Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
january 2018
| add it up
26.01
LAUNCH
“WE ALLOW
TECHNOLOGISTS TO
PROPOSE
THE UNTHINKABLE
AND CONVINCE US THE
U N T H I N K A B L E I S AC T UA L LY
PAGE 86 THE INEVITABLE .”
60
The Terror-Industrial
Complex
A weapons investiga-
tor uncovers the disturb-
ing supply chain for the
Islamic State’s munitions
production factories.
BY BRIAN CASTNER
74
Game On
A new pro league aims
to bring videogame
competition into the
mainstream—and upend
the world of sports.
B Y N AT H A N H I L L
STYLING BY NICOLE SCHNEIDER; ON-SET STYLING BY CRISTINA FACUNDO
86
Something to
Watch Over Me
One company thinks it
has the answer to the
senior caregiver short-
age: Let tech do the job.
BY LAUREN SMILEY
10 Comments
Reader rants and raves
AALPHA
The Martian
Say hello to Justin, the AI-fortified Fetish: Big Foot
space robot The revolutionary snowshoe that’s
built like a flip-flop
FILE: //
My week living with chatbots
29 Angry Nerd
16 Enough with the brain-dead 40 Eye of the Storm
AI metaphors Meet Eric Berger, leisure-time
meteorologist, predictor of
Harvey’s floods, unlikely hero.
30 BY CHRIS JONES
SIX BY SIX
96 Stories by WIRED readers
Rules of the Game
Mandela Schumacher-Hodge on
diversifying the Valley
ON THE COVER
18 Designs Within Robotic Reach Positive Energy Photographed for WIRED by Dan Winters.
How to build a droid-optimized The sunny optimism of clean tech Styling by Nicole Schneider. On-set styling
home BY CLIVE THOMPSON by Cristina Facundo.
0 0 6 JAN 2018
RELEASE NOTES
FROM TOP: COURTESY OF MARA HVISTENDAHL; MICHAEL LIONSTAR; COURTESY OF JASON PONTIN
asking her how it felt. Nix, which is now
“I mean, it was conve- being developed
nient,” she says. “It’s by JJ Abrams for
probably the future.” television. For this
A
issue, Hill turned his
attention to the rise
NDREA DICENZO is an experienced conflict zone photogra- of esports leagues
pher, but her assignment for “The Terror-Industrial Com- DiCenzo flew to Bagh- (page 74). The pro
dad (1) then drove north gamers he profiles
plex” (page 60) posed a unique challenge: getting lethally to Al Qayyarah (2), Tal make it look easy to
close to live ISIS munitions. Embedding with arms inves- Afar (3), and Mosul (4), play the first-person
returning to Erbil (5). shooter Overwatch
tigators in northern Iraq, the Erbil-based photographer
▲ in a 450-seat arena,
traveled deep into territory only streamed to hun-
recently wrested from the Islamic Decades ago, as the dreds of thousands
3 4 5
State, where the team found a make- editor of a science of viewers. But when
2
journal, Jason Pontin Hill played the game
shift weapons factory filled with dozens of became fascinated himself, he quickly
mortars, rockets, and bomblets. “They were by Silicon Valley discovered that even
absolutely terrifying,” DiCenzo says, “but 1 elites who thought the casual compe-
Iraq science and technol- tition was stiff. “I
it’s much better than having munitions ogy could be used was shocked when I
hurled at you, which was the case when I to achieve everlast- started playing other
was covering the Mosul offensive.” She let the ing life. “It struck me humans for the first
as bizarre that other- time,” he says. “I
more seasoned arms specialists handle the wise intelligent peo- died so quickly. And
explosives before she photographed them. ple were embracing so incredibly often.”
“Zuckerberg
“Zu isn’t
FOR OUR NOVEMBER cover story, writer Alex Mar meditated on robot- to blame if people
legally
leg
g use Face-
icist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s eerily lifelike androids. Adam Fisher traveled bo
book in a way others
to Paris to catch up on famed technologist Tony Fadell’s plot to get do
don’t like. What the
back at Silicon Valley. Virginia Heffernan challenged Mark Zucker-
Zucker Ru
Russians did is no
diff
different from what
berg to take responsibility for his creation. And Richard Conniff took mi
millions
i of users do.
a look at illegal logging in Peru—and shed light on a frustratingly At the end of the
opaque black market that has dire environmental consequences. day
day, it’s the consum-
er’
er’s responsibility to
Readers responded: be able to discern
tru
truth from baloney.”
Jes
Jesse Kleitman
on (what else?)
Fa
Facebook
Re: “Payback Time: Tony Fadell created the iPod and Nest, then lost
control of them. His next project could be his most ambitious yet:
taking on Silicon Valley itself.”
“HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A Re: “Love in the Time of Robots: Hiroshi
Ishiguro builds androids. Beautiful, realistic,
0 1 0 JAN 2018
PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS
By Jason Pontin
ically sound approaches. Inves- What’s tantalizing, however, Guarente to develop therapies
tor Peter Thiel is reportedly are the breakthroughs in extend- that target aging, failed to create
“really interested” in the blood ing the healthy lifespan of other such a drug. Sirtris, founded by
of the young. Based on an old species. Two decades ago, UC Sinclair, was equally unsuccess-
idea called parabiosis, the ther- San Francisco researcher Cyn- ful. And while restricting calories
apy excited new enthusiasm after thia Kenyon showed that a muta- is the best way we know to extend
a 2013 paper showed that a pro- tion in a single gene can allow a lifespans in organisms from yeast
tein richly abundant in young roundworm to live twice as long. to mice, attempts to create medi-
blood made old mice stronger. cines that harness the genes acti-
For $8,000, a company named vated by caloric restriction have
Ambrosia will now infuse older
patients with the blood serum WE’LL STILL DIE WHEN WE DO failed FDA approval.
But there are still plenty of
of donors aged 16 to 25. NOW, BUT WE’LL BE HEALTHIER enticing leads. Sinclair offers
All over Silicon Valley and the
regions that imitate it, execu- WHILE WE’RE STILL LIVING. up a list of polysyllabic possibil-
ities: “Super metformin, rapalogs,
tives follow weird revitalization NAD boosters, mitochondrial
fads. They think the code of aging activators, senolytics.” Self-
can be hacked and death made experimenters are already play-
optional. Daniel Gross, a partner ing with this menu of molecules.
at Y Combinator, fasts enthusias- And at MIT, biologists Leonard Some aspiring immortalists have
tically—and encourages others to Guarente and David Sinclair dis- long taken resveratrol, a com-
do so—because he believes it will covered that a class of genes pound found in red wine proven
extend his life. Inventor Ray Kurz- called sirtuins regulates longev- to activate sirtuins. Stem cell
weil swallows 100 supplements a ity in a wide range of organisms. pioneer Robert Hariri swears by
day for the same reason, presum- Restricting the calories of yeast metformin, a diabetes drug that
ably so he’ll live long enough to made them overexpress a partic- may extend the healthy lifespan of
be uploaded into the singularity, ular sirtuin, extending their life- the general population. The most
circa 2045. spans; mice genetically altered to daring are rumored to use rapa-
But you don’t have to be a overproduce the mammalian ver- mycin, a powerful drug that pre-
prophet of posthumanism to sion lived longer and had fewer vents organ transplant rejection.
wish for a few more good years. age-related diseases. Rapamycin inhibits a key meta-
I’ve followed my own antiaging But for all those animal dis- bolic pathway called mTOR that
routines: For a time I ate 30 per- coveries, human aging is a prob- caloric restriction shuts down,
cent fewer calories than recom- lem that the biomedical industry initiating a process where dys-
mended, and I now starve myself and its regulatory agencies are functional cellular components
for 16 of every 24 hours. And while ill-suited to solve. It’s not a dis- are degraded and recycled. No one
there’s certainly plenty of folly in ease recognized by the FDA, old or sick should take rapamycin
the tech elite’s quest for immor- and testing drugs for human life lightly, because it suppresses the
tality, I’m glad they’ve embarked extension would be costly and immune system, but safer thera-
on it—for reasons that go beyond time-consuming. As Sinclair says, pies based on analogs of rapamy-
sheer entertainment value. “The aging field is thriving sci- cin, or rapalogs, could be the first
entifically. But the translation of real antiaging medicines.
UNHAPPILY FOR MEÑand every- findings into treatments is poorly Even if these ideas become
one else—we’ve made little prog- funded. Compared to heart dis- commercial medicines, they
ress in extending the outer limit ease and diabetes, the dollars won’t magically remove the lim-
of the human lifespan. Yes, more allocated to aging are, at best, a its on the human lifespan. There
people are living longer because hundred to one. But all it will take is no master switch for aging.
we’ve gotten better at nutrition, is one success to change the way Jason Pontin We amass damage as we live,
(@jason_pontin)
curing acute conditions such as people think.” is a writer living in and damage to our DNA leads
infections, and treating a hand- So far, the search for that first Cambridge, Massa- to cell disease and senescence;
ful of chronic diseases. But the big success is stuck in the weeds. chusetts. He is the the telomeres that cap our chro-
former editor in chief
maximum reported age at death Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a com- and publisher of MIT mosomes shorten and fray, plac-
has plateaued at around 115 years. pany cofounded by Kenyon and Technology Review. ing a hard stop on the number of
0 1 4
POWER-UPS
BEST OF TIMES
vate (“uh oh, time’s
running out”). UCLA
researchers studying
HOW I FIGHT
VALLEY
PREJUDICE
⊲ Imagine you’re a black woman
pitching a startup. You look dif-
ferent. You talk different. A table
of white investors has never seen
someone who looks like you and
who’s been successful before.
All these things are working
against you. Do you let that stop
you, or do you just say so what?
DESIGNS WITHIN
ROBOTS CAN WALK, talk, run a hotel … and are entirely stumped by a
doorknob. Or a mailbox. Or a dirty bathtub—zzzzt, dead. Sure, the
SpotMini, a doglike domestic helper from Boston Dynamics, can
ROBOTIC REACH
climb stairs, but it struggles to reliably hand over a can of soda. That’s
why some roboticists think the field needs to flip its perspective.
THE DROID-
“There are two approaches to building robots,” says Maya Cakmak,
a researcher at the University of Washington. “Make the robot more
humanlike to handle the environment, or design the environment to
OPTIMIZED HOME
make it a better fit for the robot.” Cakmak pursues the latter, and to
do that, she studies so-called universal design—the ways in which
buildings and products are constructed for older people or those
with disabilities. Robot can’t handle the twisting staircase? Put in
a ramp. As for that pesky doorknob? Make entryways motion-acti-
vated. If you want droids at your beck and call someday, start think-
ing about robo-fitting your digs now. —Andrew Rosenblum
12
8 6 3 4
5 10 11
7
POWER-UPS
CHARTGEIST
BY JON J. EILENBERG
MIKE ELLIS 0 1 9
ALPHA
TOOL
THE
MARTIAN
WHEN HUMANS ARE finally ready to relocate civilization to Mars, they won’t be able to
do it alone. They’ll need trusted specialists with encyclopedic knowledge, composure
FORTIFIED
under pressure, and extreme endurance—droids like Justin. Built by the German space
agency DLR, such humanoid bots are being groomed to build the first martian habitat for
humans. Engineers have been refining Justin’s physical abilities for a decade; the mech
WITH A.I.
can handle tools, shoot and upload photos, catch flying objects, and navigate obstacles.
Now, thanks to new AI upgrades, Justin can think for itself. Unlike most robots, which
have to be programmed in advance and given explicit instructions for nearly every
movement, this bot can autonomously perform complex tasks—even those it hasn’t
been programmed to do—on a planet’s surface while being supervised by astronauts in orbit. Object recogni-
tion software and computer vision let Justin survey its environment and undertake jobs such as cleaning and
maintaining machinery, inspecting equipment, and carrying objects. In a recent test, Justin fixed a faulty solar
panel in a Munich lab in minutes, directed via tablet by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.
One small chore for Justin, one giant leap for future humankind. —anna vlasits
0 0 0 URS BIGLER
POWER-UPS
Eyes
Hands
Probe
An R2D2-style data
interface means
Justin can sync up
to computers and
data collection sta- Base
tions. Eventually
it will be able to charge Justin’s protocols
its own battery by are stored onboard,
plugging into a solar so it can complete
power unit. tasks and save data
even if communica-
tion links fail.
Wheels
JAN 2018 0 2 1
ALPHA
POWER-UPS
original return date. Their dramatic descent
didn’t make many headlines, and, except for
THING WE DID
give a thought to the International Space
Station, even though, when the future mea-
INFOPORN
BATTERY
30 2 Bring on the Batteries
Projected Cumulative
All those new EVs are going to need
CHARGE
Sales of EVs as More
Countries Enact Bans batteries. Tesla is projecting to
produce 35 gigawatt-hours’ worth
25 annually, but the world is going
to need way more than that. Today,
CLEAN
consumer electronics are the
chief users of batteries, but cars are
about to overtake them—by a lot.
JUICE FOR
20
E-CARS
800
700
15 600
2016 EV ELECTRIC
SALES FOR 500 VEHICLES
GWh
THESE 7
COUNTRIES: CHINA 400
502,038 24,040,902
IF WE HOPE to put the brakes on 300
PORTABLE
climate change, we need more 200
DEVICES
10
NORWAY GERMANY
electric vehicles, and they’ve 105, 523 3,326,995
100
16
18
6
2
2
2
2
To reduce the emissions of car-
0
0
0
2
2
2
2
NETHERLANDS UNITED KINGDOM
bon dioxide that contribute to 358,348 2,654,874
5
FRANCE
global warming, at least seven 1,985,670
0 2 4
600K
4 Batteries Will POWER-UPS
Need Better
Chemistry
REAL OR FAKE
500K
to renewables, we
are going to have to
They cry, babble, poop, and cry some more. Can technol-
6
2
mine a lot more
METRIC TONS
0
2
lithium, cobalt, and 300K ogy tame them? Parents, there’s help out there for raising
other raw ingredients your helpless babes—provided you can tell the real prod-
to create all those ucts from the fakes. —J us t i c e N a m a s t e
16
0
batteries—and do 2
200K
so sustainably and
responsibly. For
example, a lithium-
ion battery also relies 100K
on nickel and cobalt
for the electrodes.
And more than 60
percent of the world’s 0
LITHIUM COBALT NICKEL
cobalt originates
in the Democratic 14 MILLION 7 MILLION 78 MILLION
Republic of the CURRENT RESERVES (METRIC TONS)
Congo, where human
62%
rights abuses are
rampant. Researchers
are working on new
batteries that require Smartbe stroller
fewer problematic
ingredients, and the It’s a real drag trying
countries proposing to create an epic
bans will ideally Animoji while push-
follow through with ing a hefty stroller.
commitments to Instead, have your
renewable energy. child roll down the
After all, if we don’t sidewalk in this
make the system clean self-propelled model.
from top to bottom, OR
OF THE GLOBAL DEMAND FOR COBALT WILL
global warming wins. GO INTO LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES BY 2020.
Babblebot
Variations in local energy production means that sometimes EVs are Sitting in this high- This fabric-covered
dirtier than regular cars. For example, if you live in a state that generates tech toddler potty, mechanical teat sim-
electricity from coal (Kansas), your electric car probably won’t be much your little one can ulates the real thing,
kinder to the environment than a car that gets more than 35 mpg. In India, browse YouTube keeping your han-
your EV is about as clean as a conventional vehicle that gets 20 mpg. while you toilet-train gry baby happy and
them. They’ll be well-fed when you’re
screen-savvy multi- not around. Next up,
REAL: SMARTBE STROLLER, IPOTTY, BABYNES
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
taskers by age 2! RoboNanny.
