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But, in 2017, passed over for

space flight due to a potential
immune-system issue, Panek
traveled home for the weekend
to rethink her life. Hiking her
childhood mountains, she looked
up at the sky and had a new
appreciation for the need to
clean up the orbital environment
around Earth. “Growing up
camping, I was taught to leave no
trace,” she says. “The space we’re
exploring is wilderness—and we
need to take care of it.”
Now Panek is helping to design
missions to refuel and repair
defunct satellites orbiting Earth.
Of the nearly 5,000 satellites
in space, only about 2,000 are
operational. To ensure the
defunct satellites don’t crash
into each other—leading to
cascading wrecks and debris—
Panek is orchestrating missions
to repurpose them to keep our
skies clean for the future. “We
need to change how we do
things,” she says. “It’s cool to be
at the forefront of taking care
of our orbital environment.
We’re explorers.”

DESIGNING A CLEANER

S OL A R SYSTE M
TOP: Nat Panek conducting tests at
MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates based in
Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Earth.

BOTTOM: “What I’ve come to love so much

about this work is that it’s trying to hold us
accountable for taking care of the environment
that we explore.”

HOW ARC’TERYX In 2017, Natalie Panek, an aerospace engineer near Toronto,

got a life-changing notification: She had not been selected to

PROBLEM SOLVER become an astronaut. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. “For
me, becoming an astronaut was the ultimate adventure. You
NATALIE PANEK chase this goal for 25 years—and then it’s over.”

IS WORKING Panek had long been heralded as an up-and-coming space

traveler. Born in Calgary, she grew up exploring the Canadian
TO FIX A GLOBAL Rockies, which inspired her to venture into the cosmos. After
graduating as the only girl in her high school physics class,
PROBLEM: she studied engineering in college and nabbed an internship

TRASH IN SPACE with NASA. Aiming to become an astronaut, she went on to

get her private pilot’s license, help design and drive a solar-
powered car across North America, and even work on a rover
program to Mars.

DISCOVER MORE AT:

ARCTERYX.COM/PROBLEM-SOLVERS
Craig DeMartino
Climber

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ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 27.12

→ 84

0 0 3
FACE FORWARD
Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz has embarked on a series of portraits of individuals whose passion and
commitment are changing the landscape of our time. Shot exclusively on Google Pixel, the pictures portray extraordinary
people who are defined by their fierce desire to make the world a better place, no matter how daunting the obstacles.
To see more of Annie’s portraits, visit g.co/pixel/annie.
Use Google Lens to unlock immersive behind-the-scenes content from this shoot.
 BRYAN STEVENSON, EQUAL JUSTICE LAWYER
Photographed on Google Pixel by Annie Leibovitz
A Harvard Law School graduate and the great-grandson of slaves, Stevenson
founded the Equal Justice Initiative, which provides free legal representation
to prisoners on death row and to imprisoned children. He also helped create
the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum:
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, Alabama.
To see more of Annie’s portraits, visit g.co/pixel/annie.
Use Google Lens to unlock immersive behind-the-scenes content from this shoot.
 NOOR TAGOURI, JOURNALIST
Photographed on Google Pixel by Annie Leibovitz
Noor Tagouri (with her director of photography, Nausheen
Dadabhoy, in her apartment in Brooklyn) intends to become a hijab-
wearing mainstream TV personality in the U.S. “The hijab inspires
me,” she says. Her work includes a documentary on the sex trade
and a series about women in male-dominated fields.
The Photographer’s Phone
CONTENTS WIRED 27.12

TOTALLY THE STARTUPS

WIRED PRIDE AND NEED TO
ELECTRIC MIND
PREJUDICE PLAN FOR
WORD GRENADES
OF MODERN DOWNFALLS
P.10 FAN
CULTURE

RANTS P.17 P.24

AND
RAVES
BY BY
VIRGINIA ARIELLE
P.14 HEFFERNAN PARDES

ON THE MICRO- P.28 TURNING

COVER: TASKS AN F-16
ARE THE INTO
BY
FUTURE CLIVE A DRONE
OF WORK THOMPSON

P.34

PHOTOGRAPH
BY
BY
JESSICA LAURA
CHOU MALLONEE

WISHLIST: AMAZON
42 MEETS
AWESOME FEATURES ITS
GADGET HOLIDAY MATCH
LAB GIFT
IDEAS

P.58

BY
JESSICA
P.37 BRUDER

BEYOND THE P.70 THE STRANGE

RISE OF SKYWALKER: LIFE AND
STORIES BY SIX-WORD
THE REST OF MYSTERIOUS
ANGELA WATERCUTTER, SCI-FI
THE STAR WARS ADAM ROGERS, AND DEATH OF A
UNIVERSE GENEVIEVE VALENTINE CODING
GENIUS

P.84 STORIES
BY WIRED
READERS
BY
BRENDAN I.
KOERNER P.96

0 0 9
ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 27.12

TOTALLY
DIARIES OF
AN UNBRIDLED ↙
DIGITOPIAN

WIRED
WE ASKED CONTRIBUTORS:
Recently, my partner ducked into the market for enzyme sprinkles.
(It’s Lab-Grown Taco Tuesday.) Watching through the window, I saw
them consider two checkout lines. One looked significantly longer
“WHAT WOULD
but was entirely self-checkout. My partner turned toward the shorter YOUR DREAM
queue with error-prone human cashiers. No! I silently pleaded, that
way lies damnation! At the final moment, as I willed them from afar,
GADGET BE TO
they course-corrected. HELP YOU IN
Such cerebral synchronicity, a true mind-meld, is perhaps the most
intoxicating manifestation of something I seek everywhere I can. I’ve
YOUR WORK?”
always been vicariousness incarnate, longing for moments of instant
“A cloned, AI version of my brain to
instantiation. At sporting events I lurch in my seat, vainly puppeteering my answer emails as I write. That or a
favorite quantum-ball pros away from would-be quantumbles. When my lightsaber. No, definitely a lightsaber.”
partner plays videogames, I become an armchair voxel-jockey, squirming —Senior editor Angela Watercutter
(page 72)
this way and that as I attempt to telepathically guide their avatar through
digital travails. That’s why I found the news of Facebook acquiring CTRL- “Prosthetic thumbs and interspecies
Labs so elating: Festooned with the company’s armbands, I might finally translation software for my dog. My
friends refer to Max, my 11-year-old
be able to interact with my devices at the speed of thought. diabetic King Charles spaniel, as my
As your motor neurons extend from your brain through your spine and ‘assistant.’ I appreciate the company
then to the muscles, they concentrate appealingly in your forearms. When he offers, but late-stage capitalism is
all about output, metrics, and produc-
you wish to do something—tap, select, type, what have you—CTRL-Labs’ tivity. If he could handle transcription,
armband picks up on the nearly imperceptible signals announcing your it would go a long way.” —Contribu-
intention. Just like that, your wish becomes input. tor Jessica Bruder (page 58)

That was the antediluvian urge, wasn’t it, driving the foaming sea of “I tend to have my best creative break-
circuits that flooded our world? To be heard, to be felt, to be obeyed. throughs in the shower. But when I’m
CTRL-Labs manages this magic by trading sci-fi fever dreams for thrill- grappling with a story and desperate
for inspiration, I rarely have time to get
ingly cold science, treating the brain as an engine of complex interaction naked and douse myself with water.
rather than a storehouse of dark desire. (Granted, the brain does conjure I could use a gadget that tricks my
those desires, necessary and joyous that they are. Lament the cogno- brain into thinking I’m taking a shower
while I’m still anchored to my desk.”
scenti who confuse sterility for self; their lives are as dry as their loins!) —Contributing editor Brendan I.
Decades ago, Jacques J. Vidal—the soft-computing researcher who Koerner (page 84)
coined the phrase “brain-computer interface”—asked the perfect ques-
“Few keys on my laptop are as well
tion perfectly: “Can these observable electrical brain signals be put to worn as Command and F. Thing is, it
work as carriers of information in man-computer communication,” he only works for text. I’d like to have an
wrote, if genderedly, in 1973, “or for the purpose of controlling such arcade-style claw crane to extract
the perfect pop cultural reference or
external apparatus as prosthetic devices or spaceships?” Italics mine, of historical allusion from my own brain.”
course; if I applaud the pragmatic, I positively swoon before the gran- —Senior writer Arielle Pardes
diose. Roar, Vidal! (page 24)

While I confess to wishing for a cyborgian implant every birthday, even “A Go-Go-Gadget bionic arm that
I admit that Vidal’s future lives in such common-sense solutions as CTRL- helps me illustrate sketches for the
Labs’. If we are to truly navigate the world brain-first, we must do so using 8-bit monster I’m creating for this
issue, with an autopilot mode, and
the proper language: impulse. Arms united, minds ignited, we are duly neck massage mode while I’m draw-
equipped—and can all get home in time to enjoy our carbon-neutral tacos. ing.” —Contributor DXTR (page 70)

RIPLEY D. LIGHT
@ RIPLEYDLIGHT

0 1 0
 Get More A.I.
Get More Robots
Get More Ideas
Get More Rockets
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BEST
STUFF
ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 27.12

CASE CLOSED
GET MORE
In October, Lauren Smiley recounted the murder of a WIRED
woman whose Fitbit data made her 90-year-old step-
father the chief suspect. (The stepfather, Tony Aiello, If you are a print sub-
died while awaiting trial shortly after we went to press.) scriber, you can read
Also, Brendan I. Koerner chronicled how pigeons, rats, all wired stories online.
and other critters have evolved to thrive in cities, which To authenticate your
might show humans how to adapt to climate change. subscription, go to:
And in September, Jason Parham plunged into the trans- wired .com/register.
fixing world of influencers who bare it all on OnlyFans.

↙
Readers share their theories,
shock, and New Jersey pride:
ment, throughout my life, based sim- survive in certain landscapes? In par-
ply on my height, something I did not ticular, I’m thinking of the doughnut-
choose and can do absolutely noth- eating pigeon. —Pete Braden, via mail
ing about. I found it very surprising @wired .com

RE: “THE TELLTALE that a publication as well regarded

HEART”
I’m left feeling that Karen and Tony
deserve justice and closure. I’m not a
“true crime” fan, but something about
this story haunts me. The data says,
and therefore it’s true. Scary thought.
—Stephen V. Smith (@StephenVSmith),
via Twitter
I hope this story inspires further inves-
tigation so that a motive is uncovered
and Adele can finally learn the truth.
—Linda Grady, via mail@wired .com
The blood evidence seems about suf-
ficient to give anyone closure who
actually wants it, unless they would
rather believe Karen calmly had pizza
with Tony after she’d been attacked.
But cognitive dissonance is a real
thing. —David S. Lewis (@DavidSLewis83),
via Twitter
as wired would find it necessary to
stoop so low. —Jonathan Sutton Fields,
via mail@wired .com
RE: “STREET LIFE”
One question I am surprised no one
addressed: Are scientists looking at
the possibility that microbiota (in
the gut, skin, etc.) are also responsi-
ble for some animals’ urban adapta-
tions? In other words, are we focusing
solely on DNA changes in the animals
themselves? Or are we also consid-
ering the possibility that their sym-
biotic microbes may also be rapidly
evolving and bestowing the ability to
An interesting article about #urban-
evolution, leading off with a very flat-
tering description of #NewJersey :-)
—Chloé Schmidt (@chloology), via Twitter
RE: “GETTING TO KNOW
YOU”
Fascinated by this long read on the
growing fluidity between social
media and sex work via apps. I espe-
cially appreciate the reflection on his
own experience as a consumer: the
rush of power (in anonymity) and
vulnerability (in compulsive desire).
—Carina del Valle Schorske (@Fluent-
Mundo), via Twitter

RE: “STREET LIFE”

I was very shocked and offended to
see that you printed the term “little
man syndrome” in your reporting on
Tony Aiello. [Eds: A sentence in the “Mutant pigeons as a
replacement for bio-
article reads, “People who’d known
him for decades said that he’d always
had ‘little man syndrome.’” ] As a 5'2"
man I have faced multiple challenges,
including discrimination and harass- diversity? No thanks.”
—Rhys Marsh (@RhysNYC), via Twitter

0 1 4
 REACH
FOR THE
M I N D G R E N A D E S

PRIDE AND
PREJUDICE
Why it is necessary to recognize Jane Austen fans as the
avant-garde of digital culture.

BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Trekkies were the first fandom. But uni-
versal acknowledgment does not make a truth true. In fact, Adrianne Wadewitz,
a feminist scholar of 18th-century literature, set Wikipedia straight on this point
over a decade ago, when she identified the first fandom subculture as the Janeites,
the network of Jane Austen stans who found their prime directive, Austen idolatry,
around 1870. Star Trek: TOS didn’t air until 1966. Q But what does this matter,

ILLUSTRATION / LUCY JONES 0 1 7

M I N D
except for purposes of quarrels about
trivia? Here’s just one reason: Janeites are
known for having organized their net-
works in an almost magically prescient
way that didn’t just prefigure Star Trek
fan culture, it prefigured the … internet.
Go with me here. Janeites can be seen
as internet culture avant la lettre—what
Sebastian Heath, an archaeologist and
professor of computational humanities
and Roman archaeology at New York
University, calls a “self-digitizing com-
munity.” OK, yes, the Arpanet and packet
switching don’t figure much in the mis-
Janeites set in motion practices that now define
modern fan culture, in particular the online forums
dedicated to phenomena from Star Trek to Game
of Thrones to Hamilton to Doctor Who.
adventures of Emma Woodhouse or the
Bennet sisters. But the Janeites represent
a critical plot point in the evolution of
online sociology.
In the beginning, Janeites were some-
thing like an especially enthusiastic book
club. They changed as Austen’s work got
canonized and exported, but at first they
were chiefly English men. In this way,
they were unlike Trekkies and perhaps
closer to the zealous male fans—many of
whom identify as gay—of female super-
stars like Liza Minnelli or Cher.
In their devotion, according to Clau-
dia Johnson in Janeites: Austen’s Disci-
ples and Devotees, Janeites expressed
“the ecstasy of the elect.” The novel-
ist E. M. Forster and the literary scholar
A. C. Bradley were among the first prom-
inent Janeites, who, with only a touch of
self-parody, described themselves as a
“cult” devoted to their “dear,” “divine”
Jane. The group’s playfulness and ecstasy
let them blow past the rules of solemn
scholarship. And thus the Janeites set
in motion six practices that now define
modern fan culture, and in particular the
0 1 8
G R E N
online forums dedicated to phenomena
from Star Trek to Game of Thrones to
Hamilton to Doctor Who:
1. Janeites feel free to speak of fictional
characters—Miss Bates, Elinor Dashwood,
etc.—as though they are real people.
(Furthermore, according to latter-day
Janeite Ted Scheinman, they speak of
Austen herself with “the proprietary vim
of a family member.”)
2. They tolerate gentle teasing of their
fandom but balk at criticism of their
canon.
3. T hey a re met ic u lously det a i l-
oriented, priding themselves on know-
ing Austen minutiae as much as literary
themes. (Among the Janeites are students
of Regency suspender buckles, agrarian
history, English country dances.)
4. T hey a re sec ret ive—a nd of ten
abashed. (Forster once wrote: “I am a Jane
Austenite, and, therefore, slightly imbe-
cile about Jane Austen.”)
5. Their fandom is considered slightly
unwholesome. (Just as Trekkies are par-
odied as pimple-pocked teens in Spock
ears, female Janeites today are derided
as spinster cat ladies.)
6. They move comfortably between
fiction and reality, the spectral and the
solid, the fantastic and the real, the forum
and the meetup. They often bridge the
gap with fan fiction and cosplay.
To seal their in-group status and steer
clear of Muggles who might not get it,
Janeites today still use code, handles,
jargon, masquerade, memes. Generally
speaking, a “Willoughby” is a cad, and
a “Darcy” is a catch (though maybe also
kind of a dick). The code acts as hom-
age to the days when Janeites flew studi-
A D E S
ously below the radar. Kipling’s story “The
Janeites” tells of a group of World War I
vets who were closet Janeites. There’s
gender-bending too. Janeites who may
be super butch in light of day privately
visit spheres coded female: domestic-
ity, romance, social life. All of this has
stirred anxiety among out-group tradi-
tionalists. In a hatchet job on Austen and
her disciples given as a speech in 1928,
one critic derided her—and her fans—as
sexless, malicious, and girlish. As Forster
was gay and other early Janeites—includ-
ing Bradley—were lifelong bachelors, the
homophobia of haters was hard to miss.
Heath coined the phrase “self-digitizing
community” in 2011 to describe any group
that “takes the time to organize infor-
mation about itself or information that it
cares about” by making its artifacts leg-
ible, archivable, and searchable. Ancient
numismatics, he has argued, were part of
Rome’s self-digitization; the coins made
crucial aspects of the Roman Empire
retrievable by future historians and
archaeologists. In modern times, Heath
cites the superb wiki of Game of Thrones
aficionados, which makes their commu-
nity accessible and (mostly) intelligible,
even to those outside it.
For their part, Janeites riffed off Jane
Austen’s written work, which they made
supremely accessible to Austen readers
without advanced degrees by creating
indices, committing passages to mem-
ory, reenacting scenes, anatomizing the
film adaptations, and extending the nov-
els with fan fiction in which they, real
people, interact with Darcy and Bingley
and Knightley and all the rest.
Then there’s Heath’s most challenging
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What happens when two iconic brands built on design,
story, thrills, passion, and a stubborn belief in the power of
imagination come together?

ne started by engineering small and lightweight, yet highly effi-

cient sports cars just as the horsepower-obsessed muscle-car era
was taking shape. The other was a cinematic space-fantasy uni-
verse featuring wizards, a princess, a farm boy, and—of course—
Wookies that was introduced at the height of the disco era.

Two bold visionaries, both breaking the mold of their respective industries to
become cultural phenomena. Beyond their beginnings, you’ll find that these two
worlds, separated by time and space, have quite a bit in common.

From the cockpits of the 919
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The Porsche 919 Hybrid
Of course, none of these were
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M I N D G R E N A D E S

view: that digitization is, fundamentally,

something he calls “dematerialization.”
A community that digitizes itself, in CHARTGEIST
his view, renders its physical self sym- BY JON J. EILENBERG
bolic and nonmaterial when it puts itself
“online” or “in the cloud,” where its sense
and sensibility will outlive its bodily WHAT BIG TECH FEARS
demise.
The transitions from bodies to spir-
its, from Austen’s written words about Government fines
haberdashery to three-dimensional bob-
kins and petticoats, are well known to
Noncontingent workers
Janeites. When Ted Scheinman joined the
Janeites, he found himself at a séance,
among “those enthusiastic literary necro- Accountability
mancers who regularly summon Austen’s
ghost.” Note to Trekkies: Dematerializa-
tion is akin to being beamed up. China

About 10 years ago, I began to suspect

technology is the masculine form of the Amount of fear
word culture. Among the first projects
launched at Dartmouth College by John
Kemeny, the coinventor of Basic, was the
1972 digitization of the poetry of Rob- ESSENTIAL’S UPCOMING GEM PHONE
ert Frost, with a complete concordance
so anyone could search Frost’s opus by
words. Though this was little more than Slim form factor
data entry, it looked like a miracle to
Frost fans and to the librarian, Edward
Color-shifting coating
Conner y Lathem, who worked with
Features

Kemeny. Suddenly, computers weren’t

merely for mathematicians and the mil- Radical new UI
itary. They were for memorializing, pre- Company run by man
serving, and extending culture. And yet, who got paid $90 million
in spite of his close attention to Frost, to leave Google in the
wake of sexual assault
Kemeny will forever be known as a tech- allegations
nologist whose work belongs to STEM,
Relevance
and not the humanities.
Which is all why it’s necessary to rec-
ognize Janeites as the avant-garde of dig-
ital culture. Not only are Janeites fans of
NON-NATIVE SIGHTINGS
literature by a woman and about women,
but their organization was forced to
become dexterous and ironic (not unlike TikToks on Twitter
Austen herself) in response to sexism and
homosexism that kept members from
taking the main stage at literary lectures. TikToks on Instagram
And then later, while STEM and sci-fi have
been front and center in the story the
TikToks on Facebook
internet tells about itself—on Wikipedia
and elsewhere—Janeites, who are now in
full force on the actual internet, stand for Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook
posts on TikTok
the stubborn persistence of the human-
ities online.
Prevalence

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a

regular contributor to wired .

0 2 2
M I N D G R E N A D E S

END
GAMES
Every startup will eventually
stop. But Silicon Valley lives
in denial, so nobody plans for
the inevitable.

