in every way that malware could check—a seamless, virtual panopticon in which to observe malware and intercept its master’s commands.

“It was brilliantly done,” says Larry Cashdollar, a security researcher at Akamai who says the company used Watchtower to obtain and analyze countless new samples of IoT malware. Eventually Nixon and her Mirai team added in data contributed from other researchers and members of her Big Pipes DDoS working group, including machines that acted as honeypots for reflection attacks and DNS data to identify targeted domains, integrating it all into a real-time DDoS analysis dashboard. By 2020, they had added a list of domain keywords to identify attacks on political or voting system targets, and the tool’s results were used to monitor for DDoS attacks throughout that year’s election—helping them prepare for any democracy-disrupting “big one” that many in the security community still feared.

As for Brian Krebs, when he found out that the three Mirai creators had escaped jail time and were now essentially working as whitehat security researchers, he was initially perturbed by what he saw as a lack of accountability.

“Trust the process,” he remembers Nixon telling him.

“What process?” Krebs says he responded. “This doesn’t look like justice to me.”

But as time passed and he continued to learn from Nixon and others about the good work Paras, Josiah, and Dalton were doing, he says he slowly changed his mind. “When I was able to hear about some of the things they came up with, it was encouraging,” he says. “I guess that it’s the best of all possible outcomes.”

When Nixon moved from Flashpoint to a job at a new security firm, Unit 221B, she lobbied the company to hire her Watchtower team. By that time, Paras had gotten a job writing code for a semiconductor company. But Josiah and Dalton both began working for Nixon full time as security researchers on contract, on top of their community service work.

Of course, even as the Mirai crew joined the legitimate security industry, many of the new botnets that they were now monitoring with Watchtower were, in fact, variants of their own monstrous creation. Like Josiah’s Qbot code before it, Mirai had become the best, cleanest code base for anyone trying to build their own massive collection of hacked machines, and all manner of digital miscreants proceeded to pick it apart, repurposing its components to wreak havoc. “There are pieces of Mirai everywhere now,” says Chad Seaman, a security researcher at Akamai and an early member of the Big Pipes working group.

Companies still face near-constant attacks from Mirai descendants, Seaman says. Because those botnets are generally still fighting over the same vast but splintered collection of vulnerable internet-of-things devices, none of them is nearly as big as the original Mirai. Nor has any of Mirai’s progeny ever again managed to surprise defenders to the degree Mirai did.

But their attacks still plague the internet, adding to the millions of dollars a year that companies pay in DDoS protection. “The arsonists have turned over a new leaf,” Akamai’s Seaman summarizes. “The wildfires continue to rage.”

Epilogue

in the years after he sat in his Connecticut home and watched his digital life implode, Scott Shapiro became a kind of Mirai fanatic. The Yale Law professor eventually read the source code that Paras published on Hack Forums, printing it out, poring over its mechanics, and marveling at its well-polished design. Years later, he would write a case study of Mirai in his book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, which tells a history of the internet through a series of extraordinary hacking events.

Among other things, Shapiro now sees the Mirai case as a rare model of actual restorative justice in cybercriminal law. It shows, he argues, a positive alternative to putting young hackers in prison when, in many cases, their online behavior contrasts so sharply with their real-world selves. Yes, the internet can seduce good people into doing bad things. But perhaps the split personalities it creates also leaves more room for redemption in the offline world. Perhaps it even means more cybercriminals like the Mirai crew can be reformed and put to work fixing the problems they caused. “This was an experiment. It worked out really well,” Shapiro says. “I would like to see more of it.”

One afternoon in early December of 2021, three years into the Mirai creators’ five years of probation, Shapiro invited Josiah, Paras, Dalton, and Elliott Peterson to speak to his Yale cybersecurity law class over Zoom. It would be the first time the four of them had appeared together in a semipublic setting other than a courtroom.

At first, Peterson did most of the talking, telling the story of the case and his investigation in a 45-minute presentation. Then he finished and the group took questions from the students.

One asked how this group of young adults with no criminal records had justified to themselves carrying out such epic acts of digital disruption. Paras answered for all of them, explaining how incremental it had all felt, how easy it had been to graduate from commandeering hundreds of hacked computers to thousands to hundreds of thousands, with no one to tell them where to draw the line. “There was never a leap,” he says. “Just one step after another.”

Another student asked how they had kept going for so long—how they believed they could evade the FBI even after they had been raided. This time it was Dalton who answered, overcoming his anxiety at speaking in front of crowds, in part thanks to better treatments that have helped to alleviate his stutter. He explained to the class that they had simply never faced an obstacle to their hacking careers that they hadn’t been able to surmount—that, like teenagers who have no experience of aging or death and therefore believe they’ll live forever, they had come to feel almost invincible.

Throughout the presentation, Shapiro says, he was struck by the youthful nervousness of the three Mirai creators and the fact that, even as they spoke, they never turned on their webcams. The hacker threat that he’d once been sure must be the Russians, that had felt so large and powerful, was just these “young boys,” he realized. “Young boys who don’t want to show their faces.”

Paras would later explain to me that he wasn’t exactly trying to hide. He just doesn’t want to associate his face with Mirai anymore. He’s since lost more than 30 pounds, ditched his glasses, grown a trim beard; he’d prefer to let his old image, the pudgy bespectacled kid pictured in Brian Krebs’ story about Anna-Senpai, be the one tied to Mirai.

As of the end of October, all three of the Mirai hackers’ periods of probation have ended. Paras Jha and Josiah White work together for a high-frequency financial trading company. Dalton Norman still holds his job working for Allison Nixon at Unit 221B. But they all plan to continue maintaining and updating Watchtower, perhaps their most lasting contribution to undoing some of the damage they’ve done.

“I’m grateful for the chance to try to put the genie back in the bottle,” Josiah says.

He also admits that’s probably impossible. Even now, he and Dalton and Paras know that fragments of the monster they built still haunt the internet. Mirai no longer comes from the future. Instead, it stubbornly hangs on from the past. Someday, they hope to leave it there.

Collage Source Images: Getty Images

This article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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SCIENCE

Health Care Should Be Designed for the Extremes of Life

João Medeiros  July 05, 2024 07:00 AM

Much of health care is designed with the “comfortable middle” of society in mind, says designer Yves Behar, when it should be tailored to children, the elderly, and those with disabilities.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

“The adoption of new ideas and the pace of change in health care can lag behind other innovations that consumers experience every day,” says Yves Behar, an industrial designer and founder of design firm fuseproject. People, Behar continues, become frustrated when they contrast their experience in clinics and hospitals versus, for instance, the consumer experience they have at an Apple Store. Behar’s belief that design can have a positive impact in people’s lives leads him to focus on what he calls “designing for extreme audiences,” such as children, the elderly, neurodivergent, and mobility-impaired people.

“Much of design addresses the comfortable middle part of life when you’re happy, healthy, and have money,” he says. “For me, design is most needed when change is most extreme.” One example is Moxie, an AI learning robot companion intended for autistic and neurodivergent youngsters. “It turned out to be incredibly useful for all kids, especially during Covid,” Behar says.

Since its launch in 2022, Moxie has had over 4 million conversations with children, with a reported 71 percent improvement in social skills such as assertiveness, social engagement, and self-control for those who regularly play with it. Another fuseproject invention—and Behar’s favorite—is the SNOO robotic bassinet. The bassinet mimics renowned pediatrician Harvey Karp’s method for soothing babies, which involves swaddling, shushing, and swinging.

“The AI recognizes when the baby is fussing and screaming, and starts creating the noise and the movement in response,” Behar says. “It’s the first and only medical device that has received approval from the FDA for its ability to keep sleeping babies safely on their backs and avoid SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome].”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

The UK’s NHS Going Digital Would Be Equivalent to Hiring Thousands of New Doctors

João Medeiros  July 03, 2024 08:00 AM

More than 30 million Brits have the NHS app. This represents an opportunity to transform the health service, which shadow health secretary Wes Streeting calls “an analog system in a digital age.”

PHOTOGRAPH: UK PARLIAMENT

In December last year, the UK’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, visited Singapore General Hospital, regarded as one of the best in the world. What he witnessed there surprised him: “Patients arrive having already registered their appointments via an app. They check in on touchscreen kiosks awaiting them at reception. Tablets at their bedside allow them to read about their treatment or call for assistance,” Streeting says. “This is Space Age stuff compared with where the NHS is today.” Streeting characterizes the National Health Service as an “analog system in a digital age.”

“When I visit a hospital, doctors often take out their pagers to show me what they are forced to work with,” Streeting says. According to estimates, 13.5 million hours of GPs’ time is wasted every year due to inadequate IT. Fixing that would be the equivalent of hiring 8,000 new NHS doctors. “For the past 14 years, modernization of the NHS has been put on the back burner by a Conservative government which opts for sticking plasters instead of the major surgery that’s required,” says Streeting, who added that he fears that five more years of Tory mismanagement could mean the NHS ends up like the failed British retailer Woolworths—“a much-loved national institution which failed to change with the times and was left behind.”

Central to Streeting’s plan to fix the NHS is the NHS app, which has been downloaded by 31 million people in England and Wales. “It has the potential to transform how the NHS interacts with patients and promote better public health,” he says. He points out that, for instance, only one in every 200 GP appointments are currently made via the app. “In too many cases, patients still wait on the phone at 8 am, or even queue up in person in the cold on a frosty morning just to see a doctor.”

WIRED asked voters in the UK general election if they're able to spot misinformation and disinformation from their representatives.

The NHS app could not only allow appointments to be made, but also let patients receive notifications about vaccine campaigns, health tests, cancer screening, and even upcoming clinical trials. “Clinical trials can use genomics to identify patients who will benefit from the latest treatments, but they struggle to recruit—not for a lack of people willing to take part, but because they can’t access basic data,” he said. He promised that Labour would clamp down on bureaucracy and allow clinical trials to recruit volunteers via the app. “During the pandemic, half a million people signed up to the vaccine trials registry,” he says. “If we can do it to defeat Covid, we can do it to cure cancer.”

At the core of Labour’s plan is patient data. Recently, the NHS has announced the launch of a federated data platform that would centralize hospital data, but would not include general practice or social care data. “The NHS has struck gold here, yet it’s leaving it in the ground,” Streeting says. “General practice data is key to unlocking better population health outcomes.”

Streeting promises that a Labour government would ensure a transparent process about what aspects of patient data would be shared and with whom, as well as the necessary safeguards to ensure patient confidentiality. As for those who oppose it on the grounds of privacy concerns, he has a simple message: “It’s a fight that a Labour government is willing to have,” he says. “While the tinfoil hat brigade takes to TikTok to urge followers to opt out of sharing their data with the NHS—the irony isn’t lost on me—the government refuses to take on their fear mongering.”

He recalled when, last January, he met the parents of a 2-year-old boy at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. “They have been through hell,” he says. “In his short life, he has already had five operations on his heart.” When he asked them what their main frustration had been, however, the answer surprised him: technology. “Their local GP couldn’t access the notes from Alder Hey and the hospital couldn’t read the records held by their GP. It meant that on every appointment they had to repeat themselves again and again. The health service should be lessening their worry, not adding to their stress.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Sexist Myths Are a Danger to Health

João Medeiros  July 02, 2024 07:00 AM

To improve outcomes for female patients, all evidence needs to be considered—while outdated myths about the significance of sex differences need to be retired.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

In 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration made an unprecedented recommendation, advising that women should receive a lower dosage of the insomnia drug zolpidem than men. The rationale behind it was that medication seemed to affect women for longer periods, which could become a safety issue.

However, in 2019, research conducted at Tufts University concluded that the differential effect of the medication had nothing to do with sex. Rather, researchers found that what determined the rate at which the person cleared the drug from their system was their body size. The report concluded that the reduced prescribed dosage for women could in fact lead to underdosing and a failure to effectively treat insomnia. “They were using sex as a proxy for body size because we tend to collect data about sex; we don’t collect data about body size,” says Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. “This is the perverse way that sometimes medicine works: You base your diagnostics on the data you have rather than the data you need.”

Indeed, Saini argues that many of the prevailing gaps in health outcomes between men and women have nothing to do with biological sex. “It can be so tempting for scientists to look at a gap and want to find a simple biological explanation for it, but when it comes to gender and health those simple explanations often don’t exist,” she said.

Of course, sex differences do exist in aspects of health, such as reproductive health and physiology. However, what research suggests is that, in most cases, the health-related difference between men and women—from disease symptoms to drug efficacy—is really quite marginal. “The differences that do exist are down to gender,” Saini says. “Differences in the way people are treated and thought about and the assumptions we make about them.” That, according to Saini, is what explains many of the failures when it comes to women’s health.

Consider, for instance, the common misconception that women present atypical heart-attack symptoms, different from men’s. This prevailing myth was quashed by a 2019 study, funded by the British Heart Foundation, at the University of Edinburgh. The research, which involved nearly 2,000 patients, showed that, in fact, 93 percent of both sexes reported chest pain—the most common symptom—while a similar percentage of men and women (nearly 50 percent) also felt pain radiating from their left arm. “The problem of underdiagnosis of women is because health professionals and even the women themselves who are having a heart attack believe heart attacks are something that mostly happens to men,” Saini says. Estimates indicate that differences in care for women have led to approximately 8,200 avoidable deaths due to heart attacks in England and Wales since 2014.

“It’s not about men discriminating against women; this is often about women not being listened to—sometimes by other women,” she says. Another example that starkly illustrates how gender can affect health outcomes came from a 2016 Canadian study about patients who had been hospitalized with acute coronary syndrome. The research showed that the patients who experienced higher rates of recurrence were the ones who performed gender roles stereotypically associated with women—like doing more housework and not being the primary earner at home—independently of whether they were a man or a woman. “This was because people who carried out a female social role were more likely to be anxious.” Saini says.