OR OR
Fuel Efficiency a Gas Car Would Need MindBooster BabyNes
COLORADO AND KANSAS
to Match the Impact of an Electric Car
If you plan on rais- Instant baby food!
ing an overachiever, Pop in a capsule
TEXAS REGION
stuff them into this and the machine
“smart” booster seat, dispenses an age-
CALIFORNIA REGION
complete with noise- appropriate serving
making buttons and a of formula. Just don’t
foldout keyboard. No confuse it with your
MPG 0 20 40 60 80 100 typing at the table. Keurig.
Responsible
Encryption
(ri-'spänt-s -b l en-'krip-sh n)
n. A proposal to ensure that texts
are capable of being decoded,
and phones unlocked, when the
government obtains a warrant.
Brain-Operated Arm Hand That Sees The Linx
Coined by US deputy attorney gen-
Capable of: Touching Capable of: Looking for Capable of: Climbing eral Rod Rosenstein, responsible
hands, reaching out an opportunity every mountain encryption is a new name for an
old argument: that public agencies
Mind-controlled limbs Researchers at New- Unlike older lower-limb fighting crime and terrorism must
aren’t new, but Univer- castle University have prosthetics, the Linx have access to our private com-
sity of Pittsburgh scien- designed a hand with can tell when it’s sitting munications—for our own good. In
tists are working on an a tiny camera that snaps in a chair. At just under 2016, Apple defied a court order to
arm that can feel. Wires pics of objects in its view. 6 pounds, it relies on unlock an iPhone used by a shooter
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF DARPA, NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY, ENDOLITE, DARPA, OTTOBOCK (2);
link the arm and brain, so Then an AI determines seven sensors that col- in an attack in San Bernardino, Cal-
when pressure is applied, an action. Like, grasp lect data on activity and ifornia. Libertarians cheered, but
a signal alerts the sen- that beer and raise it terrain, helping the leg it was a bad look for Apple. After
sory cortex. to my mouth. adapt to new situations. that, tech giants began adopt-
ing end-to-end encryption even
they can’t decode. (So don’t ask!)
In November, the FBI reported it
was unable to open the phone of
Texas church shooter Devin Kel-
ley. ¦ Rosenstein’s rebranding
effort is the latest sally in a seman-
tic battle between Washington and
Silicon Valley. Techies say respon-
sible encryption is “doublespeak”
that would give the feds a pow-
erful new surveillance tool—and
create a “back door” in networks
Bebionic The Michelangelo The LUKE Arm that hackers will exploit. Rosen-
JARGON WATCH ILLUSTRATION BY LEON EDLER
0 2 6 JAN 2018
ALPHA
EXPERIMENT
SELF-
HELPERS
MY WEEK
LIVING WITH
CHATBOTS
RECENTLY, I was hungry. So I told
the Whole Foods chatbot what I
had in my fridge, and it revealed
that a bacon, lettuce, and heir-
loom tomato sandwich was mine
for the making. Yum. Then, out of
boredom, I booted up the movie-
recommendation bot And Chill,
which suggested I watch Jake
Gyllenhaal repeatedly relive
the last day of his life in Source
Code. I shuddered every time
the train exploded. ¶ Yes, I have
a bot problem. It’s just so con-
venient in the modern era. Sure,
friendly algorithms have existed
since the mid ’60s, when the talk-
back program Eliza started con- me; one was surprisingly life- Spiri, “your spiritual
vincing more gullible users of like. And all, in their way, were assistant.” My prob-
its humanity. But it wasn’t until effective. The problem with self- lems are neither unique
Facebook allowed app develop- help as a genre has always been nor complex—and this was Spiri’s
ers to integrate their chatbots its restriction in time and space: great lesson. One evening, I found
with Messenger a half-century the therapist’s hour, calls from a myself suppressing bile at the
later, in 2016, that bots rose up parent, the book that sits half- thought of telling a friend she wasn’t
on the order of tens of thousands. read on the bedside table. These going to be one of my bridesmaids.
Now they don’t just want to plan bots were talking to me all the But after asking me just eight ques-
your meals—they also want to time, with scant regard for my tions, Spiri diagnosed the problem:
make you a better person. ¶ Does whereabouts or state of mind. I have an unhealthy habit of feel-
this new class of digital coun- Self-help wasn’t some tempo- ing responsible for other people’s
selors work? To find out, I spent rary ideal anymore. It was always happiness. Maybe that’s just being
a week with five of them. Some on, and impossible to ignore. alive, but Spiri’s emotionless deliv-
delighted me; others annoyed —Signe Brewster ery made the point easier to take.
BRAIN-DEAD
tiny hairs. But I woke up early politely ask if you’ve made any
one morning and started attack- progress. Like most, I’m moti-
METAPHORS
ing the filth because Relate told vated by a combination of fear
me to. The bot texts short chal- and self-loathing. So, confession:
lenges meant to bring people I accomplished diddly-squat with
together—divide household labor this thing. “You’re only human, Here’s a fun drinking game:
more equitably, for one, but also so this time it’s OK”? No, it’s Every time someone compares AI
lovelier things like “take your not OK, Goalbot. I need to be to the human brain, take a shot.
It’ll dull the pain of such mindless
S.O. out for their favorite bev- reminded of my failures con- metaphorizing—and serve as a
erage.” Turns out if I splurge on stantly, preferably with a boss- reminder that you, an at least
an old-fashioned at the cocktail from-hell-style “Hey, what’s the semiconscious being, have an
actual brain that can make real
bar, he’ll volunteer to clean the status on this?” text every god- decisions like “Drink!” in the first
bathroom himself. damn morning. place. Contra the hype of mar-
keters (as regurgitated by cred-
ulous journalists—for shame!),
Woebot, the mood Invisible Boyfriend, AI resembles the gray matter
assessor. Woebot the bespoke beau. in your head about as much as
sends daily prompts Even though Relate a pull-string doll resembles a
rocket scientist. There’s a similar-
(“How are you feeling?”) to log improved my relationship, I still ity in shape, ish: So-called neural
your mood and current activity. desired the confidence boost of a networks are software programs
Ignore at your peril. (“I haven’t digital love-object. Before long, I inspired by neuroscience. But
these systems have only a few
forgotten about you, Signe.”) At was sending heart-eyes emoji to million “neurons,” which are
the end of the week, my responses “Ernesto Quigley.” He liked my really just nodes with some
confirmed that I’m happiest at the writing! Then, a twist: Ernesto input/output connections. That’s
puny compared to the 100 bil-
gym and that desk work is more wasn’t a bot. He was a real person. lion genuine neurons in your cra-
productive than couch work. I hadn’t read the fine print. But my nium. Read it and weep, Alexa!
Sound obvious? Tell that to my mistake made me reflect on the We’re talking 100 trillion syn-
apses. Or 200 trillion. (Of course,
daily routine, which now includes actual bots. Like Ernesto, they were cognition is still pretty incog-
regular walks and heightened engaging, available at weird times, nita itself—which means we’re
productivity after 3 pm. and often flawed—almost human. “modeling” AIs on something we
barely even comprehend.) The
truth is, tricks like beating people
at Go or diagnosing melanomas
owe more to brute-force com-
puting power than to any higher
sentience. It’s just basic pattern
0 2 9
ALPHA
POWER-UPS
testing its system in 60 homes on its Brook-
lyn grid and hundreds more in other areas.
“Buy energy and you’re buying from your
CLIVE THOMPSON community,” LO3 founder Lawrence Orsini
POSITIVE ENERGY
tells me. His chipsets can also connect to
smart appliances, so you could save money
by letting his system cycle down your devices
OF CLEAN TECH
to optimize power consumption on the fly,
making local clean energy ever more viable.
But wait, doesn’t blockchain number-
crunching use so much electricity it gener-
ates wasteful heat? It does. So Orsini invented
DareHenry, a rack crammed with six GPUs;
THE MOOD AROUND TECH is dark these days. Social networks are a while it processes math, phase- changing
cesspool of harassment and lies. On-demand firms are producing a goo absorbs the outbound heat and uses it
bleak economy of gig labor. AI learns to be racist. Is there anyplace to warm a house. Blockchain cogeneration,
where the tech news is radiant with old-fashioned optimism? Where people! DareHenry is 4 feet of gorgeous,
good cheer abounds? ¶ Why, yes, there is: clean energy. It is, in effect, Victorianesque steampunk aluminum—so
the new Silicon Valley—filled with giddy, breathtaking ingenuity and lovely you’d want one to show off to guests.
flat-out good news. ¶ This might seem surprising given the climate- Solar and blockchain are only the tip of
change denialism in Washington. But consider, first, residential solar clean tech. Within a few years, we’ll likely
energy. The price of panels has plummeted in the past decade and see the first home fuel-cell systems, which
is projected to drop another 30 percent by 2022. Why? Clever engi- convert natural gas to electricity. Such sys-
neering breakthroughs, like the use of diamond wire to slice silicon tems are “about 80 percent efficient,” mar-
wafers into ever-skinnier slabs, producing higher yields with less vels Garry Golden, a futurist who has studied
raw material. ¶ Manufacturing costs are down. According to US gov- clean energy. (He’s also on LO3’s grid, with
ernment projections, the fastest-growing occupation of the next 10 the rest of his block.)
years will be solar voltaic installer. And you know who switched to The point is, clean energy has a utopian
solar power last year, because it was so cheap? The Kentucky Coal spirit that reminds me of the early days of
Museum. ¶ Tech may have served up Nazis in social media streams, personal computers. The pioneers of the
but, hey, it’s also creating microgrids—a locavore equivalent for the 1970s were crazy hackers, hell-bent on mak-
solar set. One of these efforts is Brooklyn-based LO3 Energy, a com- ing machines cheap enough for the masses.
pany that makes a paperback-sized device and software that lets Everyone thought they were nuts, or small
owners of solar-equipped homes sell energy to their neighbors— potatoes—yet they revolutionized commu-
verifying the transactions using the blockchain, to boot. LO3 is nication. When I look at Orsini’s blockchain-
based energy-trading routers, I see the Altair.
And there are oodles more inventors like him.
Mind you, early Silicon Valley had some-
thing crucial that clean energy now does
not: massive federal government support.
The military bought tons of microchips,
helping to scale up computing. Trump’s
band of climate deniers aren’t likely to be
buyers of first resort for clean energy, but
states can do a lot. California already has,
for instance, by creating quotas for renew-
ables. So even if you can’t afford this stuff
yourself, you should pressure state and local
officials to ramp up their solar energy use. It’ll
give us all a boost of much-needed cheer. �
Write to clive@clivethompson.net.
JAN 2018
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN
FETISH
BIG FOOT
SNOWSHOES HAVE BEEN around for 5,700 years. But this year Boulder,
Colorado–based Crescent Moon has made the world’s first all-foam
version. Velcro bindings keep your shoes strapped to a teardrop-
shaped platform made from two layers of ethylene-vinyl acetate, or
EVA, the same stuff used to fashion flip-flops. The snowshoes might
look low-tech, but the combination of cleats and tire-like treads pro-
vide ample traction, especially on hardpack trails. Not sure you’re the
snowshoeing type? Company cofounder Jake Thamm is confident this
design will change your mind. “I would describe it as a gateway drug,”
he says. So the next time the trails behind your house look impassi-
bly piled with snow, you know what to do. — S T E P H A N I E P E A R S O N
$160
DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN 0 3 3
1
Columbia OutDry
Ex Mogul Jacket
$6 25
JAN 2018
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN
GEARHEAD
SLEET SMARTS
Some days are crushingly cold and sloppy. Bring the
right equipment and you won’t suffer. —DAVID WOLMAN
$160 $55
0 3 5
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN
GEARHEAD
POWDER PLAY
There’s nothing like skiing under dazzling blue skies.
Don’t ruin it by dressing for a blizzard. —DAVID WOLMAN 1
Trew Men’s
Wander Jacket
A simple wind-block-
ing shell is all you
need in epic weather.
The trim cut of this
one means it doesn’t
feel like you are
wearing a tent, and
the lightweight con-
struction makes it
easy to pack or stuff
in a backpack. If wind
and clouds suddenly
appear, no prob:
You’re still protected.
$419
Faction Dictator
2.0
$729
JAN 2018
5
Snowshed
3-Season Helmet
4 Beanie
3 $700
Skiing in sunglasses
isn’t recommended 3
beyond the bunny
hill. Smith Optics’ lat-
est goggles pair up
with the company’s
swappable Chroma-
Pop lenses for differ-
ent conditions. On the
brightest days, snap
in one of the antire-
flective lenses to nix
nasty glare.
$200
0 3 7
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN wired Recommends:
GoPro Hero6 Black
SNOW ANGLES
helps you share them.
$500
JAN 2018
BEFORE GORE-TEX was invented,
there were plenty of materi-
als to protect you from harsh
weather, but they all came with
trade-offs. Waxed cotton was
heavy. Vinyl could drown you
in your own sweat. Seal intes-
tine (gut parka!) was favored by
the Inuit but hardly made sense
for mass production. That said,
Bob Gore wasn’t attempting to
improve outerwear when he
created Gore-Tex. Working in
his father’s Teflon factory in the
late 1960s, he was simply trying
to make more efficient use of the
plastic by stretching it. He acci-
dentally found that yanking Tef-
lon filled it with air pockets. And
not only that: The micropores
that appeared in his “expanded
polytetrafluoroethylene” were
700 times larger than a water
vapor molecule but 20,000 times
smaller than a droplet. Gore rea-
soned that if you made a fabric
out of ePTFE, you could block out
rain while still venting steamy
perspiration—with wind protec-
tion as a bonus. The first Gore-Tex
jacket was manufactured in 1977
by a small Seattle company called
Early Winters and marketed as
“possibly the most versatile piece
of clothing you’ll ever wear.”
Since then, ePTFE has proven
much more versatile than that
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN
and is now found in everything
from space suits to heart patches.
BENCHMARK
It’s certainly better suited to
those modern applications than
seal intestine ever could be.