BY ARIELLE PARDES

Last year, Jibo—“the world’s first social

robot for the home”—began to lose its
mind. First came memory problems.
The bot started to spend less time swiv-
eling its head like the animated Pixar
lamp and more time staring blankly at
the wall. Its cognitive demise was slow,
then fast. At one point, Jibo itself deliv-
ered the fatal diagnosis: “The servers out
there that let me do what I do will be
turned off soon,” it said in its comput-
erized voice. “Once that happens, our
interactions with each other are going
to be limited.” Jibo the robot was

0 2 4 ILLUSTRATION / LENA VARGAS AFANASIE

 armanibeauty.com Ryan Reynolds

the new seduction

the new seduction
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M I N D
dying, because Jibo the company was going
out of business.
Jibo’s sudden plunge into digital demen-
tia brought on an outpouring of grief and
consternation. People had shelled out $900
for this thing; could the company really just
shut off its servers after a few years? (Well,
yes. The $70 million in venture funding
had run out.) People had kept Jibo on their
No one expected the robot to live for-
ever. And yet, no one seemed to have
fully considered that it wouldn’t.
kitchen counters, where it had listened in
on all kinds of intimate conversations. What
would happen to all that voice data now?
Would the company delete it or sell it off to
another company? And what were you sup-
posed to do with the thing after its blue ring,
like a giant digital eyeball, blinked shut for
the very last time? This wasn’t a mere hunk
of e-waste. Jibo was, in the company’s par-
lance, “a member of the family.”
Surely no one expected the robot to live
forever. And yet, somehow, it seems no one
had fully considered that it wouldn’t.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with begin-
nings and growth. It has a million words to
describe them: Launch! Bootstrap! Startup!
Scale! But the industry lives in embarrassed
denial about endings. Companies “sunset”
their unsuccessful ideas, as if sending them
off on a Hawaiian vacation. Meanwhile,
behind the scenes, founders may devolve
into a last-minute fight over the scraps. And
customers may be left wondering what hap-
pened—like the users of Picturelife, a photo
storage service, who in 2016 temporarily
lost all of their images when the company
couldn’t afford to keep paying for server
space as it was collapsing.
Tech leaders know that their businesses
must grow or die. But given that 70 percent
of new startups go out of business within
five years, you might think that more of
them would have plans in place for the
“die” scenario. When they inevitably do
fade to black, employees and even man-
agers are often left totally unprepared; cus-
0 2 6
G R E N
tomers have to figure out how to extricate
themselves and their data from the wreck-
age; and society at large is often stuck with
a load of garbage—both literal and figu-
rative—to clean up. Consider the piles of
yellow bikes strewn across sidewalks and
railroad tracks in cities like London, where
three dockless bike companies shut down
operations this year.
And it’s not just fledgling startups that are
caught by surprise when they begin to fal-
ter. This fall, after being valued at $47 bil-
lion, WeWork slid toward bankruptcy in a
span of six weeks. Analysts had raised their
eyebrows at the company’s business model
for years—WeWork takes on huge liabili-
ties with its long-term leases on commer-
cial buildings, which leaves it vulnerable to
fluctuations in market demand—and yet the
implosion came as a violent, sudden shock.
In Seattle, WeWork and a real estate partner
abruptly pulled out of WeWork’s multiyear
lease on a 36-story tower, just as the build-
ing neared completion. Then, in October,
the company announced it would lay off
thousands of employees, many of whom
had recently been expecting it to go public.
Who knows whether WeWork will pull its
act together, but the brush with death came
a bit too much out of the blue.
Even the largest companies will go away
someday, or at least fade into a ghost of
themselves. (Remember Kodak?) It’s hard to
imagine a world without Facebook or Goo-
gle, but it’s arguably important that Face-
book and Google imagine precisely that.
“Every consumer experience will have an
ending,” says Joe Macleod. “It seems bonkers
how I have to argue that point sometimes.”
An energetic Englishman, Macleod
advises companies on how to game out
their endgames. (His business card: “Head
of Endineering.”) He has worked with Ikea,
Intuit, Logitech, and Spotify, helping them
anticipate what he calls “closure experi-
A D E S
ences.” According to Macleod, every prod-
uct faces a cycle of endings, from breakage
to customer burnout to falling behind con-
sumption trends. It’s important to plan for
each of them, he says. Not all companies do.
But Macleod points out that regula-
tions are increasingly forcing businesses
to write at least some parts of their last will
and testament. In Europe, the new Gen-
eral Data Protection Regulation requires
firms to delete personal data at the end of
a service contract, so that customers retain
control of their data whenever they leave a
business—or when that business ceases to
exist. The California Consumer Privacy Act,
which goes into effect in January, makes
similar demands on how companies store,
or delete, customers’ data.
Those regulations might force even
broader conversation about endings—like
maybe there should be rules that make
companies responsible for their literal
waste, too. All too often, it’s the public that
ends up cleaning up the mess when firms
flame out without forethought.
Of course, the trouble for consumers—
and perhaps for Macleod’s consulting
business—is that companies may not see
much point in ensuring that they’ll be good
posthumous citizens; they’ve got growth to
fight for, bills to pay, and investors to charm.
If the worst happens, they’ll be gone and out
of money anyway.
Macleod argues that learning how to say
goodbye responsibly can actually help a
company stay healthy. No business keeps all
of its customers forever, and holding on to
them too tightly may backfire: People seem
to like when companies offer an easy way
out of subscriptions and services, he says.
Customer loss, of course, is not the final
farewell. But there is at least one incentive
to imagine that fateful end: A company that
sees its own death clearly also has a better
chance of seeing its next pivot.
Jibo didn’t see that far ahead, but it did
provide for a future at the 11th hour. As the
company’s last employees programmed the
robot’s goodbye speech, its founder report-
edly signed a license that would allow devel-
opers to continue working on the robot’s
source code for educational purposes. Jibo
itself was dying, but at least it might give life
to a new kind of robot someday.
ARIELLE PARDES (@pardesoteric) is a
senior writer at w i r e d .
Your business is as unique as a barcode.
The trouble is, barcodes look the same.
And judging by the one-size-fits-all coverage most insurers offer, all businesses
are the same. But when you specialize only in business insurance, you know each
one is unique and tailor policies to fit each business.

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Hiscox.com or call 877-926-1877.
M I N D G R E N A D E S

WORKERS’
LITTLE
HELPERS
Microtasks might be the future of white-collar productivity.

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

Normally, when you open Facebook, you see pictures of your friends’ awesome vacations or links to madden-
ing political stories your dad is sharing—your basic emotional goulash of FOMO and TMI. But last year, the
nerds at Microsoft Research tried something different: They put bits of office work into the News Feed. Q The
researchers created an AI app that looked through documents you were writing in Microsoft Word. It extracted
simple editing tasks, like making a sentence less wordy. Then, using a Chrome plug-in, the software would
slot these jobs into an item in your feed, one every 2,000 pixels. The researchers gave the tool to a test
group, who began duly doing the little work tasks, a few each day, when they saw them while scrolling
through Facebook. Every time they finished one, the AI would automatically insert it back into the proper
Word file. Q It might seem kind of nuts to work that way, yes? But the subjects said they oddly enjoyed

0 2 8 ILLUSTRATION / ALVARO DOMINGUEZ

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T H E A RT O F E S S E N C E
M I N D
these microtasks. They said it made them
feel more productive: “It’s like chipping away
at the document,” one noted. “It was nor-
mally time I would be wasting.”
This concept is called microproductiv-
ity—and you might be working this way soon
too, because companies like Microsoft have
begun weaving microtasks into commer-
cial software.
Microproductivity emerged in part as an
evolutionary response to everyone’s num-
ber one complaint about office life: inter-
Instead of lecturing people about mindfulness
and staying focused, what if you engineered
work to fit into fractured moments?
ruptions. It takes 25 minutes to truly resume
a task we’ve been distracted from, on aver-
age. Even still, our attention shifts across
our computer screen every 47 seconds, as
research by Gloria Mark, an informatics pro-
fessor at UC Irvine, has found. And with each
interruption we often lose context. When we
come back, we tend to forget what the heck
we were doing.
Jaime Teevan of Microsoft Research tells
me she thought about this problem because
whenever “you take a break ... you go off into
some rathole on social media.” She wondered
if she could co-opt the fragmented nature
of screen life. Instead of incessantly lectur-
ing people about mindfulness and staying
focused, what if you engineered work to fit
into those fractured moments? “You have to
meet people where they are,” Teevan says.
The Facebook experiment worked so
well that Microsoft now plans to put micro-
tasks into Word itself. As you’re working, you
will be able to identify small bits that need
doing—like finding a fact or finishing off a
paragraph—and flag them with an @ sym-
bol. Then Word pushes them out as emails to
yourself (or to a colleague, if you’ve pinged
them with an @), each message contain-
ing one task, which can be completed right
inside the email itself. Once it’s done, Mic-
rosoft inserts the edit back into the Word
doc—no cut-and-paste necessary, even if a
colleague completes the work.
Email is already “just a bunch of micro-
tasks,” as Rob Howard, Microsoft’s general
0 3 0 ILLUSTRATION / STORYTK
G R E N
manager for Office 365, tells me. The com-
pany has just made it explicit and tethered
those tasks to your macro work.
One could imagine microtasks blooming
everywhere. As AI gets better at extracting
small tasks from our big projects, it could
start tweeting us to-dos or hitting us up on
Slack. It might even be kind of fun. A few
years ago, MIT researcher Carrie Cai co-
created a language-learning plug-in for
Gchat: During down moments, like waiting
for a reply, it would teach you a new word.
(On average, people learned four a day.)
Viewed one way, microproductivity is a
clever hack of our frazzled lives. Viewed
askance, it seems deranged—digital Tay-
lorism run amok. Email has already metas-
tasized to the point where it can consume
more than a quarter of our work days;
should we be adding more? This is what
you’d expect Microsoft’s subjects feared
when they started the microtask experiment.
But once they’d tried it, Teevan says, they
liked how it fit real work into small bursts.
In fragmentary moments, instead of grazing
on social media or replying to endless email
chains, they were cranking away on actual
documents they really needed to finish.
And the microtasks could also be psy-
chologically useful: They reminded people
to complete their work. As Teevan notes,
we sometimes procrastinate on the big job
because we don’t know where to start. The
microtasks create forward momentum.
Many of our digital tools are, in precisely
this way, Janus-faced. And with productiv-
ity, Americans typically veer back and forth.
Half the time we’re Walt Whitman, loafing
around on Twitter. The other half we’re Puri-
tans, attacking our to-do lists with moral
fire. Microtasks manage to live in both
worlds. They might be, ironically, a creature
perfectly suited to our times.
CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a
w i r e d contributing
editor. Write to him at
clive@clivethompson.net.
A D E S
ANGRY NERD
BY JASON KEHE
NETFLIX,
CHILL OUT
Surprise! I have nightmares. In my lat-
est, I was stumbling through an eternal
field in the dead of night, fog so thick
I couldn’t see two inches. Then, out of
the mist, a carousel materialized. Car-
nival music jangled as the wide-eyed
wooden horsies screeched round and
round. The moment I jerked awake, the
meaning was clear: This is my freak
show of a life on Netflix. So many eve-
nings, the haze of the day gives way to
the dull shock of the Scroll. Row upon
row of bingeables, as infinite as they
are inane, siren-song me to oblivion.
If I dare pause on one, it shrieks grote-
squely alive. Oh look, Netflix has a new
movie about—YOU HAVE NO CHOICE
BUT TO WATCH THE INTERMINABLE
TRAILER RIGHT NOW. Autoplay, you
are an unconquerable horror, the sadis-
tic ride attendant who won’t let me off.
Make it stop, holy mother of cyberhell,
make it stop! Amazon respects the still-
ness (along with my ability to read a
show description); so does Hulu. Net-
flix, do you wish to nauseate your user
base? To make it impossible to breathe,
process, choose? Do you really have
such minuscule confidence in the intrin-
sic appeal of your programming? No
matter how many spins I take through
the grid, terrified to linger lest I trig-
ger a mini movie, I end up back where
I started, a little deader inside. Carou-
sels originated in ancient Arabia, let’s
remember, with real-life horsemen run-
ning in circles. The 17th-century Italian
word carosello meant “little war”—
it was a training exercise. The Scroll
appears to be training my brain for a
more modern campaign: the stream-
ing wars. When the time comes to pick
sides, I’ll be stuck inside Netflix, riding
and dying for it—forever.
PILOT
EJECTED
Vintage F-16s are reborn as drones.

BY LAURA MALLONEE

When the US Air Force launched the F-16 Fighting Falcon

in 1979, it had something no other military jet did: a com-
puter. Four, actually. Their electrical signals commanded
the aircraft instead of gears and pulleys, ushering aerial
combat into the digital era. Now, after fighting in the
Gulf and Iraq wars, some of these 49-foot supersonic
jets are speeding toward an autonomous future. Believe
it or not—we don’t blame you for thinking the buttons
in this cockpit couldn’t belong to a droid—they’ve been
retooled and given (short) new lives as drones.
Colonel Steven Boatright, commander of the Weap-
ons Evaluation Group at Tyndall Air Force Base in Flor-
ida, who’s flown Falcons for 25 years, says F-16s are
perfect for dronification, because their computer sys-
tems make them easy to modify. The Air Force began
converting the craft into QF-16s (the Q designating
drones) in 2010. This year, up to 32 will fly over the Gulf
of Mexico as elusive moving targets until they’re sacri-
ficed to missiles and guided bombs, helping Boatright’s
unit figure out how those missiles and bombs the gov-
ernment wants to buy actually work in stress tests.
To get these jets into flying, and dying, shape, Air
Force engineers resurrect old F-16s from a 2,600-acre
boneyard in Arizona. Then Boeing rigs them with $1.9
million in Drone Peculiar Equipment, including an auto-
matic flight system that triggers takeoffs and landings
at the press of a button. Soon they’re condemned to
Tyndall’s “death row” runway. They perform elaborate
maneuvers (barrel rolls, S turns), mimicking what ene-
mies might do in battle, until they’re shot down and sink
to the bottom of the ocean, the wreckage reincarnated
as a reeflike hangout for sharks and barracudas. (Ground
control can also blow up any erratic drone by remotely
detonating the plane’s AIM-9 warhead.) The boneyard
has enough F-16s to keep Boatright busy for the next
decade, and maybe even fuel a robot war. In March, Air
Force assistant secretary Will Roper cited QF-16s as a
potential host for a machine learning program called
Skyborg. That AI aims to turn drones into wingmen
2
capable of fighting and hurling bombs alongside humans
piloting the most advanced stealth aircraft by 2023.

LAURA MALLONEE (@LauraMallonee) writes about

photography for wired .

0 3 4
M I N D G R E N A D E S

1. No pilot? No harness straps, seatback cushion, 2. A new exterior lock prevents the canopy from 3. Switches now activate the drone’s telemetry
lapbelt, or survival kit straps needed. popping open during flight. system so ground control can command the plane.

PHOTOGRAPH / JASON KOXVOLD

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 CONTRIBUTORS:
BOONE ASHWORTH
MICHAEL CALORE

Wish
SCOTT GILBERTSON
JESS GREY
ADRIENNE SO
JEFFREY VAN CAMP

List
42 amazing gifts you’ll want to keep for yourself.

2019 PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JOSEPH SHIN
/
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MY NAME IS WENDY
 01 ↘
SKI CAP
POC’s new snow sports
01
helmet is full of features
to save adventurers’
brains (thick shell, rota-
tional impact protection
pads) and bodies: It has
an industry-standard sen-
sor that rescuers can use
to find you and an NFC-
enabled chip that stores
medical data. So when you
gonk your noggin on a tree
WISH
and wind up unconscious,
LIST the ski patrol can swoop in,
scan the chip, and get to
work. POC Obex BC SPIN
| $250
04
0 3 8
02 ↘
LISTEN HEAR
Since Apple’s AirPods
popularized the idea of
truly wireless listening,
everyone is taking a stab
at wirefree headphones.
1More has made the pair
most worth a listen. Like
all wirefree sets, they have
no cords and come with a
charging case. Unlike the
competitors, 1More’s buds
have a comfy, stay-put fit,
crisp audio, a reasonable
price, and more than six
hours of battery life per
charge. 1More Stylish
| $100
03 ↘
JOE TO GO
The vacuum-insulated
mouth on this totable
coffee mug is wide enough
to accommodate a pour-
over dripper, and the
ceramic coating in the
16-ounce interior preserves
all the nuanced flavors of
single-origin bean juice.
The lid locks liquid inside
 STRESS LESS
&
SLEEP
Our drug-free formula includes Ashwagandha to help calm the mind
and body, while an optimal melatonin level helps you nod off naturally
with no next day grogginess.* Naturally Superior Sleep.

© Procter & Gamble, Inc. 2019

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
advertisement
Learning
Through Play:
Common
Misconceptions
LEGO FOUNDATION
RELEASES A NEW STUDY
THAT FINDS LEARNING
THROUGH PURPOSEFUL
PLAY IS VITAL TO
STUDENTS’ SUCCESS
THE LEGO FOUNDATION
recently released the findings
of a five-year research initia-
tive that looked at the role
“learning through play1” during
school has in a successful
educational curricula. The
LEGO Foundation worked with
the Australian Council for Edu-
cational Research to review
international research studies,
and found that the way to
build a strong academic
home in which children’s edu-
cational advancement is nur-
tured, is to encourage joyful,
meaningful, actively engaging,
and iterative learning by way
of purposeful play in school.
To fully understand—and
appreciate—the role learning
through play should have in
our educational system, you
first have to debunk a couple
of common misconceptions.
MISCONCEPTION #1:
The Benefits of Learning
Through Play Are Only Rel-
evant to Younger Students.
Since learning through play is
usually found only in the lower
primary grades, the LEGO
Foundation looked at peda-
gogical approaches in upper
levels that equate to (or are
highly relevant to) learning
through play—namely active,
collaborative & cooperative,
experiential, guided discovery,
inquiry-based, problem-
based, and project-based
learning. It was determined
that these methods of teach-
ing did, in fact, evoke the
same effects that traditional
learning through play had on
younger students, at the same
time having a more joyful,
meaningful, engaging educa-
tion experience. This, in turn,
positively affects students’
learning across all domains—
social, emotional, physical,
creative, and cognitive—which
equates to well-rounded and
adjusted individuals.
Embracing this joyful, mean-
ingful and engaging learning
experience, LEGO® Education,
the education division of
LEGO®, has developed a
continuum of preK-12 STEAM
solutions, which are geared to
all different age groups, that
fit the approach of “learning
through play”. For example,
WeDo 2.0 is made for ele-
mentary school students and
helps bring science, computa-
tional thinking, and engineer-
ing principles to life. Designed
for middle school, LEGO®
Education SPIKE™ Prime is
another project-based STEAM
solution that combines LEGO
bricks, coding language
based on Scratch, and a
programmable Hub to help
students of all learning levels
build confidence and critical
thinking skills. At the high
school level, there is LEGO®
MINDSTORMS® Education
EV3, which is a hands-on,
cross-curricular STEM
solution that mixes LEGO®
Technic™ elements, class-
room-friendly software, and
standards-aligned lessons in
engineering, coding, physics
and more. All of LEGO®
Education’s solutions engage
students in active learning, in
a meaningful way, regardless
of their grade level.
MISCONCEPTION #2:
Learning Through Play is
Unstructured and Completely
Student Directed. This implies
that learning through play in
school would not be effective
because there are no set
parameters. However, if you
look at the idea closely, you
find that learning through play
is not the same as only having
“free play,” (child-directed,
voluntary, and flexible) but
rather a mix of child-directed,
teacher-guided, and teach-
er-directed learning—all of
which must work in harmony
together as they are not
effective when one approach
dominates. That brings us to
the need for an integrated
teaching methodology, as it
has been found that a multi-
pronged approach stimulates
communication, creativity,
collaboration, and critical
thinking skills.
In short, we must reimagine
the traditional notion of learn-
ing through play in school to
include students of all ages
and backgrounds—even
upper level students—as
there is evidence to show that
this approach is an essential
component to a more inte-
grated way of teaching—and
learning, regardless of age.
We must also embrace the
idea of purposeful play and
find a balance between
student- and teacher-led
play, which working together,
To learn more, visit LEGOeducation.com
can create active, coop-
erative, experiential, and
ultimately effective learning
environments. LEGO has
always been a proponent
of these types of integrated
approaches to learning. This
is at the core of the non-profit
social purpose of the LEGO
Foundation. It’s also the rea-
son LEGO® Education devel-
ops and creates hands-on,
cross-curricular solutions that
are founded on purposeful
play—bringing forward the
confidence in teachers to use
these approaches effectively.
But the real takeaway is
that in order to create
learning environments that
enable students of all ages
and levels to thrive,
“we must continue to
challenge traditional
misconceptions and
embrace integrated
approaches to
both teaching and
learning.”
When we apply the
educational approach of
learning through play, we can
have both highly engaging
experiences for students, to
develop a breadth of skills
important in the future, as
well as a deep understanding
of academic content.
1
Learning through play at school
(ISBN: 978-87-999589-6-2): https://
www.legofoundation.com/media/1740/
learning-through-play-school.pdf
Hands-on
learners are
confident
learners
Help your students build confidence in learning with
hands-on STEAM solutions from LEGO® Education.
Learning through play engages students, sparks creativity,
and encourages collaboration and critical thinking.