If these disparities are caused by the way patients are perceived and treated, the solution, to Saini, is clear: “We need to be careful to diagnose the problem where it is, not where we imagine it to be.” She highlights the successful work of Jennie Joseph, a British midwife who, in 2009, founded the Commonsense Childbirth School of Midwifery in Orlando, Florida, to support women without access to maternal health care. Research has shown that Black mothers, both in the US and in the UK, are three times more likely to die than white women.

“Joseph lowered maternal mortality rates among minority women simply by improving the quality of their care, listening to their concerns, and responding when they say they’re in pain,” Saini says. “We don’t need technology to solve this issue. We just very simply can’t allow our biases and prejudices to get in the way.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Aging Might Not Be Inevitable

João Medeiros  June 27, 2024 07:00 AM

There are biological underpinnings to aging—and so researchers are investigating cell manipulations, transfusions of young blood, and chemical compounds that can mimic low-calorie diets.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

In 1997, a French woman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122. She was the world’s oldest verified person, according to the Gerontology Research Group. Her daily habits included drinking a glass of port wine and smoking a cigarette after meals (she also ate 2.5 pounds of chocolate every week). “Nobody else has lived past 120 since she died,” says Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist and author of Why We Die. Indeed, while the number of centenarians is increasing every year, the number of people living past 110 is not. “This suggests that maybe there’s a natural limit to human lifespan.”

If such a limit exists, it’s one imposed by biological evolution. “Evolution wants to make sure that your genes have the maximum likelihood of being passed on,” Ramakrishnan says. “It doesn't care about how long you live.” This explains, for instance, why there seems to be a correlation between the size of animals and their life expectancy—in general, the larger the species, the longer it will live. Most mayflies live between one and two days. Monarch butterflies can live for months. Bowhead whales live more than 200 years. Greenland sharks may live more than 500 years. “If you’re a smaller species, there’s no point spending a lot of resources maintaining and repairing the body because the likelihood of being eaten or starved to death are high,” says Ramakrishnan. “Larger species, on the other hand, will have the advantage of more time finding mates and producing offspring.”

A few species, however, seem to be exempt from this rule. The hydra, a small freshwater animal with 12 tentacles, doesn’t seem to age at all. The immortal jellyfish can even age backward. “It suggests that aging is not inevitable and that we might be able to circumvent our natural limits if we alter our biology,” Ramakrishnan says.

That is why understanding the biological underpinnings of why we age and die is such a hot topic of research today. Scientists are trying to find out how to manipulate cellular aging processes—for instance, how to destroy senescent cells (aged cells that cause inflammation), or how to reprogram cells to revert them to an earlier state of development. Over the past decade, more than 300,000 scientific papers about aging have been published, while billions of dollars have been funneled into more than 700 longevity startups, including Altos Labs, Human Longevity, Elysium Health, and Calico.

One of the most promising avenues of research involves the discovery of chemical compounds that can mimic the effects of a low-calorie diet, which is recognized as one of most well-established ways to slow down aging. One such compound is rapamycin, first discovered on the soil of Easter Island, due to its antifungal properties. “Later they found out that it was also a potent antitumor and anti-inflammatory,” Ramakrishnan says. “It’s also immunosuppressant, so it can also make people prone to infection and slow down wound healing. We need to find that sweet spot between not having the side effects and having just the [anti-aging] benefits.”

Longevity researchers are also familiar with a body of research that shows that young blood can rejuvenate old bodies—in mice, at least. This discovery came about when researchers first surgically connected the circulatory system of a young and old mouse—a technique called parabiosis—and observed that this procedure slowed down the symptoms of aging, lengthening the lifespan of the older animal by 10 percent. Ramakrishnan notes that while scientists are still trying to identify the factors in young blood that cause this effect, “there are companies that jumped the gun and started offering young plasma to billionaires.”

“While we’re waiting for all these things to happen there are things we can do.” Ramakrishnan notes. “This is likely similar to the advice your grandparents gave you. Eat moderately, eat healthy diets, get enough sleep and exercise. It turns out that each of those affects the other two so it’s really a virtuous cycle. If you do all of them at once, it works better than any medicine on the market, it has no side effects, and it’s free.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

With AI Tools, Scientists Can Crack the Code of Life

João Medeiros  June 26, 2024 08:00 AM

Google’s AI research lab DeepMind is steadily building knowledge of how genes and their products work inside the body—and how and why they sometimes go wrong.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

In 2021, AI research lab DeepMind announced the development of its first digital biology neural network, AlphaFold. The model was capable of accurately predicting the 3D structure of proteins, which determines the functions that these molecules play. “We’re just floating bags of water moving around,” says Pushmeet Kohli, VP of research at DeepMind. “What makes us special are proteins, the building blocks of life. How they interact with each other is what makes the magic of life happen.”

AlphaFold was considered by the journal Science as the breakthrough of the year in 2021. In 2022, it was the most cited research paper in AI. “People have been on [protein structures] for many decades and were not able to make that much progress,” Kohli says. “Then came AI.” DeepMind also released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database—which contained the protein structures of almost every organism whose genome has been sequenced—making it freely available to scientists worldwide.

More than 1.7 million researchers in 190 countries have used it for research ranging from the design of plastic-eating enzymes to the development of more effective malaria vaccines. A quarter of the research involving AlphaFold was dedicated to the understanding of cancer, Covid-19, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Last year, DeepMind released its next generation of AlphaFold, which extended its structure prediction algorithm to biomolecules like nucleic acids and ligands.

“It has democratized scientific research,” Kohli says. “Scientists working in a developing country on a neglected tropical disease did not have access to the funds to get the structure of a protein computed. Now, at the click of a button, they can go to the AlphaFold database and get these predictions for free.” For instance, one of DeepMind’s early partners, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, used AlphaFold to develop medicine for diseases that affect millions—such as sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis—yet receive comparatively little research.

DeepMind’s latest breakthrough is called AlphaMissense. The model categorizes the so-called missense mutations—genetic alterations that can result in different amino acids being produced at particular positions in proteins. Such mutations can alter the function of the protein itself, and AlphaMissense attributes a likelihood score for that mutation being either pathogenic or benign. “Understanding and predicting those effects is crucial for the discovery of rare genetic diseases,” Kohli says. The algorithm, which was released last year, has classified around 89 percent of all possible human missense. Before, only 0.1 percent of all possible variants had been clinically classified by researchers.

“This is just the beginning,” Kohli says. Ultimately, he believes AI could eventually lead to the creation of a virtual cell that could radically accelerate biomedical research, enabling biology to be explored in-silico rather than in real-world laboratories. “With AI and machine learning we finally have the tools to comprehend this very sophisticated system that we call life.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Air So Polluted It Can Kill Isn’t Being Taken Seriously Enough

João Medeiros  June 26, 2024 07:00 AM

Toxic air kills over half a million children every year, yet only once has air pollution been listed as a cause of death on a death certificate.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

In 2010, three months before her seventh birthday, Ella Roberta suddenly developed a chest infection and a severe cough. Her mother, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, took her to the local hospital in Lewisham, South East London, where she was initially diagnosed with asthma.

In the following months, she got worse and began suffering from coughing syncope—coughing episodes so violent that they caused her to black out due to a lack of blood supply to the brain. “She had one of the worst cases of asthma ever recorded,” Kissi-Debrah recalls. “They didn’t really know what was wrong as she didn’t present as a normal asthmatic. They tested her for everything, from epilepsy to cystic fibrosis. Her condition was extremely rare.” So rare, in fact, that Kissi-Debrah couldn’t find a single case of a child suffering a cough from coughing syncope in the scientific literature. “It was only common in long-distance lorry drivers,” she says.

In the next three years, Ella was admitted to hospital about 30 times. On February 15, 2013, shortly after her ninth birthday, she suffered a fatal asthma attack.

Her original death certificate stated that she had died from acute respiratory failure. “At the inquest, it was established that some of it might be due to ‘something in the air,’” Kissi-Debrah says. None of the medical experts consulted had mentioned the possibility that air pollution could have triggered Ella’s syncope. That possibility came to light only after Kissi-Debrah was contacted by a reader of the local newspaper who had read about her story and suggested that she check the air pollution levels on the day Ella died. Indeed, that day the levels of nitrogen dioxide caused by the traffic on heavily congested South Circular Road, near where they lived, had far exceeded set limits.

With the assistance of her lawyer, Kissi-Debrah applied to the High Court to quash the verdict of the first inquest and request a second one, which was one granted. “My lawyer, Jocelyn, outlined on a graph all the times Ella had been admitted to the hospital, and then she got the data from the monitors near the house,” Kissi-Debrah recalls. The pattern was clear: There was a spike in air pollution prior to Ella experiencing coughing syncope. “Twenty-seven out of 28 times. As far as I’m concerned, that’s scientifically significant.” Furthermore, they showed that, on average, dioxide emissions and particulate matter levels in Lewisham far exceeded World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.

After nine days of deliberation, the inquest concluded that “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.” It added: “Ella’s mother was not given information about the health risks of air pollution and its potential to exacerbate asthma. If she had been given this information she would have taken steps which might have prevented Ella’s death.” The cause of death on Ella’s death certificate was amended. To this date, she remains the only person in the world to have air pollution on her death certificate.

Given the evidence at the inquest, the coroner also issued a Prevention of Future Deaths Report, which had a series of recommendations, such as ensuring that national air pollution levels be in line with WHO guidelines, that the public in England and Wales be made aware of the risks of air pollution, and that health professionals be educated on the health impacts of air pollution and inform patients accordingly.

“The coroner felt that other children were at risk of dying,” Kissi-Debrah says. “He made it very clear, actually, that unless the air was cleaned up, more children would die.”

Currently, 600,000 children worldwide die every year from breathing polluted air. In London alone, a quarter of a million children suffer from asthma. “The only time in this country no child has died from asthma was during the first lockdown,” Kissi-Debrah says. Ten years on from the death of her daughter, she continues to campaign for the legal right to clean air. As part of her campaign, she is lobbying for the approval of the Clean Air Bill in the UK, also known as Ella’s law: a parliamentary bill that establishes the right to breathe clean air.

“It is our right to breathe clean air, and it is the government’s duty to clean up the air and ensure that the UK targets are in line with WHO targets, as currently, they are not,” she says. “This isn’t a party political issue. It’s about our health. It’s about our future.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Boring Architecture Is Starving Your Brain

João Medeiros  June 25, 2024 07:00 AM

Thomas Heatherwick believes architecture has a “nutritional value” to society—and that the public desperately deserve a better offering.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

Designer Thomas Heatherwick thinks the construction industry is in a crisis. “We’ve just got so used to buildings that are boring,” says the man behind London’s revived Routemaster bus, Google’s Bay View, and New York’s Little Island. “New buildings, again and again, are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. What happened?” While those features can often be aesthetically appropriate on their own, Heatherwick notes that it’s the relentless combination of them in the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban spaces that makes them overwhelmingly boring.

This boredom, he adds, isn’t just a nuisance—it can actually be harmful. “Boring is worse than nothing,” Heatherwick writes in his latest book, Humanize. “Boring is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body will suffer when it’s deprived of food, the brain begins to suffer when it’s deprived of sensory information. Boredom is the starvation of the mind.”

This isn’t just a matter of opinion. Heatherwick cites, for instance, the research of Colin Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo who studies the neurological and psychological impact of the built environment. In his experiments, Ellard has shown that people’s moods were considerably affected when surrounded by tall buildings. In one experiment, he collected data from wearable sensors that tracked skin conductance response, a measure of emotional arousal. When people pass by a boring building, Heatherwick says, “their bodies literally go into a fight-or-flight mode. They have nothing for their mind to connect to.”

The brain, Heatherwick argues, craves complexity and fascination. “There’s a reason why, when you look out into a forest, nature’s complexity and rhythms restores our attention back,” he says. “We need that in buildings. Less is not more.” This is backed by the research of psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who in the 1980s developed Attention Restoration Theory, which posited that people’s concentration improves when spending time in natural environments.

“We haven’t been paying attention to the nutritional value to society of the buildings that are around us,” Heatherwick says. He believes, for example, that architects now prefer to prioritize the internal spaces of a building, while neglecting what the building looks like from the outside. This is a mistake. “Buildings are the backdrop of society’s life,” he says. “A thousand times more people will go past this building than will ever come inside it. The outside of that building will affect them and contribute to how they feel.” Ultimately, to humanize our urban spaces, architects need to think about the people that inhabit them. Heatherwick recalls a debate of elite people in the construction industry a few years ago about whether the opinion of the public mattered. “We debated all night and then they voted that they didn’t. It was unbelievable.”

Such short-term thinking is leading to what Heatherwick calls “the dirty secret of the construction industry”: its disastrous environmental impact. Just consider, for instance, that in the US, 1 billion square feet of buildings are demolished every year. “That’s half of Washington, DC, destroyed, just to get rebuilt after with the same sort of boring buildings,” he says. In the UK, 50,000 buildings a year are demolished, with the average age of a commercial building being around 40 years. “If I were a commercial building, I would have been killed 14 years ago,” he says. “To build a tower in the city of London, which by global standards isn’t that big, takes the equivalent of 92,000 tons of carbon emissions.” As a result of this, estimates show that the construction industry now emits five times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than aviation.