HUMAN SHIELD
The waterproof material in your favorite jacket—and boots
and ski pants—was born by accident. —JONATHON KEATS
0 3 9
FAIR WARNING
Over the past several decades, not only have forecasters
gotten a lot better at predicting where big storms will hit—
FILE://WEATHER
they can do so a lot sooner. — C a itlin H a rrington
(nautical miles)
400
Forecast error
48 hours out
300
24 hours out
200
100
coast, Berger wrote. Where will at its mysteries, the way he has ever they’re headed next, and
Eric Berger in Clear
it go, and will it go fast enough? Lake Park, outside of
for his small but loyal commu- without those currents,
Houston’s rainfall totals over the Houston. nity of readers for years, but the European model’s
BRENT HUMPHREYS 0 4 1
FILE://WEATHER
forecast of a stall made a lot of for the thousands of people who delayed. A man named Petey morning, you’ll have to cancel.
sense. Given the sum of the evi- ended up stranded in their cars, James pointed out that Satur- The following morning, Fri-
dence before him, Berger felt schools, and workplaces over- day night was the night of the day, August 25, it started to rain,
confident in one fearsome predic- night. Berger despises alarmism big fight between Floyd May- a few drops at first, and then
tion, and he wrote as much: Big- in all its forms. He also didn’t weather and Conor McGregor, a fairly steady shower. Har-
time floods are coming to Texas. want to bear responsibility for and he wanted to know whether vey’s leading edge had come
It was, at its essence, an children drowning in their attics. he should risk going to the local to town, and the models, con-
informed gut call, and Berger Berger’s wife, Amanda, was
thought carefully about what he getting their own two daugh-
would write next. He had made ters ready for bed in their
his reputation, such as it was League City apartment, tem-
for a leisure-time meteorolo- porary accommodations while
gist with a city-specific weather the family builds their dream
blog, by refusing to submit to home in nearby Clear Creek. His
the hysterical frenzies that com- dog, Bonnie, a Maltese-poodle
petent weather observers dis- cross who dislikes all men but
miss as “storm porn.” He is by him, kept her usual vigilant
nature a fairly skeptical person. watch. Berger can be painfully
His twin passions, space and the shy. Now he felt possessed by
weather, share long histories an unusual authority, exercised
of broken promises and unmet remotely through the digitally
expectations. His site’s motto is transmitted written word. He
“Hype-free forecasts for greater took another sip of his wine and
Houston,” mindful of the cha- returned to his keyboard.
otic and ultimately unnecessary Certainly the Corpus Christi
evacuations prompted by Hurri- area and points immediately
cane Rita in 2005. I am not going north and west of there will get
to sugar-coat this, my friends, too much rain, he wrote. Flood-
he had written in advance of ing will spread to other parts of
that storm. As a Houston resi- Texas too, quite possibly Hous-
dent and property owner, I am ton. But right now we can’t say
truly mortified right now. Rita that for certain. As I’ve said, it’s
and Berger had both missed. either going to be pretty bad, or
But underplaying weather of really really bad here.
dire consequences could lead He posted his piece. His site
to a different kind of calamity normally averaged somewhere
for his readers. James Spann, between 5,000 and 10,000 views
Alabama’s longtime weather a day. That particular entry
forecaster of choice, had infa- received 207,334 over the next
mously botched that state’s ice 24 hours. A shocked Berger
storms of January 2014. Spann surmised that his core read-
had predicted a “dusting” of ers were recommending him
snow, and unworried commut- to their suddenly weather-con-
ers headed out on the roads; cerned friends. He had become
when that dusting turned out the center of a kind of storm
to be a thick layer of ice, Spann within the storm. Millions turned to Berg-
er’s Space City Weather
shouldered much of the blame In the comments, one reader blog during the storm.
asked what Berger thought the
rainfall totals might be in San
Antonio, 200 miles to the west. bar or pay to watch it at home. stantly updated, began to align:
Someone else asked about Colo- A woman named Deb Walters Harvey was nearly laser-precise
rado County, and another about asked whether she should still in its construction and massive,
Chris Jones the neighborhoods near Elling- have the party she had planned and it was also a slow mover. The
is a longtime maga- ton Field. Another reader won- to host near Dacus on Saturday rain was going to be measured
zine writer. He also
dered whether her husband’s afternoon. I’d press ahead at this in feet, not inches. Berger sat
wrote about the
International Space flight out of Hobby Airport on point, Berger wrote to her. Obvi- down at his desk, no wine this
Station on page 22. Saturday morning might be ously if things turn ugly Saturday time, and wrote another post.
JAN 2018
Somehow
FORECASTING
the warnings
sounded
different
“A very serious flooding situa- seen former swamps turned government is low, convincing
coming from
tion is coming,” he wrote. into sprawling, unregulated people to heed your warnings, him.
He wrote it two more times developments. Houston has especially the most severe of
for emphasis. been built to flood. them, might now be the weather
“A very serious flooding situ- Dan Reilly, 52, is the local forecaster’s harder task. The
ation is coming. Warning Coordination Mete- most serious warning when it
A very serious flooding situ- orologist, part of the National comes to rain is called a Flash
ation is coming.” Weather Service’s round-the- Flood Emergency, and before
It was 3:15 pm. He hoped Deb clock professional staff. In a Harvey, the Houston office had Allison came to town. Berger
Walters had canceled her party. catastrophe-prone city like issued that warning on only is from Michigan but had gone
his, the job is twofold. The first three occasions. It would soon to the University of Texas to
is the forecast. “When some- be used for a fourth. earn his astronomy degree. He
thing bad is coming, that’s really Berger, sitting behind his Spar- moved to Houston for a girl,
SINCE 1980, THERE when we need to be at the top of tan desk that afternoon, anxi- first working weekends at
have been more than 200 our game,” he says. Of the three ety beginning to weigh on him the Houston Chronicle before
weather and climate events most damaging effects of hurri- like heat, was first among those becoming the paper’s desig-
in the United States that have canes—wind, storm surge, and who might listen—and to whom nated “SciGuy,” writing mostly
each caused more than $1 bil- rain—rain is one of the most dif- others might listen about the about physics, chemistry, and
lion in damage. Three principal ficult to quantify in advance. coming storm. He wasn’t the astronomy. He also wrote a lit-
national bodies are charged with The heaviest rain typically falls government; he was a human tle about the weather.
predicting their arrivals and in small pockets, and that level being, and somehow the warn- He had just bought his first
effects. The Storm Prediction of precision is difficult to attain ings sounded different to their house near White Oak Bayou.
Center in Norman, Oklahoma, more than six to 12 hours ahead ears coming from him, the kind On June 8, a Friday night—what
keeps watch for tornadoes. of its arrival. Houston’s physical of measured voice that shines was it about storms and Fri-
The Weather Prediction Cen- size also makes rain forecasts through in a crisis. After he had day nights?—he went out with
ter in College Park, Maryland, challenging: Each side of the written his ominous flood fore- some friends to see a Bob Schnei-
monitors heavy rains. And the I-10, for instance—one of several cast three times, he looked out his der concert. Allison had passed
National Hurricane Center in highways that serve as bound- office window at one of the two through Houston once already,
Miami minds hurricanes. They aries in an otherwise endless garages he keeps. One of them but now it returned to take a
have been busy. city—might receive a substan- was bursting with new things second run at the city. Berger
In the case of Harvey, all three tially different amount. for his new house, and he began remembers that the sound of
were involved, funneling their A good meteorologist is ferrying boxes upstairs to his the rain on the roof drowned
best information to the Hous- almost always, by definition, office, filling the space in front out Schneider, as though there
ton branch of the National skilled at pattern recogni- of his desk with new light fix- was too much percussion in the
Weather Service, one of its 122 tion. Weather, like the law, is tures, a microwave, and a tub. In mix. After the concert, he and his
field offices across the coun- built on a foundation of sim- between trips, he heard Amanda friends left to wander around
try. Each helps turn national ilar cases. Veteran meteorol- making arrangements to take midtown, gawking at the water
forecasts into finely tuned ogists—Reilly has been in the shelter, with their daughters, at rising on the empty streets.
local ones. The Houston office job for 24 years—mine their her sister’s house, built on pilings Berger wrote about the storm.
is the only one that shares space memories for analogues. In the and tucked away from the wind. One of his stories, about the
with its home county’s Office of early hours of Harvey, Reilly’s Berger would stay. He would drowning deaths of tens of
Emergency Management—Gal- team began upping the National hunker down behind his wall thousands of research animals
veston County in its case—bet- Weather Service’s rain fore- of boxes with his PC and his in the basement of the Texas
ter to coordinate their shared cast to amounts that no one readers, now numbering in Medical Center, drew massive
response. It is no accident that had ever seen: 25 inches, 30, the hundreds of thousands, for national readership. He began
their building sits atop a mound and eventually 50, over a wide- the duration of the storm. He having visions—he saw a place
and that their offices are on spread swath of Houston. Reilly knew that his city was in seri- for thoughtful written analysis
the upper floor. Over the past set aside everything he knew ous trouble, and he felt an almost of the weather online. His dis-
few decades, greater Houston about the weather and decided spiritual need to convince his cussions could be more timely
has grown exponentially from to obey the combination of awe neighbors that it was time for and interactive than the fore-
a mosquito- plagued oil port and dread he felt in his chest: them to share his fears. casts printed in the paper itself.
into the fifth-largest metro area A killing flood was on its way. And unlike TV meteorologists,
in the United States, home to The next part of the job, and he needn’t worry about ratings
nearly 7 million people. That perhaps the more important one, or being available to viewers
population explosion, combined is getting the word out. At a time THE WEATHER STARTED only at certain designated times.
with a certain regional antipa- when the weather can be more making an impression on Berger In June 2005, he started his
thy toward civic oversight, has extreme than ever, and trust in in 2001, when Tropical Storm own blog on the Chronicle’s site.
0 4 3
FILE://WEATHER
He didn’t yet have any meteoro- tion, which on radar resembled At 12:03 pm on Sunday, Berger
logical training; he was just some- the longest tentacles of an angry finished writing a post that
one who liked talking about the squid, opened up over Houston, he titled: “Houston, We Will ON TUESDAY EVENING,
weather. (His colleagues called slowly crossing the city from Get Through This.” more than four days after the
him “Weather Boy.” It was not a west to east. As predicted by the With the prospect of more rain first started to fall, Berger
compliment.) Three months later European model, it stalled. Addi- rain, you may feel hopeless would finally write: It’s over.
came Katrina. Then came Rita. tional bands trailing behind it or helpless, or both. From a He had been nearly perfect
And three years later, Hurricane intensified and merged with the mental health standpoint, the in his forecast. It hadn’t been
Ike. Berger’s life could seem gov- first. This created what meteo- uncertainty this brings adds a all that windy, so there weren’t
erned by storms; even his first rologists properly call a seeth- considerable amount of stress many roofs blown off or trees
meeting with Amanda, whom he ing nexus of hate, Berger later to an already stressful situa- toppled, except in those few
married in 2002, came only a few wrote. The now-combined band
weeks after Allison’s transfor- extended more than 400 miles
mative rains. He convinced the over Galveston and deep into the
newspaper to put him through too-warm waters of the Gulf, cre-
a distance learning program at ating a superhighway for rain to
Mississippi State to earn his cer- be delivered directly to Houston.
tification as a professional mete- By very early Sunday morning,
orologist. Modern technology Harvey’s enormous size began to
and information dissemination tell, and another band prepared
have led to a democratization of to make its assault on the already
weather forecasting, and that flooded southern suburbs. The
could mean compounding disas- Houston branch of the NWS had
ter in the wrong hands. Berger issued its special emergency bul-
wanted to make sure his hands letin, and in the adjacent Office
were the right ones. of Emergency Management, the
When he left the Chronicle walls were being papered with
to join Ars Technica in Octo- calls for water rescues. People
ber of 2015, he started Space were drowning in the rain.
City Weather. The day after he A sleepless Berger sat down
opened up shop, the remnants of at his desk and began writing
Hurricane Patricia began cloud- a new post. Amanda and their
ing the skies of Houston. He was daughters had been at her sister’s
supposed to go out for dinner house for several hours, and she
with Amanda. He worried his texted him to ask if he thought
readers would feel he’d aban- the latest band would be the
doned them in a time of need, end of it. He inserted the scene
and he couldn’t help writing a into his piece, which went up
post. His first forecast on Space at 2:10 am on Sunday morning.
City Weather was for a flood. I wanted nothing more than to
Now in August 2017, the rains fall in her arms and tell her yes,
on Harvey’s opening night this was it. By God, yes. Let’s go
shocked even him. They were to bed and forget this ever hap-
biblical. Rain falling at a rate pened. It had to be it, surely.
of 2 inches an hour would force It would not be it. Harvey
most drivers to pull over. Har- would make true Berger’s most
vey would sometimes drop 5. It pessimistic projections and tion. I wish we could tell you cursed places that were also
didn’t look like water; it looked refuse to leave. He would tell when the rains will end, but visited by tornadoes. And there
like milk. Worse, Berger studied his readers that the rain would we can’t. Here’s one thing we wasn’t much local storm surge.
the models and the satellite imag- continue, especially at night. He are sure of, however. The rains The water didn’t come rush-
ery, and if he knew anything in would later hear that adminis- will end. After that the sun will ing through Houston. It didn’t
that moment, listening to the rain trators at the Houston Method- come out. arrive in walls the way it did in
against his window, he knew that ist Hospital and Baylor College More than a million people New Orleans with Katrina, one
there was so much more to come. of Medicine were among those would visit Space City Weather of the reasons Harvey directly
On Saturday, August 26, looking to him for guidance. He on Sunday alone. Hurricane killed 68 people, many in their
an hour after sunset, the eve- would harbor a guilt for deliver- Harvey already had a name. cars, instead of an estimated
ning’s first band of precipita- ing bad news for so many. Now it had its face. 1,833 people, many in their beds.
JAN 2018
At 12:03 pm
FORECASTING
on Sunday,
Berger finished
writing a post
Harvey was a cataclysmic rain ton’s swamps and reservoirs and floor and its bottom fell out. A titled: “Houston,
event, just as Berger had feared. drainage canals filled up, which book titled From Dawn to Deca- We Will Get
He could have been wrong and meant that the city’s kitchens dence by Jacques Barzun dropped
his readers would have moved and living rooms and dens filled into the water and disappeared.
Through This.”
their furniture back downstairs up next. Then the water drained Berger had treasured that book,
and grumbled about the wasted away. In the time in between it a massive 500-year history of
effort. But he had been right, and made an estimated $75 billion Western civilization. Its French-
thousands of his readers didn’t in property irreparably wet. born author had died in Texas in
have a downstairs anymore. He headed south toward Dick- 2012. Barzun was 104 years old, on their communities. The NWS
A month after the storm, inson, one of the worst-hit areas. and the book had been his life’s can offer its best daily guess,
Berger dropped into his Hyun- On some streets, every house work. Something about losing informed by their forecasters’
had an enormous pile of debris that particular book hit Berger computer models and profes-
out front—everything that had harder than it might have. It was sional experiences. It can give
been inside the house was now a metaphor for how easily even warnings and sound alarms.
outside of it, rotting in the sun. our monuments can be erased. But the NWS can’t talk about
Other streets had been picked He had written about the loss the weather the way human
clean, and they looked almost of that book and other things in beings talk about the weather.
normal, except that through their a post that went up on Ars Tech- It can’t explore each of its uncer-
windows, Berger could see that nica early in the morning on tainties, almost reveling in the
the otherwise pristine-seeming August 30, the Wednesday after sweeping possibilities of hurri-
houses had been stripped down the storm. The post was titled canes and their animal behav-
to the studs. “This Is Probably the Worst US iors. It can’t riff.
There was a photograph that Flood Storm Ever, and I’ll Never More important, when the
had made the rounds during Be the Same.” The cardboard weather is at its worst: The
the storm. It was of the flood- box had failed, he wrote, and National Weather Service can’t
soaked residents of a nursing the book had dropped into the comfort. Even though Dan Reilly
home, sitting on their loungers murk. Almost immediately, a and his colleagues live and work
and walkers, water up to their current from the rushing water in greater Houston, even though
chests. It seemed like a maca- beyond the garage door pulled they were plenty concerned
bre piece of surrealist art. On the tome away, forever. Damn, during Harvey for their own
his tour, Berger decided to visit I loved that book. An indescrib- families and homes, they can’t
that nursing home, La Vita Bella. ably bad night had just gotten issue a bulletin that says, We’re
Nearly everything that wasn’t that little bit worse. sick and tired of the rain, just like
human in that photograph was Berger started receiving everyone else. They can’t write:
now sitting out in the yard. The emails and notes from his grate- The rains will end. After that the
lamps, the chairs, and the pop- ful readers. They had saved some sun will come out.
corn machine from that haunt- of their own treasures because of Only someone like Eric Berger
ing image melted in the piles of his warnings, and they felt they can do that, providing a weather
sodden sheetrock and carpet, had a debt to settle. A copy of forecast that includes words like
relics of a viral infamy. They From Dawn to Decadence was hope or sorry or maybe. Only
were joined by smaller but per- eventually put into his hands by someone like Eric Berger can
Harvey’s unrelenting
rain left so much haps more significant losses: a a stranger, a woman who had employ our best technology in
underwater—like these stuffed animal, a deck of play- attended a talk he had over- a way that still feels intimate
orchards in Pecan Grove.
ing cards, a broken mirror, a lip- come his nerves to give after and human-scale, applying the
stick and a rouge, a large-print the storm. That book now sits wisdom of satellites to Deb Wal-
copy of Marley & Me. high and dry on a shelf in his ters and her doomed party. Only
dai hybrid and went for a drive. Berger had also lost a book in office, a tiny reminder of the someone like Eric Berger, look-
He wanted to see the terrible the flood. Before dawn on Sunday, things that Harvey had taken, ing out his window at the rain
reality that had accompanied lightning had lit up the sky, and he but also a reminder of the things and willing for it to stop even
his forecasts, as though he could could see that water had reached it had delivered. though he knows that it won’t
use the reminder that Harvey his garages. He had mostly emp- The National Weather Ser- be stopping anytime soon, can
really did do what it did, to Hous- tied one but not the other—not vice is part of a necessary and speak to a family watching the
ton and to him. By then the last the one that contained his old effective meteorological bureau- water on its torturous rise to
part of weather analysis, the things, his diplomas and his cracy. It is staffed by thousands their door, the winds threat-
accounting of the aftermath, was Appetite for Destruction poster of people—by good and compe- ening the entirety of their lives,
nearly complete. It had rained and his boxes of books. He raced tent forecasters who care deeply and make them feel a little less
so hard for so long that Hous- down and lifted up a box from the about the weather and its effects alone in the storm. �
0 4 5
FE ATURES | 26.01
Cristina Daura 0 4 7
YOU
ARE
A
NUMBER
B y MARA HVISTENDAHL P h o t o g r a p h s b y D a n W i n t e r s
0 4 8
AMERICA
INVENTED THE
THREE-DIGIT
CREDIT SCORE .