Learn more at LEGOeducation.com

#LEGOconfidence

LEGO, the LEGO logo, DUPLO,

the SPIKE logo, MINDSTORMS
and the MINDSTORMS EV3 logo
are trademarks and/or copyrights
of the LEGO Group. ©2019 The
LEGO Group. All rights reserved.
 05 ↘
STUCK ON YOU

Does that itty-bitty Apple

TV remote keep get-
ting lost? Try Tile’s latest
tracker, a tiny waterproof
sticker about the size of
three stacked dimes. Affix
one to anything you want
to keep tabs on, and use
Tile’s app to locate pre-
cious missing objects up
to 150 feet away. The bat-
tery is good for three years
of misplacing things. Tile
Sticker | $40 for two

06 ↘
MINOR KEYS

WISH Downsized keyboards

LIST are hot these days; people
like the ability to conserve
both desk space and hand
movement. This quirky
QWERTY trims the fat
by ditching most of the
non-letter keys. But what
it lacks in buttons, it makes
up for in options. Use the
dedicated special keys
on either side of the smol
space bar to access less
common functions. Despite
07 ↘
SUN DIAL

One Eleven’s latest wrist-

wear is an eco-friendly
timepiece de résistance.
It uses solar power to

42-mm, water-resistant

08
case is made from plant-
based castor oil, and the
velcro strap is made from
reclaimed water bottles.
Even the packaging is

Solar Three-Hand rPet

Watch | $75

08 ↘
BABY DRIVER

Kids are joyful, adorable,

electronic assistance. The

battery-powered motor
kicks on automatically

or struggling on a sand or
gravel path. It’ll also slow

a steep sidewalk. Cybex

e-Priam | $1,400

0 4 2
Shape the
future of AI in
your classroom
Advance your STEM program with
LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Education EV3 and
Python. Engage students with real-world
applications that build a foundation to
explore advanced concepts like artificial
intelligence and machine learning.

Learn more at LEGOeducation.com

#LEGOconfidence

LEGO, the LEGO logo, MINDSTORMS and the MINDSTORMS EV3 logo are trademarks and/or copyrights of the LEGO Group. ©2019 The LEGO Group. All rights reserved.
09 ↘
ART FILM
Put Instagram on the wall
with this pocket-size com-
bination instant camera and
printer. The LCD screen lets
you preview photos before
printing them, so only the
winners end up on a sheet
of Instax Mini film ($12 for
a 20-pack). The glass lens
and 5-megapixel sensor
produce sharp images, but
you can also download the
companion app to print pics
taken on a phone. Fujifilm
Instax Mini LiPlay | $160
10
10 ↘
DRY CYCLE
Haul all your work gear
without worrying about
those cloudy skies. This
weather-resistant 20-liter
carrier has pockets with
sealed zippers, a padded
15-inch laptop sleeve, a
slot for a water bottle, and
enough interior space to
accommodate just about
everything else a worker
needs for the daily com-
mute. The rain won’t know
what hit it. Timbuk2 Tech
Tote | $159
11 ↘
BEAT GENERATION
Whether making tracks
that sound like the Jungle
Brothers or the broth-
ers Ween, IK Multimedia’s
compact drum machine
will help dial in the proper
bounce. Choose one of its
100 presets to program a
beat, or assemble a sonic
palette by mixing the Uno’s
six analog sounds with its
library of 54 digital sam-
ples. Battery power means
the show can go on the
road. IK Multimedia Uno
Drum | $250
12 ↘
LAB PARTNERS
Class up social gatherings
with this measurably awe-
some drink set. It’s not just
sharp-looking, it’s scientifi-
cally sound—all the pieces
are made of laboratory-
standard borosilicate
glass, and the graduation
marks denote hundredths
of a liter for precise pour-
ing. Perfect for water, wine,
or any chemical concoc-
tion. Industry West 1L
Carafe | $55
Tre Glass Set Large | $100
 16 ↘
THE RIGHT STUFFIE

Tardigrades, those thicc

microscopic organisms,
are as adorable as they are
resilient. They can survive
anywhere—in a vacuum,
atop snow-capped moun-
tains, at the bottom of the
ocean, and, of course, in
our hearts. Blown up to
13 ↘ cuddling size, this 6-inch
plushie is a perfect sleep
QUIET REFLECTION companion—tardigrades
can lie dormant for as
This elegant-looking long as a century. Giant
mirror stays put on its Microbes Waterbear | $10
perch without any fas-
tenings or attachments—
just the magic of physics.
There’s a ball attached
to the back of the glass;
rotate it in the stand’s
socket to find the right
angle for admiring your vis-
age, or just pick the mirror
up and grip the ball like a
handle. Available in walnut,
beech, or ebonized beech.
Anden Cameo Mirror

14
| $194

14 ↘
AUDIO LOG

Simplify any audiovisual

connection with this boom-
ing television speaker that
has Roku streaming hard-
ware built in. Access thou-
sands of channels in one
place with Roku’s easy
voice controls and slick
menu system. The sound-
bar also works as a Blue-
tooth speaker, and it pairs
with the company’s new
subwoofer ($180) for some
extra thump. Roku Smart
Soundbar | $180

15
15↘
FLIP OUT

The cheeky name—doppio

is Italian for “double”—
betrays this coffee table’s
secret. The two-sided top
has oak veneer on one
side and a black lacquer
finish on the other. Just lift
the top off the powder-
coated steel frame and flip
it around for a change of
scene. We suggest wood
for movie night and shiny
black for New Year’s Eve.
Civil Doppio 65 | $499

0 4 6
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 17
19
20 ↘
HIDE BOUND
Don’t just toss a MacBook
into some cheap nylon
sleeve. Form’s simple and
elegant cases are shaped
from sustainably sourced
Italian and French leather,
then die-cut and hand-
stitched in San Francisco.
The exterior pocket can
hold a phone, a paper note-
book, or the latest issue of
wired . Form Leather Lap-
top Case | $1,600
0 4 8
↘
sleek instead of
Adapted from a process
pioneered with ski boots,
Tecnica’s heat-molding
technology makes these
the most comfortable,
lightweight hikers ever. A
20-minute in-store process
shapes the shoe to your
foot. When you’re chug-
ging up Mount Whitney,
the flexible upper, locking
laces, and grippy Vibram
sole will help you keep your
footing. Tecnica Plasma S
GTX | $180
19↘
SUCTION CUP
Combine hot water and
ground coffee in the hop-
per, then press the but-
ton on top. The FrankOne’s
vacuum mechanism sucks
the liquid through a mesh
filter and into the glass
carafe below. The coffee’s
bitter oils are left behind,
resulting in a sweeter-
tasting brew. A 12-ounce
cup of hot java is ready
in 30 seconds; cold brew
takes just four minutes.
Frank DePaula FrankOne
| $120

WISH
LIST
21 ↘
GAME BOY
23
Nintendo’s Switch console
is one of the most popu-
lar gaming machines in the
world, and the Switch Lite
is the newest member of
the family. Just about any
Switch game works on this
younger sibling. It can’t
connect to a TV like the
full-size Switch can, but
the mobile-only Lite makes
up for it by being about 10
percent smaller and a full
$100 cheaper. Nintendo
Switch Lite | $200
ing the smart home,
Sonos has finally made a
model that can step into
the great outdoors. The
weather-resistant Move
has a 10-hour battery and a
built-in handle, so its pow-
erful and clear audio can
be carried to wherever the
fiesta ends up. On Wi-Fi it
works with Alexa and Goo-
gle Assistant; out of range,
it works as a Bluetooth
speaker. Sonos Move
| $399
23 ↘
CODE TO ENJOY
Drone king DJI took a
break from building fly-
ing machines to create the
coolest toy vehicle we’ve
tested. Designed for robot-
ics competitions, the Robo-
master S1 can be piloted
with a controller or pro-
grammed with Scratch or
Python to operate auton-
omously. More of a STEM
project than a laser-
shooting robot car, it’s still
a laser-shooting robot
car—and endlessly fun. DJI
Robomaster S1 | $549
0 0 0
 25 ↘
ANGST-A-GRAM

Michelle Rial’s illustrated

precisely weighted tonearm
on Denon’s turntable say
this is an audiophile com-
ponent. But the USB port
on the front says it’s future-
proofed as well. Plug in
a thumb drive, drop the
needle on that vintage
Coltrane LP, and press
book explores life’s big
questions (Am I eating too
much cheese? Has any-
one seen my sunglasses?)
through a series of charts,
graphs, and diagrams. Her
delightful visuals dissect
modern anxieties with real-
life objects: reliance on

25
Record. Whatever you’re
spinning is transformed
into CD-quality files that
can be loaded onto your
digital gadget of choice.
Denon DP-450USB
| $689
single-use plastics plotted
with a flexi straw, the rate
of climate change mea-
sured on an X-Y graph
using a burnt, upwardly
curved matchstick. Am I
Overthinking This? | $14

26↘
ORB IT

This app-controlled
robotic ball game is a cod-
ing class in disguise. Kids
can follow the lessons on
the 15 Activity Cards that
come with it by program-
ming the sphere’s move-
ments, or they can just flex
their imagination, building
(then demolishing) towers,
knocking over bowling pins,
and guiding the sphere
through a maze of their
own devising. Sphero Mini
Activity Kit | $80

0 5 0
 27 ↘
ACHIEVE BALANCE
It’s easy to get the hang of
Onewheel’s portable Pint;
just lean forward to cruise
ahead at up to 16 mph,
and lean back to slow or
stop. The brushless elec-
28
tric motor can power this
thing across pavement,
gravel, or dirt for up to 8
miles per charge, and the
battery even rejuvenates
when the Pint heads down-
hill. A carry handle makes it
easier to sling the 27-inch,
23-pound board onto the
bus. Onewheel Pint | $950
30
28 ↘
ADVENTURE TIME
Garmin’s multisport smart-
watch tracks runs, swims,
rides, and hikes. But for
trips way off the grid, put it
in Expedition mode and a
battery manager will prior-
itize keeping features like
topographic maps, bread-
crumb tracking, and heart
rate monitoring alive for
up to 20 days. It can even
detect a fall, alerting emer-
gency contacts and send-
ing your GPS location if
you can’t get up. Garmin
Fenix 6S Pro | $700
29↘
THIRD EYE,
BLINDING
BioLite’s design sepa-
rates the usual single-unit
headlamp into two, putting
the light assembly on the
front and the battery pack
on the back of the head-
band, thereby eliminating
any uncomfortable bounc-
ing. At almost 40 hours per
charge, with four lighting
modes and a max output
of 330 lumens, it brightens
the scene during nighttime
runs, hikes, or dog walks.
BioLite HeadLamp 330
| $50
30 ↘
RETURN OF
THE KING
JBL wants to party like it’s
1970, and we’re here for it.
The company’s iconic L100
loudspeaker ruled living
rooms in the vinyl era, and
now it’s back, thankfully
complete with that distinc-
tive foam grille. The L100
gets a few updates, like a
titanium dome tweeter and
an internal brace for added
vibration control, but JBL’s
3-way design still has all
the regal mojo of the
original. JBL L100 Classic
| $4,300 a pair, with stands
0 0 0
 32 ↘
UNDER PRESSURE

31↘
SILENCE, PLEASE
They’re pricey, we know,
but these noise-canceling
cans are worth it. The cus-
tom, 40-mm beryllium
drivers produce a balanced,
warm sound as refined
and inviting as the exteri-
or’s aluminum and leather
construction. Two levels of
canceling and 24 hours of
battery life make them our
preferred choice for buffer-
ing the coffee-shop buzz.
Master & Dynamic MW65
| $499
Developed by electronic
instrument pioneer Don
Buchla in 1990, the Buchla
Thunder was a touch-
sensitive music-making
interface unlike anything
else. Now, this legendary
synth controller is reborn
as a modern performance
tool. Slap Sensel’s silicone
template atop the com-
pany’s mousepad-sized
Morph controller and
manipulate any digital
music software by gliding
up to 10 fingertips across
the pressure-sensitive sur-
face. Sensel Morph With
Buchla Thunder Overlay
| $269

33 ↘
SPHERE FACTOR

Brooklyn studio Craighill is

known for crafting beau-
tiful desktop curios, but
its weighty Venn puzzle
shows the designers’ dia-
bolical side. Three identical
stainless steel pieces slot
together to form a perfect
sphere the size of a bil-
liard ball. Separating the
pieces is easy; just twist
them gently and they fall
apart. Piecing them back
together, however, requires
concentration, dexterity,
time, and a whole lot of
colorful language. Craighill
Venn Puzzle | $95

34 ↘
A REAL LOOKER

Undoubtedly one of the WISH

most expensive compact
LIST
cameras on the market,
the Q2 is also unequiv-
ocally the best. Hand-
made in Wetzlar, Germany,
by Leica’s exacting engi-
neers, the weather-sealed
shooter features a fixed
28-mm, f/1.7 lens with stel-
lar optics. Credit for the
hyperreal photos it pro-
duces goes partly to the

34
47-megapixel, full-frame
sensor and partly to your
most discerning eye. Leica
Q2 | $4,995

0 5 2
PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY. BULLEIT DISTILLING CO, LOUISVILLE, KY.
36 ↘
ACE ID
Our favorite method of
hardware-based two-
factor authentication finally
works with iPhones. The
YubiKey 5ci has a Light-
ning connector on one end.
Plug it in to prove you’re
actually you, or just tap it
against your phone to iden-
tify yourself via the built-in
NFC connection. Some
of our favorite security
apps are already compat-
ible, including the Last-
Pass password manager.
YubiKey 5Ci | $70
WISH
LIST
0 5 4
35 ↘
WIND TO THE
SHEETS
The BedJet is basically a
giant, quiet hair dryer that
keeps your bed the per-
fect temperature. A hose
runs from the blower unit
to under the comforter,
so you can waft yourself
to sleep with hot or cool
air (between 66 and 104
degrees Fahrenheit). Cou-
ples who can’t agree on a
single climate can instead
get a dual-jet bundle
($899) and each enjoy
their own breeze. BedJet 3
| $399
37 ↘
DREAM THEATER
With all the new streaming
services coming from Dis-
ney, Apple, and everyone
else, you’re going to want
a bigger, bolder screen.
Vizio’s premier 4K panel is
packed with colorful Quan-
tum Dot pixels that display
a wide range of bright-
ness levels, from striking
white to absolute black. It’s
a whole lot of television,
all for hundreds less than
other top-rated sets. Vizio
P-Series Quantum 4K
65-Inch | $1,400
38 ↘
LEGENDARY BREW
Hailing from Japan’s snowy
Niigata prefecture, Yuki
Otoko is a clear and dry
junmai sake. The yeti on
the label pays homage to
local legend—a hirsute
mountain-dwelling mon-
ster who helps lost travel-
ers find their way to safety.
Indeed, a portion of the
proceeds from Yuki Otoko
go to fund local search and
rescue efforts. Yuki Otoko
“Snow Yeti” Sake, 24 oz.
| $35
40 ↘ 39 ↘
WE LOVE LAMP COAT OF WARMS

Designer Mona Sharma’s

task lamp can be dimmed
to emit a warm and soft
glow like an accent light or
cranked up to full bright-
ness to illuminate a work-
space. Its physical footprint
is tiny, and so is its envi-
ronmental one: Both the
13-inch-tall housing (avail-
able in green, white, or
black) and the frosted
lens are 3D-printed out of
corn-based plastic. Gantri
Buddy Light | $148
The interior of this breath-
able jacket is stuffed with
insulation made of 50 per-
cent recycled merino wool
39
fleece, which retains its
warming properties even
if it gets wet. But it likely
won’t, since the durable
water-repellent shell blocks
drizzle, wind, and any other
irksome elements out
there in the wintry wonder-
land. Smartwool Women’s
Smartloft-X 60 Hoodie
Full Zip | $250

41 ↘
COMMAND CENTER

Google Assistant is our

favorite way to control
a smart home, and the
Home Hub Max is one of
the best vessels for the
virtual helper. Streaming
music and YouTube vids
sound impressive through
the stereo speakers, and
video chats look superb
thanks to the onboard
camera. When Assistant
fails to understand spoken
commands, just tap them
out on the 10-inch touch-
screen. Google Nest Hub
Max | $229

42 ↘
TRUE CYBERCRIME

Author and wired security

reporter Andy Greenberg
tells the globe-spanning
detective story of the

42
search for the hackers
behind the NotPetya
cyberattack. Unleashed in
summer 2017, the malware
paralyzed railways and
postal systems and even
disrupted power grids.
Sandworm traces the
Russian team behind the
exploits and examines how
the digital and physical
battlefields have merged in
our fight against computer
crime. Sandworm | $29

41
0 0 0
Furniture and housewares for living in style.