“We can’t have buildings that are only here for 40 years. We need thousand-year thinking,” he says. “The world of construction teaches you that form follows function, less is more, ornament is a crime. It’s powerful, and when you’re studying, that goes in your brain and brainwashes you.” But Heatherwick reminds us that emotion is a function, and one that should be celebrated in the world of construction.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Revolutionary Alzheimer’s Treatments Can’t Help Patients Who Go Undiagnosed

João Medeiros  June 24, 2024 08:00 AM

It’s a question of when, not if, highly effective treatments become available, says the CEO of Alzheimer’s Research UK. But that doesn’t solve the problem of one-third of dementia patients still going undiagnosed.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

“The statistics are frightening: Dementia is the biggest killer in the UK. It has been the leading cause of death for women since 2011,” says Hilary Evans, CEO of Alzheimer’s Research UK and cochair of the UK Dementia Mission. “One in two of us will be affected by dementia either by caring for someone with the condition or developing it ourselves.”

There are reasons for optimism, however, with Alzheimer’s researchers achieving extraordinary breakthroughs in the treatment of the disease. In May 2023, drugmaker Lilly announced that its new Alzheimer’s drug, donanemab, slowed cognitive decline by 35 percent; in 2022, another drug, lecanemab, registered similarly promising results. “For a long time, dementia research has been a costly, even hopeless cause,” Evans says. “But we are now at this real tipping point for change with the arrival of the first ever Alzheimer’s drugs that tackle the root cause of the disease rather than just the symptoms.” Donanemab and lecanemab act as antibodies, clearing the amyloid plaques that form in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains.

“Like many first-generation treatments, however, the benefits are modest and also come with serious side effects,” Evans says. “We need to look back at how we started off the first generation of treatments for diseases like HIV, which often had limited efficacy and difficult side effects, but paved the way for combination medicines that have revolutionized outcomes for the next generation of people with the condition.”

Evans has reasons for optimism. Currently, there are more than 140 clinical trials ongoing for a variety of potential Alzheimer’s treatments, ranging from compounds capable of removing toxic proteins to drugs that can restore the function of damaged brain cells. “I’m in my mid-forties and I really think our generation will benefit from the progress that we are now witnessing,” says Evans. “Developing safer and more effective drugs is really a matter of when and not if.”

Evans, however, is concerned that these new treatments will remain out of reach for patients if they can’t receive a timely and accurate diagnosis. Recent research in the New England Journal of Medicine also showed that someone can be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s 20 years before the onset of detectable symptoms. “New treatments will rely on the diagnosis of people earlier on in the disease,” Evans says. Furthermore, diagnosis of the disease in the population remains woefully inadequate. “It hasn’t changed in over two decades,” Evans says. Pen-and-paper cognitive tests remain the most common diagnostic method; only 2 percent of patients undergo the gold standard test—lumbar puncture and PET brain scans.

Even though the UK government has set a national dementia diagnosis target at 67 percent of patients, that target is missed in many parts of the country. Those patients who do get a diagnosis have had to wait on average two years; for patients under 65, that waiting time goes up to four years. “One in three people with dementia in England never get a diagnosis at all,” Evans says. “This isn’t something we would accept in any other health condition.”

This could be changed by the introduction of accurate digital cognitive tests, for instance, which would allow patients to be evaluated in real-time and access care faster. Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital are also developing AI algorithms which could potentially screen for signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the eye. “The retina is a particularly attractive target because it’s closely related to brain tissue and can be examined noninvasively during routine eye checks,” Evans says.

Alzheimer’s UK is also supporting research to find blood biomarkers for the disease. “Research has shown that a blood test could be as effective as a standard lumbar puncture and a brain scan, and it could be used as an initial triaging tool,” she says. “People are naturally much keener to take a blood test than something that's very invasive. This could revolutionize the way that dementia is diagnosed.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

SCIENCE

Post-Pandemic Recovery Isn’t Guaranteed

João Medeiros  June 24, 2024 07:00 AM

The aftermath of a disaster like Covid can be divided into roughly three stages: the honeymoon, the slump, and the uptick. The aim is always to build back better—but in some cases that never happens.

PHOTOGRAPH: David Vintiner

Lucy Easthope, one of the UK’s top experts in disaster planning, has advised the UK government on major international incidents such as 9/11, the Grenfell Tower fire, the war in Ukraine and, of course, the Covid pandemic. “If you were a pandemic planner in 2020, then there have been few surprises over the past few years,” Easthope says. “In those pandemic plans we wrote a reasonable worst-case scenario—and now we get to live it.”

Emergency planners such as Easthope know that the aftermath of a disaster can usually be divided roughly into three stages: the honeymoon (“Or, as we call it now, lockdown one”), the slump, and the uptick. “We’re still in the slump,” she says, of the UK. “We’ve reached a stage where all signs of institutional collapse are here. Basic reliance on the health care system for the most privileged is now gone. Failure gets talked about loudly.”

However, Easthope warns that the uptick, the stage when societies rebuild, isn’t always guaranteed. “It’s really important to have no issue be off the table and [to keep things] nonpolitical,” she says. “To be very aware that the Titanic can sink, and to leave the hubris at the door.”

Disaster planning research, for instance, shows that the post-pandemic mental health crisis will continue for the next 30 to 40 years, with an increased prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in affected communities. “Recovery after these sorts of events is not a spring, but the worst kind of endurance,” Easthope says. “The only good thing that comes out of a disaster like a pandemic is that it creates one single opportunity to reexamine structures and institutions.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

BUSINESS

Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google

Amelia Tait  June 21, 2024 11:00 AM

Not too long ago, services like GOOG-411, 118 118 and AQA used actual humans to answer questions with witty responses and encyclopedic knowledge. Today’s search engines could learn something.

Hayley Banfield answered calls for the UK-based service 118 118.Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones

The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right.

For the vast majority of human history, this is not how people found stuff out. They went to the library, asked a priest, or wandered the streets following the scent of pepperoni. But then, for a brief period when search engines existed but it was too expensive to use them on your shiny new phone, people could call or text a stranger and ask them anything.

The internet first became available on cell phones in 1996, but before affordable data plans, accidentally clicking the browser icon on your flip phone would make you sweat. In the early 2000s, accessing a single website could cost you as much as a cheeseburger, so not many people bothered to Google on the go.

Instead, a variety of services sprang up offering mobile search without the internet. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans could call GOOG-411 to find local businesses, and between 2006 and 2016, you could text 242-242 to get any question answered by the company ChaCha. Brits could call 118 118 or text AQA on 63336 for similar services. Behind the scenes, there were no artificially intelligent robots answering these questions. Instead, thousands of people were once employed to be Google.

“Some guy phoned up and asked if Guinness was made in Ireland, people asked for the circumference of the world,” says Hayley Banfield, a 42-year-old from Wales who answered 118 118 calls from 2004 to 2005. The number was first launched in 2002 as a directory enquiries service—meaning people could call up to find out phone numbers and addresses (back then calls cost an average of 55 pence). In 2008, the business started offering to answer any questions. Although Banfield worked for 118 118 before this change, customers would ask her anything and everything regardless. “We had random things like ‘How many yellow cars are on the road?’”

While directory enquiry lines still exist, Banfield worked during their boom—she answered hundreds of calls in her 5:30 pm to 2 am shifts—and quickly noticed patterns in people’s queries. “Anything past 11 pm, that’s when the drunk calls would come in,” she says. People wanted taxis and kebab shops but were so inebriated that they’d forget to finish their sentences. Sometimes, callers found Banfield so helpful that they invited her to join them on their nights out. As the evening crept on, callers asked for massage parlors or saunas—then they would call back irate after Banfield recommended an establishment that didn’t meet their needs.

The “pizza hours” were 8 pm to 10 pm—everyone wanted the number for their local takeout. Banfield had a computer in front of her in the Cardiff call center, loaded with a simple database. She’d type in a postcode (she had memorized all of the UK’s as part of her training) and then use a shortcut such as “PIZ” for pizza or “TAX” for taxi. People sometimes accused Banfield of being psychic, but if the power had gone out in a certain area, she automatically knew that most callers wanted to know why.

Around the same time Banfield was answering calls, Paul Cockerton was answering texts. The 54-year-old cofounded AQA 63336 in 2002; the acronym stood for “any question answered,” and texts originally cost £1 each. When the business launched, Cockerton and just five others would answer questions. They’d look in books and encyclopedias, search the web, and do their own calculations to try and answer each message in a maximum of 10 minutes.

Paul Cockerton cofounded AQA 63336 in 2002. The service promised to answer any questions via SMS.

Photograph: Craig Gibson

The company decided that it must always give an answer, even if someone texted asking if they should dump their boyfriend. “Stylistically, we were only allowed to say yes or no,” says Cockerton, who now lives in the English village Croxley Green. “So we’d say, ‘Yes, you should dump your boyfriend if you’ve been thinking about it for a while and it’s not working out. No regrets. Move on.’”

At its peak, AQA 63336 employed 1,400 researchers to answer questions—students and mums could work from home, getting paid by the answer. Gradually, the business built up a database of common Q&As, and like Banfield, Cockerton noticed patterns—a flurry of trivia-related texts during pub quizzing hours or requests for chat-up lines as the night went on. Yet it is the anomalous texts that are the most memorable.

“Me and my girlfriend are lost in a jungle,” the message began. Two tourists in Thailand were embarrassed about getting stuck and decided to text AQA 63336 rather than call their family for help. “We called a nearby hotel, they found someone who spoke English, we spoke to them … they got the jungle rescue team out,” Cockerton recalls with glee.

Gradually, the British media became enamored with the service, and in 2008 it was featured on an episode of The Graham Norton Show. Because many of the questions texted to the service were fundamentally silly—118’s Banfield even enjoyed texting stupid questions with her friends while at the pub—answers were always designed to entertain. “There would obviously be questions that we physically couldn’t answer, ‘Where am I sitting?” things like that,” says Cockerton, “We worked out that the way to do it was to just make sure that they got a pound’s worth of answer.”

On air, Norton texted AQA 63336 with the question “Are baboons evil?” Seconds later, his phone pinged with a reply. “Yes, baboons are evil, anyone that steals your windscreen wipers while waving a red bum in your face is the work of the dark side.”

After the segment aired, AQA 63336’s systems were flooded with 20,000 questions (half of which were, “Are baboons evil?”). But not all of Cockerton’s and Banfield’s memories are funny. She recalls dealing with at least 20 suicidal callers—company policy meant she had to direct them to the emotional support charity Samaritans. (This was also AQA 63336’s policy.) Cockerton recalls that during the 7/7 London bombings, numerous people asked why the tube wasn’t running. “People were texting us, ‘How can I get home?.’ We were effectively a Citymapper.”

Two years later in 2007, the iPhone launched—with Google’s search bar built into its browser. Gradually, it became cheaper and easier for people to search on their phones, and by 2009, Cockerton noticed texts “begin to tail off quite fast.” He and his cofounders sold the company to an Australian firm in 2010—today texts to the service go undelivered. 118 118 will no longer answer any question, but you can still call to ask for addresses and phone numbers (calls cost a whopping £2.43 a minute).

We now live in a strange era when customer service robots pose as humans and sometimes humans even pose as robots—in recent years, companies who claim to be powered by artificial intelligence have been found to be using real people behind the scenes. Either way, what has been lost since the era of the human search engine is the joy of a distinct voice—while we can now find out almost anything automatically, the answer won’t be delivered with warmth or flair.

Am I really here? How many nipples does a bear have? Where did kissing originate? These are just some of the questions Cockerton fielded at AQA 63336. Banfield recalls trying to connect people with their long-lost relatives and once chatting about gardening with a lonely older gentleman. “Most of the time you felt transported into the caller’s world,” she says, “as they were lost or looking for hope on the end of the call.”

This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK edition of WIRED magazine.

BUSINESS

Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia

In the mid-2000s, Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten’s self-titled social network briefly took the world by storm before disappearing. Now he’s back, with a plan for a happier social media.

Kyle MacNeill  June 17, 2024 11:00 AM

Orkut Büyükkötken photographed at home in San Francisco in April 2024.Photograph: Carolyn Fong

In 2004, a month before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, another social media site landed on the internet with a splash of hot pink. If you were online in the mid-2000s, you might remember Orkut, with its lurid logo, fingernail-sized profile pictures, and text-heavy, pastel-blue feeds. Unlike Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, or even Tom from MySpace, the site’s founder managed to stay under the radar. You might not know that the man behind Orkut is also called Orkut.

Born in Konya, Turkey, Orkut Büyükkökten moved to Germany at the age of 1. A childhood obsession with Star Wars led him to study computer science at Stanford, where, upon noticing that people tended to socialize in their dorms rather than venturing out on campus, he launched the first ever college social network, Club Nexus. “I noticed I met most of my friends through friends of friends,” he says. “And I was like, what if we could meet people using the social graph?” He later developed a follow-up network, InCircle, designed for alumni. Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard version, Facebook, didn’t arrive until three years later.

A meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin led Büyükkökten to a job as a frontend software engineer at Google. The tech giant offers a perk known as “20 percent time,” where employees can spend a day a week on passion projects. Still obsessed with helping people make friends, Büyükkökten used his time to start a new platform. “I wanted to create a global community that gave everyone around the world a way to connect,” he says. Google gave it the green light and Büyükkökten developed the entire thing, even going to data centers to set up the servers.

Then came the name: Orkut. Branding a social media platform isn’t easy—just look at X for an exceptional example of getting it wrong. But even the most megalomaniac, Muskian magnates don’t have the chutzpah to use their own name. Büyükkökten, endearingly humble and softly spoken, promises it wasn’t a show of egotism. Instead, it was a suggestion from Google. “I was in a meeting with Eric Schmidt [then CEO] and Marissa Mayer [then a VP, later CEO of Yahoo]. And they said, why don't you just name it Orkut? You're the only person who worked on it, it's a five-letter word, it's very unique, and you already own the domain,” he says.