NOW COMPANIES
IN CHINA
ARE TAKING
THE IDEA TO
THE EXTREME ,
USING BIG
DATA TO TRACK
AND RANK
WHAT YOU
DO—YOUR
PURCHASES ,
YOUR PASTIMES,
YOUR MISTAKES .
SOON
THE
GOVERNMENT
WILL
JOIN
IN.
ENTER
THE AGE OF
SOCIAL
CREDIT.
2015, when Lazarus Liu moved home to
China after studying logistics in the
United Kingdom for three years, he
quickly noticed that something had
changed: Everyone paid for everything
with their phones. At McDonald’s, the
convenience store, even at mom-and-pop
restaurants, his friends in Shanghai
used mobile payments. Cash, Liu could
see, had been largely replaced by two
smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat
Pay. One day, at a vegetable market,
he watched a woman his mother’s age
pull out her phone to pay for her gro-
ceries. He decided to sign up.¶ To get
an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell
phone number and scan his national ID
card. He did so reflexively. Alipay had
built a reputation for reliability,
and compared to going to a bank man-
aged with slothlike indifference and
zero attention to customer service,
signing up for Alipay was almost fun.
With just a few clicks he was in. Ali-
pay’s slogan summed up the experience:
“Trust makes it simple.”
Illustrations by James Graham
Alipay turned out to be so convenient that
Liu began using it multiple times a day, start-
ing first thing in the morning, when he ordered
breakfast through a food delivery app. He real-
ized that he could pay for parking through Ali-
pay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s
license and license plate numbers, as well as
the engine number of his Audi. He started
making his car insurance payments with the
app. He booked doctors’ appointments there,
skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese IN 1956 AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER NAMED BILL
hospitals are famous. He added friends in F A I R and a mathematician named Earl Isaac
Alipay’s built-in social network. When Liu started a small tech company out of a San Fran-
went on vacation with his fiancée (now his cisco apartment. They named it Fair, Isaac and
wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants
and bought trinkets with Alipay. He stored
Co., but the business eventually came to be
known, for short, as FICO. Their chief inno-
ON THE
whatever money was left over, which wasn’t vation was using computer-driven statistical SCREEN WAS
much once the vacation and car were paid analysis to translate people’s personal details
for, in an Alipay money market account. He and financial history into a simple score, pre- A BUTTON
could have paid his electricity, gas, and inter- dicting how likely they were to pay back loans.
net bills in Alipay’s City Service section. Like Before FICO, credit bureaus relied in part on THAT READ,
many young Chinese who had become enam- gossip culled from people’s landlords, neigh-
ored of the mobile payment services offered bors, and local grocers. Applicants’ race could be “START MY
by Alipay and WeChat, Liu stopped bringing counted against them, as could messiness, poor
his wallet when he left the house. morals, and “effeminate gestures.” Algorith-
CREDIT
If you live in the United States, you are by
now accustomed to relinquishing your data
mic scoring, Fair and Isaac argued, was a more
equitable, scientific alternative to this unfair
J O U R N E Y. ”
to corporations. Credit card companies know reality. FICO’s approach eventually caught on LIU
when you run up bar tabs or buy sex toys. Face- among the credit bureaus—TransUnion, Expe-
book knows if you like Tasty cooking videos or rian, and Equifax—and in 1989 FICO introduced TAPPED.
Breitbart News. Uber knows where you go and the credit score we know today, enabling mil-
how you behave en route. But Alipay knows lions of Americans to take out mortgages and
all of these things about its users and more. rack up credit card bills.
Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the During the past 30 years, by contrast, China
massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is some- has grown to become the world’s second largest
times called a super app. Its main competitor, economy without much of a functioning credit
WeChat, belongs to the social and gaming giant system at all. The People’s Bank of China, the
Tencent. Alipay and WeChat are less like indi- country’s central banking regulator, maintains
vidual apps than entire ecosystems. Whenever records on millions of consumers, but they
Liu opened Alipay on his phone, he saw a neat often contain little or no information. Until
grid of icons that vaguely resembled the home recently, it was difficult to get a credit card
screen on his Samsung. Some of the icons were with any bank other than your own. Consum-
themselves full-blown third-party apps. If he ers mainly used cash. As housing prices spiked,
wanted to, he could access Airbnb, Uber, or this became increasingly untenable. “Now you
Uber’s Chinese rival Didi, entirely from inside need two suitcases to buy a house, not just one,”
Alipay. It was as if Amazon had swallowed eBay, says Zennon Kapron, who heads the financial
Apple News, Groupon, American Express, Citi- tech consultancy Kapronasia. Still, efforts to
bank, and YouTube—and could siphon up data establish a reliable credit system foundered
STYLING BY NICOLE SCHNEIDER; ON SET STYLING BY CRISTINA FACUNDO
THE BAD
tech company began the process of creating a without the user’s prior consent.”
score that would be “credit for everything in Ant Financial did state, however, in a 2015 press
your life,” as You explains it.
Ant Financial wasn’t the only entity keen on
PEOPLE IN release that the company plans “to help build a
social integrity system.” And the company has
using data to measure people’s worth. Coinci- SOCIETY already cooperated with the Chinese govern-
dentally or not, in 2014 the Chinese government ment in one important way: It has integrated
announced it was developing what it called DON’T HAVE a blacklist of more than 6 million people who
a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s
Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly A PLACE TO database. According to Xinhua, the state news
called for the establishment of a nationwide agency, this union of big tech and big government
tracking system to rate the reputations of indi- GO.” has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million
viduals, businesses, and even government offi- defaulters, who opened their Zhima Credit one
cials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be day to find their scores plunging.
trailed by a file compiling data from public and The State Council has signaled that under
private sources by 2020, and for those files to the national social credit system people will
be searchable by fingerprints and other biomet- be penalized for the crime of spreading online
ric characteristics. The State Council calls it a rumors, among other offenses, and that those
“credit system that covers the whole society.” deemed “seriously untrustworthy” can expect
For the Chinese Communist Party, social to receive substandard services. Ant Financial
credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible appears to be aiming for a society divided along
authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people moral lines as well. As Lucy Peng, the compa-
toward behaviors ranging from energy con- ny’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in
servation to obedience to the Party. Samantha Ant Financial, Zhima Credit “will ensure that
Hoffman, a consultant with the International the bad people in society don’t have a place
Institute for Strategic Studies in London who to go, while good people can move freely and
is researching social credit, says that the gov- without obstruction.”
ernment wants to preempt instability that
might threaten the Party. “That’s why social
credit ideally requires both coercive aspects
and nicer aspects, like providing social ser-
vices and solving real problems. It’s all under
the same Orwellian umbrella.”
In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech
companies granted approval from the Peo-
ple’s Bank of China to develop their own pri-
vate credit scoring platforms. Zhima Credit
appeared in the Alipay app shortly after that. I LIVED IN CHINA FOR THE BETTER PART OF A
The service tracks your behavior on the app decade but left in 2014, before mobile pay-
to arrive at a score between 350 and 950, and ments had fully taken hold. Today $5.5 tril-
offers perks and rewards to those with good lion in mobile payments are made every year
0 5 2
scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not in China. (In contrast, the US mobile payments
only whether you repay your bills but also what market in 2016 was worth roughly $112 bil-
you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores lion.) When I returned for a visit in August, I
was determined to be a part of the new cash- young people hunched over their phones, sip-
less China. So I signed up for Alipay and Zhima ping peach iced teas and green tea Frappucci-
Credit a few hours after emerging bleary-eyed nos. Liu claimed the last open table.
from the plane. Because I lacked a transaction Liu told me that he chose his English name,
history, I immediately faced what felt like an Lazarus, after converting to Catholicism three
embarrassing judgment: a score of 550. years ago, but that his religion was mostly a pri-
On my first day in Shanghai, I opened Zhima vate affair. He saw his Zhima Credit score the
Credit to scan a yellow bike that I found parked same way; it revealed something about him,
at an angle on the sidewalk. China’s bike-sharing but he kept those insights mostly to himself.
culture had, like mobile payments, emerged out He rarely checked his score—it just lurked in
of nowhere, and Shanghai’s streets were littered the background of the Alipay app on his Sam-
with brightly colored bikes, deposited wherever sung—and because it was good, he didn’t have
the riders pleased. A scan of a bike’s QR code to. After starting at 600 out of a possible 950
revealed a four-digit number that unlocked the points, he had reached 722, a score that enti-
back wheel, and a ride across town cost roughly tled him to favorable terms on loans and apart-
15 cents. Because of my middling score, however, ment rentals, as well as showcasing on several
“IF YOUR I had to pay a $30 deposit before I could scan dating apps should he and his wife ever split
my first bike. Nor could I get deposit-free hotel up. With a few dozen more points, he could get
FRIENDS stays or GoPro rentals, or free umbrella rentals. a streamlined visa to Luxembourg, not that he
I belonged to the digital underclass. was planning such a trip.
ARE ALL In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers, As Liu amassed a favorable transaction and
SCORES, Amazon and eBay. I rate others in Airbnb and Uber tion about what it collects on a site called About-
and care a little too much about how others rate TheData.com, has me pegged as a single woman
AND MOST me. There is not yet a great American super app, with a high school education and a “likely Las
and the scores compiled by data brokers are mainly Vegas gambler,” when in fact I’m married, have
OF THEM used to better target ads, not to exert social control. a master’s degree, and have never even bought
But through a process called identity resolution, a lottery ticket. But it is impossible to challenge
ARE HELD BY data aggregators can use the clues I leave behind these assessments, since we’re never told that
to merge my data from various sources. they exist. I know more about Zhima Credit’s algo-
COMPANIES Do you take antidepressants? Frequently return rithm than I do about how US data brokers rate
me. This is, as Pasquale points out in his book The
THAT GIVE clothes to retailers? Write your name in all caps
when filling out online forms? Data brokers collect Black Box Society, essentially a “one-way mirror.”
US NO all of this information and more. As in China, you After I left China, I checked back in with
may even be penalized for who your friends are. Lazarus Liu on WeChat. He sent me a screenshot
CHANCE TO In 2012, Facebook patented a method of credit of his Zhima Credit score, which had increased by
assessment that could consider the credit scores eight points since we met. His screen read “Fan-
OPT OUT. of people in your network. The patent describes tastic,” and the font had shifted to soft italics.
a tool that arrives at an average credit score for We talked about a new facial recognition fea-
ture called Smile to Pay that Ant Financial had
introduced at a concept restaurant in Hangzhou
owned by KFC. The walls of the restaurant were
adorned with gigantic white phones. To order,
you simply tapped a picture of what you wanted
and then showed the phone your face, typing in
your cell phone number to confirm payment.
First smartphones had eliminated the need for
a wallet; now Smile to Pay eliminated the need
for a phone. All you needed was your face.
Liu wasn’t eager to try Smile to Pay. The “gov-
ernment affairs” page on Zhima Credit’s website
suggests that Ant Financial partners with local
governments throughout China to use its facial
recognition capabilities, but that wasn’t what
made Liu uneasy. While studying abroad, he had
played around with Android’s Face Unlock fea-
ture. His roommate, who shared his square jaw,
had been able to unlock his phone a few times.
“I feel that it could be unsafe,” he messaged me.
“I would want to see that it’s the real thing.”
He wrote real thing in English, for emphasis.
While chatting with Liu, I, too, had opened
up Zhima Credit. My score had increased by
four points. “You still have room to improve,”
0 5 9
the app informed me delicately. But next to my
new score, 554, was a small green arrow. I was
on my way up. �
6 0
N O L O N G E R S AT I S F I E D W I T H C R U D E R O A D S I D E B O M B S , I S I S I S D O I N G S O M E T H I N G U N P R E C E D E N T E D F O R
A J I H A D I S T G R O U P : D E S I G N I N G A N D M A S S - P R O D U C I N G I T S O W N A D VA N C E D M U N I T I O N S . A N D A S O N E O B S E S S I V E
I N V E S T I G AT O R D I S C O V E R E D , I T S S U P P L Y C H A I N I S R I F E W I T H U N L I K E L Y A N D D I S T U R B I N G S O U R C E S .
by Brian Castner
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CALLIGRAPHY BY
At Iraqi military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, weapons inspector Damien Spleeters (left)
and his coworker, Haider al-Hakim, look through crates of ISIS ammunition. Previous page: a PG-7 grenade
launcher, one of thousands of weapons that Spleeters has tracked down.
hipster barista, not an investigator who has during my tours were largely hidden in the charge for mortars and rocket warheads:
spent the past three years tracking down ground or deployed as massive car bombs, Spleeters discovered the same buckets, from
rocket-propelled grenades in Syria, AK-47- detonated in marketplaces and schools so the same manufacturers and chemical dis-
style rifles in Mali, and hundreds of other that the gutters filled with blood. But the tributors, in Fallujah, Tikrit, and Mosul. “I
weapons that have found their way into war majority of those devices were crude, held like to see the same stuff” in different cit-
zones, sometimes in violation of interna- together with duct tape and goopy solder. ies, he tells me, since these repeat sightings
tional arms agreements. The work Spleet- The few rockets and mortars the fighters allow him to identify and describe different
ers does is typically undertaken by secretive possessed were old and shoddy, lacked the steps in ISIS’ supply chain. “It confirms my
government offices, such as the US Defense correct fuzes, and often failed to detonate. theory that this is the industrial revolution
Intelligence Agency’s Military Material Iden- Many of ISIS’ leaders were veterans of of terrorism,” he says. “And for that they
that insurgency, but as they began ramping need raw material in industrial quantities.”
up their war against the Iraqi government Spleeters is also constantly searching for
in 2014, they knew they needed more than new weapons that show how ISIS engineers’
IEDs and AK-47s to seize territory and create expertise is evolving, and with this trip to Tal
their independent Islamic State. A conven- Afar he has set his sights on one promising
tional war required conventional arms— new lead: a series of modified rockets that
mortars, rockets, grenades—which, as an had appeared in ISIS propaganda videos on
international pariah, ISIS could not buy in YouTube and other social media.
sufficient quantities. Some they looted from Spleeters suspected that the tubes, trigger
the Iraqi or Syrian governments, but when mechanisms, and fins of the new rockets were
those ran out they did something that no all the work of ISIS engineers, but he thought
terrorist group has ever done before and the warheads likely came from somewhere
that they continue to do today: design their else. After discovering similar weapons over
own munitions and mass-produce them the past six months, he has grown to believe
using advanced manufacturing techniques. that ISIS may have captured the warheads
Iraq’s oil fields provided the industrial base— from antigovernment militias in the Syrian
tool-and-die sets, high-end saws, injection- civil war that had been secretly armed by
molding machines—and skilled workers who Saudi Arabia and the United States.
knew how to quickly fashion intricate parts But he needs more evidence to prove it. If
to spec. Raw materials came from cannibal- he can find more launchers and more war-
3
izing steel pipe and melting down scrap. ISIS heads, Spleeters believes he can build up
6
engineers forged new fuzes, new rockets and enough proof—for the first time—that ISIS
launchers, and new bomblets to be dropped is repurposing powerful explosive ordnance,
by drones, all assembled using instruction purchased by the US, for use in urban combat
plans drawn up by ISIS officials. against the Iraqi army and its American spe-
Since the early days of the conflict, CAR cial operations partners. For ISIS to produce
has conducted 83 site visits in Iraq to collect such sophisticated weapons marks a signif-
weapons data, and Spleeters has participated icant escalation of its ambition and ability.
in nearly every investigation. The result is a It also provides a disturbing glimpse of the
detailed database that lists 1,832 weapons future of warfare, where dark-web file shar-
and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered ing and 3-D printing mean that any group,
in Iraq and Syria. CAR describes it as “the anywhere, could start a homegrown arms
most comprehensive sample of Islamic State– industry of its own.
captured weapons and ammunition to date.”