Available now at
CB2 stores and cb2.com/gq
FEATURES WIRED 27.12

ILLUSTRATION / VINCENT SCHWENK 0 5 7

0 5 8
 The immigrants
who took
on Amazon

HOW A GROUP
OF SOMALIS BECAME
LEADERS
IN THE FIGHT TO
CHANGE A TECH
BEHEMOTH.

by Jessica
Bruder
with additional reporting
by Saraswati Rathod
T. IT WAS
11 DAYS
BEFORE
CHRISTMAS
IN 2018,
and Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee,
Minnesota, was operating at full tilt. At the
rear of the facility, waves of semi trucks
backed up to a long row of loading docks,
some disgorging crates of new merchandise
and others filling up with outbound pack-
ages. Inside the warehouse, within dark,
cyclone-fenced enclosures, thousands of
shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet,
ferrying towers of merchandise from one
place to another. And throughout the cav-
ernous interior, yellow bins brimming with
customers’ orders zipped along more than
10 miles of conveyor belts, which clattered
with a thunderous din.
Negotiating all the distances and tasks
that fall between those pieces of machin-
ery were the people. Like most of the
110-plus US facilities that Amazon calls
fulfillment centers, the warehouse known
as MSP1—named for its proximity to the
Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport—employs
more than a thousand workers, including
hordes of temps brought in for the holidays.
They power-walked (running was forbid-
den) across roughly 850,000 square feet of
polished concrete, following green-taped
paths on what amounted to a giant game of
Pac-Man the size of 14 football fields.
Among them was William Stolz, 24, a
lanky Wisconsinite who’d been at Ama-
zon for a year and a half. As a “picker,” his
job was to hover at the dim perimeter of
a cyclone fence and retrieve customers’
orders from the robot-borne storage pods
that came to his station. He would stoop,
squat, or climb a small ladder to grab items
and then rush to place them in one of the
yellow bins that sped off to the packaging
0 6 0 PHOTOGRAPH / JESSICA CHOU
department. There, another crew of work-
ers boxed orders, reportedly at a rate of 230
per hour, sending them off in cardboard
cartons bearing the trademarked Amazon
smile logo. Stolz says he and his fellow pick-
ers were expected to fetch more than 300
items every 60 minutes. And, according to
workers, Amazon’s inventory-tracking sys-
tem closely monitored whether they were
hitting their marks.
The pace that Amazon demanded was
inhumane, Stolz thought. Many of his
coworkers endured pain from leg, back,
and shoulder injuries as they strained to
hit their hourly rate—which was one of the
many reasons Stolz had decided to walk
off the job that afternoon, December 14, at
precisely 4 o’clock.
Stolz and several coworkers had been
planning the coordinated walkout for
weeks, but now, as he counted down the
minutes, he felt anxious and alone. “I was
watching the clock at my station. You know,
‘3:57 … 3:58 …’ ” he recalls, “just getting
really nervous.” His work station was rela-
tively isolated, and he couldn’t see anyone
else around him who planned to partici-
pate. He was momentarily gripped by the
fear that he’d be the only one to go through
with the plan.
Reminding himself that he’d made a
commitment, Stolz summoned his cour-
age; when the clock struck 4, he logged off
his computer and headed for the stairwell.
As he reached the ground floor, he felt a
sense of relief. Trickling down the stairs
after him he saw the familiar faces of other
workers he’d been getting to know over the
past several weeks as they had discussed
what to do about conditions in the ware-
house. Unlike him, most of his fellow strik-
ers were Somali Muslim immigrants. Many
of their faces were framed by hijabs.
Clocking out quietly, they walked through
airport-style metal detectors, past private
security guards. They stopped at their lock-
ers to bundle up in heavy coats, gloves, and
hats. “We gathered by the front doors for
a few minutes,” Stolz recalls. “That way, if
anybody was coming out late, they wouldn’t
get scared.”
Stolz estimates that about 50 workers
assembled before they streamed out into
the bracing air. (Amazon says the number of
workers who walked out that day was more
like 15.) A cheer rose up from the far side of
the warehouse parking lot, where a crowd
of off-duty Amazon workers and local com-
munity allies—more than 200 by some esti-
mates—had been watching the doors and
waiting for them. They stood amid patches
of crusted snow as the strikers crossed the
asphalt to meet them. The protesters bran-
dished signs that said, “Safe jobs now!” and
“Respect the East African community.”
Stolz settled into a place at the edge of
the crowd. He had joined friends at political
protests before, but he’d never participated
in anything like this. As American labor ral-
lies go, this one offered a striking remix of
the genre’s usual conventions. The organi-
zation presiding over the event was not a
union but a fledgling organization called the
Awood Center, whose motto was “Building
East African Worker Power.” (Awood is the
Somali word for power.) In the middle of the
crowd was a portable PA system, and the
first speaker received an ecstatic welcome:
US representative Ilhan Omar, who had
just weeks before become the first Somali
American elected to Congress, promptly
led the group in singing “Aan Isweheshano
Walaalayaal” (“Let’s Get Together With Our
Brothers and Sisters”), a classic Somali sol-
idarity anthem.
“I’ve had many jobs,” the congresswoman
told the crowd. “I cleaned offices, I worked
on assembly lines, I was even a security
guard once. I’ve had jobs where we did not
have enough breaks, where we used to try
Nimo Omar
to go to the bathroom just so that we could
pray.” The East African community, she said,
demanded better. “Amazon doesn’t work if
you don’t work,” she said. “It’s about time we
make Amazon understand that.”
Then the mic went to a young warehouse
worker from Somalia named Khadra Kassim,
who delivered a jibe about working for the
richest man in the world. “It’s sad to see that
the head of Amazon—God is the greatest, and
God is above all of us—doesn’t know who his
workers are, and what they are faced with,”
she said to laughs from the crowd.
As the sun set, the protesters began
marching toward the warehouse, back to
the glass doors where Stolz and the other
strikers had emerged, so that managers
could hear them. As if on cue, several Sha-
kopee Police Department patrol cars rolled
up to intercept them, misery lights blazing.
Flashes of red and blue strobed through
the twilight, illuminating the marchers’
faces and picket signs. The officers called
for backup. Squad cars arrived from five
other towns—Bloomington, Burnsville, Eden
Prairie, Jordan, and Savage—and the Scott
County Sheriff’s Office. Within minutes,
some 15 vehicles, including an ambulance,
had converged on the scene. Armed with
pepper spray, police formed a human bar-
ricade across the glass doors of the lobby.
The crowd started to dissipate when
darkness fell. But not all the protesters went
home. For several, it was time to start the
night shift. Wending their way through the
police barricade, they presented their Ama-
zon badges in the lobby and disappeared
through the turnstiles, back to the grind of
robots and conveyor belts and Christmas.
All told, the walkout at MSP1 lasted less
than two hours. Amazon characterizes it as
a “small protest” rather than a strike, arguing
that it had no appreciable impact on opera-
tions. But according to multiple labor experts,
it marked the first coordinated strike at an
Amazon warehouse in North America—and
it wouldn’t be the last time that workers in
Shakopee would set precedent. As the pro-
testers cleared away from the police line,
they chanted “Amazon, we’ll be back,” and
they would soon make good on the promise.
In the 25 years since Amazon was
founded, it has become the second-largest
private employer in the United States. Over
that time, the company has displayed an
extraordinary knack for dictating its own
terms to suppliers, local governments,
PHOTOGRAPHS / JENN ACKERMAN
and laborers. For years, the company has
induced cities and states to compete to host
Amazon facilities; it has managed to extract
tax breaks, costly infrastructure upgrades,
and valuable public data, even as it builds
out a logistics network without which Ama-
zon’s retail empire couldn’t function. What
Amazon offers those communities in turn
are jobs with competitive wages and ben-
efits for full-time workers, and the expec-
tation that workers—managers, pickers, or
stowers—will do their part to uphold the
company’s principles of “speed, innovation,
and consumer obsession.” In presiding over
that bargain, the company has enjoyed tre-
mendous leverage over its US employees,
terminating workers if they fail to meet their
hourly productivity rates and going to great
lengths to fend off labor organizers.
In recent years, however, Amazon’s lever-
age has weakened ever so slightly. With US
unemployment nearing record lows, workers
have become harder to find and to replace.
And though opinion surveys suggest that
Amazon remains one of the most highly
regarded American companies, it has been
caught in a riptide of public criticism over
its enormous market power and its treat-
ment of workers. Numerous stories have
tracked the bodily impacts of the compa-
ny’s devotion to speed: In 2018, accounts
began coming out of the UK that Amazon
warehouse workers were peeing in bottles
for fear of missing their required productivity
rates. (Amazon disputed this account of its
working conditions.) Then came stories that
Amazon delivery drivers—who, according
to ProPublica, are required to deliver 999
out of 1,000 packages on time—have been
involved in scores of serious road accidents.
(Amazon countered that “the vast percent-
age of deliveries” arrive without incident.)
Donald Trump has frothed against the com-
pany’s effect on retailers on Twitter; US sen-
ator Elizabeth Warren has made breaking up
Amazon a theme of her presidential cam-
paign. In September of 2018, with Amazon in
his sights, US senator and Democratic presi-
dential candidate Bernie Sanders introduced
a bill to tax large corporations whose low-
wage workers rely on government assis-
tance. He called it the Stop Bad Employers by
Zeroing Out Subsidies—or Stop Bezos—Act.
Last year, in a rare concession, Amazon
raised the minimum wage for all of its US
employees to $15 an hour. In a statement,
Bezos said that Amazon’s leaders had “lis-
Above: A robot enclosure at
MSP1. Right: Safiyo Mohamed,
an Amazon worker.
tened to our critics.” But critics keep lining up,
some of them inside Amazon’s own buildings.
In many ways, MSP1 is just like the dozens
of other Amazon fulfillment centers in the
US. But it differs in at least one significant
respect: At least 30 percent of its workers
are East African. Many are Somali Muslims
who have been in the country for only a few
years. Some are refugees who survived years
of civil war and displacement, only to face
anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamopho-
bia in their new home. This relatively small
group—bound together by shared neighbor-
hoods, mosques, cafés, and Somali shopping
malls—has managed to pull off feats of orga-
nizing unmatched by workers at any other
Amazon warehouse in America. The group
has staged walkouts, brought management
to the negotiating table twice, demanded
concessions to accommodate Muslim reli-
gious practice, and commanded national
attention—all without the clout of a tradi-
tional union. Of course, Amazon is still in a
hugely dominant position; Somalis in Min-
neapolis sometimes compare it to a lion. So
how did a two-year-old organization made
up of immigrants become such a thorn in
the lion’s paw?
TT. ONE
of the most important people at the rally
on December 14 was neither a politician
nor an Amazon employee. Running oper-

ations behind the scenes alongside workers
was a 23-year-old college student named
Nimo Omar, who also helped cofound the
Awood Center. The American-born daugh-
ter of East African refugees, Omar stands
5' 1". A devout Muslim, she wears a head-
scarf, black plastic-framed glasses, and a
slender hoop in her nose. She speaks four
languages—English, Somali, Oromo, and
Amharic—and her favorite expression of
approval is “dope.” At the Awood Center,
people affectionately call her “the lioness.”
In the early 1990s, in the midst of the
Somali Civil War, Omar’s parents, who
had fled to Kenya as refugees, emigrated
to Atlanta, Georgia. Not long afterward,
the couple split up, and Omar’s teenaged
mother found herself isolated with two
small children in a sprawling Southern city
with few Somalis. “She didn’t know English
and had never driven across the country,”
Omar says. “But she knew she had relatives
in Minnesota.” So she bundled Omar and
Omar’s older brother into their car seats for
the 16-hour road trip north.
Somali refugees had been clustering in
the Twin Cities since the ’90s, with each
new migrant reinforcing the attraction for
the next. Eventually, some 52,000 people
who live in Minnesota would report Somali
ancestry, the largest population in the US.
Omar’s family moved in with a cousin in
Rochester, a city about an hour and a half
south of Minneapolis. Omar’s father, mean-
while, began spending much of his time
back in East Africa, eventually remarrying
there. So in 2006, Omar and her brother
temporarily moved to join him in an eth-
nically Somali region of Ethiopia.
Those years in Africa made Omar con-
scious of how many advantages she had rel-
ative to other Somalis. “I was a 10-year-old
girl who grew up in this privileged country,”
she says. During one trip, a relative who had
recently given birth visited Omar’s father’s
house, then lost the newborn to preventable
illness; Omar watched her grief-stricken
family wash the infant’s body, preparing
it for a funeral. When she was 15, not long
before she moved back to the US, Omar
and her brother were detained by Ethiopian
immigration agents who claimed they owed
$3,000 in fees. Omar spent three nights
sleeping on the concrete floor of a jail cell,
sharing the space with around seven Somali
women who’d been trying to make their way
to France. What stuck with Omar, once her
Some 52,000
family had raised enough money to free her,
was the women: how they’d told her about
people in surviving without food or water in a series
of detention centers, how curious they were
Minnesota about America—and again, how much priv-
report Somali
ilege she had relative to them.
Life back in the States, meanwhile, would
ancestry. make her conscious of how little privilege
she had relative to other Americans. By the
time Omar returned, her mother had relo-
cated to Las Vegas. There, Omar was the
only girl who wore the hijab in her high
school. White boys taunted her, threatened
to trip her on the stairs, called her a terrorist,
and asked her what she thought of Osama
bin Laden. She remembers thinking, “I’m
not a part of the fabric of this country.”
Omar was alienated but ambitious.
During her senior year of high school, she
moved back to Minneapolis, where she
later enrolled in community college; by
her sophomore year of college, she’d been
elected president of the student senate.
She also began getting involved with Black
Lives Matter—just in time for the protest
movement to swing its attention to the
Twin Cities.
On November 15, 2015, police in Minne-
apolis shot and killed Jamar Clark, 24, an
unarmed black man, after responding to
a domestic violence call. Many witnesses
claimed that Clark was already handcuffed
when police shot him in the head. Police
denied it and said he’d engaged them in
a scuffle, during which Clark allegedly
reached for one officer’s gun. Local Black
0 6 3
Lives Matter activists took to social media,
organizing a march to the city’s Fourth
Precinct police station under the hashtag
#justiceforjamar, which evolved into an
open-ended occupation of the street out-
side the precinct, with tents and banners
stretching down the block. Omar settled in
for the long haul.
On the night of November 23, eight
days in, Omar happened to be helping
with security for the encampment when
four masked men rolled up in a car. She
approached one of them, a guy in red flan-
nel, and asked him to leave. As other pro-
testers helped her escort him away from the
crowd, Omar heard what she mistook for
fireworks. Another of the masked men had
shot five protesters. Two of the victims—
brothers she’d met earlier—were lying on
the pavement near her, one shot in the leg,
the other in the stomach. Omar and her
friends rushed to use winter coats to stanch
the blood. (None of the victims suffered life-
threatening injuries, and the assailants were
later arrested.) The attack was terrifying, but
the protesters didn’t disband. Three days
later, the occupiers celebrated “Blacksgiv-
ing” together, feasting on donated turkey
and sweet potato pie, huddled around fire
pits in the slushy drizzle. “That was the best
Thanksgiving I ever had,” Omar said.
The ensuing year brought a string of dis-
illusioning events for Omar: On the 18th
day of the occupation, police used bulldoz-
ers to clear the encampment, and county
authorities eventually declined to press
charges against the officers involved in the
Clark shooting, concluding that Clark was
not handcuffed when he was shot. Other
developments were broadly terrifying for
Somalis: In Minnesota and other Midwest-
ern states, the run-up to the 2016 election Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Air- Clockwise from
saw enthusiasm for Donald Trump fused port. Omar took the job. After a month of left: William Stolz;
Khadra Kassim, an
with increasingly virulent anti-Somali, anti- intense work, a majority of the roughly Amazon worker; and
Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric. Weeks before 600-person workforce voted to unionize. Abdirahman Muse.
the election, federal agents intercepted a plot Omar was thrilled.
by three men to blow up a Kansas apart- On a warm June evening several months
ment complex full of Somalis just after vot- after the airport victory, Omar was sitting
ing day. And when Trump announced his ban on the cushion-strewn front porch of an
on refugee admissions during his first week SEIU organizer named Dan Méndez Moore.
in office, it felt personal. But still, Omar was They chatted about their next moves. Nearly
invigorated by activism. a decade earlier, Méndez Moore’s wife,
In the fall of 2016, she heard that the Veronica, had cofounded a workers’ cen-
Service Employees International Union ter—a nonprofit focused on training non-
(SEIU) was looking for someone who was union workers to organize themselves
fluent in Somali to help organize work- around their own goals—originally for the
ers, many of whom were East African, at local Latinx population. The group went on