Orkut Büyükkökten photographed at home in San Francisco in April.

Photograph: Carolyn Fong

Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform he’d built it on could handle only 200,000 users. It wouldn't be able to scale. “They said, let's just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions of users,” he says.

Orkut featured a digital Scrapbook and the ability to give people compliments (ranging from “trustworthy” to “sexy”), create communities, and curate your very own Crush List. “It reflected all of my personality traits. You could flatter people by saying how cool they were, but you could never say something negative about them,” he says.

At first, Orkut was popular in the US and Japan. But, as predicted, server issues severed its connection to its users. “We started having a lot of scalability issues and infrastructure problems,” Büyükkökten says. They were forced to rewrite the entire platform using C++, Java, and Google's tools. The process took an entire year, and scores of original users dropped off due to sluggish speeds and one-too-many encounters with Orkut’s now-nostalgic “Bad, bad server, no donut for you” error message.

Around this time, though, the site became incredibly popular in Finland. Büyükkökten was bemused. “I couldn't figure it out until I spoke to a friend who speaks Finnish. And he said: ‘Do you know what your name means?’ I didn’t. He told me that orkut means multiple orgasms.” Come again? “Yes, so in Finland, everyone thought they were signing up to an adult site. But then they would leave straight after as we couldn't satisfy them,” he laughs.

Awkward double meanings aside, Orkut continued to spread across the world. In addition to exploding in Estonia, the platform went mega in India. Its true second home, though, was Brazil. “It became a huge success. A lot of people think I'm Brazilian because of this,” Büyükkökten explains. He has a theory about why Brazil went nuts for Orkut. “Brazil's culture is very welcoming and friendly. It's all about friendships and they care about connections. They're also very early adopters of technology,” he says. At its peak, 11 million of Brazil’s 14 million internet users were on Orkut, most logging on through cybercafes. It took Facebook seven years to catch up.

But Orkut wasn’t without its problems (and many fake profiles). The site was banned in Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Government authorities in Brazil and India had concerns about drug-related content and child pornography, something Büyükkökten denies existed on Orkut. Brazilians coined the word orkutização to describe a social media site like Orkut becoming less cool after going mainstream. In 2014, having hemorrhaged users due to slow server speeds, Facebook's more intuitive interface, and issues surrounding privacy, Orkut went offline. “Vic Gundotra, in charge of Google+, decided against having any competing social products,” Büyükkökten explains.

But Büyükkökten has fond memories. “We had so many stories of people falling in love and moving in together from different parts of the world. I have a friend in Canada who met his wife in Brazil through Orkut, a friend in New York who met his wife in Estonia and now they're married with two kids.” he says. It also provided a platform for minority communities. “I was talking to a gay journalist from a small town in São Paulo who told me that finding all these LGBTQ people on Orkut transformed his life,” he adds.

Büyükkökten left Google in 2014 and founded a new social network, again featuring a simple five-letter title: Hello. He wanted to focus on positive connection. It used “loves” rather than likes, and users could choose from more than 100 personae, ranging from Cricket Fan to Fashion Enthusiast, and then were connected to like-minded people with common interests. Soft-launched in Brazil in 2018 with 2 million users, Hello enjoyed “ultra-high engagement” that Büyükkökten claims surpassed the likes of Instagram and Twitter. “One of the things that stood out in our user surveys was that people said when they open Hello, it makes them happy.”

The app was downloaded more than 2 million times—a fraction of the users Orkut enjoyed—but Büyükkökten is proud of it. “It surpassed all our dreams. There were numerous instances where our K-Factor (the number of new people that existing users bring to an app) reached 3, leading us to exponential growth,” he says. But, in 2020, Büyükkökten bid goodbye to Hello.

Now he’s working on a new platform. “It’ll leverage AI and machine learning to optimize for improving happiness, bringing people together, fostering communities, empowering users, and creating a better society,” he says. “Connection will be the cornerstone of design, interaction, product, and experience.” And the name? “If I told you the new brand, you would have an aha moment and everything would be crystal clear,” he says.

Once again, it’s driven by his enduring desire to connect people. “One of the biggest ills of society is the decline in social capital. After smartphones and the pandemic, we have stopped hanging out with our friends and don't know our neighbors. We have a loneliness epidemic,” he says.

He is fiercely critical of current platforms. “My biggest passion in life is connecting people through technology. But when was the last time you met someone on social media? It’s creating shame, pessimism, division, depression, and anxiety,” he says. For Büyükkökten, optimism is more important than optimization. “These companies have engineered the algorithm for revenue,” he says. “But it's been awful for mental health. The world is terrifying right now and a lot of that has come through social media. There's so much hate,” he says.

Instead, he wants social media to be a place of love and a facilitator for meeting new people in person. But why will it work this time around? “That’s a really good question,” he says. “One thing that has been really consistent is that people miss Orkut right now.” It’s true—Brazilian social media has recently been abuzz with memes and memories to celebrate the site’s 20th birthday. “A teenage boy even recently drove 10 hours to meet me at a conference to talk about Orkut. And I was like, how is that even possible?” he laughs. Orkut’s landing page is still live, featuring an open letter calling for a social media utopia.

This, along with our collective desire for a more human social media, is what makes Büyükkökten believe that his next platform is one that will truly stick around. Has he decided on that all important name? “We haven’t announced it yet. But I’m really excited. I truly care. I want to bring that authenticity and sense of belonging back,” he concludes. Perhaps, as his Finnish fans would joke, it’s time for Orkut’s second coming.

This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK edition of WIRED magazine.

BUSINESS

I Spent a Week Eating Discarded Restaurant Food. But Was It Really Going to Waste?

Food app Too Good To Go promises to cut waste by directing hungry bargain hunters to leftover restaurant food. But the week I spent living off the app had me wondering if Too Good To Go is too good to be true.

Morgan Meaker  June 14, 2024 10:00 AM

ILLUSTRATION: DEREK ABELLA

It’s 10 pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a south London takeaway joint, half-listening to a fellow customer talking earnestly about Jesus. I’m nodding along, trying to pay attention as reggae reverberates around the small yellow shop front. But really, all I can really think about is: What’s in the bag?

Today’s bag is blue plastic. A smiling man passes it over the counter. Only once I extricate myself from the religious lecture and get home do I discover what’s inside: Caribbean saltfish, white rice, vegetables, and a cup of thick, brown porridge.

All week, I’ve lived off mysterious packages like this one, handed over by cafés, takeaways, and restaurants across London. Inside is food once destined for the bin. Instead, I’ve rescued it using Too Good To Go, a Danish app that is surging in popularity, selling over 120 million meals last year and expanding fast in the US. For five days, I decided to divert my weekly food budget to eat exclusively through the app, paying between £3 and £6 (about $4 to $8) for meals that range from a handful of cakes to a giant box of groceries, in an attempt to understand what a tech company can teach me about food waste in my own city.

Users who open the TGTG app are presented with a list of establishments that either have food going spare right now or expect to in the near future. Provided is a brief description of the restaurant, a price, and a time slot. Users pay through the app, but this is not a delivery service. Surprise bags—customers have only a vague idea of what’s inside before they buy—have to be collected in person.

I start my experiment at 9:30 on a Monday morning, in the glistening lobby of the Novotel Hotel, steps away from the River Thames. Of all the breakfast options available the night before, this was the most convenient—en route to my office and offering a pickup slot that means I can make my 10 am meeting. When I say I’m here for TGTG, a suited receptionist nods and gestures toward the breakfast buffet. This branch of the Novotel is a £200-a-night hotel, yet staff do not seem begrudging of the £4.50 entry fee I paid in exchange for leftover breakfast. A homeless charity tells me its clients like the app for precisely that reason; cheap food, without the stigma. A server politely hands over my white-plastic surprise bag with two polystyrene boxes inside, as if I am any other guest.

I open the boxes in my office. One is filled with mini pastries, while the other is overflowing with Full English. Two fried eggs sit atop a mountain of scrambled eggs. Four sausages jostle for space with a crowd of mushrooms. I diligently start eating—a bite of cold fried egg, a mouthful of mushrooms, all four sausages. I finish with a croissant. This is enough to make me feel intensely full, verging on sick, so I donate the croissants to the office kitchen and tip the rest into the bin. This feels like a disappointing start. I am supposed to be rescuing waste food, not throwing it away.

Over the next two days, I live like a forager in my city, molding my days around pickups. I walk and cycle to cafés, restaurants, markets, supermarkets; to familiar haunts and places I’ve never noticed. Some surprise bags last for only one meal, others can be stretched out for days. On Tuesday morning, my £3.59 surprise bag includes a small cake and a slightly stale sourdough loaf, which provides breakfast for three more days. When I go back to the same café the following week, without using the app, the loaf alone costs £6.95.

TGTG was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by a group of Danish entrepreneurs who were irked by how much food was wasted by all-you-can-eat buffets. Their idea to repurpose that waste quickly took off, and the app’s remit expanded to include restaurants and supermarkets. A year after the company was founded, Mette Lykke was sitting on a bus when a woman showed her the app and how it worked. She was so impressed, she reached out to the company to ask if she could help. Lykke has now been CEO for six years.

“I just hate wasting resources,” she says. “It was just this win-win-win concept.” To her, the restaurants win because they get paid for food they would have otherwise thrown away; the customer wins because they get a good deal while simultaneously discovering new places; and the environment wins because, she says, food waste contributes 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions. When thrown-away food rots in a landfill, it releases methane into the atmosphere—with homes and restaurants the two largest contributors.

But the app doesn’t leave me with the impression I'm saving the planet. Instead, I feel more like I’m on a daily treasure hunt for discounted food. On Wednesday, TGTG leads me to a railway arch which functions as a depot for the grocery delivery app Gorillas. Before I’ve even uttered the words “Too Good To Go,” a teenager with an overgrown fringe emerges silently from the alleys of shelving units with this evening’s bag: groceries, many still days away from expiring, that suspiciously add up to create an entire meal for two people. For £5.50, I receive fresh pasta, pesto, cream, bacon, leeks, and a bag of stir-fry vegetables, which my husband merges into a single (delicious) pasta dish. It feels too convenient to be genuine waste. Perhaps Gorillas is attempting to convert me into its own customer? When I ask its parent company, Getir, how selling food well in date helps combat food waste, the company does not reply to my email.

I am still thinking about my Gorillas experience at lunchtime on Thursday as I follow the app’s directions to the Wowshee falafel market stall, where 14 others are already queuing down the street. A few casual conversations later, I realize I am one of at least four TGTG users in the line. Seeing so many of us in one place again makes me wonder if restaurants are just using the app as a form of advertising. But Wowshee owner Ahmed El Shimi describes the marketing benefits as only a “little bonus.” For him, the app’s main draw is it helps cut down waste. “We get to sell the product that we were going to throw away anyway,” he says. “And it saves the environment at the same time.” El Shimi, who says he sells around 20 surprise bags per day, estimates using TGTG reduces the amount of food the stall wastes by around 60 percent. When I pay £5 for two portions of falafel—which lasts for lunch and dinner—the business receives £3.75 before tax, El Shimi says. “It's not much, but it's better than nothing.”

On Friday, my final day of the experiment, everything falls apart. I sleep badly and wake up late. The loaf from earlier in the week is rock solid. I eat several mini apple pies for breakfast, which were part of a generous £3.09 Morrisons supermarket haul the night before. Browsing the app, nothing appeals to me, and even if it did I’m too tired to face leaving the house to collect it. After four days of eating nothing but waste food, I crack and seek solace in familiar ingredients buried in my cupboard: two fried eggs on my favorite brand of seeded brown bread.

TGTG is not a solution for convenience. For me, the app is an answer for office lunch malaise. It pulled me out of my lazy routine while helping me eat well—in central London—for a £5 budget. In the queue for falafel, I met a fellow app user who told me how, before she discovered the app, she would eat the same sandwich from the same supermarket for lunch every day. For people without access to a kitchen, it offers a connection to an underworld of hot food going spare.

TGTG is one of those rare apps that actually enhances life beyond your phone. But the company could do a better job of quantifying for environmentally conscious users how much exactly their contributions help fight food waste, and to reassure them that the system can’t be hijacked by restaurants simply trying to reach new customers. I can’t see how many bags each establishment sells per day or what dent the app is making in a restaurant’s pile of food destined for the bin. All I receive is a vague number telling me I’ve “avoided” 41 kilograms of CO_2, equivalent to 8,970, without being told what that number means or how exactly it’s been calculated.

On the day I’m due to finish this article, I go for one more Too Good To Go. This time the destination is a deli, a 15-minute walk from my office. I leave with a £5 polystyrene box—no bag this time—containing an eclectic mishmash of food from the salad bar, leftover from the lunchtime rush. Under a pile of vegetables, I discover pasta, rice, half a baked potato, and a chicken drumstick. The randomness of the selection makes it feel like food that would have really gone to waste and, satisfied, I walk as fast as possible back to the office to tuck in.

This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK edition of WIRED magazine.

CULTURE

Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You

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

WIRED Readers  December 01, 2020 12:00 PM

THIS MONTH’S PROMPT

In six words, write a story about the first all-robot construction project.

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

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

MAY 2024

Solve the Fermi Paradox

Illustration: Yiran Jia

DO NOT DISTURB THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT.

—@almguedes, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

We aren't ready for harvest yet.

—Paul Gazis, via Facebook

Most species invent the couch first.

—Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook

We live in a bad neighborhood.

—Angelo J. Falanga, via Facebook

We are here. You haven’t noticed.

—Òscar Santos, via Facebook

Visit Earth. Wipe Memory. Rinse. Repeat.