Which is how, this autumn, Spleeters came
to be hovering over a 5-gallon bucket of alu-
minum paste in a dingy home in Tal Afar,
waiting for his fixer to arrive. Al-Hakim is
bald, well-dressed, and gives off a faint air
of the urban sophisticate, such that at times
he looks a bit out of place in a sewage-filled
ISIS workshop. The two men have an easy Nearly all military munitions—from rifle
tification Division, known as Chuckwagon. rapport, though one in which al-Hakim is cartridges to aircraft bombs, regardless of
But while Chuckwagon is barely discoverable the host and Spleeters always the respect- the country of origin—are engraved and
by Google, Spleeters’ detailed reports for ful guest. Their job is to notice small things; marked in some way. The arcane codes can
CAR are both publicly available online and where others might see trash, they see evi- identify the date of manufacture, the specific
contain more useful information than any dence, which Spleeters then photographs production factory, the type of explosive
classified intelligence I ever received when and scours for obscure factory codes that filler, and the weapon’s name, also known
I was commanding a bomb disposal unit for can give a clue to its origins.
the US military in Iraq in 2006. The aluminum paste in the bucket, for BRIAN CASTNER (@Brian_Castner) is a
In that fight, guerrillas ambushed Amer- example, which ISIS craftsmen mix with writer, former Air Force explosive ordnance
ican soldiers with IEDs. The devices I saw ammonium nitrate to make a potent main disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War.
as the nomenclature. For Spleeters, these These codes are considered proprietary small company with less than 20 researchers;
engravings and markings mean that ord- information by arms manufacturers, so deci- Spleeters’ job title is head of regional oper-
nance is “a document you cannot falsify.” phering their markings is both art and science, ations, but he has no permanent employees.
Pressed stamps on hardened steel are diffi- part train-spotting, part intelligence collec- Globally, much of CAR’s work involves small
cult to change or remove. “If it’s written on tion, part pattern recognition. Officials at CAR arms—rifles and bullets, mostly—and the
it that it comes from this country, 99 per- have been tracking the markings since 2011, group published its first report on ISIS in 2014,
cent chance it is true,” he says. “And if it’s when a group of weapons specialists from when its researchers documented that ammu-
not, you can figure out that it is counterfeit, the United Nations founded the organization nition apparently provided to the Iraqi army
and that means something else. Everything to supplement the work being done by gov- by the US had ended up in the hands of ISIS.
means something.” ernments and NGOs around the world. It’s a Unlike government agencies that conduct
5
kinda weird, you know?” he says. “I was tak- ground across Iraq, Spleeters worried that
6
ing vacation so I could go to Libya.” the group’s weapons infrastructure could be
Spleeters found the rifles he was look- obliterated before he or anyone else would
ing for, and he also discovered that tracking be able to document its full capabilities. He
munitions satisfied him in a way that read- needed access to these factories before they
ing about them online did not. “With weap- were destroyed. Only then could he describe
ons you can tell a whole story,” he told me. their contents, trace their origins, and piece
“It makes people talk. It can make the dead together the supply chains.
talk.” He returned to Belgium as a freelance Then, at the end of August, ISIS quickly
journalist, writing a few stories about weap- lost control of Tal Afar. And unlike other
ons trafficking for French-language newspa- pulverized battlefields, Tal Afar remained
pers and producing reports for think tanks relatively undamaged: Only every fourth
like the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. home was destroyed. To find more evidence
But the freelance life proved too unstable, of covert arms diversions, Spleeters needed
so Spleeters set journalism aside and joined to get to Tal Afar quickly, while he still could.
CAR as a full-time investigator in 2014.
On one of his first trips in his new job, to
Kobani, Syria, he worked among dead ISIS
fighters left to rot where they fell. He found
one AK-47-style rifle with decomposing flesh
jammed in the cracks and crevices of the
wooden handguard. The whole place smelled
sickly sweet. Among the bodies, he also found
are otherwise classified. “We can reference 7.62-mm ammunition, PKM machine guns, In mid-September, Spleeters flew to Bagh-
the CAR reports because they’re all open and PG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, some dad, where he met up with al-Hakim and then,
source, and they never reveal US sources and stolen from the Iraqi army. Such discoveries under the protection of an Iraqi army convoy
methods,” he says. Which in practice means make him an evangelist for the value of field- of gun trucks, drove nine hours north along
that if US officials want to convey the totality work. He says that his data cannot be repli- highways only recently cleared of IEDs. The
of what ISIS forces are up to and they have cated by watching news reports or online final stretch of road to Tal Afar was lonesome
only classified information to make their videos. “With all the social media things, and scorched, cut by underground detona-
point, then there’s only so much they can when you see ordnance or small arms from tions at every culvert, the fields all around
share with the public. But if that informa- afar, you might think, ‘Oh, that’s an M16.’ burned and black.
‹
Spleeters inspects
mortar projectiles
in a building that
ISIS abandoned
when it lost control
SPLEETERS BELIEVES HE CAN BUILD UP ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO PROVE THAT ISIS
of Tal Afar.
IS REPURPOSING EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE PURCHASED BY THE U.S.
Spleeters’ team
found molds for
119.5-mm mortars
in the abandoned
‹
Dark Arsenal
T H E N EW G E N E R AT I O N O F W E A P O N S T H AT I S I S
I S U S I N G TO WAG E WA R .
1
— s a r a s wat i r at h o d
BOMBLETS
In 2017, ISIS ramped up its use of grenadesized
bombs that can be strapped to small hobbyist
drones and dropped on unsuspecting targets. These
“bomblets” are custommade, likely using injection
molding, and they can also be thrown like a hand gre
nade or shot out of the business end of an AK47.
MORTARS AND
MORTAR TUBES
2 ISIS engineers are repurposing steel pipes,
believed to have once been oil pipes, and fashion
ing them into tubes to fire off explosive shells
known as mortars. However, since most existing
mortars are either too big or too small to fit snugly
inside these pipes, ISIS has started making its
own using clay molds. These ISISdesigned shells
are exactly 119.5 mm in diameter—a perfect fit for
the ISISdesigned mortar tubes.
simple, design, though the ingenuity of this a citywide electrical outage means Spleet- dles. Unfired ordnance is fairly safe, as long
device actually lies in its interchangeability. ers can’t examine or photograph this jack- as you don’t drop it on its nose, but disassem-
The standard ISIS fuze will trigger all of their pot without natural light. Our convoy soon bled munitions are unpredictable, and the
rockets, mortars, and bomblets—a signif- returns to the Iraqi army base near the city’s lab could have been booby-trapped besides.
icant engineering problem solved. For the devastated airport. It’s a small post of sal- But Spleeters isn’t alarmed. He’s frustrated.
sake of security and reliability, the US and vaged single-wide trailers with holes in half “Habibi,” he says, “I really need them to
most other countries design specific fuzes the roofs; two detained fighters, thought stop touching and taking stuff away. It’s
for each type of ordnance. But the ISIS fuzes to be ISIS—a young teenager and an older important that it’s together, because it makes
3 3
ISIS-MODIFIED
ROCKETS
Rocketpropelled grenades like PG7s and PG9s
have long been used by militaries around the world,
but ISIS engineers take these weapons apart and
reuse the diamondshaped warheads to weaponize
their own line of customized rockets. The new muni
tions come in three different types that vary in range
from a few hundred feet to nearly half a mile, accord
ing to Spleeters. They’re tricked out with new propel
lant charges and stabilizing fins that can be folded
down so the rockets can be launched from a tube.
ISIS-DESIGNED
ROCKETS
4
ISIS’ network of munitions factories have produced
two main types of rockets: a smaller rocket about
2.5 feet in length and a longer one measuring almost
6 feet. These products are made from scratch using
a combination of steel, plastic, and aluminum, and to
ensure they’re compatible with the other elements
of the ISIS arsenal, each one adheres to a standard
weight and diameter.
Spleeters exclaims to al-Hakim. It is a Roma- Romanian government confirmed this sale by technicians separated the stolen warheads
nian rocket marked with lot number 12-14-451; providing CAR with the end-user certificate from the original rocket motors before add-
Spleeters has spent the past year tracking this and delivery verification document. ing new features that made them better
very serial number. In October 2014, Romania In 2016, however, Spleeters came across suited for urban combat. (Rocket-propelled
sold 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades, known a video made by ISIS that showed a crate grenades can’t be fired inside buildings,
as PG-9s, with lot number 12-14-451 to the US of PG-9s, with what appeared to be the lot because of the dangerous back-blast. By
military. When it purchased the weapons, the number 12-14-451, captured from members attaching ballast to the rocket, ISIS engi-
US signed an end-use certificate, a document of Jaysh Suriyah al-Jadid, a Syrian militia. neers crafted a weapon that could be used
stating that the munitions would be used by Somehow, PG-9s from this very same ship- in house-to-house fighting.)
US forces and not sold to anyone else. The ment made their way to Iraq, where ISIS So how exactly did American weapons
Because so much of the ordnance Spleeters found in this Tal Afar factory was largely intact,
he believes the extremists didn’t bother to destroy evidence before they fled.
end up with ISIS? Spleeters can’t yet say for
sure. According to a July 19, 2017, report in
Heavy Traffic
The Washington Post, the US government
secretly trained and armed Syrian rebels from
2013 until mid-2017, at which point the Trump
administration discontinued the program—in
part over fears that US weapons were ending W E A P O N S F RO M A L L OV E R T H E WO R L D M A K E T H E I R
up in the wrong hands. The US government did WAY TO I S I S F O RC E S I N SY R I A A N D I R AQ. H E R E’S W H E R E
not reply to multiple requests for comment on T H EY C O M E F RO M . — s . r .
how these weapons wound up in the hands of
C
E
B A
1
7
D
Turkey > Syria > Iraq China > South Sudan > Syria
On numerous occasions, Conflict Arma Chinesemanufactured rifles popular
ment Research (CAR) has discovered among rebels in South Sudan were recov
Turkish weapons, ammunition, and explo ered from ISIS during the siege of Kobani, C
A sive materials among ISIS forces in Iraq Syria, which began in September 2014 and
and Syria. The organization also believes ended in January 2015.
that most of the chemicals that ISIS uses
to make explosives are purchased on the Belgium > Libya > Syria
civilian market in Turkey. Belgianmanufactured ammunition that
was originally sold to Gadhafi’s Libya in D
the 1980s has reemerged decades later
Bulgaria > Serbia > Burundi > Iraq in ISIS strongholds.
Iraqi authorities recovered Bulgarianmade
Syrian rebels or in an ISIS munitions factory. rockets from ISIS forces on two separate Romania > US > Iraq
The government also declined to comment on occasions. Both appeared to be part of a CAR has tracked numerous shipments of
shipment that passed through Serbia and Romanian rockets that were sold to the
whether the US violated the terms of its end- B Burundi before arriving in Iraq. (Bulgarian US and later recovered from ISIS forces. E
weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia have (Spleeters says CAR is not sure whether
user certificate and, by extension, failed to these shipments were ever physically
also been smuggled into Syria, most likely
comply with the United Nations Arms Trade through Jordan.) delivered to the US or if they were sent
directly elsewhere.)
Treaty, of which it is one of 130 signatories.
Other countries seem to be purchasing
and diverting arms as well. CAR has tracked
I L L U S T R AT I O N
multiple weapons that were bought by Saudi
Arabia and later recovered from ISIS fighters. Story TK
In one instance, Spleeters checked the flight igan Tech University, is an expert in open whole operation is housed in the lower level
records of an aircraft that was supposed to source hardware (a protocol to create and of a three-story, open-roofed market, to vent
be carrying 12 tons of munitions to Saudi improve physical objects—like open source the incredible heat of the smelter. All of Tal
Arabia. The records show the plane didn’t code, but for stuff), and he describes ISIS Afar has been put to industrial use.
stop in Saudi Arabia, but it did land in Jor- manufacturing as “a very twisted maker Spleeters finishes his evidence collection
dan. Due to its border with Syria, Jordan is a culture.” In this future, weapons schemat- quickly. “Is there more?” he asks the Iraqi
well-known transfer point for arms supply- ics can be downloaded from the dark web or army major. “Yes, more,” the major says, and
ing the rebels fighting the Assad regime, and simply shared via popular encrypted social we walk next door, to the next factory. There,
while the Saudis could claim the weapons had media services, like WhatsApp. Those files in a foyer, stands a tall furnace that ISIS sol-
been hijacked or stolen, they don’t: Personnel can then be loaded into 3-D metal printers, diers covered with painted handprints, like
involved with the flight insist the plane and machines that have become widely available
IN A FOYER STANDS A TALL FURNACE THAT ISIS SOLDIERS COVERED WITH
the weapons landed in Saudi Arabia, flight in the past few years and cost as little as a
records notwithstanding. The Saudi govern- million dollars to set up, to produce weap-
ment did not reply to requests for comment ons with the push of the button.
on how its weapons ended up in ISIS’ hands. “It’s a lot easier than people think to prop-
PAINTED HANDPRINTS, LIKE A KINDERGARTEN ART PROJECT.
“It’s war,” Spleeters says. “It’s a fucking agate these weapons through additive man-
mess. Nobody knows what’s going on, and ufacturing,” says August Cole, director of
there’s all these conspiracy theories. We live the Art of Future War Project at the Atlantic
in a post-truth era, where facts don’t matter Council. And the rate at which ISIS’ intellec-
anymore. And with this work, it’s like you tual capital spreads depends on how many
can finally grab onto something that’s true.” young engineers join the ranks of its affili-
ates. According to an analysis by research-
ers at the University of Oxford, at least 48
percent of non-Western jihadist recruits
went to college, and nearly half of those were
engineers. Of the 25 individuals involved in
9/11, at least 13 attended college, and eight
were engineers, including Mohamed Atta
and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the
In Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters are in retreat, principal planners. Mohammed received a
losing ground to government forces and degree in mechanical engineering from North
becoming increasingly constrained in their Carolina A&T State University, and while in
attacks and ambitions. But their intellectual US custody, the Associated Press reported,
capital—their weapon designs, the engi- he received permission to build a vacuum
neering challenges they’ve solved, their cleaner from scratch. Mindless hobbyism,
industrial processes, blueprints, and sche- according to his CIA holders, or the mark
matics—still constitute a major threat. of a maker. The schematics had been down-
“That’s really the scary part, to the extent loaded from the internet.
that the ISIS model proliferates,” says Matt
Schroeder, a senior researcher at the Small
Arms Survey, the Geneva-based think tank
where Spleeters used to contribute. Much
of the international structure that prevents
weapons trafficking is rendered useless if
ISIS can simply upload and share their
designs and manufacturing processes with
affiliates in Africa and Europe, who also have Spleeters has only two days to investigate the
access to money and machinery. munitions factories in Tal Afar, and on our last
Most next-generation terrorism and evening there he is anxious to do as much work
future-of-war scenarios focus on artifi- as he can in the little time he has left. ISIS uses
cial intelligence, drones, and self-driving a distributed manufacturing model—each site
car bombs. But those are, at best, only half specializes in a certain task, like automobile
the story, projecting white-collar Ameri- plants—and he wants to document them all. a kindergarten art project. The hallways are
ca’s fears of all the possible dystopian uses “We only have an hour to see these things,” he lined with clay molds to mass-produce the
of emerging technology. The other, and says, watching the sun make its way toward interior forms of 119.5-mm mortars.
potentially more worrisome, half lies in the the horizon. At the first factory, Spleeters The next compound houses what appears
blue-collar technicians of ISIS. They have finds an enormous smelter, surrounded by raw to have been an R&D lab. Every surface is
already shown they can produce a nation- materials waiting to be boiled down. Engine covered with mortars, old and new, illumi-
state’s worth of weapons, and their manu- blocks, scrap metal, piles of copper wiring. A nation rounds, cut-away models, tables full
facturing process will only become easier vice holds molds for fuzes; next to them are of dissected fuzes, and huge 220-mm mor-
with the growth of 3-D printing. Joshua mortar tail booms—product awaiting ship- tars—the largest ISIS-developed weapons
Pearce, an engineering professor at Mich- ment to the next finishing workshop. The we have seen—plus the massive tube that
fires them, as big around as a telephone pole.