0 6 4

to help wrangle victories for employees at
fast-food restaurants and Target stores and
to organize all kinds of people.
Given the success of the campaign to
organize East African airport workers, Omar
and Méndez Moore thought that a similar
kind of effort might work for Somalis. And
they knew just where to start.
The summer before, Amazon had opened
a warehouse in Shakopee after officials
agreed to spend $5.7 million to improve
local roadways. To fill jobs in a city with
just 3.5 percent unemployment, Amazon
went all out to attract East African workers.
Recruiters hired people virtually on the spot
in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighbor-
hood, known colloquially as Little Moga-
dishu. Recognizing that many immigrants
lacked cars, the company chartered coaches
to shuttle workers between the neighbor-
hood and the Shakopee warehouse. They
ran multiple times a day, seven days a week.
Omar’s brother and uncle had both
worked for Amazon, so she knew a little
about what went on in the warehouse: the
productivity quotas, the relentless pace.
She wanted to learn more. So she started
visiting the Amazon shuttle stop before
dawn, greeting bleary-eyed workers as they
headed off to the warehouse. “At first, peo-
ple didn’t want to talk to me,” she says. Some
were downright rude. But gradually people
started offering up their phone numbers,
saying they’d be willing to meet up later.
TTT. WHEN
MSP1 first opened in the summer of 2016,
things weren’t so bad. Hibaq Mohamed, a
Somali refugee, started that August as a
stower—a worker who scans and shelves
products that have just come into the
warehouse. She says she was required to
process just 90 items per hour. Amazon’s
shuttle service made for a pleasant, effi-
cient 45-minute commute. And in Novem-
ber, just before the peak shopping season
set in, the warehouse’s workers were given
the chance to win gifts for good perfor-
mance: speakers and big-screen TVs, as
well as credit to spend on gas, food, and
Amazon’s website.
But the honeymoon didn’t last, she says.
With the holidays came greater demands.
Mohamed says she now had to stow 120
items per hour, the first of several produc-
tivity upticks. And relations between the
warehouse’s managers and its East African
workers were becoming increasingly testy.
The managers at MSP1 were predomi-
nantly white, and barely any of them spoke
Somali. The language barrier, Mohamed
says, led to frequent, excruciating misun-
derstandings. Once, Mohamed watched a
manager admonish an East African worker
who thought he’d been paid a compliment;
he smiled, giving the boss a thumbs-up.
Mohamed, who spoke English better than
many of her colleagues, often tried to step
in and translate.
Mohamed was a natural leader. As a teen-
ager in Somalia, she had worked on an aid
convoy, which once thrust her into a ver-
bal confrontation with armed men trying
to interfere with emergency food deliveries.
She had also traveled to small villages dis-
pensing mosquito nets and advice to local
women on caring for newborns—all before
the age of 17. In Shakopee, her superiors
soon tasked her with showing new workers
the ropes. In February, they offered to offi-
cially designate her as a “fulfillment center
ambassador,” a role that involves training
other workers and boosting morale—but
with no authority and no increase in pay.
Mohamed turned the offer down.
She did, however, continue informally
orienting workers to life in the ware-
house, serving as a sounding board and
dispenser of advice. And as the summer of
2017 approached, Somalis were becoming
more and more nervous about how Amazon
would accommodate them during Rama-
dan, the monthlong religious observance
when Muslims fast during the day, which
would begin that year on May 26.
Working at Amazon already created
challenges for devout Muslims, who answer
the call to prayer five times a day. While
federal law protects their right to worship,
there were no designated prayer rooms in
the warehouses at the time; instead, work-
ers say, they prayed on the work floor or
by the coffee machines in the break room.
Workers also say they were losing time
against their rate during every minute that
they faced Mecca. It was hard enough to
meet the escalating quotas, and Muslims
worried about how they would keep up
during Ramadan, when they weren’t eat-
ing or drinking and as the temperatures
rose in the warehouse.
Sure enough, when Ramadan came
around, it was an ordeal. The Shakopee
warehouse had no air conditioning on the
work floor at the time, and some days were
sweltering. Because the latter part of Rama-
dan that year coincided with the summer
solstice, Muslim workers’ daily periods of
fasting were especially long. Several Muslim
workers reported exhaustion and dehydra-
tion, though Amazon disputes those reports.
Managers, for their part, seemed largely
unprepared for the holiday’s demands on
observant Muslims, workers say. By the time
Ramadan was over, East African workers
were desperate to avoid a repeat of the
debacle. They just didn’t know how.
TV. THE
grievance that first made workers truly
interested in talking to Omar was a rel-
atively small one. In October, Amazon
announced that it would cancel its direct
shuttle service from Cedar-Riverside to the
Shakopee warehouse. In its place, the com-
pany had convinced the Minnesota Valley
Transit Authority to add a permanent Sha-
kopee warehouse stop to an existing bus
route. Now the trip would include a transfer
and take an hour and a half—twice as long
as the shuttle ride had been.
To William Stolz, the picker, Amazon’s
cancellation of the shuttle seemed like a bait
and switch. Stolz lived in Cedar-Riverside,
and he dreaded making the longer commute
in freezing winter months. Having just grad-
uated from college with a liberal arts degree,
Stolz had taken a job at Amazon thinking he
would put his head down and pay off his stu-
dent loans. What he hadn’t anticipated was
how much he would come to enjoy the com-
pany of his coworkers. Working among so
many immigrants, he says, was like being in
“a small United Nations.” And now Stolz was
worried that few of those coworkers seemed
to be aware of the impending shuttle change.
Amazon says it announced the transition in
morning meetings and posted notices of the
news, but many of Stolz’s colleagues seemed
not to have gotten the memo.
Stolz had met Omar amid her efforts to
chat up Amazon workers. So now he started
to help her spread the word at the bus stop,
letting people know what was coming.
“Workers were super furious,” Omar
recalls. It didn’t help that the new pickup
point was farther than the shuttle stops
had been from the area where many of the
workers lived. Some of them—particularly
Muslim women who wore the hijab—wor-
ried about their safety walking to and from
the bus stop after dark.
Eventually, Omar would post herself out-
side the Shakopee warehouse itself, greet-
ing workers who had just clocked out and
bringing up the canceled shuttle. “Y’all, this
is an issue that we all need to talk about,”
she remembers telling them. One night,
some 20 people followed her to a nearby
Caribou Coffee. They went on to form a
new group they called the guddiga xalinta—
Somali for “problem-solving committee.”
In November, the Awood Center
launched its website and officially opened
its doors, with funding from the SEIU and
support from the Council on American-
Islamic Relations, a major Muslim advo-
cacy group. A Friday night kickoff event
drew about 50 people for a catered Somali
dinner at the center’s new headquarters
at Bethany Lutheran Church, a weathered
brick structure across the street from a
halal grocery near Cedar-Riverside.
Just a few days later, Awood made its
presence known to Amazon. While Omar
had been chatting with MSP1 workers about
their commutes, she had also been talking
to East African delivery workers at two
nearby Amazon facilities that sends vans,
trucks, and cars out to dispense packages
to customers. One driver claimed that an
Amazon subcontractor owed him hundreds
of dollars. So Awood’s first outing became a
protest against alleged wage theft by Ama-
zon contractors. (Neither the worker nor
his previous employer could be reached for
comment, and Amazon has since ended its
relationship with that subcontractor.)
On November 20, Omar, Stolz, and a
handful of delivery drivers gathered out-
side a delivery station in the suburb of
Eagan. They stood in the parking lot, bun-
dled up in hats and puffy coats, holding
a giant Awood banner. When an Amazon
manager emerged to see what was going on,
the drivers said that they were getting stiffed
by Amazon’s subcontractors. The manager
listened and promised to look into their
concerns, then hustled back inside. Now it
was certain: Awood was on Amazon’s radar.
V. THAT
fall, Stolz and a few other workers began
bringing a petition to work with them at the
Shakopee warehouse; it was addressed to
Jeff Bezos, and it asked the CEO to restore
direct bus service between Cedar-Riverside
and Shakopee. As Hibaq Mohamed tells the
story, she and Stolz happened to meet each
other one day while they were warming up
their food in the break room microwave.
He told her about the petition (which she
signed) and about Awood (which she hadn’t
heard about), and eventually they agreed to
meet up later with other workers at a local
library not far from the warehouse.
Mohamed, who worked in a different part
of the warehouse from Stolz, was energized
by the chance to air all the frustrations she’d
been hearing about. She was quickly brought
into the fold and started attending the meet-
ings that Awood was holding once or twice a
month at Bethany Lutheran. Amazon work-
ers would file into the church’s doors, past
signs advertising the parish’s soup kitchen
and its LGBT-friendliness, to learn about
their rights under US labor law and compare
notes about problems in the warehouse.
When Representative Ilhan Omar came to
one meeting to hear about Amazon work-
ers’ experiences, Mohamed and Stolz were
among those who stood up to talk.
In general, the workers shared a deep
sense of dread over the pace of Ama-
zon’s hourly stowing, picking, and packing
rates—which they saw as not only exhaust-
ing but unsafe. People were getting hurt in
the course of meeting their quotas. The US
Occupational Safety and Health Adminis-
tration requires companies to log any work-
related injuries or illnesses that involve
loss of consciousness, work restrictions or
reassignments, or treatment that exceeds
basic first aid, along with a few other cri-
teria. In 2017, according to OSHA docu-
ments obtained by w i r e d , the warehouse
in Shakopee reported an average of eight
such events a week, mostly sprains, strains,
and contusions. The month of July, which
includes Prime Day, Amazon’s summer ver-
sion of Black Friday, saw the most logged
incidents. The other two months with the
most such events were November and
December—the peak holiday rush. (In 2018,
the company says, it invested more than $55
million in safety improvements.)
The workers who gathered at Awood
were also constantly afraid of being fired or
“written up” for falling behind on their quo-
tas amid breaks for prayer. But above all,
they came to focus on one fact that height-
ened all their other anxieties: Ramadan was
coming around again, and they wanted to
do something to avert how bad it had been
the previous year.
In early May, Amazon management
announced that they’d heard some concerns
about Ramadan, so they scheduled two
open meetings where workers could discuss
the holiday with them inside the warehouse.
Small crowds showed up for the sessions,
which took place inside a conference room
with managers at the front. Workers rattled
off a number of desires: lower productivity
rates for the holiday, more breaks, some
kind of respite from heat, time off for Eid
al-Fitr, the festival that concludes the holy
month. According to Stolz, the managers’
replies were noncommittal. (Amazon says
the purpose of these meetings was just to
hear from the workers.)
Awood’s response, meanwhile, was tac-
tical. That month the center had hired its
first executive director, Abdirahman Muse,
a 36-year-old Somali immigrant who had
worked as a warehouse laborer, organizer,
and policy aide to the mayor of Minneap-
olis; Muse says that his first goal, now that
Awood had built up a base of support, was
An inspirational
display at MSP1.
to “take the fight to Amazon publicly.”
So workers in Shakopee promptly began
to hand out leaflets calling for Muslim
employees to show up for work on the first
day of Ramadan—May 15—wearing shirts
and hijabs that matched the color of the
Somali flag. The show of force, called Blue
Day, was meant to draw media attention to
Amazon’s failure to accommodate Muslim
workers for the holy month.
Soon after those flyers went out, Awood
says, warehouse management agreed to
create dedicated prayer rooms and prom-
ised to lighten quotas for Ramadan. Blue
Day was called off. Shortly thereafter, an
Awood organizer spotted two Amazon man-
agers at Karmel Mall, a Somali shopping
center, negotiating with a merchant over
the cost of 60 to 80 new prayer rugs.
On May 15, 2018, Amazon distributed its
new prayer rugs and agreed to convert a
conference room into a quiet prayer room,
though it would be available only on Fri-
days. The company also says it began allow-
ing workers to transfer to the night shift so
they wouldn’t have to work during periods
of fasting, approving leaves of absence for
Ramadan—though workers say these were
unpaid—and offering unlimited time off to
workers who wished to celebrate Eid. (An
Amazon spokeswoman says, “Our policies
on religious accommodations were made
as part of long-term plans, not as a direct
result of Blue Day.”)
The promise of a prayer room heartened
the activists, and it helped that the ware-
house was also now cooled by large fans.
But then Ramadan began, and workers
say the quota system didn’t change. When
Amazon fired one Somali American who
fell behind on her rate while fasting, the
Awood Center posted an online petition
that would receive more than 12,000 sig-
natures. It read: “Before Ramadan, Amazon
promised its Muslim employees that the
company would ease off its usual gruel-
ing daily productivity requirements during
the holy month. But just three days into
Ramadan, [a Muslim worker] was fired by
Amazon for—you guessed it—not meet-
ing her productivity requirements.” The
group demanded that the worker get her
job back. (The worker could not be reached
for comment. Amazon does not speak pub-
licly about individual cases but said that
productivity quotas are evaluated over a
long period of time and that the company
provides dedicated coaching to under-
performing employees. Amazon did not
comment on whether it ever committed
to lighter quotas.)
Awood upped the ante again, inviting
reporters to a protest outside the Eagan
delivery station on June 4. That day, a hand-
ful of Amazon employees stood chant-
ing “Yes, we can!” in Somali (“Haa waan
awoodnaa! ”) and English. They presented
managers with a list of demands, including
lighter workloads during the Ramadan fast.
Stories about the protest appeared on Min-
nesota Public Radio and in local news out-
lets, and the media blitz put Amazon on the
defensive; the company responded by tout-
ing its workplace benefits and its plans to
build a permanent prayer room for Muslim
workers at the facility. But on some points,
Amazon would not budge: Workers who
prayed, the company made clear, were still
expected to meet the same hourly quotas,
unless they wanted to dip into their unpaid
time off. The principle of speed, it seemed,
was not up for negotiation.
Behind the scenes, Amazon agreed to
meet with the workers who had organized
under Awood. And on September 25, after
much back and forth, about 12 workers,
three Islamic community leaders, Muse,
Nimo Omar, and four Amazon manag-
ers met in a rented conference room at a
Minneapolis institution called the African
Development Center. The walls were dec-
orated with paintings of Somali pastoral
scenes. The group of workers explained
their concerns about hourly productiv-
ity quotas, the warehouse’s response to
workplace injuries, and the lack of Afri-
can managers, among other things. Ama-
zon, which says it welcomes diversity at
all levels, promised to look into the issues
they had raised. One of the workers, Khadra
Kassim, was delighted to notice that the
managers seemed nervous.
At a second meeting, on October 28—
for which Amazon flew in a Libyan Amer-
ican manager from Texas—the company
presented the group with some responses
to their concerns. The workers then broke
away to discuss whether they were satisfied
with Amazon’s presentation. They weren’t.
So they gave Amazon until November 15 to
give them a better answer. Amazon’s second
response felt like more of the same.
On November 20, The New York Times
published a story about Awood’s meetings
0 6 7
with Amazon under the headline “Somali
Workers in Minnesota Force Amazon to
Negotiate.” The story underscored how
rare the Minneapolis workers’ successes
seemed to be: “Labor organizers and
researchers said they were not aware of
Amazon coming to the table previously
in the United States amid pressure from
workers.”
Amazon’s response to the story, mean-
while, showed how ambiguous labor orga-
nizing without a union can be. In comments
to the press, the company has repeatedly
classified its meetings with Awood as mere
community engagement, analogous to its
outreach with veterans groups and LGBT
advocates: “We were never ‘coming to the
table’ in the sense that’s described,” says
an Amazon spokeswoman. The purpose of
the meetings with Awood, she says, was to
“deepen our understanding of the East Afri-
can community and deepen their under-
standing of Amazon.”
Nonetheless, for Awood, it was a
moment of triumph. The scrappy Somali
workers had created a classic David ver-
sus Goliath tale, and as soon as the Times
posted its story, calls of support started
rolling in from around the country. Seiz-
ing the momentum, Awood announced
on Facebook that it was planning its big-
gest event ever: a protest at the Shakopee
warehouse on December 14. Everyone was
invited.
With the Awood Center suddenly com-
manding national attention, Amazon pro-
jected a measure of seemingly strategic
benevolence during the week before the
protest. The company held a job fair in the
heart of Cedar-Riverside on December 10,
advertising it with a video in English and
Somali. On December 13, Bezos pledged
$2.5 million to Simpson Housing Services,
a Minneapolis nonprofit that serves the
homeless. Awood organizers decided to
escalate their plan further: They would
stage a walkout in the thick of the pre-
holiday rush.
On December 14, as Stolz watched the
minutes tick down to 4 pm, Awood mem-
bers, supporters, and reporters gathered
on the far side of MSP1’s parking lot, hug-
ging themselves against the cold. It was a
moment of euphoria. But in the days and
weeks after the protest, some workers
would come to feel less secure than they
had before.
0 6 8
VT. AMAZON
has fended off unions ever since it was
young. In 2000, when the company was still
largely a bookstore, the Communications
Workers of America tried to organize the
company’s customer-service employees.
Amazon ultimately closed the call center
that had been the focal point of the orga-
nizing drive, calling the move a reorgani-
zation that “had absolutely nothing to do”
with the unionization effort. In 2013 and
2014 the company repelled an organizing
push in Delaware, reportedly with the help
of an anti-union law firm. And in Septem-
ber 2018, when whispers of a union drive
began passing through the workforce at
Whole Foods, Amazon sent out a roughly
45-minute training video to the grocery
chain’s managers about how to snuff out
organizing campaigns while steering clear
of US labor law violations.
The video, which later leaked to the press,
crystallizes the company’s attitude toward
organized labor, which Amazon regards
as incompatible with its core principles of
speed, innovation, and customer obsession.
“We are not anti-union, but we are not neu-
tral either,” the video’s narrator says. “We
will boldly defend our direct relationship
with associates.”
In one sense, Awood doesn’t threaten
that direct relationship the way a union
would. Omar and Muse take pains to clar-
ify that Awood does not represent workers
as a bargaining agent, it only helps them
organize themselves—which perhaps also
helps explain why Amazon doesn’t clas-
sify its meetings at the African Devel-
opment Center as “coming to the table.”
But that hardly means that coordination
between even small groups of workers
is exactly welcome. Amazon prefers to
deal with workers not only directly, but as
individuals—to resolve issues one on one.
And as the leaked training video makes
clear, the company trains managers to
keep tabs on “warning signs” of workers
organizing in numbers.
In animations vaguely reminiscent of
South Park, the video instructs managers
to stay alert for workers who suddenly start
to linger in break rooms after their shifts
are over, or clumps of workers who scat-
ter when managers approach, or the use of
terms like “living wage” or “grievance.” The
video tells supervisors what they must not
do, according to labor law—threaten work-
ers, interrogate them, spy on them, or prom-
ise rewards if they reject a union—but then
coaches managers through lawful ways of
achieving many of the same ends. (“To avoid
your comments being an unlawful threat,”
the video says, “avoid absolutes. Speak in
possibilities instead.”) In general, says Jan-
ice Fine, a professor of labor studies at Rut-
gers University, the workplace at Amazon
“is one that makes it really clear to workers
that they’d better not engage in any kind of
collective action.”
Within days of the rally in Shakopee,
several workers say they began to feel dis-
tinctly uncomfortable in the warehouse.
One Somali night-shift worker, who asked
to remain anonymous for fear of retalia-
tion, says that as she approached one of her
supervisors, she realized he was reading
news about the walkout on a warehouse
computer. She says he zoomed in on a photo
of her face and then told her that he was
very interested to see who was at the pro-
test. She felt shaken; his look suggested that
it wasn’t idle interest. Then, in May, three
East African workers filed a complaint with
the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission, saying that, almost immediately
after their participation in the December
14 protest, they “began experiencing a cam-
paign of retaliatory harassment from Ama-
zon management.” Amazon, for its part,
says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward
harassment and retaliation.
Meanwhile, some workers in Shakopee
noticed that, for the first time, the warehouse
appeared to be hiring only temporary work-
ers. So on March 8, 2019, nearly 30 stowers
at Shakopee—about a third of the depart-
ment working that shift, by Stolz’s esti-
mate—walked off the job around midnight.
(Amazon puts the number at less than 15.)
Together with Stolz and Nimo Omar, most
of them decamped to a Perkins restaurant.
Three hours later, they returned with a list
of demands, handwritten on a sheet of note-
book paper. They included “stop temp hir-
ing” and “end unfair firings.” (At one point
during the night, Omar and one of the men
who had walked off the job recognized each
other. He was one of the workers who had
initially been rude and dismissive to her
back when she was hanging around shuttle
stops in the wee hours of the morning, ask-
ing about what it was like to work at MSP1.)
Amazon is a nearly $1 trillion com-
pany with almost unlimited resources for
legal fights, public relations campaigns,
and strategic planning. But in the church
where Awood and warehouse workers met
to strategize, there was no falling back.
They decided to plan a new strike, this
one to be held on Prime Day itself. Euro-
pean Amazon workers had been doing it
for years, but as with a number of things
Awood was doing, it had never happened
before in the US.
VTT. ON
July 15, 2019, MSP1 was decked out as if for
a pep rally, with Prime Day banners and
mylar balloons and free commemorative
T-shirts for everyone. Amazon had decided
to expand its annual consumer bonanza into
a two-day affair, featuring a brand-new
service: free one-day shipping for Prime
members. Analysts predicted the event
would drive a record-breaking $5.8 bil-
lion in global sales. For the company, the
stakes were high. Mandatory overtime was
in effect. In the early morning, managers
stood outside the lobby, high-fiving workers
as they arrived for 11-hour shifts.
A week earlier, the Awood Center had
announced its plans for the strike. Since
then, it had drawn widespread attention. A
group of white-collar Amazon tech work-
ers was flying in from Seattle to attend the
protest and lend their support. In Germany,
where a Prime Day strike was also planned,
a participant composed an ode called
“Flowers of Dignity” for his Minneapolis
comrades. That morning, Democratic pres-
idential candidate Elizabeth Warren had
tweeted: “I fully support Amazon workers’
Prime Day strike. Their fight for safe and
reliable jobs is another reminder that we
must come together to hold big corpora-
tions accountable.”
The strike was due to start at 2 pm. By
1:30, about 50 people—including off-duty
Amazon workers and local labor activists—
were marching in a circle with picket signs
in the warehouse’s truck lane. Ashley Rob-
inson, a senior Amazon public relations
manager, had flown in from Seattle and
was greeting reporters at the warehouse.
Outside, as the temperature hit 91, the air
was thick with humidity. Torrential storms
were predicted for later that day. “The
weather might work in our favor,” she said.
Meanwhile, Omar was stationed out-
side the lobby, waiting for people to walk
out. “My job is to corral workers and make
a march,” Omar said. As had happened back
in December, the rally was taking place on
the far side of the massive parking lot. On
the hot summer day—under the scrutiny
of managers—the expanse seemed like an
impassable desert, and the idea was to give
workers a feeling of strength in numbers.
Inside the warehouse, however, things
weren’t going as planned. Stolz, who’d
arrived around 5:30 that morning to hand
out strike flyers in the parking lot, was trying
to rally the day shift. He made the rounds
of the break rooms, where he saw man-
agers handing out snacks and chatting up
employees. People were getting nervous.
Some told Stolz they didn’t want to lose their
unpaid time off. Others balked when they
neared the lobby, where Shakopee Police
officers and Amazon’s in-house security
team had gathered.
Only a few people trickled out to strike,
and Omar gave up on the idea of leading
workers away from the warehouse in a
parade. According to Awood, about 35 people
took part in the walkout; Amazon would later
say, yet again, that only 15 employees partic-
ipated and it didn’t see the event as a strike,
either. Inside the warehouse, reporters were
handed the following press statement:
“An outside organization used Prime Day
to raise its own visibility, conjured misinfor-
mation and a few associate voices to work
in their favor, and relied on political rhet-
oric to fuel media attention,” it read. “The
fact is that Amazon provides a safe, quality
work environment in which associates are
the heart and soul of the customer expe-
rience, and today’s event shows that our
associates know that to be true.”
By 4 pm, a stage had been set up across
the parking lot. Despite the heat and the
poor showing of strikers, the protest took
on a festive mood. More than 200 people
had gathered. There were trays full of beef
sambusas, large thermoses of chai tea, and
a performance by a Somali dance troupe;
at one point, Hibaq Mohamed jumped into
formation with them. Finally an emcee—
an Amazon worker named Sahro Sharif—
took the stage.
“There were a lot of people who were
afraid to come out and stand out here today
because of the management that’s going on
inside,” Sharif declared. “For the people that
actually came out tonight, I want to say thank
you and welcome, and let’s make it great!”
When the speeches were done, Omar and
a small group of activists walked back to
the warehouse to see if more strikers would
emerge. The shifts were changing, and an
employee leaving the warehouse looked at
the activists disdainfully. “There’s plenty of
jobs for you!” he hollered. “There’s Target!
There’s UPS! There’s Walmart!”
The air smelled sharply of ozone, and
forecasters were now issuing a tornado
warning. Omar and her group posed for a
selfie in front of the warehouse, and then the
sky opened up. Drenched, they hustled back
across the parking lot to help break down
tables and shade tents.
Today, there is no end in sight to the joust-
ing match between Amazon and Awood.
Immediately after the Prime Day strike, 13
members of Congress—led by Representative
Ilhan Omar and Senator Bernie Sanders—
led a call to investigate Amazon for work-
place abuse. Less than a month later, 50 to
80 workers staged a walkout at the Eagan
delivery facility, wearing yellow reflective
vests and singing “Aan Isweheshano Walaa-
layaal,” the same anthem Representative
Omar had sung the year before.
When labor experts characterize what
Awood has accomplished overall, they tend
to focus not on any specific concessions the
group has extracted thus far (which Amazon
denies are concessions anyway) but instead
on the national attention the group has
attracted—and its implications for other
workers in warehouses and in tech. Awood
bears a certain resemblance not only to
worker centers that focus on low-wage
industries, but to recent efforts by Google
employees and other tech workers to orga-
nize themselves and learn labor law without
the structure of a union. “Tech workers are
in this situation where they’re trying to figure
out: Where is their leverage? Where is their
ground to stand on? How do you negotiate
with an algorithm?” says Fine, the labor
scholar at Rutgers. Awood has become one
of the prime examples to learn from. Ama-
zon, in other words, is not the only one
watching a few Somalis very closely.
JESSICA BRUDER (@jessbruder) is a
New America fellow and the author of
Nomadland: Surviving America in the
Twenty-First Century.
 ILLUSTRATIONS BY
DXTR

W e’ll see the new Star Wars movie. Of course we’ll see it. Dark
Rey! Folding dual-bladed lightsabers! More porgs (or not)! But
here’s the worst-kept secret in the galaxy: Star Wars hasn’t
been about the movies in a long time. In the 42 years since Luke watched
twin suns set on his moisture-farming boyhood, the franchise has gone
supernova, expanding every which way. And not just to the obvious places
(games, TV, toys). There are costuming guilds. Cookbooks. Fan cons. VR
immersions. Endless behind-the-scenes ephemera. Even billion-dollar
theme parks. So, in the following pages, three writers—two resident
superfans and a novelist—travel to the outer edges of the Star Wars
storyverse, where they survey the true scene. —THE EDITORS

1
0 7
 EVERY-
\BODY
LOVES

0 T H E E X P AN D E D U N I V E R S E
Words by Meghan Herbst
7 2 Illustrations by Violet Reed
  STAR WARS FAN CAITLIN
BEARDS COSPLAYS AS THE
JEDI REY.