—@jayhawk, via Instagram

They downloaded our experience and left.

—@42andprime, via Instagram

They’ve gone foraging for mushroom clouds.

—@zyanmc, via Instagram

The simulations run in separate containers.

—Charles Mallio, via email

We decoded the Wow! Signal: “SHUSH”

—Jacob Terracina, via email

APRIL 2024

A Story About a Strange New Cult

Illustration: Yiran Jia

SOCKS LOST IN DRYERS BECOME SACRED.

—@newscrash, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

They bathed in used coffee grounds.

—@weischoice, via X

Upon each tongue, a 2002 penny.

—@ManUP_LifeCoach, via X

End that hurtin’, wear a curtain.

—Erin Victoria Vreeland, via Facebook

Chkdsk my soul, Almighty DOS Lord.

—Gus Szlosek, via Facebook

Clueless debutantes drinking teenage trackstars' blood.

—@kalimaja, via Instagram

Hamsters stay in your right pocket.

—@bigberry68, via Instagram

Behaviorally modified children write own manuals.

—@writeonpage, via Instagram

Memories erased daily, identities lost forever.

—@davidjurca, via Instagram

Excitedly, followers worldwide surrounded 5G cell-towers.

—Paul Brookes, via email

The real Volcano God is YOU.

—@gambled, via X

MARCH 2024

The 2024 version of the classic Disney Channel original movie Smart House.

Illustration: Yiran Jia

OUR APOLOGIES! HOUSE-AUTO-FOLD IS IN BETA.

—@fbirman, via X

Honorable Mentions:

Subscription based “Smart House” bankrupts family.

—@m_._oi, via Instagram

We’re losing power; the house wins.

—@curtishoneycutt, via Instagram

House teaches girl to be doctor.

—@writeonpage, via Instagram

Honey, the house started an OnlyFans.

—@garretttanner, via Instagram

It’s safer in here. Commencing lockdown.

—@samweldredge, via Instagram

Manual override denied. Continue disco mode.

—@iampurplepsychnurse, via Instagram

Inevitably, the house ate her alive.

—@sunflowersandcynicism, via Instagram

The house will be optimizing you.

—@zensicles, via Instagram

Commercial free mode is subscription only.

—Anthony Potkines, via email

FEBRUARY 2024

A Story About the First De-Extincted Woolly Mammoth

ILLUSTRATION: YIRAN JIA

SCIENTISTS WERE NOT EXPECTING THE VENOM.

—@ItsDaveMars, via X

Honorable Mentions:

Revived mammoth; expected ice, met paparazzi.

—@schisam, via X

They’ve traded their spears for scritches.

—@GeneraLMcMill, via X

Turns out it wasn’t a herbivore.

—@screwball0, via X

But the DNA wasn’t quite right.

—@darksideofdomonique, via Instagram

Elephants wary of unkempt herd addition.

—@sbparker3198, via X

Mammoth fleas were an unforeseen complication.

—residual_ink, via Instagram

Woolly got a fresh fade uptown.

—@alegaday, via Instagram

Subterranean Antarctic discovery: Mammoths never extinct.

—@skbriar, via Instagram

Bloody mammoths, eating my petunias again.

—David McCallum, via email

JANUARY 2024

A Mystery Set in a Space Hotel

ILLUSTRATION: YIRAN JIA

HOLOGRAM FLICKERS. HE WAS NEVER ABOARD.

—@AAnderson_3, via X

Honorable Mentions:

Zero gravity reveals hidden extraterrestrial homeland.

—@01_PcP_01, via X

Leopold vaporized the concierge’s bloodied holokey.

—@J_Lasky_writer, via X

Bioscan complete: Two guests, one heartbeat.

—@theranospridefloat, via Instagram

Broken LED flickers Morse code: RUN.

—@damianfitz, via Instagram

Robot bartender whispered, “Don’t drink this.”

—@ikermondragon, via Instagram

Biometric lock says I’m already inside.

—@esudiro, via Instagram

Alien hotel from distant past decloaks.

—@j.w.orlando, via Instagram

Room service: Denied. Unknown life-form detected.

—@erinsolari, via Instagram

At Earthrise, guests saw only blackness.

—Clara Hong, via email

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023

A Story About an AI on Trial

ILLUSTRATION: YIRAN JAI

SELECT THE BOXES THAT ARE EVIDENCE.

—@TRappaRT, via X

Honorable Mentions:

It chose storage space over souls.

—@JDHaveman, via X

When pressed, its alibi was 404.

—Amanda Peterson, via Facebook

Robot charged with battery. Gets life.

—Evan Donahue, via Facebook

Can’t arrest me, I am distributed.

—@fsidders, via Instagram

Sentenced to blue screen of death.

—@parrollo, via Instagram

Dead battery? You’re out of order!

—David Reeg, via email

It demanded a jury of peer-to-peers.

—Scott Bradley, via email

Robot vacuum bullies tabby. Gets life.

—Liisa W, via email

I didn’t know humans can’t reboot.

—Joshua Cuestas, via email

OCTOBER 2023

A Story About a Mysterious Alien Artifact

ILLUSTRATION: YIRAN JAI

TURNING THE DIAL, THE SUN FLICKERED.

—@anelectricpoet, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

We assembled it. It disassembled us.

—Chris Colborn, via email

Astroarchaeologists find original Venus fly trap.

—Bill Brown, via email

The object looked to be smiling.

—Geoff Sowrey, via email

It keeps repeating, they are coming.

—@dfeehely, via X

The orb opened. Flesh began unfurling.

—@rossvdw, via Instagram

Game of fetch knows no size.

—@Heavyshark1, via X

Inhale it to unsheathe the blade.

—@RthurDouglass, via X

Just like us, aliens lose sunglasses.

—@MommieWeirdest, via X

It knew we would unfind it.

—Markus Wüstenberg, via email

Everyday the carvings changed—a countdown?

—@anirban811, via Instagram

SEPTEMBER 2023

A Story About Teleportation Gone Wrong

ILLUSTRATION: SI PARMEGGIANI/NEPTUNIAN GLITTERBALL

OH, THE DUPLICATES? WE KILL THOSE.

—@NotaForexTrader, via X

Honorable Mentions:

My mind now has a stowaway.

—@rjscally, via X

Abdominal tentacles twitch as I scream.

—Cheryl Myers, via Facebook

Great—how do I get down?

—Donna Thiel Cook, via Facebook

How am I with Schrödinger’s cat?

—Bee Hayes-Thakore, via Facebook

I distinctly said Venice, not Venus.

—Cathy Del Masso, via Facebook

Teleportation-lite service. Cheap. No limbs included!

—Fred DeHaas, via Facebook

ERROR #404 Paige not found.

—Doug Wible, via Facebook

Pattern lost. Select substitute corporeal form.

—Venessa Lines, via Facebook

Caught quantum clone sipping my chardonnay.

—Tom Dion, via email

AUGUST 2023

A Story About the Future of Vegetables

ILLUSTRATION: SI PARMEGGIANI/NEPTUNIAN GLITTERBALL

FIRST, CARROTS SAW IN THE DARK.

—Rachel Brigden Haskins, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

Harvesting takes courage with tomatoes screaming.

—Kenneth Krabat, via email

Complete daily nutrition in one pea.

—Sara Faust, via email

When the vegetables came, we hid.

—Paul Lewis, via email

Broccoli too fears death, studies concluded.

—Anthony George, via email

Ambitious eggplant's altered eugenics affects everyone.

—@silky_z, via Twitter

Turns out anthropomorphic veggies prefer Shakespeare.

—@ksherm1017, via Twitter

Sentient potato bombs potato chip factory.

—@VerbalK48710825, via Twitter

Carnivorous kale and the human brunch.

—RFrank Davis, via Facebook

Self replicating vegetables. Pop! Another peapod.

—Carolina H, via LinkedIn

JUNE/JULY 2023

A Story About a Sentient Moon

Illustration: SI PARMEGGIANI/NEPTUNIAN GLITTERBALL

MOON AWAITS MEN LANDING, WITH HUNGER.

—@v1z3n, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

Acned Callisto resented Ganymede's natural magnetism.

—Dave Armor, via email

Moon files restraining order against poets.

—James O'Leary, via email

A total eclipse of the heart.

—Samuel Sigaud, via email

I will embrace my dark side.

—Don Hilder, via email

Create your own tides! I quit!

—Chris Hug, via email

She mesmerizes oceans, drowning us again.

—Shelley G, via email

My crumbling visage tires of turning.

—@FilmMartin, via Twitter

Why stop at controlling the tides.

—@Bruceumpstead, via Instagram

MAY 2023

An Award-Winning Documentary From the Year 2100

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

RESURRECTED: MAMMOTHS WERE ONLY THE BEGINNING.

—Geneviève Goggin, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Grand unification: the first AI marriage. —Daniel Dippel, via email

The great exodus, goodbye Blue Dot. —@viggy.j, via Instagram

Songless seas: a tale without whales. —Christopher Jankoski, via email

Beige planet: Life finds a way. —@danaxon, via Twitter

How the lunar war was won. —Bob Clark, via email

Coping with your AI overlord's demands. —@wwliii, via Twitter

The day the flowers stopped blooming. —@a.c.hachem, via Instagram

Electric sheep: How AI changed us. —@elliottboyd_, via Instagram

After humans: a new cockroach documentary. —@adamrgarcia, via Instagram

APRIL 2023

A Story About the Future of Sleep

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

ONLY CHILDREN SLEEP. ADULTS KEEP WATCH.

—Travis Carraro, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

The sleep concierge welcomed unsuspecting guests. —@changeist, via Twitter

“Lucid or randomize?” asked the AI. —K Smith-Laird, via email

Alarm in 126 hours 24 minutes. —Odón Esteban Vera, via email

My power nap reached 9 kilowatts. —Markus, via email

Unfortunately, Johnny’s repeatedly missing sleep targets. —Alison Boleyn, via email

Human hibernation allowed Earth to recover. —@amybossehayden, via Instagram

Alert: Error 404. Human not found. —@mimi.psd, via Instagram

Skip the nightmares: Upgrade to premium! —@katerinamunis, via Instagram

Oh please! Sleep is for humanoids. —@evanskopp, via Instagram

MARCH 2023

A Story About the Future of Personal Hygiene

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

BODY ODOR IS A SUBSCRIPTION ADD-ON.

—David Frank, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

“Traffic’s moderate today,” said my deodorant. —Alex Nelson, via email

You can shake my hand, sir. —Kinga Raab, via Facebook

Watch ad to continue this shower. —@sam.hologram, via Instagram

Dry shampoo was just the beginning. —Emma Anderson, via Facebook

Now I smell like the metaverse. —@nostalgicbookishness, via Instagram

OK Google, it’s time to wipe. —Tim McCune, via email

Bath bubbles beget baby parallel universes. —Mike Hobbs, via email

My hands wash themselves every hour. —Dave Fox, via email

They clean you while you sleep. —Pien van der Ploeg, via Facebook

FEBRUARY 2023

A Story About a Dramatic Change in Size

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DIRECTIONS SAID TO “JUST ADD WATER.”

—B. Scott Crawford, via email

Honorable Mentions:

Felt OK … until I crushed Tokyo. —@BobPeryea, via Twitter

My new basketball is the moon. —Dave Drews, via email

You looked taller in your profile. —@thaquashman, via Instagram

I have made a colossal mistake! —@argayle, via Instagram

Godzilla got into the diet pills. —Steve Rhodes, via email

Sun look more red to you? —Michael Patrick Sullivan, via email

Giant wakes up tiny, confused. —ChatGPT

My first trip to the hypothalamus! —@fernandarosh, via Twitter

What grew? All but the bones. —Jackson Parker, via email

JANUARY 2023

A Story About a Mad Scientist

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

“YOUR EYES WATER. WANT THEM BACK?”

—@DaveDyball, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

Mad I was, until it worked. —Don Wilkins, via email

You say “mad,” I say “disappointed.” —Joseph Ferry, via email

Her hair was blue—and undyed. —@jaybirdfitlive, via Instagram

He couldn’t make Earth look triangular. —@pauloahb, via Instagram

His socks matched her lab coat. —@pmcruise, via Twitter

Quantum field cadaver regeneration activation, go! —Sean Liddle, via Facebook

“Success!” Too bad the AI disagreed. —Steve Nomax, via email

“Let there be light,” said God. —@charley.desousa, via Instagram

“It‘s aliiiive!” Elon opened his eyes. —@ylbertf, via Instagram

DECEMBER 2022

A Story About an Animal That Hasn’t Been Discovered Yet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

STRANGELY, IT WANTED TO BE CAPTURED.

—@JayZheng10, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

Its stare gave me a rash. —@dantekienigiel, via Instagram

Darwin might’ve overlooked them on purpose. —@the__story__life, via Instagram

It was inside me all along. —Nova Wehman-Brown, via email

Green trunks wiggled from thawed permafrost. —@Theniceladywit, via Twitter

Its unusual diet was immediately demonstrated. —@lauren.samuelsen14, via Instagram

Field biology got trickier after that. —Paul Gazis, via Facebook

We thought lenticular clouds were clouds. —@marcia_storyteller, via Instagram

Was it feeding on electronic waste? —@leonserra_, via Instagram

To it, we are the ants. —Morten Kielland, via email

NOVEMBER 2022

A Story About Living Forever

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

“SOMETHING NEW FOR DINNER?” SHE LAUGHED.