The sun begins to set. Spleeters asks again if
there is more and the major says yes. We have
already been to six facilities in just over 24
3
hours, and I realize that no matter how many
7
times we ask if there is more, the answer will
always be the same.
But night has come, and Spleeters has run
out of time. The other factories will have to
go unexplored, at least until tomorrow. �
The city of Tal Afar once had a population of about 200,000. It’s now virtually
deserted but for the Iraqi army units and Iranian-backed, majority-Shiite militias.
G A ME ON
HIGHLY
PAID
PLAYERS. BY
BILLION-
NATHA N
HIL L
AIRE TEAM
OWNERS.
DEDICATED
FANS. A
MAJOR NEW
LEAGUE
AIMS TO
BRING
VIDEOGAME
COMPETI-
TION INTO
THE MAIN-
STREAM— PHOTOGRAPHS
AND UPEND BY
DAMON
THE CASAREZ
WORLD OF 0 7 5
STEFANO
DISALVO IS A videogame called Overwatch. He’s 18 years old, and he has just
signed his first major professional contract: He’ll get a nice salary,
IF YOU ARE, LIKE ME, OF A GENERATION WHERE VIDEOGAMES WERE NOT A SPECTATOR
sport except for maybe gathering around the arcade to watch someone who’s really good
at Street Fighter, then you could be forgiven for not knowing all of this was going on. The
He has the physical gifts of a profes- phenomenon of esports—people playing against each other in live videogame competi-
sional athlete, the dedication and tions—is still so new that there isn’t even consensus about how to spell it: I’ve seen esports,
drive of a professional athlete, the e-sports, E-sports, and eSports.
monomaniacal schedule of a profes- I should say, actually, that esports are relatively new—that is, new for some of us. But for
sional athlete. He wakes up at 6:30 in the professionals who play, who are almost uniformly between the ages of 17 and 26, it’s
the morning and spends some time something that’s been around for most of their lives and something they take for granted.
reviewing game tape of his own per- When Disalvo was a 16-year-old high school student in Toronto, he already knew he wanted
formance before calisthenics begin to be an esports professional. He knew this mostly through a process of elimination: He had
around 9—jogging, frisbee, soccer— tried every other thing, and none of them felt transcendent or even interesting. He played
followed by practice, seven straight hockey and tennis, he swam. He took all the classes you’re supposed to take, and when people
hours of it, where his team plays asked him what his favorite subject was, he’d say lunchtime. “I was trying to find something
against some of the finest competi- that I loved doing,” Disalvo says. “I honestly didn’t really enjoy anything.”
tion in the world, testing new strat- There was one thing he did enjoy, though, a secret he kept from almost everyone: He loved
egies. Then a team meeting at night playing videogames, and he was extraordinarily good at it. And when he saw players win-
to discuss the day’s mistakes and how ning tournaments for games like League of Legends, he decided that he wanted, more than
to correct them, after which he will anything else, to do that.
spend another few hours practicing A basic problem, though, was that League of Legends already had a well-established
alone or interacting with his fans or and very competitive esports scene, and the path to becoming a pro in that game seemed
studying his rivals or, sometimes, all very narrow. However, in November 2014, Disalvo saw that Blizzard, the company behind
three. Then bedtime, before doing the such massive franchises as Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, was developing a new game.
same thing again tomorrow. It was called Overwatch, and it looked to be a first-person shooter. Knowing that most of
It’s likely you’ve never heard of Blizzard’s games eventually generate big esports scenes, Disalvo decided to switch. “New
Stefano Disalvo. You probably hav- game,” he says. “Everybody’s starting at the same level. It’s not as if I have to catch up to
en’t heard of his team either. You all the other professional players.”
maybe haven’t heard of his sport, and I was surprised to hear this, as I’d assumed that pro gamers began playing a game because
even if you have heard of his sport, they enjoyed it and then gradually became good enough to turn pro. But Disalvo decided
you wouldn’t know him as Stefano to make Overwatch his young life’s work before he’d ever even played it. “I saw the esports
Disalvo—he’s known as “Verbo,” one potential,” he says with a shrug. “I didn’t care if the game was fun.”
of the top players in the world at a He got access to the Overwatch beta and committed himself to mastering the game. He
stopped eating lunch with his friends, using that time to finish homework so he could go
home and play Overwatch for seven hours straight. He didn’t go to parties, he didn’t go out
with friends, he didn’t date, he wasn’t in any way social.
If you’re thinking that Disalvo fits the stereotype of a friendless, socially awkward gamer,
disabuse yourself of that notion. He’s an affable and confident young man who’d been a swim
instructor, a lifeguard, and an excellent hockey player. He has a good sense of humor, and
NATHAN HILL (@nathanreads) is when he laughs, he looks startlingly like James Franco. In other words, if he’d wanted to date,
the author of The Nix. This is his he probably could have. But he didn’t, and his classmates didn’t know what to make of it.
first piece for wired. Playing the beta, and before Overwatch was even officially released in May 2016, Disalvo
began competing in amateur tournaments. He started playing even longer hours, and his
studies suffered. His mother demanded he focus on school, but he announced he was going
to be an esports professional. His mother said no, he was going to college. He said no, he
was skipping college to go pro in Overwatch. Looking back, he’s not sure how that standoff
would have been resolved were it not for a job offer that came two weeks after his mother’s
ultimatum. A professional esports outfit wanted him on its Overwatch team, and it wanted
to move him to Southern California to live and train with his teammates. against other real people who are con-
Armed now with an official contract, Disalvo went back to his mother, and she eventually nected to the internet and seeing and
agreed to let him leave school early, on the condition that he would finish his diploma online. hearing the same things as you. You
Most of his classmates were mildly puzzled by his sudden disappearance. There were rumors can play as any of the 26 heroes, even
about California. Were it not for a yearbook article about his new career, it’s possible that his swapping from one hero to another
classmates would still be asking: Whatever happened to Stefano Disalvo? during the course of the game. Mostly,
the game is played as a series of timed
JEFF KAPLAN, WHO OVERSEES ALL THINGS OVERWATCH AT BLIZZARD, SAYS THAT rounds: The attacking team has four
when developers began work on the game in 2013, they felt the need to create a world wholly minutes to capture certain areas or
apart from the trio of worlds that the company already offered: the high fantasy of War- move a payload (think: the pigskin
craft, the space opera of Starcraft, the gothic horror of Diablo. What would be the most going downfield) while the defending
unexpected, most fantastical place they could take gamers next? team tries to thwart them. Once time’s
The answer, they decided, was Earth. up, attackers and defenders switch
The team ultimately began working roles for the next round. Whichever
on a game that would be Blizzard’s first team captures more areas or moves
entry into the popular first-person- the payload farther wins the game,
shooter genre, and they would set it and if a player is killed in action, they
on Earth, sometime in the not-too- have to wait 10 seconds (sometimes
distant future. more) before rejoining the fight.
But when they began researching The formula—refreshing optimism
other earthbound first-person shoot- plus interesting heroes plus shoot-
ers, they found a surplus of what ’em-up action— was an immediate
Kaplan calls “cynical, borderline post- hit. Overwatch became Blizzard’s
apocalyptic dystopia.” In other words, fastest-growing game ever, a best
morbidly dark, gritty, and depressing. seller that, after a little more than
Lots of blood and gore. Games you’d a year, has 35 million players and
feel a little weird about if you played generates more than a billion dol-
them in front of your kids. lars annually.
This led the team in a different and Nate Nanzer, who was Blizzard’s
sort of radical direction: optimism. global director of research and con-
“We wanted it to be a future worth sumer insights leading up to Over-
fighting for,” Kaplan says. “So it’s a watch’s launch, says the game’s
bright, aspirational future, and when popularity comes, in part, from
conflict happens you have to go out gamers’ love for the heroes, not-
and defend it, because this world is so ing particularly the significance of
awesome we can’t let anybody ruin it. a lineup that “looks like what the
So it really led us to a place of hope.” world looks like,” by which he means
STEFANO DISALVO, BETTER KNOWN
AS VERBO, IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S The basic premise of the game is racially diverse, multinational, and
TOP OVERWATCH PLAYERS. that AI robots, designed to usher in equitably gendered.
an economic golden age for human- The other thing Nanzer noticed
ity, try to take over the world. To respond to the crisis, the United Nations forms Overwatch, early in Overwatch’s development
a team of fighters and adventurers recruited to quash the robot rebellion. The Overwatch cycle was a surge in interest in video-
forces defeat the robots, and then end up battling each other. games as a spectator sport. Esports
These characters—they’re called “heroes” in Overwatch lingo, and there are 26 of them originated largely in South Korea,
as of this writing, though Blizzard tends to update this a lot—are the beating heart of the with the game StarCraft: Brood War,
game. As opposed to many other first-person shooters, where your avatar is just a kind of roughly 20 years ago, and eventually
anonymous good guy or bad guy, the heroes you play in Overwatch have personality. They found its way onto Korean television.
have persuasive origins and very human hopes and fears and complicated relationships Then it jumped to Korean internet
with the other heroes. There’s Mei, for example, a climate scientist who was stranded streaming platforms around 2003,
in her research station in Antarctica and has since become this gallant adventurer who which is when North American gamers
nevertheless still wears these huge, nerdy round glasses and an adorable poofy coat. Or began getting clued in. The popular-
Bastion, an anthropomorphic machine gun who’s friends with a tiny delicate bird that he ity of gaming streams eventually
gently cares for. This game doesn’t just have backstory, it has lore, which is all explicated gave rise to Twitch, a platform that
in animated web movies and comic books that are intended to drive “deep engagement,”
to borrow the language of Blizzard’s quarterly reports.
The game is team-based, six versus six. If you’re playing Overwatch, you are playing with and 0 7 7
mind. The co-owner of the Boston Overwatch franchise, for example, is Robert Kraft, who
also owns the New England Patriots. The owner of the New York franchise is Jeff Wilpon,
COO of the New York Mets. Philadelphia’s Overwatch team is owned by Comcast, which
also owns the Philadelphia Flyers. Blizzard hasn’t made public the cost of a league fran-
launched in 2011 and specializes in chise, but the reports are $20 million, and when I asked Nanzer about that number, he nei-
videogame livestreaming. By 2014, ther confirmed nor denied it, saying: “You know, if you hear the same rumor over and over
when Amazon purchased Twitch for again, you can figure out what that means.” So, OK, $20 million.
almost a billion dollars, the total num- “There’s going to be kids who can say ‘I play professional Overwatch for the same guy
ber of minutes that people spent every that Tom Brady plays for,’” Nanzer said. “That’s pretty cool.”
year watching other people, mostly Perhaps the most high-profile executive recruit for Overwatch League is Steve Bornstein.
strangers, play videogames on Twitch One of the early architects of ESPN and a former president of ABC Sports, he left his most
was 192 billion. By the end of 2016, it recent job as CEO of the NFL Network to become Blizzard’s esports chair. When asked why
had risen to 292 billion. he made the change from traditional sports to electronic, Bornstein borrows an old Gretzky
Even while Overwatch was in beta, quote: “Skate to where the puck is going.”
fans and entrepreneurs were already “When I left the NFL, the only thing I saw that had the potential to be as big was the
organizing Overwatch tournaments, esports space,” he says. “What fascinated me was just the level of
broadcasting matches live on Twitch. engagement, the fact that we measure consumption in billions of
It was completely grassroots, seri- minutes consumed.”
ously hardcore, totally decentralized, And it’s growing, especially among younger people, which is not
and kind of a mess. Nanzer wondered something that can be said of traditional sports. For the cord-cutter
what would happen if Blizzard could and cord-never generations, sports tend to be behind what is, in effect,
take control of the tournaments. “If a giant paywall. The big, exclusive contracts that leagues sign with
we structure a league the right way the TV networks mean there are few other ways to access sports “ THE
and put the right investment behind content—which seems annoying or downright bizarre to people
KILL
it, we can actually monetize it in a
way that’s not too dissimilar from
accustomed to getting their entertainment for free on YouTube.
Every major sport in the US has seen the average age of its view-
CAM
traditional sports,” he says. ership increase since 2000. The NBA’s average fan is 42. The average SAYS,
Enter Overwatch League. NFL fan is 50. The average MLB fan is 57. What’s more, these audi- THIS IS
Blizzard announced the venture ences are limited almost entirely to North America. The Overwatch HOW YOU
in November 2016 at Blizzcon, the League, meanwhile, will begin with nine US teams and three from WERE
company’s annual convention. Over- abroad—Shanghai, Seoul, and London (with more, I’m told, on the
KILLED,
watch League would be the world’s
first esports venture to follow the
way)—and its average fan is a demographically pleasing 21 years old.
There’s no better symbol for Blizzard’s confidence in the game’s
SO
North American sports model: fran- potential than the place it chose for its new home: Burbank Studios, LET'S
chised teams in major cities, live Stage One. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s the very AVOID
spectator events, salaried athletes. same soundstage that Johnny Carson used when he brought The THAT
Along with all the revenue oppor- Tonight Show to California. Every match of Overwatch League’s inau- IN THE
tunities offered by sports leagues— gural season will be played here, while the teams work with Blizzard
FUTURE.
ticket sales, media rights, licensing, to bring matches to their respective hometowns in future seasons.
and so on—there were also opportu- The studio’s centerpiece is the long dais up front, big enough for
nities for “team-based virtual mer- two entire Overwatch teams—six players on the left, six on the right.
chandise.” For example, fans might Each player will have their own personal pod (Blizzard’s term for
be able to buy a “skin” so that when what appears to be a simple table), and each pod is separated from
they’re playing Overwatch at home, the adjacent pods by a space of a few inches, because apparently some players can get a little
their hero will be wearing the jersey excited during a match and bother their neighbors with their table-tapping or knee-banging
of the Los Angeles Valiant. or fist-pounding. Every player is issued a standard desktop computer and a standard mon-
“We are literally building a new itor (144 hertz), though many players like to choose their own keyboard and mouse. Above
sport,” says Nanzer, who was everything are three enormous LED screens, approximately 20 feet by 11, that will be show-
appointed the league’s commis- ing the audience the in-game action, as well as intermittent close-ups of the players them-
sioner last year. “We’re trying to selves, their faces, their twitching hands.
build this as a sustainable sports Kitty-corner to the players, stage right, is an elevated desk for the on-air talent—the hosts
league for decades and decades to and analysts and interviewers. Backstage, these folks get their own hair and makeup room,
come.” And while you might think, one of the few places still serving its original Tonight Show function. Next to the analysts’
at first glance, that such an ambi- desk is a room for the “shoutcasters,” which are what play-by-play commentators are called
tion is outrageously optimistic, the in esports. The term was coined in the earliest days of esports, before high-speed broadband
expertise recruited may change your made video streaming possible; the feeds were audio-only, and commentators used a Winamp
plug-in called SHOUTcast to broadcast their voices. The name lives on, though. There’s even
a paper taped up on the door that says shoutcasters.