'

ANNAMARIE MCINTOSH IS coming undone.

DAISY
People in comic-book tees are rushing past
RIDLEY'S
her, lit up by too-bright fluorescents. She’s
CHARACTER
IS A surrounded by massive signs with corpo-
MISFIT rate logos, from Nintendo to DC Comics.

on Luke’s childhood home (but he lacked a permit and was shut down).
 Kanye West modeled a prototype for a low-income housing project
SCAVENGER The cavernous hall is 460,000 square feet,
FROM and McIntosh is taking up about three of
A DESERT them, trying to cinch the beige bandages
PLANET, wrapped around her arms. “We’re having
WITH A issues here,” she says, with an exasperated
NO-NONSENSE giggle. “It’s been falling down all day.” With
WARDROBE an assist by her mom, the 17-year-old finally
TO MATCH. twists and tucks her costume into place. All
THAT'S WHY things considered, the fix is easy. It’s 2019’s
A BROAD Comic-Con International, and compared
SPECTRUM OF to the wizards and warlocks and Wonder
COSPLAYING Women crowding the floor, the outfit of the
REBELS Jedi Rey is plain, simple. Sensible.
HAVE Cosplay, that pinnacle of performative
EMBRACED fandom, dates back to the mid-20th cen-
HER OUTFIT— tury; some accounts note that there were
AND HER cosplayers at the first World Science Fiction
POWER. Convention, in 1939. Women have always

BY Angela Watercutter
➔

PHOTOGRAPH BY
Amy Lombard

 Wookieepedia has more than 150,000 entries.

  Rey and Kylo started popping up frequently on birth certificates in 2016, but Luke remains
the most popular Star Wars name, surging 636 percent in the rankings since 1977.
been involved, both making costumes and
wearing them. Options, however, have never
tomes number in the hundreds, with nearly 100 contributing authors.
been wide-ranging. For every Harley Quinn,
 The Star Wars canon has 59 original novels; expanded-universe
there were a hundred Batmen and Jokers;
for every Uhura, a dozen Spocks and Kirks;
for every Kitty Pryde, a slew of, well, X-Men.
Star Wars, too, offered few opportuni-
ties for women to embody major charac-
ters. There weren’t many marquee names
to begin with, and those that did exist had
significant barriers to entry. Padmé Amidala
had more layers, makeup, and hair spray
than a British royal. Mon Mothma’s sober
toga wasn’t as intricate or bank-breaking,
but fellow con-goers only wanted to talk
to you about Bothan death tolls. Princess
Leia, the obvious choice, was most recog-
nizable in an ogle-baiting metal bikini. For
years, women did dress up like one hero—
Luke Skywalker—but they could never
really be that hero. (The choice between an
opposite-gender farm boy and a royal sex
object scrambles one’s sense of belonging.)
Then, in 2015, Star Wars: The Force
Awakens happened. Near the start of the
first act, a young scavenger removes a pair
0 of goggles, and we meet the galaxy’s new
7
4
hero: a brave woman, draped in no-fuss
garments and carrying a staff. Every fan
wanted to be her; every fan could be her.
“I make a lot of costumes with my dad,”
McIntosh says, looking down at her linen
and straps. “It’s super empowering for girls
to see that they can be that person.”
Now Rey is heading into her third (and
possibly final) movie. Which has meant four
years of fan-driven debate about the exis-
tence and value of a female protagonist.
Much of that conversation has felt either
rote or backward—but shifting the focus
from Rey’s gender to the more specific ways
she wields and wears it reveals the deeper
secret to her success: her costume.
This was all by design. From the begin-
ning, Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, was meant
to be a nobody who doesn’t know she’s a
somebody. As he developed her look, cos-
tume designer Michael Kaplan sought to
ANGELA WATERCUTTER (@WaterSlicer) is
a senior editor on wired’s culture desk.
C O S P L AY O P T I O N S
FOR WOMEN
H AV E N E V E R B E E N
WIDE-RANGING.
FOR EVERY UHURA,
THERE ARE A DOZEN
SPOCKS AND KIRKS;
FOR EVERY KITTY
P R Y D E , A S L E W O F,
W E L L , X- M E N .
make it as attainable, but still as Star Wars, as possi-
ble. Rey wears the cheap, desert-ready clothes of a
resourceful orphan. She has protective eyewear fash-
ioned from a retrofitted stormtrooper helmet. “You can
tell they’re homemade goggles. That shows savviness
on the character’s part. She’s self-possessed,” Kaplan
says. “We didn’t want her necessarily to be a very femi-
nine character—or a very masculine one.” Her arm ban-
dages were inspired by the shin wraps on Luke’s boots.
Kaplan has some experience with utilitarian looks,
particularly those that become fashion statements; he’s
the man responsible for Jennifer Beals’ legendary cut-up
sweatshirt in Flashdance. For Rey, he built off Donna
Karan’s “seven easy pieces” philosophy, layering essen-
tials so she always has what she needs on her back.
“Daisy didn’t have a simple job,” he says. “The stunts
she was expected to do, the training, and the things she
needed to learn in a short period of time—I would’ve
really felt bad if she was encumbered by a complicated
costume. She felt very heroic in this.”
Rey’s accessories are—for a specifically important
reason—also heroic. Until she summoned a lightsaber
in The Force Awakens, leading women in the Star Wars
movies had never wielded the saga’s signature weapon;
Padmé and Leia, in the few instances they were allowed
to fight, had to make do with puny blasters. “Let’s be
honest, who doesn’t pick up a wrapping-paper roll as
a kid and pretend it’s a lightsaber?” Caitlin Beards, a
cosplayer and longtime Star Wars fan, says. “And for
the main character in the story to be a female Jedi is
just phenomenal.”
 The 34-year-old Beards had been cosplaying as
fandom hub FanFiction.net. The four most popular are “Vader redemption fic.”
 There are more than 45,000 fan-generated Star Wars stories on the literary
anime characters and Final Fantasy folks for years, but
she’d hardly touched the Lucasfilm universe. “Look-
ing at the cosplay community of Star Wars initially, it
always seemed really scary,” she says. “Everybody was
so gung-ho about being as screen-accurate as pos-
sible.” She liked Padmé’s look—the embroidery, the
beadwork—but “wasn’t in love with her.” She did some
dressing up as Sabine Wren, but that Mandalorian war-
rior isn’t exactly well known. When she saw Rey for
the first time, Beards felt a sartorial kinship. “She had
to work for everything she had,” Beards says. Rey had
to rely on her own resourcefulness and strength, and
that, Beards says, made her someone that women in the
fandom wanted to emulate. The simple outfit, paired
with the singular accessory of a lightsaber, gave rise to
an army of Reys.
They now fill convention halls everywhere. On a
Facebook group called the Rey Cosplay Community,
which Beards belongs to, scores of “scavenger sisters”
trade tips on costume construction. Don’t know how
to make your belt? A fellow fan will tell you, or you can
commission them to craft one. Stuck on what color
dye to use for Rey’s Jakku rags? There are tutorials.
(The less devoted can pick up Rey’s outfit on Ama-
zon for around $35. Just add a pair of Uggs and you’re
convention-ready.)
But here’s the most unexpected twist: According to
Alice Hall, who studies how role models in movies affect
fans, Ridley’s character seems to impact not just young
women but young men too. They don’t necessarily want
to be her, Hall explains, but they do want to live up to
her zeal and daring. She’s at the center of the trilogy—
Han likes her (grudgingly), Finn admires her. Obi-Wan
Kenobi and Luke are no longer the galaxy’s only hope;
the future of the Resistance is now largely in Rey’s hands,
and hers is the fate that matters most. Hall believes this
signals a shift in the Star Wars universe, an indication
that the women’s stories can be just as rich, and enrich-
ing, as the men’s.
In their explanations of fandom, media theorists like
Hall often talk about parasocial relationships, one-sided
bonds formed with a character or celebrity. When a fan
sees a character as a hero, Hall says, that fan can adopt
 The 12,000 members of the 501st Legion—the cosplay organization that also
calls itself Vader’s Fist—spend about 200,000 hours a year doing charity work.
the character’s personality quirks and even
their moral code. No interaction is neces-
sary; these heroes and the choices they
make hold an outsize, personality-shaping
importance. When people talk about the
merit of having “strong female characters”
in movies, this is what they mean.
Indeed, Beards’ connection with Rey goes
beyond performance. In 2017 she joined the
New York chapter of the Saber Guild and
has since become the temple’s resident Rey
enthusiast, transforming her hobby into
an opportunity to do meet-and-greets
with other young fans and raise money
for charities like children’s hospitals and
the Trevor Project. (During an event at a
New York Yankees game with the Rebel
Legion, a young girl tugged on Beards’ cos-
tume, hugged her, and said, “Rey, you’re
my hero.”) She teaches aspiring Reys how
to swing their swords—a radical notion for
a group of fans who likely would’ve been
harassed in their Leia outfits 20 years ago.
“Myself and too many of my female friends
have had bad run-ins with people. But I
feel like now cosplayers are quicker to say,
‘Back off!’ ” Beards says. “If a guy gets too
up close and personal when you’re Rey,
you have a lightsaber, so you can put a nice
32-inch distance between you and the guy
real fast.”
Rey and her lightsaber: Throughout the
new trilogy, Disney has capitalized on the
power of that image. Trailers for The Last
Jedi lingered on scenes of Rey training on
Luke’s lonely island, blue blade flashing;
The Rise of Skywalker promises an epic,
storm-drenched sword fight between Rey
and Kylo Ren. Then there’s the most GIF’d
Star Wars moment of 2019: Rey unfolding
a double-bladed red lightsaber. Theories
about “Dark Rey” have blanketed the web
like Ewok fur. Kaplan, the costume designer,
keeps mum on what this Sith-ish costume
could mean. “I would be in a lot of trou-
ble if I talked about that,” he says, laughing.
Fans like McIntosh and Beards will likely
stick with their hero. “It’s just a challenge to
the Force to see what side she connects to,”
Beards says. “That’s my theory.” Sure, but
the possibility remains: Rey could go evil.
She could become a Sith. And you know
what the 10 existing Star Wars movies have
never had? A badass female villain.
 THE
NERDIEST
PLACE
ON BY Adam Rogers

EARTH

 The soon-to-open Rise of the Resistance ride

at Galaxy’s Edge will be at least 15 minutes long.
HOW IN STAR WARS MOVIES, people flying the Millennium Falcon pull a very
DISNEY'S specific lever to jump the ship into hyperspace, which is technobabble for
IMAGINEERS “Go very fast!” People do the same thing at Disneyland, on a ride called Mil-
CREATED lennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. It’s part of Galaxy’s Edge, a new billion-
A dollar, 14-acre expansion, and to get to that lever, visitors first navigate a
WHOLE queue that twists through a meticulous re-creation of a spaceport and the
NEW inside of the Falcon. Then six at a time are ushered into the ship’s cockpit (the
PART ride actually has several) to get rumbled and wobbled while a screen outside
OF THE the window shows a first-person POV movie of a swooping, dogfighting
STAR
WARS
UNIVERSE. ➔

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Amy Lombard

0
7 7

space mission. It’s a motion-simulator ride.
The Falcon doesn’t actually go anywhere.
At least, not in our universe. In the Star
Wars universe … well.
So now, me, in the pilot’s seat, a light flash-
ing: I’m a fan, so I reach for the lever in, I’ll
admit it, a transport of delight. It’s metal, a
little cold, takes some real force to pull back.
It feels perfect. I mean, this is exactly what
it feels like to pilot the Millennium Falcon.
Sure, under the dashboard are leaf
springs and gears, shaking haptics torqued
to within a play-tested centimeter of their
lives to give good feedback. But, like, that’s
not what I mean. What I mean is, how could
pulling that lever feel perfect? How could
it feel like anything? There’s no such thing
as hyperspace. There’s not even any such
thing as a Millennium Falcon. It’s Hollywood
magic, polyurethane, and pixie dust.
There’s a full-size Falcon at the entrance
to the ride, yes—and another in the corre-
0
sponding park in Florida. They’re props,
7
8 basically, dressing for a heightened envi-
ronment, like Hogwarts at Universal Stu-
dios or Gotham City at Warner Bros. World
in Abu Dhabi. Except unlike those, Galaxy’s
Edge doesn’t end here. It is, in native nerdish,
“in canon.” What happens in Galaxy’s Edge
happens in the official Star Wars universe.
Me again: I’ve pulled the lever. Lots of little
computational beeps and tweets. And then,
wooooooooOOOO-shoom! The stars blur
backward into speed lines, and something
like acceleration pushes us all back into our
seats. We have made the jump to hyperspace.
THERE ARE TWO ways to talk about Galaxy’s
Edge. Both are true.
One:
The remote planet of Batuu was once
covered with trees thousands of feet tall.
After a cataclysm petrified them, only their
trunks remained. For mysterious reasons,
one looks like obsidian, giving a town that
grew up around it its name: Black Spire Out-
post. A disreputable trader named Hondo
Ohnaka recently opened a cargo business
there, for which he is recruiting pilots to fly
ADAM ROGERS (@jetjocko) is a senior cor-
respondent who covers science and culture.
 Lucasfilm’s VR wing, ILMxLAB, partnered with Oculus to launch Vader
Immortal in May, a three-part VR game for the new Quest headset.
off-books cargo runs that may also be in support of the
galactic Resistance movement. Stormtroopers from
the First Order have just arrived to hunt for Resistance
sympathizers.
Two (this one is longer):
In 2012, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt
Disney Company for $4 billion. As intellectual property
goes, Star Wars is unusual, in that sanctioned stories exist
inside a rigorously enforced storyworld stretching mil-
lennia into the past and future. Disney, with producer
Kathleen Kennedy heading the new division, would make
new movies and TV shows (as well as comic books, nov-
els, toys, videogames, and so on). In 2014, Disney CEO
Bob Iger added theme parks to the mandate.
At the time, Scott Trowbridge was the head of research
and development at Disney Imagineering, the compa-
ny’s theme-park design arm. A USC film major who’d
spearheaded the immersive Harry Potter attractions
when he ran Universal Creative, Trowbridge proposed
a novel way to capitalize on the newly acquired IP. He
pitched Disney’s “first franchised, story-universe-based
creative development studio.” It would include mer-
chandise, product development, even food service, and
it would build not just rides but entire stories that’d feed
from the parks back into the canonic maw.
Disney brass not only went for it, they put Trowbridge
in charge, telling him to build a new land every bit as
significant as Tomorrowland or Fantasyland. From the
moment anyone stepped across the threshold, they’d
be totally immersed in the Star Wars universe.
That’s trickier than it sounds. “For an immersive
world, it’s not so much a linear narrative arc as an emo-
tional arc,” says Margaret Kerrison, whose title is man-
aging story editor. She’s a fast talker, code-switching
between in-canon discussions of lightsaber technique
and meta-canonic conversations about “Starwarsifica-
tion.” “As a fan, what are the various aspirational things
we want to do in order to have that fulfilling Star Wars
experience? We talked about taking control of the Fal-
con, drinking blue milk, visiting the cantina.”
Not the cantina from the first Star Wars, though. The
Disney imagineers decided to build a whole new world.
Batuu would have to feel like Star Wars even though it
was utterly original. “A lot of us were like, the universe
is a big place. That meant not going back to a planet
where we’ve been before,” Kerrison says. “We wanted
to create a new settlement or city so that all of us could
create an experience from scratch.”
With Lucasfilm’s Story Group onboard, the imagi-
neers set out to compile a several-hundred-page bible
of Galaxy’s Edge background stories. Maintaining it was
Kerrison’s first job with the imagineers, who Starwars-
 Star Wars Celebration, the official fan festival, attracted about 65,000
people this year. Two of the four days for the 2020 event are already sold out.
ified the place by combining otherworldly wilderness
with a teched-out overlay of full-scale greeblies (what
VFX folks call the mechanical-looking stuff they attach
to the outside of spaceship models). That’s look and feel.
Galaxy’s Edge also obeys the rules of the galaxy far, far
away: The team sited it on the timeline just after The
Last Jedi, which meant they could have park employees
dressed as Kylo Ren and First Order stormtroopers walk-
ing around (but not Darth Vader and Han Solo—they’re
dead). Lucasfilm offered up a character who could intro-
duce the Millennium Falcon show: Hondo, a stalwart of
the Star Wars cartoons.
Like any good magician, imagineers are so cagey
about the mechanics of all this careful world-building.
Hondo had to be translated from an animated charac-
ter to a 7-foot-tall animatronic robot, his face “aged”
since his cartoon years. An imagineer initially insisted
to me that they’d constructed the Falcon’s interior
according to “original blueprints,” which is nonsense,
of course, since the ride accommodates versions from
all the various movies and multiple cockpits. A spokes-
person finally allowed that a Falcon built from origi-
nal plans wouldn’t have passed muster with Earthly
building codes. The Millennium Falcon flew the Kessel
Run in less than 12 parsecs, but it is not ADA compliant.
And that uncanny hyperspace lever? They spent
months play-testing it with pilots of all ages and sizes.
“But we don’t want you to think about the complex multi-
GPU real-time rendering system and the custom game
engine with stochastic anti-aliasing,” Trowbridge says.
“We just want you to think about, you know, ‘I’m flying
on the fastest ship in the galaxy.’”
WHEN DISNEYLAND OPENED in 1955, a low hill surrounded
it, demarcating its borders and cutting it off from the
world outside. The berm was inviolable, except when
visitors walked under the train tracks that circumnav-
igated it and found … Main Street, an architectural fan-
tasy of small-town America that led to a fairy-tale castle.
As Disneyland’s rides got more complex, the park
needed more room. Imagineers started breaking through
the berm, mounting elaborate facades inside the park
but constructing boxy “ride buildings” or “show build-
ings” beyond the rim. It was an all but undetectable bit
of architectural prestidigitation; no one ever really asked
why the Pirates of the Caribbean boats slid down a cou-
ple of drops or the stretching room in the Haunted Man-
sion carried you down only so the doom buggies—the
vehicles you ride in, “omnimovers,” tilting and pivoting
to direct attention—would carry you back upward again.
It was in service of getting people under the berm and
into the fictional space of the ride building.
All those switchbacks, drops, and omni-
7,541 pieces, it’s the largest (and, at $800, most expensive) Lego set ever sold.
 In 2017, Lego unveiled the Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon. With
moves provided structure for a story. On
so-called dark rides, one tableau here gives
way to another tableau there, a spatial-
ized version of a classical story’s temporal
sequences. As John Hench, the lead imagi-
neer from the 1950s to the ’80s, told the mag-
azine New West in 1978, Disneyland “was
planned like a motion picture, to evolve and
unfold in time so a thread runs through it.”
The whole experience of Galaxy’s Edge,
then, becomes one very long filmic take. You
never (well, let’s say rarely) experience any-
thing you wouldn’t find in Black Spire Out-
post. Except on rides, any music you hear
is on a local “radio station,” or sometimes
playing from an open second-story win-
dow, or courtesy of the droid DJ in the can-
tina. There’s a stand that sells both blue and
green milk. The alcoves of the souk are real
shops. Park workers—the “cast,” officially—
have all been encouraged to come up with
backstories plausible for a Batuuan. Most
of the signage is in the Aurebesh alphabet,
translatable via the Disney app. In the lan-
guage of story-building, that’s called diege-
sis. Everything is diegetic, in-story.
On a walk around the park, Asa Kalama, a
bearded imagineer in tech-regulation kha-
kis, shows me an even deeper diegetic level.
A visitor can use their phone as a “data pad”
to create a character—good guy, bad guy,
neutral—and play games localized to spe-
cific parts of the space. Beating a maze-like
minigame causes lights to flash on control
panels next to doorways, or you can accept
“missions” to find stuff hidden in scattered
cargo boxes, to be scanned with a QR reader.
After Kalama shows me how to “hack” a
comm tower to make it emit a resonant beep,
he points at the unfolding text messages on
my screen. “You can eavesdrop on a conver-
sation,” he says. “These towers are relaying
messages between characters.” I get a little
backstory on a gunfight in the marketplace
that left a wall pockmarked with divots.
 Think about what all that requires. Ker-
rison’s story team comes up with that bit
of plot and writes the dialog of the mes-
sages. “Blaster specialists” carve the impact
marks into the wet plaster of the walls under
construction—the imagineers decided that
each one should look different depend-
ing on the type of blaster and the angle of
impact. Kalama’s interactive group has to
code all that into the minigames and link
those games to Bluetooth beacons around
the park. This fine-grained, fractal detail
adds to the sense that not only is Batuu in
canon, but so is anyone who buys a ticket.
On my second trip to Batuu—to the one in
Anaheim—I watched a little girl race off
Smugglers Run at hyperspeed and slam
into her dad. “Papa, I was pilot!” she
screamed, making swooshing noises.
Kids, right? All the Starwarsification
didn’t much move my adult partner,
until she took over my phone to help
our 10-year-old hack the giant First
Order ship looming over one corner of
Black Spire Outpost. Its running lights
flashed and its engine roared, and so
did her delight. She was in the story.