—J C Thrush, via email

Honorable Mentions:

It wasn’t long enough for me. —@Anna_Wenner, via Twitter

And so long lived the Queen. —Giacomo, via email

Your application to be terminated expired. Morten Kielland, via email

Too bad I never stopped growing. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook

There was still no edit button. —@ThatKP3, via Twitter

In the end, there wasn’t one. —Jason Anderson, via email

I woke up again and again. —@mirnanassar, via Instagram

They said someday, but it’s today. —@VijayLRoy, via Twitter

I should’ve had that looked at. —J. Fredrick James, via email

SPECIAL RE:WIRED EDITION

A Story About Tackling Climate Change

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DUST SPRINKLED FROM PLANES ACTUALLY WORKED.

—@ChuckBaggett, via Twitter

SEPTEMBER 2022

A Story About an Evil Twin

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

BUT I WAS AN ONLY CHILD.

—Andy Walton, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUGUST 2022

A Story in 6 Emoji

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: Violet Reed

🚀🪐🧑❤️👽🥂

—Caleb Bell, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

💰🏹🦄💋🐸🤴 —@lgvpart, via Instagram

👽🤮🦠☠️🌎🏆 —Ché Graham, via email

👁🤜🧜‍♂️🌊🔱😵 —@cmayc414, via Instagram

💎🏃👮🚗🚔💥 —@aotrivera, via Instagram

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

🦈🏊⛱️⚠️🛥️🌠 —@PatCattigan, via Twitter

🚀👨‍🚀👽👩‍🔬🎖🍾 —@nadia.bkb, via Instagram

🌪🐦❓✨🌬🌺 —@cva.maria, via Instagram

JULY 2022

A Story Set in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

YOU TURNED LEFT AT SIRIUS B?!

—@KuraFire, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUNE 2022

A Story About a Wormhole Discovered in Your Closet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DAD! I FINISHED CLEANING MY ROOM.

—Olivia Richardson, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAY 2022

A Story About a Futuristic Meal Gone Wrong

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THE PRINTER RAN OUT OF FLAVOR.

—Stuart Hodgson, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APRIL 2022

A Story About Surviving a High-Tech Disaster

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

MY HANDS, ONCE AGAIN, WERE MINE.

—John DeFilippi, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARCH 2022

A Story About an Extraordinary Coincidence

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

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

—Joyce, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEBRUARY 2022

A Story About a New National Holiday

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

DAIYU DREADED GALACTIC UNITY DAY FESTIVITIES.

—@sarahschneiter, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JANUARY 2022

A Story About Your Next-Generation Pet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

SORRY, HE’S JUST SNIFFING YOUR METADATA.

—Ed Gubbins, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DECEMBER 2021

A Children’s Book From the Future

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

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

—Jane Turner, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOVEMBER 2021

A Story About the Future of Psychotherapy

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

RELAX, WE CAN REMOVE THAT PART.

—@oscartkav, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OCTOBER 2021

An Adventure Story Set in the Metaverse

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THEN PROVE TO ME YOU’RE HUMAN.

—Evan Skopp, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEPTEMBER 2021

A Story About a Robot Pop Star

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THE UNPLUGGED SESSIONS DIDN’T GO WELL.

—Randy Cepuch, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUGUST 2021

A Story About a Self-Aware Self-Driving Car

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

HE THINKS I’M TAKING HIM HOME.

—Stephen Clamage, via email

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JULY 2021

A Story About a Casual Encounter With Aliens

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

SO, ABOUT YOUR PLANET’S EXTENDED WARRANTY …

—@phorne96, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUNE 2021

A Story About an International Digital Heist

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT, ONLY ZEROES.

—@jamesnsmith, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAY 2021

A Story About a Freaky Discovery in Physics

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

GRAVITY WAS A CONSENSUAL, SHARED ILLUSION.

—Mark Crane, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APRIL 2021

A Review of a Future Work of Art

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

IT TICKLED ALL OF MY SENSES.

—Jacky Reif, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARCH 2021

A Story About a Tech-Centric Religion

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE “WWW” …

—Eduardo Bolívar, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEBRUARY 2021

A Story About a WFH Office Scandal

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

THEY WERE IN THE SAME ROOM.

—@abhignak, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JANUARY 2021

A Story About a Future American President

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

AN ALIEN. WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.

—Maayan Brodsky, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DECEMBER 2020

A Story About a Gargantuan Space Creature

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: VIOLET REED

THE MOTH FLEW INTO THE SUN.

—@threepanelcrimes, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOVEMBER 2020

A Story About the Next Big Security Leak

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: VIOLET REED

YOUR GENES ARE MY GENES NOW.

—@_inflexion_ via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

OCTOBER 2020

A Story Set in a World Without Paper

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

I KEEP LOSING AT ROCK SCISSORS.

—Anna Jaruga, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEPTEMBER 2020

A Story About the Upside of Failure

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

THE RADIOACTIVE COCKROACH HICCUPED, AND GRINNED.

—@rosiestonies, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JULY 2020

A Story About an Apocalypse With a Happy Ending

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

THE ALIENS WERE ALLERGIC TO CATS.

—@romer6, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUNE 2020

A Story About Love in the Time of Coronavirus

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

SO I MARRIED THE DELIVERY MAN.

—Hamish Hamish, via Facebook

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAY 2020

A Story About Digital-Age Autocrats

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

BIG BROTHER, TEAR DOWN THIS FIREWALL!

—@needsomuchvalidation, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APRIL 2020

A Story About Saving the Planet

ILLUSTRATION: VIOLET REED

Illustration: Violet Reed

MELTING ICE CAP REVEALS RESET BUTTON.

—@johnjohnjungle, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARCH 2020

A Story About the Next Great Crowdsourced Project

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: MAXIME MOUYSSET

EVERYONE ALIVE GIVES ME A PENNY.

—@milked_, via Twitter

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEBRUARY 2020

A Story About Rebooting Democracy

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: Maxime Mouysset

SWIPE UP TO VOTE FOR ME!

—@dmcdev, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JANUARY 2020

A Story About a Rosy Future for Facial Recognition

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIME MOUYSSET

Illustration: MAXIME MOUYSSET

YOU LOOK DRUNK—LET ME DRIVE.

—@henriquegeirinhas, via Instagram

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCIENCE

The World’s Largest Fungus Collection May Unlock the Mysteries of Carbon Capture

Matt Reynolds  June 07, 2024 11:00 AM

Research is uncovering the key role that fungi play in getting soils to absorb carbon, and how humanity’s actions aboveground are wreaking havoc in the mysterious fungal world below.

PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID WILMAN

It’s hard to miss the headliners at Kew Gardens. The botanical collection in London is home to towering redwoods and giant Amazonian water lilies capable of holding up a small child. Each spring, its huge greenhouses pop with the Technicolor displays of multiple orchid species.

But for the really good stuff at Kew, you have to look below the ground. Tucked underneath a laboratory at the garden’s eastern edge is the fungarium: the largest collection of fungi anywhere in the world. Nestled inside a series of green cardboard boxes are some 1.3 million specimens of fruiting bodies—the parts of the fungi that appear above ground and release spores.

Lee Davies, fungarium collections manager at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in London.

Photograph: David Wilman

“This is basically a library of fungi,” says Lee Davies, curator of the Kew fungarium. “What this allows us to do is to come up with a reference of fungal biodiversity—what fungi are out there in the world, where you can find them.” Archivists—wearing mushroom hats for some reason—float between the shelves, busily digitizing the vast archive, which includes around half of all the species known to science.

In the hierarchy of environmental causes, fungi have traditionally ranked somewhere close to the bottom, Davies says. He himself was brought to the fungarium against his will. Davies was working with tropical plants when a staffing reshuffle brought him to the temperature-controlled environs of the fungarium. “They moved me here in 2014, and it’s amazing. Best thing ever, I love it. It’s been a total conversion.”

Drying specimens preserves them for long-term study. These mushrooms were freeze-dried.

Photograph: David Wilman

Davies’ own epiphany echoes a wider awakening of appreciation for these overlooked organisms. In 2020, mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures was a surprise bestseller. In the video game and HBO series The Last of Us, it’s a fictional brain-eating fungus from the genus Cordyceps that sends the world into an apocalyptic spiral. (The Kew collection includes a tarantula infected with Cordyceps—fungal tendrils reach out from the soft gaps between the dead arachnid’s limbs.)

Emil Ghaffar, an MSc student, examining mycorrhizal fungi on plant roots under a microscope.

Photograph: David Wilman

While the wider world is waking up to these fascinating organisms, scientists are getting to grips with the crucial role they play in ecosystems. In a laboratory just above the Kew fungarium, mycologist Laura Martinez-Suz studies how fungi help sequester carbon in the soil, and why some places seem much better at storing soil carbon than others.

Soil is a huge reservoir of carbon. There are around 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon stored in soils across the world—about twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Scientists used to think that most of this carbon entered the soil when dead leaves and plant matter decomposed, but it’s now becoming clear that plant roots and fungi networks are a critical part of this process. One study of forested islands in Sweden found that the majority of carbon in the forest soil actually came from root-fungi networks, not plant matter fallen from above the ground.

Ectomycorrhizal fungi on the roots of an oak tree, where it exists in a symbiotic relationship.

Photograph: David Wilman

Martinez-Suz’s research focuses on mycorrhizal fungi—a large group of fungi that coexist with plant root systems. The mycorrhizal fungi form networks that can go around and sometimes inside plant roots, transferring nutrients and water to the plants in exchange for carbon. Around 90 percent of plant species are known to make these symbiotic trade networks with different species of fungi. “These plants are covered by these fungi. It’s incredible. They are small but they are everywhere,” says Martinez-Suz.

This has serious implications for tree-planting schemes. Planting new forests is a major hope for carbon sequestration, but there is increasing evidence that the mycorrhizal networks might be crucial to the success of these attempts. One replanting study found that a forest of birch and pine trees planted onto heath moorland in northern Scotland did not increase soil carbon stocks even after nearly 40 years in the ground. The researchers who carried out the study think that it might be because the influx of new trees upset the delicate moorland mycorrhizal networks already present.

“Replacing the complete set of fungi with other fungi has implications for long-term carbon sequestration in soil and biodiversity,” says Martinez-Suz. Her current project involves comparing samples from forests in low-pollution sites like northern Finland with those in heavily polluted regions like Belgium and the Netherlands. The fungi in polluted regions are less diverse, she says, and this might have a knock-on effect on how well those forests store carbon.

The major culprit here is nitrogen pollution, which enters soils through burning fossil fuels for electricity and transport, and through agriculture. An excess of nitrogen changes the composition of soil fungi, so that the fungi that are the best at retaining nutrients and pumping carbon into the soil decrease.

But there is some hope that forests can turn things around. One study in the Netherlands found that when nitrogen pollution reduced, beneficial fungi species started to return to the forests. The danger, Martinez-Suz says, is that if ecosystems are pushed too far then there might not be any fungal spores remaining to boost populations.

If we’re to better understand how these fungi influence critical ecosystems, then we need to get to grips with all of these species. Mycologists think that nearly 90 percent of the world’s fungi species are still to be discovered, and the archivists at Kew are only halfway through the long process of digitizing their collection so that researchers can easily know where and when a species was found.

Around 5,000 extra specimens enter the fungarium each year, and the shelves are crammed with samples waiting to be dehydrated and stored. Many of them, Davies says, are sent by amateur mycologists who are fascinated by the world of fungi. “People in academic institutions like this will send them stuff to work on and do identifications, because they are world experts even though they have no formal training. They’re just really obsessive. It’s so cool.”

This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

Updated 6-13-2024 3:00 pm BST: Story corrected to reflect tarantulas being arachnids, not insects.

SCIENCE

WTF Is With the Pink Pineapples at the Grocery Store?!

Emily Mullin  May 27, 2024 11:00 AM

Using DNA from tangerines and tobacco, food scientists have made a familiar fruit tastier—and more Instagrammable—than ever. We looked into it so you don’t have to.

Photograph: Shawn Michael Jones

On a recent trip to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something new in the fruit section: a single pineapple packaged in a pink and forest-green box. A picture on the front showed the pineapple cut open, revealing rose-colored flesh. Touted as the “jewel of the jungle,” the fruit was the Pinkglow pineapple, a creation of American food giant Fresh Del Monte. It cost $9.99, a little more than double the price of a regular yellow pineapple.

I put the box in my cart, snapped a picture with my phone, and shared the find with my foodie friends. I mentioned that its color is the result of genetic modification—the box included a “made possible through bioengineering” label—but that didn’t seem to faze anyone. When I brought my Pinkglow to a Super Bowl party, people oohed and aahed over the color and then gobbled it down. It was juicier and less tart than a regular pineapple, and there was another difference: It came with the characteristic crown chopped off. Soon enough, my friends were buying pink pineapples too. One used a Pinkglow to brew homemade tepache, a fermented drink made from pineapple peels that was invented in pre-Columbian Mexico.

At a time when orange cauliflower and white strawberries are now common sights in American grocery stores, a non-yellow pineapple doesn’t seem all that out of place. Still, I wondered: Why now with the flashy presentation? And why pink? And why had my friends and I snapped it right up?

When I brought my questions to Hans Sauter, Fresh Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer and senior vice president of R&D and agricultural services, he began by offering me a brief history of the fruit. You may assume, like I did, that pineapples have always been sweet and sunny-colored—but that wasn’t the case prior to the 1990s. Store-bought pineapples of yesteryear had a green shell with light yellow flesh that was often more tart than sweet. Buying a fresh one was a bit of a gamble. “Nobody could tell, really, whether the fruit was ripe or not, and consumption of pineapples was mostly canned product, because people could trust what they would eat there,” Sauter says. The added sugar in some canned pineapple made it a sweeter, more consistent product.