Taped to the next door, a piece of paper says observers, which strikes me as sort of sin-
ister, like the Eyes from The Handmaid’s Tale. The Observers are actually cinematographers
who operate in the game’s digital space. If you’re watching an Overwatch match, you might
be watching it from the point of view of one of the players or from the point of view of one
of the Observers, who float around the players and capture the in-game action as it unfolds.
Imagine a camera operator at a hockey match skating around on the ice with the players and game version of the Undertaker
yet magically not interacting with them in any way. The Observers are like that. character from WWF wrestling, circa-
Directly across the hall from the Observers is where the technical stuff happens, all the 1990s, but with guns—a pair of shot-
wizardry needed to create a professional-looking sports broadcast: a whole room for instant guns that, instead of reloading, he
replay, two rooms for audio, two control rooms with walls of flatscreen TVs. All told, it takes tosses to the ground and replaces by
between 80 and 100 people to broadcast one match of the Overwatch League. Some of the grabbing two new ones from under
people who work here say there’s a special significance in the league’s broadcasting from The the folds of his black overcoat. I’m
Tonight Show’s old home. It’s an obvious metaphor: new media replacing old media. It all running to get into place with my
reminds Steve Bornstein of the moment in the early ’80s when he came aboard the fledgling teammates, wondering what exactly
ESPN, then only three months old. He says all the critics at the time argued there wouldn’t I’m supposed to be doing, and also
be any interest in a whole channel devoted to sports. Who would ever watch that? idly wondering how many shotguns
Reaper can hide under that coat.
(The answer, it turns out, is infinite.
Infinite shotguns. He never runs out.
Just go with it.) Suddenly a firefight
erupts ahead of me and I run up to
aid my companions and promptly
get killed. Swiftly and abruptly and
bewilderingly, I am dead. I have no
idea why. This is when I am intro-
duced to the kill cam.
Let me tell you about the cruelty
of the kill cam.
After you die in Overwatch and the
camera pans back to show your now
lifeless corpse on the ground, you
endure the kill cam, which shows
you what you looked like and what
you were doing the moment before
you were killed, from the perspective
of your killer. It’s like being able to
watch your own face while getting
dumped. As I died over and over, I
would be treated anew to kill-cam
footage showing just how long some-
one had me in their sights, how many
SHOUTCASTERS PROVIDE REAL-TIME GAME COMMENTARY FOR
BOTH IN-STUDIO AND STREAMING AUDIENCES. shots they took before I even noticed,
how I just stood there and sort of
spun in place, dumbly looking around
MY FIRST TIME PLAYING OVERWATCH WAS ASTOUNDING TO ME FOR TWO REASONS: while my killer patiently picked me
first, for the sheer amount of onscreen information I was asked to digest at any given moment, off. According to the game’s develop-
the bullet tracers and grenade explosions, the bright blossoming energy shields and walls of ers, the kill cam’s primary function
ice that were sometimes mysteriously erected and then shattered, plus the head-up display is not actually sadistic, but educa-
overlaying various timers and health bars and glowing mission objectives, and sometimes tional. The kill cam says: This is how
floating yellow plus-sign things (which I eventually figured out meant I was getting healed you were killed, so how about avoid-
by someone, somehow), plus all the pretty little environmental details like streetlamps that ing that in the future, eh?
flicker a bit of lens flare onto your screen when you accidentally aim at them, the wooden The fact that it’s so easy to be killed
chairs that splinter and the wine bottles that shatter when they take stray fire, not to mention means that players in Overwatch are
the outlines of your teammates and all the enemy players who (for reasons that will become never still for a second, which pres-
clear momentarily) tend to jump around constantly, spasmodically, almost insectoidally—all ents a cognitive challenge: You must
of this happening at the same time in a way that felt not only disorienting, not only mentally keep track of 11 other players who
taxing, but more like New York City air-traffic-control-level overwhelming. are always in motion while you your-
The second thing I was astounded by was the number of times I died.
It was a little surprising to me how quickly, simply, and even sort of eagerly my character
bit it. I was playing a hero called Reaper, whose whole basic deal is to be an updated video- 0 7 9
>
HERO SHOTS
0 8 1
think, distractingly, though the other players don’t seem to care or even really notice.
This is one of the ostensible reasons they all live together, so that they can get accus-
tomed to each other’s tics and moods and can develop the kind of shorthand with one
another that I usually associate with best friends or intimates. They come from very dif-
chairs for nine hours without mov- ferent places—Verbo is Canadian, Grim is American, while Fate, envy, and KariV are from
ing,” he says—though from what I Korea—but they need to communicate in the quickest way possible. Like the game itself,
can tell, the players, left to their own the team must operate with no lag.
devices, literally, would be happy to Sitting in an adjoining room, the team’s manager, Joshua Kim, and one of its coaches,
remain in their chairs for even lon- Henry Coxall, observe that morning’s scrim in the game’s spectator mode. They discuss
ger.) By the time I arrive, the players failures of strategy, how one player was baited into a disadvantaged position. But they also
are seated and warming up for their seem very attentive to their team’s emotional state. Any blip of negative emotion from any
first “scrim” of the day. of the players is immediately registered and discussed. Kim talks about not bringing bad
A scrim is the primary way a pro emotions to “work,” and how living together presents a challenge on this front.
Overwatch team practices. The At 27, Kim is the old man in the house. I ask him whether it’s hard sharing a living space
team’s coaches set up scrims with with a bunch of teenage boys—and, yes, they’re all boys, and with the exception of one
other pro teams, and the players will 20-year-old, they’re all teens. The house itself
do three two-hour scrims a day, every bears the filthy evidence of this. The boys’ dis-
day. Once the day’s first scrim begins, carded shoes litter the front foyer. Their bed-
everything gets very serious, very rooms are totally bare but for mattresses sitting
fast. The players hunch their shoul- on the floor surrounded by clumps of wrinkled
ders, and their eyes are about even clothes. The kitchen counters are covered with
PEAK
with the top bevel of their monitor
so that they’re looking down at the
jars of peanut butter and Pop Tarts and a family-
size box of Frosted Flakes and protein powder
PERFOR-
screen, which makes them appear, in big bulbous jugs and a few spray bottles of MANCE
in profile, something like carnivores Febreze.
eyeing dinner. They give one another I won’t even tell you about the condition of Playing a videogame for
constant updates about what the the bathroom. 50-plus hours a week
other team is doing, what heroes But if this bothers Kim, he tries not to show isn’t just an exercise in
sustained concentra-
are in use, what special abilities are it. “It teaches me patience,” he says. As the first tion and laser focus;
available. Their shouted instructions scrim ends, the players blink back into the reality it’s also hard on the
and updates sound to me like soldiers of the living room, almost like they’re surprised body. We asked Bryce
Browne, a performance
speaking some kind of wacky code. to be there. There’s a sort of incorporeal quality coach with fitness facil-
“Monkey monkey monkey!” to the players while they’re in the game: They ity Sports Academy,
“Are they right or left?” play with such focus and intensity that, as soon and Levi Harrison, an
orthopedic surgeon
“Clear left!” as a match is over, it’s as if they suddenly real- nicknamed “the Esports
“Inside! Saloon! Saloon!” ize they have bodies. They crack their knuckles Doctor,” for their rec-
“EMP! EMP! EMP!” which, shouted and stretch and shake out the stiffness in their ommendations on how
players can prevent
very quickly, sounds like “empee hands. They wander into the kitchen, where the injury and optimize per-
empee empee!” chef has prepared a meal of mostly Korean fare: formance. —Phuc Pham
In the kitchen, meanwhile, the barbecued short ribs, glazed chicken drumsticks,
team’s chef is busy cooking lunch. and a really fantastic fried rice. The players con-
She seems to be successfully ignor- sume all of this in less than 10 minutes.
ing all of this. During their break I’m able to ask the ques-
Despite living together, the players tions that have been on my mind: How do you
do not call each other by their real learn to play this game at a high level? And how do you possibly keep track of everything
names. They exclusively use their that’s happening onscreen?
screen names, so much so that I find It’s Grim who first suggests the concept of “mental RAM.” The basic idea, he says, is that
it odd and even jarring to call Disalvo there is only so much the mind can process at once, an upper limit on the number of things
“Stefano.” Here, he’s Verbo, and the any player can pay attention to; the key, then, is to put as many things on autopilot as pos-
teammates he’s playing with today sible, so you have fewer things to consciously think about. “For a lot of people who aren’t
are GrimReality (which everyone pro, aiming takes a lot of concentration,” Grim says. “It gives you less room to think about
shortens to Grim), Fate, envy, and other things. So that’s why I practice really, really hard on my aiming, so I can think more
KariV, who, among all of them, seems about my positioning and what I need to do next.”
the most likely to spontaneously Grim, whose real name is Christopher Schaefer, is 18 years old and from Chico, Califor-
shout or giggle or exclaim “What nia. He is one of the team’s primary damage-dealers. Like Verbo, Grim wanted more than
the fuck!” very loudly and, I would anything to be an esports professional. And like Verbo, he decided to go pro in Overwatch
before he’d ever played it. When he first began the game—at 16—he was “really bad,” he
says. “I would spend hours at a time just practicing flicks.”
I interrupt to ask: What’s a flick?
“It’s basically starting from one point of the screen and then snapping to the enemy’s
head or something. And so it’s a very fast muscle-memory movement.”
Being able to flick effectively is essential to pro play. It requires you to understand the
exact ratio of mouse-movement to game-space distance, plus how to compensate if, for
example, you’re moving left and your target is to the right, which will require an extra IN LATE SEPTEMBER, THREE
millimeter or so of flick, and you have to possess the kinesthetic body awareness to do this months before the league’s first
with your hand and wrist perfectly almost 100 percent of the time. This is why pro players’ regular-season game and a mere
mouse choices are so personal and why the team insists that, with any sponsorship deal 60-some days from the start of pre-
with any company that sells peripherals, players always get to choose their own mouse. season play, Disalvo shakes his head
Grim uses a Logitech G903 with a DPI of 800 and an in-game mouse sensitivity setting of in disbelief at the prospect of play-
5. He is now, suffice it to say, extraordinarily good at flicking. ing for the Los Angeles Valiant. “It
“A lot of people think that I just have natural talent,” he says, laughing. “No, no, not at feels like I’m part of something that’s
all. It took a lot, a lot, a lot of practice to be able to aim properly.” going to be big, like very big,” he says.
After the lunch break, the teammates return to their stations for more sitting, more “There’s going to be billboards? I’m
scrims, more shouting. gonna be representing a city like Los
Angeles? Like … what? That’s crazy.”
It’s especially crazy given that he
didn’t actually move to LA to join the
Valiant. His first professional esports
contract, the one that achieved peace
with his mother, actually came from
an organization called the Immor-
tals, one of the independent esports
brands, known as endemics, that field
teams in a number of different video-
DOOR STRETCH LUNGE SEQUENCE SUPERMAN games. (The Immortals, for example,
Hunched shoulders can lead Strong glutes prevent the type This super-flex strengthens have teams that play Counter-Strike:
to low energy, so players can of lower back pain that can the players’ core to improve
boost endurance by opening distract players during hours- posture and avoid neck and Global Offensive and League of Leg-
up their upper torsos. long gaming sessions. shoulder fatigue. ends, among others.) Endemic teams
have been in esports for a long time
and have been essential to its growth.
They’re well known within gaming
circles, but they are not billion-dollar
organizations like Blizzard or the
New England Patriots, and thus they
GLIDING EXERCISES DOUBLE COBRA STRETCH NIRSCHL EXERCISE are not able to be as generous with
Rotating both wrists Stretching their hand, wrist, By stretching the muscles in their players.
(with both open and closed and forearm muscles keeps their forearms, players avoid
palms) wards off carpal players loose for clutch head tennis elbow. Jake Lyon, a 21-year-old from San
tunnel syndrome. shots. Diego whose screen name is the
refreshingly straightforward “JAKE,”
is one of the best damage-dealers in
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURIE ROLLITT
Overwatch. He earned about $2,000
a month as a member of an endemic
called Luminosity Gaming—that is,
“Monkey’s up for a jump! Monkey monkey! I’m dead.” until the Luminosity Overwatch ros-
“Small regroup! Regroup!” ter disbanded in mid-2017, as Blizzard
“I’m on soldier, I’m on soldier!” began consolidating control over pro-
“We have numbers! Let’s go!” fessional Overwatch play. “In the past
“Monkey monkey!” there’s been no security in an esports
About the monkey: One hero named Winston is a supersmart, genetically engineered contract,” he says. “Even though we
gorilla who has the ability to jump really far, right into the middle of the scrum. And were signed to a two-year contract
when an enemy team’s Winston lands nearby, he’s automatically your team’s number with Luminosity, there’s always a
one target. If you take down Winston, you can really disrupt the other team’s strat- clause—and it’s not just them, every
egy. So when he lands, everyone shouts his name. But because “Winston” is hard to say single esports contract looks like
many times fast, Overwatch players started calling him “monkey.” The effect is that, this—that says they can buy you out
for the many hours I watched the Los Angeles Valiant play scrims, as I was dutifully for one month’s salary. When they
taking notes and thinking earnestly about how this might be the future of sports,
every few minutes this whole pack of teenage boys would suddenly burst out shouting,
“Monkey monkey monkey monkey!” 0 8 3
and play games with my son,” he said. “But then the other day my daughter asked me, ‘Can I
play Overwatch too?’ and I was like, oh shit, I gotta be better about this. I gotta treat it equal.”
And the women who do play Overwatch often find themselves to be targets of harassment.
Glisa is the screen name for a 19-year-old Overwatch player who lives in Portland, Oregon.
decide it’s your last month: goodbye.” Despite being busy with her college studies, Glisa is one of the top 100 Overwatch players in
Lyon went on to sign with the Over- terms of time spent in the game. She has so far logged thousands of hours of gameplay, and she
watch League’s Houston Outlaws, keeps a YouTube channel with highlight reels. But sometimes she posts videos of her interac-
and he says the new league is a “huge tions with other gamers. She uploaded a montage recently called “Online Gaming as a Girl.”
improvement.” Contracts are guaran- “That was spawned after I had several different, very toxic encounters with people who
teed for at least a year, after which the brought up the fact that I was female many times and tried to use that to degrade me,” she says.
team will have a second-year option This will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the horrors of Gamergate over the
with a prenegotiated salary. And, crit- past few years, and the video is hard to watch. The gamers she encounters aren’t just being
ically, players cannot be fired during a little insensitive—they are straight-up knuckle-dragging misogynists:
the length of their contract, unless “You’re such a bimbo.”
they’re guilty of something that would “You’re probably ugly.”
get them fired from any job.
Players are provided with hous-
ing, health insurance, a retirement
plan, and a minimum league salary
of $50,000, though Lyon believes that
most players who are among a team’s
starting six will earn much more than
that. (Most teams also have a few
backup players.) Plus, there’s revenue
sharing and a prize pool of $3.5 mil-
lion for successful teams, $1 million
of which is reserved for the inaugural
season’s eventual champions.
When he signed his contract with
Houston, Lyon sat at his computer
clicking his e-signature to the doc-
ument’s relevant places, and he real-
ized how different it was from what
had come before. “Maybe this could
be the way esports is going forward,”
he says. “That it can be a legitimate
career, and that it’s not like someone
is going all-in on some fragment of
a dream.”
ABLES “Having mentors, advisers, who are men is very impactful,” she
says. “It gives you the courage to stay because you know that the
more because I felt like I wanted to
prove something. I don’t know. It felt
IN PLAY toxic voice is just one among many other voices. It’s a reminder that like this thing that I had to prove.”