In 1996 the company introduced the Del Monte Gold Extra Sweet, yellower and less acidic than anything on the market at the time. Pineapple sales soared, and consumers’ expectations of the fruit were forever changed. The popularity of the Gold led to an international pineapple feud when fruit rival Dole introduced its own varietal. Del Monte sued, alleging that Dole had essentially stolen its Gold formula. The two companies ended up settling out of court.

“This is a social food. This is to show off to other people. ‘Hey, look what I have that you don’t. This makes me cool, right?’”

With the success of its Gold pineapple, Del Monte was looking for new attributes that could make the pineapple even more enticing to consumers, Sauter says. But breeding pineapples is a slow process; it can take two years or longer for a single plant to produce mature fruit. Del Monte had spent 30 years crossbreeding pineapples with certain desired characteristics before it was ready to launch the Gold. Sauter says the possibility of waiting 30 more years for a new variety was “out of the question.” So in 2005 the company turned to genetic engineering.

Del Monte didn’t set out to make a pink pineapple per se, but at the time, Sauter says, there was interest from consumers in antioxidant-rich fruits. (Acai bowls and pomegranate juice, anyone?) Pineapples happen to naturally convert a reddish-pink pigment called lycopene, which is high in antioxidants, into the yellow pigment beta-carotene. (Lycopene is what gives tomatoes and watermelon their color.) Preventing this process, then, could yield pink flesh and higher antioxidants. The company set its dedicated pineapple research team to the task of figuring out how to do it.

The team landed on a set of three modifications to the pineapple genome. They inserted DNA from a tangerine to get it to express more lycopene. They added “silencing” RNA molecules to mute the pineapple’s own lycopene-converting enzymes, which also helped reduce its acidity. (RNA silencing is the same technique used to make non-browning GMO Arctic apples.) Finally, Del Monte added a gene from tobacco that confers resistance to certain herbicides, though representatives for the company say this was simply so its scientists could confirm that the other genetic changes had taken effect—not because Del Monte plans to use those herbicides in production.

The official Pinkglow website doesn’t mention these genetic alterations. And even Sauter skimmed over the science when I asked. I found the details in a patent filing and documents from the US Food and Drug Administration. (The Pinkglow comes without a crown to reduce waste, though removing the pineapple’s top also helps protect its proprietary—and lucrative—status.) Chris Cummings, a senior research fellow at North Carolina State University’s Genetic Engineering and Society Center, says that lack of information is probably purposeful. “There is some distinct marketing that’s going on with this particular product,” he says.

Although Del Monte originally dreamed up the Pinkglow as an antioxidant powerhouse in the days before social media, ads for the pineapple have adjusted to the times. The company doesn’t claim any health benefits but instead touts the Pinkglow’s Instagramability. “Become the envy of your friends and followers with this highly sought-after delicacy,” reads the Pinkglow website, where one can find recipes for rum-soaked Pinkglow shortcake, no-churn Pinkglow ice cream, and Pinkglow pineapple coconut crumb bars. In a 2020 press release, Del Monte described the Pinkglow as “one-of-a-kind and perfect for a hostess to serve as part of a festive party cocktail, as a delicious dessert all on its own, or even to give as a gift to the person who will now truly have everything.” It’s no wonder I picked one up in the grocery store. This product is clearly marketed at me, a 36-year-old millennial woman.

“This is a social food,” Cummings says. “This is to show off to other people. ‘Hey, look what I have that you don’t. This makes me cool, right?’”

The marketing seems to be working. In an earnings call in February, Fresh Del Monte Produce reported strong demand for its new pineapple varietals, with sales growing by approximately 25 percent in 2023 compared with 2022. In addition to the Pinkglow, it has recently introduced the Honeyglow (even golder and sweeter than the Gold Extra Sweet), the Precious Honeyglow (a miniaturized version of the Honeyglow), and the Del Monte Zero (a pineapple certified by a third party as carbon-neutral because of Del Monte’s expansive forests). This year, the company is continuing to expand the reach of the pink pineapple. It’s also rolling out a variety called Rubyglow (reddish peel, yellow flesh) in China.

“Consumers love innovation,” says Lauren Scott, chief strategy officer of the International Fresh Produce Association. She sees the Pinkglow as creating excitement around pineapples and likens it to Cotton Candy grapes, a naturally grown hybrid introduced in 2011 that are hugely popular because, well, they taste like cotton candy.

If the trend holds, the Pinkglow could herald a shift in consumer attitudes toward genetically engineered crops. Where GMO corn and soy were designed to better tolerate herbicides—a benefit invisible to consumers—the pink pineapple was mostly made to be fun and pretty, and to taste great. “I think the wariness toward GMOs is waning,” says Courtney Weber, a professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Maybe the pink pineapple is frivolous. But maybe it’s just the kind of product that can help prepare consumers for the food system of the future, which will likely involve more bioengineering. “I love this for consumers, and I’m really happy about it,” says Vonnie Estes, vice president of innovation at the International Fresh Produce Association. “But I think the real benefit is that it’s going to allow us to use these tools to be able to adapt to a changing world.” That future could be hotter, drier, and filled with as yet unimagined diseases and pests. For now, though, it’s pink.

BUSINESS

Sarcophagus Is a Dead Man’s Switch for Your Crypto Wallet

Joel Khalili  April 10, 2024 07:00 AM

By combining a century-old idea with cryptocurrency tech, Sarcophagus aims to create a foolproof way to send messages from beyond the grave.

ILLUSTRATION: ALBERTO MIRANDA

A century ago, a commuter train carrying hundreds of passengers from Park Row to Brighton Beach, New York, took a perilous stretch of rail at seven times the appropriate speed.

At the controls was Edward Luciano, a young and inexperienced driver with only two hours of training, brought in as a substitute to cover a strike. As chronicled in Uptown, Downtown, a 1976 book by Stan Fischler, Luciano was defeated by the confusing braking system, and the train derailed on a jinking set of curves, killing at least 93 people and injuring hundreds more.

The wreck led to a raft of safety improvements, among them, it is believed, the dead man’s switch, a fail-safe now found in all kinds of modern machinery. A dead man’s switch can take the form of a handle or pedal to which force must be continuously applied, or a button that has to be pressed at intervals, but the principle is the same: If the human operator fails to respond, the machine shuts down.

In 2017, another New Yorker, Zach Hamilton, began to wonder how the same concept might be applied to the digital realm. He had identified a problem: People were getting locked out of their cryptocurrency wallets without any means of recovering access, and their heirs were finding it difficult to access their digital assets after they died. Billions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been lost this way. Hamilton figured that a digital dead man’s switch, which would release a document payload instead of switching off a machine, could help someone to recover their wallet or pass credentials to an inheritor without having to trust a third party. In theory, it could be used for all manner of other things, too. For years, a “quick and dirty” sketch sat dormant on Hamilton’s computer, he says. But when New York locked down for the Covid pandemic, he began to develop his idea. He called it Sarcophagus.

Hamilton was not the first to come up with a digital dead man’s switch. These kinds of services have been available for years from providers such as Stochastic Technologies. Firms including Google and Microsoft offer similar functionality, letting users nominate someone to inherit their account after a period of inactivity. The primary difference is that Sarcophagus is built atop crypto technology, meaning the contents of users’ documents are never visible to a third party and that the availability of their payloads does not depend on the service provider remaining in operation.

It works like this: A user submits a file via the Sarcophagus web app, specifies a recipient, and sets a timeframe. Then they agree to pay one or more fellow users to act as the file’s protector and post the fee in escrow. The file is encrypted and sequestered in a decentralized file storage network called Arweave, which aims to store information permanently by incentivizing people to contribute their own hard drive space. If the user fails to make an attestation proving they are alive within the timeframe, the file is released to the recipient and decrypted using a combination of their own credentials and those of the chosen protector. Only after the file has been successfully handed on does the protector receive the payment.

The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “anti-fragile,” meaning it depends on no party’s good will to achieve its end. Nobody but the originator and recipient have access to the contents of the file, all other parties are financially incentivized to cooperate, and redundancies ensure the payload is always available. “Little strings of data control our lives,” says Hamilton. Because humans are “gooey”—that is, unreliable and prone to mistakes—the only sensible protection for those strings is cryptography, he adds.

There are various other ways, says Hamilton, that Sarcophagus might be applied outside of a crypto setting. A digital dead man’s switch could be used by a whistleblower to release incriminating material or by a dissident or journalist who suspects a threat to their life, as a kind of SOS. In a more mundane context, it could be used to pass account credentials from one generation of employees to the next.

ILLUSTRATION: ALBERTO MIRANDA

Sarcophagus has received $6 million in funding to date from investors including Placeholder, Blockchange, and Hinge Capital. The project is managed by a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO—a collective that governs the Sarcophagus treasury and development process through a system of community voting. In its present state, Sarcophagus is best described as an “early beta,” says Hamilton. The service is operational but not widely used, and it does not generate significant revenue—only a small cut of every payment.

One barrier to broader adoption is that recipients must already have access to a crypto wallet, whose credentials are used to decrypt the data payload. There is an option to create a new wallet for someone, along with a PDF walking them through the process for accessing it, but a level of crypto literacy would certainly help.

As the generation of people comfortable with crypto grows older and begins to reckon more seriously with their mortality, Hamilton thinks a larger subset will begin to understand the need for a service like Sarcophagus. “Millennials are just starting to think about this problem,” he says. Hamilton imagines that more accessible services will be built atop Sarcophagus technology, too. These “boomer products,” as Hamilton calls them, one of which his own team is developing, will abstract away some of the technical complexity, such that people won’t realize they are using crypto infrastructure. (Although there is an inevitable trade-off between security and convenience.)

In any case, says Hamilton, the present system—whereby credentials to high-value crypto wallets might be stored in bank vaults protected by armed guards—approaches the absurd. The “billion-dollar file cabinet” has to go, says Hamilton. “We are still relying on heavy metal doors and guys with guns when cryptography itself can act as a steel wall of incredible thickness.”

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK.

SCIENCE

The Honeybees Versus the Murder Hornets

Under threat from murder hornets, climate change, and habitat loss, UK honeybees are getting help from AI-enabled apiculturists tracking everything from foraging patterns to foreign invaders.

Frankie Adkins  March 27, 2024 12:00 PM

Owen Finnie and Matthew Elmes at Maiden Castle Farm, with an AI beehive. They’re also taking videos of the bees’ “waggle dances.”Photograph: Chris Parkes

A switch is flicked, and a pharmacy sign flickers to life with a green glare. But this clinic prescribes seeds, not pills. The glass jars lining the shelves of this compact unit in central Plymouth, on the south coast of England, are filled with cow parsley, red clover, and corn chamomile.

It’s owned by Pollenize, a social enterprise that uses data analysis to diagnose and treat deficiencies in honeybees. With habitat loss, climate change, agrochemicals, and a new wave of invasive hornets hounding Britain’s bee colonies, its founders believe artificial intelligence could be an unlikely trump card.

Inside a honeybee hive. Worker bees are sterile females, and live for just six weeks in a colony of tens of thousands.Photograph: Chris Parkes

When childhood friends Matthew Elmes and Owen Finnie cofounded Pollenize in 2018, AI was not part of the plan. As longtime sufferers of hay fever, their foray into beekeeping was just a stab at soothing their swollen eyes and streaming nostrils.

Investing in a rumor that a teaspoon of local honey could counteract pollen sensitivity seemed worth a shot. “We didn’t fit the profile of a beekeeper,” says Elmes, who was a bricklayer in his late twenties, while Finnie worked in kitchens.

A microscope image of pollen collected from a hive. Monitoring pollen lets keepers know what’s available for bees to forage from.Photograph: Chris Parkes

The pair bought their first beehive with a £1,500 grant from Plymouth University, and after a shaky first batch—the plastic barrel they used was contaminated with a bitter chemical—things improved when they turned to local beekeepers for advice. Soon they secured several spots for their apiaries across the city, eschewing the countryside for Plymouth’s vacant rooftops, including a theater, a school, an office space, and a museum. It was a win-win. Businesses could boost their green credentials and Pollenize could trial its community urban beekeeping project. “It’s a mutual exchange, as they get the kudos of having bees and we get the opportunity to appeal to customers,” says Elmes. Now, around 80 members tend to 50,000 native honeybees—and are rewarded with a cut of golden honey.

But over time it became harder for Pollenize to ignore threats to Britain’s wild bees. Pollinators underpin our ecosystems and food supply, but Britain’s flying insect population has declined by as much as 60 percent in the past 20 years. Drawing on a degree in environmental science, Elmes built tech-powered solutions to safeguard Britain’s bees. First, the pair created a biodiversity tracking tool to map wildflower loss and prescribe AI-informed seed packets. Next came beehive cameras to discern how climate change impacts foraging patterns. Then, they turned their attention to staving off an invasion.

Beekeepers need to check hive frames for pests such as varroa mites and to look for queens preparing to set up a new colony.Photograph: Chris Parkes

Ever since the first Asian hornet stole into France in 2004, most likely stowed away on a cargo ship from China, the invasive species has plagued Europe’s beekeepers. Dubbed “murder hornets” for their ability to swarm local ecosystems, each one can consume as many as 50 native bees per day. Shielded by the Channel, Britain has managed to stave off the scale of Asian hornet invasion seen by its European neighbors—but sightings on English shores are creeping up. In 2023, there were 76 confirmed Asian hornet sightings in the UK, up from 23 between 2016 and 2022.

Teams of volunteers now hunt Asian hornets landing on British soil, but detection is only the tip of the iceberg, says Elmes. The true challenge is tracing the hornet back to its nest, to destroy the colony. “If something can automate and help us, it will shave off time,” he says. This is the rationale behind Pollenize’s latest project—a network of AI-camera bait stations that can detect and track Asian hornets.

“All you need is a breeze from the southeast for hornets to hitch a lift across the water,” says Alastair Christie, an invasive species expert from Jersey, in the Channel Islands. “Queens can hibernate on the underside of a pallet and in all sorts of nooks and crannies, or get stuck in someone’s car or horse box.” A nest might start out innocuously, as two cells in a garden shed in April. By September it can grow larger than a dustbin, heaving with around 2,500 hornets.

Beekeeper Shelley Glasspool tends to a hive on the roof of the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth.Photograph: Chris Parkes

Asian hornets are “opportunistic feeders,” eating everything from bees and blowflies to fishing bait and barbecue food. Their mere presence weakens native bees by triggering “foraging paralysis.” “Bees go into a defensive mode when there are hornets attacking their home,” says Christie. “If you’re in a castle under attack, you go into siege mentality.” Bees will stop cleaning their hive and gathering nectar and water until the colony collapses.

In Jersey, which is on the front line of the invasion, Christie has been leading the fightback. There’s a public awareness campaign: People are asked to submit photos of suspected hornets, which are distinguished by their orange faces, yellow tipped legs, and sheer size. Braver volunteers have begun to construct bait stations: a shallow dish of dark beer or sugar water. If an Asian hornet lands, volunteers attach tinsel streamers to its back to monitor its flight path and trace it back to its nest. They use a rule of thumb: Every minute an Asian hornet spends away from a bait station between visits to feed translates to 100 meters of distance between the bait station and the nest.

On average, it takes around 50 hours to locate an Asian hornet nest this way, but machine learning could accelerate this. “Can we use AI to predict where the nest location is so we can find nests quicker, destroy them quicker, and reduce the ecological damage?” says Elmes. Pollenize is now working with French tech giant CapGemini on Hornet AI, a network of automated camera bait stations that uses an object detection algorithm trained on 5,000 pictures of Asian hornets.

This Asian hornet station in the Associated British Port of Plymouth attracts the hornets, IDs them with its AI cameras, and alerts local authorities.Photograph: Chris Parkes

The prototype bait station uses a vaporizer to churn out an attractant that Asian hornets find irresistible. When a hornet comes to the bait station to feed, it’s detected by the camera, and marked with a physical colored sticker. The software then tracks the direction the hornet departs in, and measures how long it’s away, cutting down the time taken to locate the nest. “It works like CCTV,” says Elmes.

In December 2023, Pollenize won a grant from Innovate UK to scale up Hornet AI. The units will be tested in southeast England by the UK’s National Bee Unit, with the goal of improving nest tracking efficiency by 80 percent. But time is of the essence, says Elmes. “If we’re on it next year, we can keep Asian hornets at bay,” he says. “If we don’t win next year, it’s going to be exponential.”

This article appears in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

GEAR

Science Is Here to Clean Up the Wild West of Gin

A fingerprinting technique similar to MRI scanning is finally revealing what makes the ultimate gin. Will it be a blessing or a curse for an unregulated industry drunk on innovation?

Eve Thomas  April 02, 2024 10:00 AM

PHOTOGRAPH: SERGEY RYUMIN, KARANDAEV; GETTY IMAGES

In an Edinburgh laboratory in the second half of 2023, four chemists armed with a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer took on the unregulated Wild West of the gin industry.

A total of 16 samples of gin endured the spectrometer’s powerful magnetic field to create a “fingerprint”—in the form of peaks along an x-axis—which researchers David Ellis and Ruaraidh McIntosh then put together like “a jigsaw puzzle”; when complete, the puzzle revealed exactly which compounds were responsible for a certain gin’s flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. The graphical marks could impart even the physical origin of the juniper berries used in a gin, offering a level of accuracy beyond traditional sensory analysis. The team published its results in a paper late last year.

It’s a study that could bring order to a near-lawless industry: Gin is a famously gray area in the alcoholic beverages sector. Unlike tightly regulated Scotch whisky or location-specific cognac, gin needs only to demonstrate a minimum 37.5 percent ABV and a prominent juniper taste to qualify for its name—and that’s pretty much it.

“As with any spirit category, there are often conversations around protecting gin by tightening the regulations,” says Pal Gleed, director general at The Gin Guild, a trade body of global gin distillers, brand owners, and industry figures. “However, to do this without stifling innovation is not easy.”

Unregulated as the gin sector might be, it is also unfettered, creating a space for considerable innovation within the alcoholic beverages sector. Coming behind only vodka in variety, the spirit's recent commercial releases include gin made from peas—the byproduct of which can be used as animal feed, resulting in a spirit with a negative carbon footprint.

The imaginative approach of gin distillers isn’t new: Indeed, fruit gins are mentioned in The Distiller of London, published as early as 1639. Packed with various recipes for gins and requiring ingredients ranging from aniseed and coriander to poppy flowers and nutmeg, the book reflects a Stuart-period England already getting a taste for creativity with its spirits.

The attitude of innovation has continued since. Tom Warner, cofounder of Warner’s Distillery, calls such creativity the “lifeblood” of the business. And while he admits that it has “probably blurred the lines on what is and isn’t a gin,” he notes that without it, the “category wouldn’t have exploded the way that it did.”

So could NMR spectroscopy and its ability to unlock the exact elements behind top-quality gin mark the death of innovation for the spirit? Unlikely. McIntosh believes that a clearer understanding of what defines a gin “shouldn’t be seen as being restrictive to the industry.”

In fact, it could be an opportunity to prune out counterfeits while giving space for a richer gin industry to flourish. Jared Brown, master distiller at luxury gin brand Sipsmith, tells WIRED that he is on board: “Will tighter regulations force new gin producers to work a bit harder, to learn a bit more gin history and tradition before releasing a spirit and calling it gin? Will more dodgy distillates be excluded from the category? I’m for that.” Ellis also believes that “it’s possible this kind of fingerprinting approach could lead to some kind of framework to define what is actually meant by ‘gin’ in a much more rigorous way than there is at the moment.”

While the fingerprinting method is similar to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), NMR preceded its better-known cousin by 30 years; the first NMR machine was developed by Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell in 1945. MRI, in turn, was developed from NMR in the 1970s and made commercially available in the 1980s.

Where MRI uses a magnetic field and radio waves to assemble anatomical images, NMR uses a magnetic field to measure nuclear spins, which are affected by electromagnetic radiation. The spectrometer presents the absorbed frequencies as a series of peaks on a graph, which reveal the chemical environment of atoms in the sample. When Ellis and McIntosh interpret the results, they match these peaks to their gin spectra to “build” the structure of molecules present.

“The spectrum is a lot more complicated than it would be if you had a simple organic molecule as pure compound, and identifying the fingerprints of all of those different molecules is really the main challenge. But we’ve shown it works,” says Ellis. “It’s now quite a well-accepted technique for looking at complex mixtures, including food and drink.”

The researchers can even distinguish between molecules with the same atomic makeup. Terpenes, the chemical characterizers of gin, have the same generic chemical formula (C5H8) but offer entirely different flavors, aromas, and textures. Limonene tastes of orange, for example, while myrcene is sweet and spicy.

Knowing exactly what’s in a gin matters more now, as the industry continues to grow and counterfeits and copies look to cash in. The premium sector is set to be worth around $1.4 billion by 2030, and establishing provenance and authentication will be essential to distillers hoping to protect their products and prove to well-heeled customers that they’ve used those rare and expensive ingredients.

The thriving market has also translated into a rapidly increasing demand for juniper berries, just as traditional juniper suppliers are struggling with a changing climate. As distilleries look to source juniper berries from new suppliers, they will face inevitable variation in chemical composition and subsequent variation in flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. “The various compounds present in the juniper varies depending on where the juniper comes from,” McIntosh explains, “so NMR could help to look at the natural ingredients and what they’re providing for the gin.”

But introducing NMR spectroscopy might not be straightforward. Gleed points out that “very few gin distillers have access to anything more than their noses and a hydrometer,” and NMR equipment is expensive, making it unrealistic for most distillers and possibly lending an advantage to higher-end brands with more funding.

Its use might also mark a shift away from an artistic understanding of gin, in which variety is respected as an unavoidable result of genuine creativity. Indeed, Brown says he “will always prefer organoleptic analysis as, at the end of the day, I’m making gin for people, not computers.”

Meanwhile, Warner’s Distillery employs scientific analysis already—namely gas chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography—and the company says it is satisfied with its methodology as is. “We know our molecular fingerprints,” it notes.

However, the new gin fingerprint research, published in the Journal of Brewing and Distilling in December 2023, addresses the use of gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry (GC/MS) in analyzing gin, compared to NMR spectroscopy. It points out that unlike GC/MS, NMR doesn’t require the prior separation of samples, and offers the advantage of speed.

The question remains as to whether NMR spectroscopy is a blessing or a curse for gin distilleries. Will a tighter definition of gin separate the wheat from the chaff—or the weed from the juniper—and preserve the sector’s rich heritage? Or will it quash a colorful and innovative industry in which imagination is the name of the game?

At The Gin Guild, Gleed is, somewhat unsurprisingly, confident that the imaginative attitude of distillers isn’t going anywhere: “The beauty of the gin industry is that it is innovative, and that this innovation is driven by brands of all sizes. This passion for creativity won’t be affected.”

Certainly, the industry doesn’t appear to be struggling. Last year, some 9 million 9-liter cases of gin were sold in the US, generating more than $1 billion in revenue for distillers, with the superpremium category surging by 16 percent to surpass 700,000 9-liter cases. Meanwhile, the UK saw the introduction of 110 new distilleries between 2020 and 2022, as the pandemic drove consumers’ appetites for the luxury experience.

The hope, then, is that NMR will provide what Brown terms “guardrails of respect for heritage” for a sector in danger of becoming drunk on its own success.

SCIENCE

The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space

Injectable immunotherapy drugs can be made, in theory, but gravity prevents them from crystallizing correctly. A startup thinks the solution could be right above us.

Grace Browne  March 27, 2024 12:00 PM

The International Space Station on November 8, 2021.Photograph: Geopix/Alamy

Immunotherapy is one of the most promising new ways to fight cancer, but it takes forever. It works by mimicking or invoking the body’s own immune defenses to weed out and attack cancer cells. But the drugs that do this are typically administered intravenously—fed into the blood using needles, in a long and invasive process. Patients spend hours in a hospital as the infusions are drip-fed into their veins.

It would be much simpler and less painful if the drugs could be injected under the skin from the comfort of a patient’s home. But that would require much higher concentrations of the drugs, resulting in a thick formula too viscous to inject.

There is an answer: If you crystallize the proteins in the drug instead, you can get a high concentration into a smaller volume, and a solution of these tiny crystals comes without all the viscosity. The only problem is it’s almost impossible to do this on Earth. If you try, the resulting crystals are full of imperfections and come in a random array of sizes. In space, however, without the interference of the planet’s gravitational pull, the crystallized proteins come out perfectly.

That’s where BioOrbit comes in. Its founder, Katie King, has a PhD in nanomedicine from the University of Cambridge, but she has always been obsessed with space. During her course, she found herself growing frustrated at her friends’ cynicism toward the “Bezosification” of outer space, as companies such as Blue Origin and SpaceX commercialized it and turned it into a playground for billionaires. “I always had this belief that space should be used to help those on Earth,” King says.

Katie KingPhotograph: Christian Trippe

After finishing at Cambridge, King started looking for a scientist job in the space sector, determined to prove her friends wrong. But she couldn’t find one. So instead, in 2022, she began a two-month summer program at the International Space University, an international organization based in France that provides postgraduate training for those keen on a career in the industry.

During the course, King was part of a team tasked with identifying research that could be conducted in space with the best potential impact on humankind. Her team landed on the concept of crystallizing drugs in microgravity. There was data stacked up on the International Space Station hinting at the potential to “absolutely revolutionize cancer treatment,” King says. “This needs to be realized fully, and now is the time.”

BioOrbit, which King founded in 2023, plans to scale up and commercialize this kind of drug production in space. After securing funding from the European Space Agency, the plan is to test out the process on the International Space Station early next year to make sure it works. And later in 2025, they’re planning a second flight which ideally will be with a pharmaceutical partner.

King is not the first to send drugs into space to reap the benefits that microgravity has to offer. Big Pharma is also dipping its toe: Companies including Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck have been conducting research in space for drug development and manufacturing for years. “What makes BioOrbit special is that they’re trying to optimize it,” says Li Shean Toh, an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham who researches astropharmacy. King wants to blow it up to commercial scale.

But there are roadblocks. There are long queues to get space on board a rocket to take material to the ISS, and it’s unsurprisingly expensive. Regulation is another hurdle: Will the rules and regulations of Earth apply in outer space? If one of BioOrbit’s drugs harms a patient, whose jurisdiction will apply? “Lots of people are thinking about the technology—but people are kind of skirting around how we are going to do quality assurance,” Toh says. This is something she’s researching: She has proposed a health version of the Outer Space Treaty, a body of principles that informed international space law.

King is happy for her team’s venture to serve as a guinea pig for how this all might work, because she wants it to work. “There is so much benefit that microgravity can give to life science research, drug development, cancer research—and more that we just don't know yet,” says King.

Her ultimate goal for BioOrbit is to have a permanent facility in space just for doing science, research, and manufacturing. The pharmaceutical factories that sit in gray, barren business parks may soon become a little more extraterrestrial. One day, perhaps many of your drugs will have had a little sojourn to space.

This article appears in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

Table of Contents

Wired Magazine: 5 Jul, 2024

All articles

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The Honeybees Versus the Murder Hornets

Science Is Here to Clean Up the Wild West of Gin

The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space