SEEMS not everyone is like that.” Which makes sense to me. That,
TO When asked what the Overwatch League was doing to attract more yes, for the people who go pro in
EXCEED female players, nobody at Blizzard could point to any specific out- esports, there’s a certain happiness
THE reach or recruiting efforts. Nanzer says he’s been looking at data from in playing videogames for a living. But
HUMAN women-only sports leagues like the WNBA that suggest a women’s
league would bring more women into the game. “The idea comes up
maybe more than that, esports allows
people an avenue to do something
BRAIN'S all the time: Should we have a women’s-only tournament or league?” different, to be special. Like musi-
ABILI- he says. “I think there’s a way to do that where it’s awesome and sup- cians or actors or writers pursuing
TIES. portive and grows the sport. I think there is a way to do it where it’s an unlikely dream, it strikes me as
actually detrimental and it makes it seem like, oh, you’re not as good both romantic and brave.
as men. We kind of go back and forth on that.” Meanwhile, to try to absorb the
Shock’s frantic offense, the Valiant
BACK IN REDONDO BEACH, THE EARLY EVENING SUNLIGHT IS STREAKING IN THROUGH team has figured out a new strategy.
gaps in the curtains as the Los Angeles Valiant begins its last scrim of the day. Tonight’s match They go with a hero lineup that’s big-
is against another Overwatch League team, the San Francisco Shock, which recently made head- ger—more tanks, more health.
lines by signing superstar damage-dealer Jay “sinatraa” Won for a rumored $150,000 a year. “Niiiiiiice,” comes a chorus from
And while I’m still a noob at Overwatch, even I can tell that this San Francisco team plays around the room when they finally
with an unusual intensity. “They’re a team of 17-year-olds who just do not stop,” says Coxall, the win a round.
Valiant coach, making the Shock sound young and insane as opposed to the Valiant’s qualities “There you go, boys,” Coxall says
of wisdom and tactics. “If you think you’ve won a fight, you haven’t,” he tells the team. “These into his headset’s microphone. “You
guys will keep throwing themselves at you. And one of them will clutch. Always expect that.” took control. ”
I ask him about that word, “clutch,” and he explains that it refers to someone overcom- The sun has gone down, but nobody
ing dubious odds to win. In other words, the Shock’s strategy is not necessarily to maneu- seems to have noticed. By the end
ver as a team but rather to have their players engage in seemingly suicidal encounters and of the last scrim of the day, they are
trust that they have the skill to pull it off. It’s unrelenting, high-intensity pressure designed playing in the dark.�
to fluster opponents.
It’s a reminder that this is truly a young person’s game—not just in its audience but also
in its players. When I asked Christopher Schaefer, aka Grim, how long he thought he’d be a 0 8 5
SOMETHING TO
0 8
OVER ME
AS THE U.S.
POPULATION AGES,
OLDER PEOPLE
IN NEED OF 24/7
MONITORING WILL
OUTNUMBER
THE AVAILABLE
CAREGIVERS. ONE
COMPANY THINKS
IT HAS THE ANSWER:
LET TECH DO THE
JOB.
BY
LAUREN SMILEY
GRANT CORNETT
7
Arlyn Anderson grasped her Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and
general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—
with the choice. “A nursing home disease had progressed, often causing his
thoughts to vanish midsentence. But Jim
would be safer, Dad,” she told him, would rather risk living alone than be clois-
tered in an institution, he told Arlyn and
relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s her older sister, Layney. A nursing home
certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him
risky to live here alone—” “No way,”
¶ either. But the daily churn of diapers and
cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides,
Jim interjected. He frowned at and the compounding financial strain (she
had already taken out a reverse mortgage
his daughter, his brow furrowed on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers)
forced her to consider the possibility.
under a lop of white hair. At 91, Jim, slouched in his recliner, was deter-
mined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated
he wanted to remain in the woodsy to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled
up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s
Minnesota cottage he and his house was a 40-minute drive from the cot-
tage, and for months she had been relying
wife had built on the shore of on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs
on her dad. She set an open laptop on the
Lake Minnetonka, where she had counter so she could chat with him on Skype.
She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen
died in his arms just a year before. and another in his bedroom, so she could
he could still navigate just fine— she read in the newspaper about a new digi-
tal eldercare service called CareCoach a few
tor of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would third ontological category. The caretakers Jim was sitting on his
always prefer the human touch over a robot,” seem to blur that line too: One day Pony couch and looking out
he says. “But if there’s no human available, I told Jim that she dreamed she could turn side. Jim thanked me
for being there when
would take high tech in lieu of high touch.” into a real health aide, almost like Pinocchio he’s alone and said that
CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam wishing to be a real boy. he loves me so much.
of both. The service conveys the percep-
2/24/2014 7:00:28 pm
tiveness and emotional intelligence of the
humans powering it but masquerades as Arnie said they had
an animated app. If a person is incapable of dinner but Jim did not rec
ognize her at first. I told
M
consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then her everything will be fine.
someone must do so on their behalf. But the
more disconcerting issue is how cognizant 3/5/2014 7:31:12 am
these seniors are of being watched over Jim was on the stretcher
by strangers. Wang considers his product and the paramedics
“a trade-off between utility and privacy.” carried him out. Joyce,
the caretaker, said she
His workers are trained to duck out during Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside could not contact Arnie
baths and clothing changes. in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To so I offered her my help.
Some CareCoach users insist on greater undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang
3/7/2014 5:15:42 am
control. A woman in Washington state, posts English-language ads on freelancing
for example, put a piece of tape over her job sites where foreign workers advertise A nurse came into Jim’s
CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t room to take his vital
signs, but he won’t let
she could be viewed. Other customers like disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang them. He’s afraid they
Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or claims the company bases its salaries on fac- are going to hurt him.
other diseases, might not realize they are I told Jim they are friends.
I also informed them he
being watched. Once, when he was tem- likes ice cream.
porarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic
after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked 6/12/2014 6:16:18 pm
Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You
mean there’s someone overseas looking
Man’s I woke up and saw Jim
sleeping on his bed.
at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. Best Friend I think Arnie already went
home. Hope I can talk
(Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remem- Excerpts from Pony’s to Jim when he wakes up.
bered the incident later.) By default, the CareCoach log. Good night, Jim! :)
app explains to patients that someone is
surveilling them when it’s first introduced.
But the family members of personal users,
like Arlyn, can make their own call.
Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about
whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling
Jim about the human on the other side of the 0 9 2
screen “would have blown the whole charm
of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s
as well, and Arlyn had learned how to nav-
igate the disease: Make her mom feel safe;
don’t confuse her with details she’d have
trouble understanding. The same went for
her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says,
tors such as what a registered nurse would
make in the CareCoach employee’s home
A
country, their language proficiencies, and
0 9
the cost of their internet connection.
The growing network includes people like
Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives
in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Phil-
ippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college
graduate. She earns about the same being As time went on, the father, daughter, and
an avatar as she did in her former call cen- family pet grew closer. When the snow
ter job, where she consoled Americans irate finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to
about credit card charges. (“They wanted the picnic table on the patio so they could The
to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as
she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted,
Eldercare
nights to coincide with the US daytime, typ- Pony could coax him to talk about his past, Gap
ing messages to seniors while her 6-year- recounting fishing trips or how he built the Aging in America, by the
old son sleeps nearby. house to face the sun so it would be warmer numbers. —BLANCA MYERS
Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Para- in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around
gas via video, then vetted her with an inter- the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony
national criminal background check. He along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)
gives all applicants a personality test for One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting
certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held
extroversion, agreeableness, and neurot- up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy,
icism. As part of the CareCoach training between her paws. It had been more than a
program, Paragas earned certifications in year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly
delirium and dementia care from the Alz- mentioned her anymore; he struggled to “Arnie, how are you?”
heimer’s Association, trained in US health form coherent sentences. That day, though, Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way
care ethics and privacy, and learned strat- he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly ther-
egies for counseling those with addictions. her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoul- apeutic—and told the pet how hard it was
All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone der, clasping her hand over her mouth to to watch her dad lose his identity.
who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” “I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you,
about 1 percent of its applicants. Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the Arnie.”
Paragas understands that this is a com- picture of his deceased wife and petted When she recalls her own attachment
plicated business. She’s befuddled by the her face with his finger, the same way he to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection
absence of family members around her would to awaken a sleeping Pony. wouldn’t have developed if Pony was sim-
aging clients. “In my culture, we really When Arlyn first signed up for the ser- ply high-functioning AI. “You could feel
love to take care of our parents,” she says. vice, she hadn’t anticipated that she would Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to
“That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in think of Pony as her father did—a friendly
is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, the sincerest sense of the word—the ava- pet—rather than a person on the other end
for some people, she’s their most significant tar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, of a webcam. “Even though that person
daily relationship. Some of her charges tell sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” probably had a relationship to me,” she
her that they couldn’t live without her. Even like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”
when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with even more than her dad. When Arlyn col- Still, she sometimes wonders about the
his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a lapsed onto the couch after a long day of person on the other side of the screen. She
friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch sits up straight and rests her hand over her
gained a valuable ally. on the table: heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my
thought is: Did Pony really care about me and
my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully
at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds.
“Did this really happen? Was it really a rela-
tionship, or were they just playing solitaire
and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it
seemed like they cared.”
When Jim turned 92 that August, as
friends belted out “Happy Birthday”
around the dinner table, Pony spoke the
lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the
single candle on his cake. “I wish you good
health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more
birthdays to come.”
COLOPHON
up when the paramedics arrived. The dog
told them Jim’s date of birth and offered
to call his daughters as they carried him
5
out on a stretcher. SOCIAL FAUX PAS THAT
HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
Jim was checked into a hospital, then
into the nursing home he’d so wanted to Failing to reply to the monthly “Colo
phon” submission request; demanding
avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which colleagues emojireact to your Slack com
made it difficult for Jim and Pony to con- ments; not knowing how to tip in Buda
pest; welltimed “accidental” replyalls;
nect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet requesting to hang out in person; inexpli
cable breakdowns with the dog trainer;
to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from closing the art department’s window with
out asking; complaining about a coworker
those months chronicle a series of com-
10,000 over Slack—to that coworker; accidentally
munication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” “liking” a source’s twoyearold Instagram
photo; mishearing Sarah Fallon as Sarah
Baby boomers Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all Palin; texting while jaywalking in order
estimated to turn 65 to make it to Jay’s morning meeting;
the time.” One day, in a rare moment of Slacking one coworker while Zoom con
every day ferencing with another; freaking out and
connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim
tweeting something totally inappropriate
79 percent go sailing that summer, just like the good (read: aggro) at @realDonaldTrump;
getting food in your hair while eating at
old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said. your desk; agreeing to host a stop for a
Projected increase progressive Halloween party, then giving
in the number of baby That July, in an email from Wang, the address to only half the guests.
boomers aged 80 Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his
wired is a registered trademark of
and older, from 2010 sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo Advance Magazine Publishers Inc.
to 2030 Copyright ©2018 Condé Nast. All
bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s rights reserved. Printed in the USA.
Volume 26, No. 1. wired (ISSN 1059–
1 percent Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that 1028) is published monthly by Condé
his friend would be accepted into heaven. Nast, which is a division of Advance
Projected increase Magazine Publishers Inc. Edi torial
in the number of “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305, San
Francisco, CA 941071815. Principal
potential family care a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I office: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Cen
givers, aged 45 to 64, ter, New York, NY 10007. S. I. New
felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve house, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Robert
from 2010 to 2030 A. Sauerberg, Jr., President and Chief
met them.” In the year and a half that he Executive Officer; David E. Geithner,
348,400 had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to Chief Financial Officer; Pamela Drucker
Mann, Chief Revenue & Marketing Offi
him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a cer. Periodicals postage paid at New
Number of home York, NY, and at additional mailing
health aide jobs sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry offices. Canada Post Publications Mail
Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian
expected to be created and learned about his rich past. They had Goods and Services Tax Registration
in the next decade celebrated birthdays and holidays together No. 123242885 RT0001.
as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see
$22,600 DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND
sure, you betcha” countless times. MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address
Median annual salary corrections to wired, PO Box 37706,
That day, for weeks afterward, and even Boone, IA 500370662. For subscrip
of a home health aide tions, address changes, adjust ments,
in the US now when a senior will do something that or back issue inquiries: Please write to
reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels wired, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA
500370662, call (800) 769 4733, or
$7,698 a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. email subscriptions@wired.com.
Please give both new and old
Median monthly cost After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Vic- addresses as printed on most recent
label. First copy of new subscription
of a private room in a tor Wang to say she wanted to honor the will be mailed within eight weeks after
nursing home in the US workers for their care. Wang forwarded receipt of order. Address all editorial,
business, and production correspon
her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s dence to wired Magazine, 1 World
Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For
team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony permissions and reprint requests,
please call (212) 630 5656 or fax
to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing requests to (212) 630 5883. Visit us
forward on the pew beside her. She invited online at www.wired.com. To sub
scribe to other Condé Nast maga zines
any workers behind Pony who wanted to on the web, visit www.condenet.com.
Occasionally, we make our subscriber
attend to log in. list available to carefully screened
I
companies that offer products and ser
A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the vices that we believe would interest
our readers. If you do not want to
CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt receive these offers and/or informa
like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, tion, please advise us at PO Box 37706,
Boone, IA 500370662, or call (800)
“Pony!” when the voice of her old friend 769 4733.
gives her directions as she drives around wired is not responsible for the return
or loss of, or for damage or any other
Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps. injury to, unsolicited manuscripts, unso
In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo licited artwork (including, but not lim
ited to, drawings, photographs, and
about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s heaved a sigh and logged in to the Care- transparencies), or any other unsolic
ited materials. Those submitting manu
ever lost a client. His reply: Yes. Coach dashboard to make his rounds. He scripts, photographs, artwork, or other
materials for consideration should
In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and not send originals, unless specifically
requested to do so by wired in writ
head on his way to the bathroom. A care- hospital rooms around the United States— ing. Manuscripts, photographs, artwork,
taker sleeping over that night found him seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody and other materials submitted must
be accompanied by a selfaddressed,
and called an ambulance, and Pony woke needed to talk. � stamped envelope.
SIX BY SIX: STORIES BY WIRED READERS
Each month, we publish a six-word story—and it could be written by you. Submit your six evocative
words on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, along with #WIREDBACKPAGE. We’ll pick one story to
illustrate here. Your next assignment: In six words, imagine the ideal social media platform.
#WIREDBACKPAGE
10 20 30
DISCLAIMER: ALL #WIREDBACKPAGE SUBMISSIONS BECOME THE PROPERTY OF WIRED. SUBMISSIONS WILL NOT BE ACKNOWLEDGED OR RETURNED. SUBMISSIONS AND ANY OTHER MATERIALS, INCLUDING YOUR NAME
PERSONAL HEALTHY MERGER
BEST! RANGE! SUCCESS!
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.
20 50 250
FINE: PERFECT HIGH
$280 MATCH! SCORE!
IN
THE
FUTURE,
GAMES
PLAY
YOU.
BY @DUDUKF, VIA INSTAGRAM
HONORABLE MENTIONS: SUMMER GAMES, WINTER GAMES, INDOOR GAMES. (@FSIDDERS, VIA INSTAGRAM) // MIXED REALITY MEETS MIXED MARTIAL ARTS. (@MICHAELBL, VIA
TWITTER) // ADDERALL FOUND IN BOTTLES. CHAMPION SHAMED. (KENNETH BALAGOT, VIA FACEBOOK) // FINAL ROUND, LAST MINUTE: CONNECTION LOST. (@JSCHULENKLOPPER, VIA
INSTAGRAM) // VAST CROWDS OF FANS, TOGETHER VIRTUALLY. (LISA HORTON, VIA FACEBOOK) // WIPE THE SWEAT FROM MY INTERFACE. (@ISABELLAMARIAOFFICIAL, VIA INSTAGRAM)