IN 1997, REALISTIC, highly rendered

videogames were ascendant, and devel-
opers and the people who study narra-
tive were arguing about whether a game
could—or should—tell a story. Celia
Pearce, a game designer and for-
mer theme park builder,
coined a phrase to cut
through the fight: spa-
tial narrative.
Games didn’t

 If you want to craft your own lightsaber at Galaxy’s Edge, reserve 20 minutes and $200.
invent that, of course. “Spatial narrative is a very old kind
of storytelling. You see it in ancient Rome, in cave paint-
ings,” says Pearce, a professor at Northeastern University
who teaches, among other classes, Designing Imagi-
nary Worlds. Consider medieval churches. For attend-
ees, many of whom were illiterate and didn’t understand
Church Latin, the church was the Bible—stations of the
cross along the nave or in stained glass, important char-
acters represented as statuary in the transept. “It’s about
where you are, what you can see from where, how you
feel as an embodied entity in the space,” Pearce says.
It’s also true that narratives—books, movies, what-
ever—have spatial elements. Action takes place. In 1938
the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the way people
and things move through narrative a chronotope, a Rus-
sian translation of the Greek for “space-time.” Bakhtin
set out to map the ratios of time and space in stories, and
other critics have extended the idea to a chronotopic net-
work, all the movements in space and time a story covers.
I think Pirates of the Caribbean or the Wizarding
World of Harry Potter are immersive without being
narrative, necessarily. Ditto the new heavy-immersion
theme parks spreading across the Middle East and
China. But Galaxy’s Edge is a full-fledged chronoto-
pia. It exists in the sanctioned Star Wars paracosm; it’s
a door between our universe and theirs.
Two doors, actually. Your character in the phone-
based games in California persists if you go to Florida,
and vice versa. The lands are identical in architecture
(albeit inverted on the north-south axis). Canonically,
in the Star Wars universe, they’re the same place, on
the same day, over and over; several imagineers men-
tioned Groundhog Day to me as a touch point. Galaxy’s
Edge is a Möbius story: one place in the Star Wars uni-
verse trapped in a time bubble that’s also two places in
ours, where we all move through time normally. I’d like
to see Bakhtin unravel that chronotopic fuckmuddle.
Actually, I bet a gamer could speed-run that four-
dimensional topology. In games, “you’re designing a
space that people are going to use and be in and traverse,”
says Frank Lantz, director of the NYU Game Center. “You
want to use it like an artist, to convey ideas.” Games (like
architecture, cinematography, and omnimovers) direct
people’s gaze, put resistance and friction into people’s
movements to guide them in certain directions.
The common element that science fiction and games—
and even cities—share is world-building. “This part of
storytelling was always one of the nerd ingredients in lit-
erature,” Lantz says. World-building rules are especially
overt at theme parks like Disneyland, if you look for them.
“Everything there is mechanical and designed, and that’s
chilling and weird and creepy and beautiful,” Lantz says.
In other words, Disney has literalized world-building
and made a space for people to live out fan fiction—a
massively multiplayer online role-playing game with
a chewy live-action role-playing center. Pearce again:
“You have emergent fan behavior converging with a
spatial experience.”
THE ONLY THING that doesn’t work in an
immersive environment of such refinement
is—with apologies—you. It’s your baseball
cap, your shorts, your churro. Or my note-
pad and backpack. “That takes away from
the immersion, doesn’t it?” Pearce says.
Disney parks have a longtime rule against
adults wearing elaborate costumes, which
militates against that instantiated fanfic;
Galaxy’s Edge is no Comic-Con in terms
of Han Solos and Boba Fetts. (Though it is
a place for Leias, Reys, and Holdos. I saw
more than a few women cosplaying on the
down low, hair done weird, rocking galac-
tically appropriate boots.)
Perhaps Disney will relax these rules.
Eventually, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser will
open. That’s a two-day stay adjacent to the
8 1
Orlando park in a hotel designed to look like a
0
Star Wars spaceship, a luxury liner called the
Halcyon. The windows will somehow look
out onto space, families will get tours of the
bridge, and “port day” will connect to Galaxy’s
Edge. Apparently even the hotel building will
be bermed off from arriving guests—all they’ll
see is the “terminal” where they board a shut-
tle to the Halcyon in orbit above.
It’s murky to me whether that’s an expe-
rience people want—two days of immer-
sion tips away from a vacation and toward
reenactment. In fact, it isn’t clear that people
even want Galaxy’s Edge. Disney anticipated
a huge bolus of visitors for the new lands’
openings, and, hey, I get it—my family went
to opening week of Star Tours in 1987, and
the line ran all the way down Main Street.
For Galaxy’s Edge? Not so much. The com-
pany cracked down on annual passhold-
ers and asked for reservations for entry to
try to avoid a flood, and instead ended up
with a trickle. Disney spokespeople denied
they’d had an attendance problem, and fur-
ther denied that the September departure
from the company of Catherine Powell, pres-
ident of Disney Parks West, had anything to
do with the performance of Galaxy’s Edge.
That’s the business side, though. A whole
other universe. For me, down here, planet-
side, Galaxy’s Edge works. When I stood
inside the Falcon that first time, I stretched
my hand out, reverentially, to touch the pads
that line the rounded corridors, and my
Disney-assigned minder smiled. “Everyone
does that,” she said. The walls felt just
right—a diegetic apotheosis. Stories about
places are common. But this is a place about
a story. It feels, well, maybe not real. Stranger
than that, it feels like Star Wars.
 QUEEN
OF EMPTY
SPACE
1 In the concept sketch, Padmé Amidala stands in profile. The stiff brown tunic
and pants—the clothes she’ll die in—are a far cry from the regalia worn by the
Queen of Naboo. Her pregnancy is far enough along to hinder her, and her pos-
ture overcompensates. Her long dark braid is wrapped in thick ribbon: bright,
blood-red. Her eyes cut across the page, directly toward the viewer.
2 There is no central thesis left
for Star Wars. It’s just too big,
a single root system hold-
ing up a thousand trees. It’s
a locus of pop-culture fasci-
nation because it both is and
is not pretty much anything
you need. By now, purchase
patterns at Star Wars theme
parks are sent to the same
offices where story decisions
are made.
The sheer scope of the
canon—films, comics, TV,
toys—makes an endless
appetite for stories. Just look
at Willrow Hood, a Cloud City
refugee with two seconds
of screen time in The Empire
Strikes Back. In 1997, a Star
Wars trading card game gave
him a name; a few years later,
the ice cream maker Hood
carried in that short scene
was officially canonized as
a database that saved the
Resistance. He has an action
figure. (Jon Favreau, on the set
of The Mandalorian, posted
an Instagram photo of a grimy
ice cream maker, teasing that
its role isn’t over.)
In a canon with so much
room, there are always more
stories to tell. And the most
appealing of these might be
the fractal what-ifs: What got
left behind? What looked good
until something else looked
perfect? Beneath them, in a
place that’s hard to define, are
the stories that aren’t told, for
which it’s just too late.
That’s where Padmé Ami-
dala died.
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
(@GLValentine) is a novel-
ist and comic book writer.
0
8 2
THE FULL STORY
´ AMIDALA
OF PADME
ISN'T FOUND IN
THE MOVIES—BUT
IN THE FRAGMENTS
LEFT BEHIND. BY Genevieve Valentine
store, from TIE Fighter–printed shoes to Death Star picnic blankets.
 About 800 pieces of Star Wars merch can be purchased at Disney’s online
3 “ I WI LL N OT CO ND O NE A CO URS E OF AC TI ON
T HAT WI L L L E AD U S TO WAR.”
´ AMIDALA IN THE PHANTOM MENACE
—PADME
THE BIGGEST BATTLE in Star Wars is between its mythic arcs—the heroes’
journeys—and its political stories. Padmé fell on the political side so squarely
that the prequel trilogy expended significant visual and narrative energy
trying to drag her toward the mythic, where Anakin Skywalker was waiting.
She never got there. Her realm was that of the negotiation and the vote,
and nothing was able to bring her into line with the adventure and the
myth. A war couldn’t do it; courtship with a Jedi couldn’t. Even her cos-
tumes couldn’t pull her into legend. (Designer Trisha Biggar drew on myriad
sources for Padmé’s wardrobe—Mongolia, Japan, China, the Hopi—feeding
a wider discussion about what it meant to use cultures as a visual short-
hand for something alien. Even here, for Padmé, it was politics.)
Her problems were just too complicated for the Force. When she was the
teenage Queen of Naboo trying to fend off a hostile blockade of her planet,
Senator Palpatine used her desperation to engineer his rise to power. After
he began using his position as chancellor to dismantle the rule of law, her
fight against him was stymied by the erosion of democracy, until there was
nothing left but an Empire. Once the mythic showdowns took over, Padmé
all but vanished from the narrative of the last prequel film, crushed by the
future that was barreling down on her, begging her husband not to do the
terrible things we already knew he was going to do.
But it wasn’t always so. In an interview at Academy of Art University in
October 2016—since removed from YouTube—artist Iain McCaig detailed
the early stages of production and a potential moment George Lucas had
considered for Revenge of the Sith. “[Anakin] leaves. Moments later, in
come the Separatists and right behind his back, [Padmé] is starting the
Rebellion to overthrow him,” McCaig said. “Because Padmé can see that
he is becoming a monster.”
It wasn’t the first time fans had heard evidence of a path not taken.
In The Art of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, below the por-
trait of sharp-eyed Padmé with the bright red ribbon in her hair, a note
by McCaig describes some queen who never was: “The moment Padmé
realizes Anakin can’t be saved, she should do the thing that she needs to
do—out of love. She should kill him.”
We know Padmé saw what her husband was; that much survived. The
surprise is that, in a story that never got told, she did something about it.
 6 AMID THE THINGS that can’t be undone, there are endless Star Wars stories.
(Willrow Hood’s ice cream maker is still poised for a more satisfying narra-
tive than Padmé.) If there’s one franchise that knows the value of ghosts, it’s
4 In deleted scenes from
Revenge of the Sith, Padmé Star Wars. And Padmé casts long shadows over the canon.
meets a few sympathizers One shadow looms over the new trilogy: Anakin and Padmé’s impos-
from the Galactic Republic, sible love story echoes through their grandson Ben, whose obsession (at
which is faltering toward fas-
cism. They form a coalition first antagonistic, later mutual) with Rey reshuffles half a dozen facets of
of planets concerned about the first star-crossed love story. Rey is a scrapper from a sandy nowhere, in
democracy. Padmé leads the dire straits until a high-stakes emergency intervenes, and strong enough
delegation to deliver their
demands to Chancellor Palpa- in the Force to make everybody nervous. Ben Solo grew up with a politi-
tine; behind him, Anakin. cian and was sent through the proper channels to get training for his abil-
This story stretches back ities. It’s Ben who gets paranoid, kills his competition, changes his name,
to The Phantom Menace,
when Palpatine convinced and flees to the fascists. Rey, who had only as much time to contemplate
young Queen Amidala to call justice as starvation allowed, still dreamed of the Resistance before it ever
a vote of no confidence in the landed at her door. And her loyalties run deep. She fell in love with Ben in
Senate. Despite the shatter-
ing consequences, it’s a story The Last Jedi, enough to give herself over to the First Order, trying to get
the movies somehow couldn’t Ben to change his allegiance.
tell. A 14-year-old queen made He does. He kills his emperor for her; he and Rey fight side by side. But
one misstep and doomed the
galaxy for a generation; it’s hunger wins out, and he was Kylo Ren a long time. He claims Supreme
almost too painful to face such Leader, one hand out for Rey. She begs him—once: “Don’t go this way.” Then
a mistake. What would she she fights him, and she flees.
have thought once she real-
ized what she’d done? As the That’s the other shadow: all that fighting. Politics gets heavy, and the
Senate applauded its emperor, psychological tolls are too close to the real. Trade blockades and murder
did she think the galaxy got by committee isn’t the struggle people come to see. Everyone understands
what it deserved? What cal-
culations would she have to that loyalty will spur a hero to draw their sword against a sworn enemy;
make to justify her love for Padmé railing against a darkness with a hundred thousand hands is too
Anakin? What does it mean much to think about. Even in Rogue One (the rare Star War where heroes
for a story to worry so much
about Anakin’s gullible hatred make tough moral decisions), the Empire lurks on every corner, an enemy
and leave all this behind? so obvious there’s no question what needs doing.
Whatever the outcome in The Rise of Skywalker, it will
happen in a world where fascists are fairly easy to recognize
and where everyone—even, occasionally, Kylo Ren—under-
5 THE NOVELS, COMICS, AND
stands they’re in the wrong. (It’ll happen in a movie that had
TV series offer Padmé plenty to leave a story behind. With the loss of Carrie Fisher goes
to do. Spy on a r istoc r at s. whatever burden Padmé’s daughter, Leia, a political royal
Defend the innocent in court. who fought her mother’s losing battles for so many years,
Demand the Senate stop com- was originally meant to carry in these last hours.)
missioning soldiers and alle- The fights will happen without much political background
viate some suffering instead. noise. We do not yet know if any of the heroes have made
In this expanded universe, she catastrophic mistakes, but we understand any risk taken in
and Anakin fight—each other, the name of a good cause; the movies have made it clear
or side by side. She uses any enough that the law won’t save you once the emperor comes.
gambit within the rule of law, We know it—but we go to Star Wars for a myth. Some things
and when the law stops work- have to be settled by the sword. Someone has to be right.
ing, she goes around.
T h e s to r y m a ke r s m u s t
know how inert she seemed in 7 “AT T H E E N D, O N M U S TA FA R , W H E N [PA D M É ] G O E S
Revenge of the Sith. They give TO S E E [A N A K I N ] , S H E H A S A K N I F E I N H E R H A N D S É
her canon space wherever they S H E ’ S G O I N G TO K I LL H I M É B U T S H E C A N ’ T D O IT.”
find it. The one thing they can- —IAIN MCCAIG
not do is turn back time and put
a knife in Padmé’s hand. Some There’s another piece of concept art in The Art of Star Wars. In the murky glow
things it’s too late to alter. Some of Mustafar, Anakin stands with his back to us, saber drawn, black robes swamp-
ing the foreground—a familiar moment that made it to the screen. The part that
stories stay untold. didn’t: Facing us, staring him down, is Padmé in a burgundy cloak. Out of the
shadows her face is sharp, tired. Determined. In her hand she clutches a dagger:
bright, blood-red. She has recognized the danger. She’s about to make a choice.

 Le Creuset released a nine-piece collection of Star Wars–themed

cookware this year, including a Han Solo Carbonite Signature Roaster.
A VIRTUOSO CODER WAS ON THE BRINK OF

BLOCKCHAIN RICHES. THEN HIS BODY WAS FOUND

IN THE WOODS OF SOUTHERN OHIO.

BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HANA MENDEL

 LIFE
THE
STRANGE AND
MYSTERIOUS

DEATH JEROLD HAAS

OF

E
ERIC MEYERS STAYED silent as he trained
his rifle on the eight-point buck. He fired
once and watched the deer shudder from
the bullet’s impact. But the wounded animal
turned and fled through the woods north of
Clarksville, Ohio, spattering autumn foli-
age with blood as it ran. Meyers followed
the buck’s trail for hours before finally sus-
pending his pursuit well past sunset. But he
set out again the next afternoon, November
3, 2018, this time with two helpers: his
father, William, and a family friend named
Bill O’Bryan, a Cincinnati logistics magnate
who owns the estate where the hunt was
taking place.
The three men were scouring a thicket on
the edge of a soybean field, hoping to stum-
ble across the buck’s carcass, when Eric
noticed a peculiar stonelike object lying
on the ground. He knelt down for a closer
look and saw that it was a human skull, its
jawbone missing but its upper teeth still a
healthy shade of white. He and his fellow
hunters left the forest at once to call 911.
A dozen investigators from the Warren
County Sheriff’s Office used ATVs to search
the area around the skull. They soon spot-
0 8 6
ted a headless skeleton slumped against a
honeysuckle tree, its right leg bent sideways
at a 90-degree angle, its left still flecked with
strands of muscle. Nearby was a rib and a
jumble of arm bones that had evidently been
gnawed off by coyotes and foxes. There were
no man-made objects in the vicinity that
might indicate an obvious cause of death: no
gun, no knife, no rope, no drug paraphernalia.
A few feet deeper into the forest, the
crime scene unit found two black sneak-
ers, a dark shirt, and a pair of black pants
with a vine threaded through its belt loops.
The clothes’ tattered condition suggested
that they, like the skull and loose bones, had
been removed from the body by scavengers.
Inside a pants pocket was a wallet contain-
ing a wad of waterlogged cash, rewards
cards from Subway and a chain of erotic
boutiques, and an Ohio state ID for Jerold
Christoper Haas, born September 30, 1975.
By running the name through an Ohio
law-enforcement database, the investiga-
tors learned that Haas had been reported
missing seven weeks earlier. Haas had
lived in Columbus, 80 miles from where
his remains were discovered, but he’d last
been seen at a gas station one county over
from O’Bryan’s sprawling property. He’d
disappeared along with a black backpack
in which he carried the tools of his career
as a computer programmer: three smart-
phones, two Dell laptops, an Amazon tab-
let, and an array of USB sticks and cables.
He never let the backpack out of his sight;
even on trips to the office bathroom, the bag
stayed glued to his shoulder. But the back-
pack was nowhere to be found in the woods.
Haas had vanished only months after he’d
been on the verge of a life-altering triumph.
He was a cofounder of Tessr, a buzzed-about
Columbus startup that aimed to use block-
chain technology to streamline data sharing
in higher education. The company had cre-
ated a blockchain-based token, known as
TSRX, that it had started selling to insiders
in the late spring and early summer of 2018;
the sale’s lofty goal had been to raise $30
million from investors. Haas, who’d received
1.5 million tokens as part of his compensa-
tion package, believed he could make a
fortune if Tessr panned out, and he’d been
pushing himself to finish the code needed
to launch the startup’s platform in the fall.
Much of the critical software he’d written
was stored on the hard drives he’d been tot-
ing in his backpack. He had neglected to
make any copies of his work.
Such rank carelessness was not out of the
ordinary for Haas, a man whose genius was
frequently overshadowed by his penchant
for self-sabotage. Anyone who’s spent time
in the tech industry knows characters like
Haas: frighteningly intelligent, fiercely icon-
oclastic, socially maladroit. They seem to
live by their own inscrutable code. Often,
due to a combination of arrogance and
immaturity, they make a hash of all the big
opportunities that come their way. Haas
shrugged off his many failures by telling
himself and others that he actually preferred
life as an outsider. But he had come to regret
his obstinance as he felt the undertow of
middle age. He’d thrown himself into Tessr
as a last-ditch effort to achieve the wealth
and respect he’d missed out on during his
wasted youth.
Haas’ hard-fought attempt at reinven-
tion had somehow ended with his death in a
forest far from home, his priceless software
gone. For the detectives charged with unrav-
eling how that grisly tragedy had come to
pass, the first step was to follow the tokens.
A
DAY AFTER collecting evi-
dence in the woods near
Clarksville, four investi-
gators from the Warren
County Sheriff’s Office
made the two-hour drive
to Columbus. Their first
stop was the headquarters of the police
department, where they spoke to the
detective who’d fielded the missing persons
report for Haas almost two months earlier.
The Columbus police hadn’t put any great
effort into locating Haas, as he was an adult
who was free to do as he pleased.
The Warren County investigators next
split up into pairs: Two headed southeast
to notify Haas’ mother, Judith Wallace Huff,
who lived in the hills near the West Virginia
border; the other two, Lieutenant Chris
Peters and Sergeant Brian Hounshell, stayed
in Columbus to interview acquaintances of
the deceased programmer.
One of the first people Peters and
Hounshell tracked down was Emanuel
Sylvia, one of Haas’ cofounders at Tessr,
who asked to meet the investigators in a
Kroger parking lot near his home. As soon
as he stepped out of his car, officers say,
Sylvia startled them with an odd question:
Did they offer police protection? Rather than
explain why he felt the need to make such
an inquiry, Sylvia launched into the story of
his brief yet intense partnership with Haas.
In October 2017, while working as a
storage engineer for JPMorgan Chase in
Columbus, Sylvia had experienced what he
terms an “Office Space moment”—a sudden
realization that he could no longer let cor-
porate culture diminish his soul. His solution
to this crisis was to quit his job and start a
business that he described as having “a pur-
pose to help others.” This company would
eventually come to be known as Tessr.
Sylvia’s core idea for the startup was to
create a new kind of blockchain, a digi-
tal public ledger spread across a network
of trusted computers. He conceived of a
blockchain that could communicate seam-
lessly yet securely with all other blockchains
regardless of their origin. Over time, Sylvia
came to believe this innovation could rev-
olutionize higher education, in particular,
by simplifying basic transactions, such as
the transfer of credits between institutions.
Sylvia also envisioned a system of trans-
parent “smart contracts” under which cor-
porations would agree to buy courses for
students they wished to recruit and monitor
their academic progress on the blockchain.
Though Sylvia had two decades of IT
experience, he lacked the advanced coding
chops to create his ideal blockchain. In early
2018 he went looking for a programmer to
serve as Tessr’s lead developer. He was in the
midst of that search when he set up a meet-
ing with a web developer named Etienne
Fieri, who he hoped to enlist to help build
the tessr.io website. Fieri had heard that the
startup also had an opening for a program-
mer, so she brought along a friend of a friend
whom she’d been told was desperate for
work—a tall and slender man with icy blue
eyes and strikingly blond hair named Jerold
Haas. Immediately after shaking hands with
Sylvia, Haas flipped open his laptop and
asked, “What do you need coded?”
After marveling at Haas’ ability to solve
a slew of tricky programming challenges,
Sylvia asked him to join Tessr on the spot. He
was thrilled to have lucked into this virtu-
oso coder, and soon made him a cofounder.
“The programming language we use to write
smart contracts, Solidity? Jerold picked it up
in a day or two,” Sylvia says. “I’ve been in this
industry for 20-some years and met a lot of
brilliant people, and Jerold was one of the
best. He definitely had this extreme talent.”
Sylvia and Haas worked on Tessr in a
friend’s vape shop after hours, hacking away
at the code until they crashed from exhaus-
tion on the store’s two sofas. Haas focused
much of his labor on imbuing the startup’s
blockchain with the ability to use the newly
minted TSRX token for tuition payments. He
also helped design cryptocurrency wallets
that could be opened only with biometric
data, rather than traditional passwords; Tessr
dubbed this innovation the Bio-Key Ring.
After burning the midnight oil to code
Tessr’s framework, Haas would dive into
freelance projects to make ends meet as
he awaited his startup payday. In his rare
moments of leisure, Haas was usually in the
company of Fieri, whom he’d started dating
days after they both joined Tessr; the cou-
ple moved in together just two weeks later.
By early May, Tessr was causing a stir in
the Columbus tech scene, a community keen
to cultivate a reputation as a wellspring of
blockchain startups. (Ohio was the first state
to accept bitcoin for tax payments, a signal
of the state’s desire to foster crypto ven-
tures.) Small investors pumped in enough
cash for Sylvia and Haas to lease an office
at the Idea Foundry, a sleek tech incubator
west of downtown.
Right after settling into their new digs,
Haas and Sylvia made the rounds at
Columbus Startup Week, where they pro-
moted a presale of the TSRX token. For a few
weeks, select buyers would be allowed to
use the Ethereum cryptocurrency to pur-
chase Tessr’s tokens for the rough equiva-
lent of 10 cents each. If the token’s price rose
when the crowdsale commenced that fall,
presale customers stood to make a killing.
“Investors in the tokens get 5,000 percent
or more profits from the move,” Haas prom-
ised one potential buyer in a text message.
“It’s a really weird hack to the whole stan-
dard financial system model of investors,
stocks, etc., and I’m pretty chuffed about the
whole thing.”
Afflicted with the fear of missing out,
crypto enthusiasts scooped up tranches of
TSRX that May and June. Sylvia and Haas
discussed how their lives might change were
Tessr to become a hit. The two men professed
to have little interest in the baubles of mate-
rialism, and they joked that they would cash
out of Tessr to become wandering Buddhist
monks. But Haas also bragged to friends that
he was looking forward to becoming “filthy
rich.” (Sylvia now says that Haas soon had a
change of heart: He says that Tessr canceled
its plans to sell tokens to the public in July and
that he and Haas became intent on figuring
out how to distribute free tokens instead.)
In mid-August, as the Tessr team was
scrambling to get its “educational block-
chain” out of beta, Sylvia noticed that his
business partner was becoming frazzled and
glum. Haas confided to a concerned Sylvia
that he and Fieri were having troubles. “She’s
expressed wanting to keep me for herself, but
doesn’t want to be kept herself,” Haas wrote
in one text message to a friend. “This imbal-
ance hits my Libra energy to the core.” He
also said there were people intent on caus-
ing him harm, though he didn’t name them
or offer a reason for their hostility.
Toward the end of his conversation with
Peters and Hounshell, Sylvia recounted
his last interaction with Haas, which took
place just after a Tessr board meeting held
in a suburban office park on the night of
August 30. A visibly distraught Haas con-
fronted Sylvia on one of the complex’s quiet
sidewalks. He lay down on the concrete and
moaned that Fieri’s “group” was out to get
him; he also said there was sensitive mate-
rial on his phone that he urgently needed
to delete. Sylvia had never seen his friend
so anguished, and he feared for his physi-
cal safety. Yet he wasn’t able to offer many
words of comfort before Haas took off.
Their interest in Fieri clearly piqued,
Peters and Hounshell asked Sylvia for his
opinion of Haas’ girlfriend. “He said he
does not trust her and does not like her,”
an investigator wrote in his summary of the
interview. “He described her as very rough
around the edges and didn’t get a good vibe
from her; that something was off about her.”
T
H AT S A M E D AY the detec-
tives met Etienne Fieri in a
Steak ’n Shake parking lot.
She seemed to be shattered by
grief. Contrary to what Sylvia
told the cops, a sobbing Fieri
swore that she and Haas were
very much in love and had been “insepara-
ble” to the very end.
 Fieri and Haas had been introduced
by a mutual friend named Charles “Chic”
Ford, a 67-year-old auto mechanic who
sold nutritional supplements on the side.
It was Ford who emailed Haas’ résumé to
Fieri, leading her to bring the programmer
to the Tessr interview. The two bonded over
their shared passion for composing music,
as well as their past struggles with the lure
of drugs: Haas told Fieri that he’d recently
gotten sober after years of abusing opiates,
and Fieri had once been in the thrall of pain-
killers after a back injury. They made for a
visually striking couple—the gangly Haas
with his Nordic mien, the petite Fieri with
her jet-black hair. They moved in together
in a bleak extended-stay hotel in northeast
Columbus but were saving up for a house
in the affluent suburb of Bexley. They even
opened a joint bank account. The 43-year-
old Fieri, who’d previously envisioned her-
self going through life unhitched, claims to
have believed it inevitable that she would
someday marry Haas.
“He struck me hard,” she says in an inter-
view. “I fell into ... well, not to be too poetic,
but I fell into the position where what I
wanted in my secret places was possible in
the real places.”
Fieri agrees with Sylvia that Haas’ mood
had deteriorated as August wore on. But
that’s where their agreement ends. She
ascribed her boyfriend’s angst to turmoil
inside Tessr. According to Fieri, Haas had
become disillusioned with the startup. “We
0 8 8
just had the feeling they were telling peo-
ple what they wanted to hear, whatever
they wanted to hear, because they were
like, ‘Hey, let’s be millionaires,’” says Fieri,
who cut back on her involvement with Tessr
during the company’s token presale. “But
Jerold wasn’t like that, I’m not like that. I
dunno, maybe we’re just hippies at heart.”
(Sylvia vehemently disputes Fieri’s asser-
tion. He was solely committed to using Tessr
to provide free education for the betterment
of society, he says, with no regard for per-
sonal enrichment.)
Fieri told the detectives that she’d last seen
her boyfriend on August 30, shortly before the
Tessr board meeting. Haas had been coding
nonstop for days, incessantly popping legal
“smart drugs” such as phenibut, a Soviet-era
tranquilizer, which is supposed to enhance
concentration. He called Fieri to say he was
suffering from acute anxiety; Fieri suggested
they grab an early dinner to relax before the
meeting. The two met at a mall and started to
walk to a nearby restaurant. But Haas raced
ahead and darted around a street corner.
When Fieri made that same turn, the man
she’d hoped to marry was gone.
Fieri said she wasn’t too concerned at
first. Haas often isolated himself when he
felt overwhelmed. He would pace the streets
of Columbus with a baggy black hoodie
pulled so tight around his head that his eyes
were scarcely visible. After days passed
with no word, Fieri assumed he’d gone to
visit his mother, who she knew lived some-
where in southern Ohio. But when Haas’
mom emailed looking for her son in mid-
September, Fieri became alarmed and con-
tacted the police.
T h e t h i rd key p e r s o n Pe te r s a n d
Hounshell interviewed in the Columbus area
was Charles Ford, the mechanic who had
introduced Fieri to Haas. A garrulous and
slightly pudgy man who keeps his patchy
gray hair pulled into a ponytail, Ford was
also the last person known to have seen
Haas alive.
Ford got to know Haas through a mutual
friend—a woman Haas was having a fling
with. When that relationship went sour in
early 2018, Ford invited Haas to stay at his
condo. The programmer ended up living at
While struggling to get clean after years of drug abuse, Haas—right, in a photo taken when
he was 15 or 16—lived in a camper parked at the home of his mother, Judith Wallace Huff, left.
Not long after that he ended up in a homeless shelter, above, in Columbus, Ohio.
Ford’s place until he moved in with Fieri in
late winter. The two men grew close enough
to travel together to a nutritional confer-
ence in Indianapolis. (Haas was a devotee
of herbal supplements sold by LifeVantage,
the company for which Ford is an indepen-
dent distributor.) Ford also invested a mod-
est sum in Tessr, on the chance that such a
bet would allow him to join the burgeon-
ing ranks of blockchain millionaires; the
startup, in turn, named Ford’s wife, who lives
in Florida, to its board of advisers.
Haas, who didn’t have a car or a driver’s
license, called Ford on the evening of August
30 to ask for a ride to the Tessr board meeting.
Their agreed-upon rendezvous point was a
park across from a shopping mall; when Ford
arrived in his Saturn, Haas emerged from the
bushes as if he’d been hiding. Getting into the
car, Haas said that people were attempting to
steal his money and that they were willing to
“OD” him to get it.
After melting down on the sidewalk after
the board meeting, Haas went to Ford’s
condo instead of returning to the hotel suite
he shared with Fieri. He never slept, spend-
ing the whole night pecking away at his lap-
top. One of the emails he sent that night was
addressed to a company he did freelance
work for. It contained a request to mail him
paper checks instead of depositing his pay-
ments into his joint account with Fieri.
The next morning, Haas asked Ford to
drive him south toward Cincinnati; he did
not give any reason for the trip, and Ford
did not inquire. The pair tooled down I-71
for a ways before Haas insisted they switch
over to I-75, once again providing no expla-
nation for his request. Ford pulled off at an
exit in sparsely populated Clinton County
and decided to refuel at a BP station before
heading west to I-75.
After refueling, Ford went into the sta-
tion’s convenience store to buy water and
snacks, while Haas stayed outside to smoke
a cigarette. Ford told the police that the
store’s credit card system was on the fritz,
delaying his checkout by 30 to 45 minutes.
When he finally emerged from the store
with his purchases in hand, Haas and his
backpack were gone.
Ford said he went looking for Haas in the
soybean field across from the gas station and
then all along the country roads that snake
off the state route leading to I-75. He also said
he stopped at a Burger King during his search
and bought a double cheeseburger for the
clerk at the BP station, since he’d heard her
mention that she was famished.
Detectives felt there were several things
amiss with Ford’s account, police records
show, starting with his manner of deliver-
ing it: In response to brief and direct ques-
tions, Ford tended to speak in meandering
10-minute chunks filled with obfuscation.
More important, the detectives couldn’t
fathom how it could have taken 45 minutes
for the BP station to fix a credit card snafu, or
why Ford hadn’t bothered to call Haas’ cell
phone even once after the day Haas disap-
peared. The investigators’ instincts told them
that, at the very least, Ford knew how Tessr’s
master coder had died.
 L
IKE SO MANY other children of
the 1980s, Jerold Haas could
trace his love of program-
ming back to the Christmas he
unwrapped a Commodore 64.
As a preteen he would seques-
ter himself in his room for
hours to fiddle with the budget computer,
writing elementary software on analog
cassettes and exploring the nascent online
realm with a 300-baud modem.
The son of a firefighter father and an
insurance agent mother who divorced when
he was young, Haas was bright enough to
skate through school in Springboro, a well-
to-do suburb of Dayton; he could ace any
test despite having played Super Mario Bros.
the entire night before. But his lax study hab-
its caught up with him at Ohio University,
where he was studying computer science,
and he washed out after his sophomore year.
Haas’ response to this failure was to float
around for a spell. He traveled to Florida
with $200 in his pocket and lived on the
streets for months, reveling in the chance to
observe society from an outcast’s point of
view. He didn’t spend a dime of the cash he’d
brought along, instead saving it for bus fare
to return to Ohio. (In the end he hitchhiked
home.) He would later credit his dabbles in
homelessness with shaping some of his core
values: “Given my prior past, my idea of liv-
ing maximally is likely closer to the Average
Joe’s minimalism,” he once wrote to online
friends. “I don’t like money or much of what
it represents in modern society.”
Haas’ next stop was Hocking College, a
two-year technical school in Nelsonville,
Ohio, where he trained to become a broad-
cast engineer. Aside from twiddling knobs
at the campus TV station, his main preoc-
cupation was creating psychedelic audio-
visual shows as part of a performance-art
combo called the 555 Timers. (The group
was named after a type of integrated cir-
cuit used in joysticks.) It was during his
days at Hocking that Haas, who went by the
nickname Darry on the Ohio rave scene,
became an omnivorous consumer of drugs.
“Darry would find something to put up his
nose, and regardless of what it was, he’d
get involved,” says Mark Yannitell, a fellow
member of the 555 Timers.
Haas had a fondness for esoteric halluci-
nogens, particularly one called DMT, known
for producing a “businessman’s trip” that
0 9 0
lasts only minutes but distorts time percep-
tion in such a way that the user feels as if
they were high for years. On occasion, Haas
liked to get zooted on such potent intoxi-
cants, then wade through a crowded rave in
a three-piece suit and an Israeli gas mask;
he loved how his appearance confused the
glowstick-waving teens.
After earning his associate’s degree in
1998, Haas settled in the town of Athens and
juggled a full-time job as an ISP technician
with freelance coding gigs. The late 1990s
and early 2000s were a time of abundance
for skilled programmers; anyone proficient
in LightWave 3D or Macromedia Director
could make six figures. But Haas had a
knack for botching every good opportunity.
No matter how straightforward an assign-
ment was, he’d take the most convoluted
approach possible to demonstrate his supe-
rior intellect. If a client asked for a project to
be coded in a relatively simple language like
Lingo, for example, he’d do it in C++ instead
and inevitably miss the deadline. “You ask
him to walk a straight line, he’d find a way
to insert algebra into it,” says Scott Yannitell,
Mark’s younger brother and Haas’ room-
mate for a time.
Haas’ productivity was also hampered by
his escalating drug use. He was now ingest-
ing all manner of opiates—oxymorphone,
hydrocodone, fentanyl, Dilaudid—and he
suffered multiple overdoses. When friends
expressed concerns about his narcotic
adventures, he swore that his geeky atten-
tion to detail prevented him from risking too
much harm. “I do that dumb thing where I
actually research the drugs I use,” he wrote
in an online chat. “I know, how silly of me.”
There were occasions, however, when
Haas would temporarily shake off the
druggy haze and dazzle with his brilliance.
Mark Yannitell recalls that Haas figured
out how to dramatically improve an open
source video encoder so that it could crunch
multimegabyte files in a matter of minutes
rather than hours. Yannitell urged his friend
to capitalize on his achievement, but Haas
hemmed and hawed before dropping the
project altogether.
“He was like Cypher from The Matrix—
y’know, ‘You see code, but I see brunettes
and redheads,’ ” Yannitell says. “But when
he reached that genius moment, when he
was on the cusp of some big idea that could
maybe change the world, he got nervous.”
In 2006, Haas’ childhood friend Jerritte
Couture contacted him about a job. Couture
headed up a web development firm outside
Dayton and hired Haas to work as a full-
stack developer. Haas did the job remotely,
from Athens, for four years, until Couture
drove over from Dayton one day to check
on his employee. He was shocked to discover
that Haas was living with his girlfriend and
her father in a house that had literally been
hit by a tornado; there was a gaping hole in
the roof. The floors were buried beneath
mounds of newspapers, old cereal boxes,
and plates encrusted with rotten food that
emitted an unholy stench.
Haas seemed oblivious to the filth, his
attention devoted to chatting with people
online. (“Maslow didn’t know about the
internet when he created his hierarchy of
needs,” Haas once wrote. “I could be wrong,
but I think it’s just below food.”) Under the
alias tonehog, he spent countless hours
moderating a cyberpunk web forum where
he opined about his pet topics: libertarian
politics, social anxiety, high-fat diets, and
shibari bondage.
Fearing for his friend’s well-being,
Couture eventually convinced Haas to
move in with him and his family in the sub-
urbs of Dayton and start working full-time
at his company, Edge Webware. Haas left
his girlfriend behind in Athens and instantly
curtailed his drug use. At the office, he
embraced the role of the lone weirdo amid
Midwestern squares—the resident expert
on matters such as government surveil-
lance and a newfangled invention called
bitcoin. “The way his ego worked, he was
turned on by the things he knew that you
didn’t know,” says Ron Campbell, the pres-
ident of U! Creative, a marketing firm that
had brought Edge Webware in-house. “He
felt like he knew a whole world that you
didn’t—that you’re living in this polished,
2.2-children, white-picket-fence world, but
he knows a dark world you know nothing of,
a humanity you know nothing of.”
But Haas couldn’t sustain this state of
near-normalcy. He moved out of Couture’s
home in 2013, reunited with his girlfriend,
and once again drifted into darkness.
Dressed in ratty black clothes, Haas would
show up hours late for work or nod off at
his desk. His dental hygiene was so poor
that several of his teeth rotted into goo. One
Halloween he whipped off his shirt and ran
 “ H E W A S L I K E C Y P H E R F R O M T H E M A T R I X ,”
A FRIEND SAYS. “BUT WHEN HE REACHED THAT
GENIUS MOMENT, WHEN HE WAS ON THE CUSP
OF S OME BIG IDE A T H AT C O U L D M AY BE C H A NG E
T H E W O R L D , H E G O T N E R V O U S .”
around the office with arms outstretched
while muttering, “I’m getting the idea, man,
I’m getting the idea.”
Haas was also a fount of fantastic lies. He
once submitted his notice to Edge Webware,
for example, explaining that he’d saved up
$40,000 and was going to move abroad
with his girlfriend and her father; he said
they needed to escape the US government,
which had targeted his girlfriend’s dad
because of his radical politics. After bidding
his final farewells on a Friday, Haas showed
up for work the next week, claiming that all
his money had been stolen just hours before
his flight to an unidentified foreign country.
As always, Edge Webware gave Haas
another chance, because hyperpolyglots like
him are so rare. “I can’t tell you how many
times a client would say, ‘Can you program
this in X?’ and I would go to Jerry and say, ‘I can
hire a contractor to do this, but do you want
to take a crack at it?’” Couture recalls. “And
he’d say, ‘Sure,’ and within 24 hours he’d know
the language well enough to have an intelli-
gent conversation with our client, and within
a week he’d be coding competently in it. I can’t
tell you how many times that happened.”
Haas’ run at Edge Webware finally came
to an end in November 2016. One morning,
as usual, Couture went to give the nondriving
Haas a lift to work. When Haas emerged from
his ramshackle rental house, he was trembling
and holding a .22-caliber pistol. He said he’d
been up all night because people had been
banging on his door, threatening to murder
him and his girlfriend. He persuaded Couture
to give him a day off to recover. He never
showed up for work again.
Once untethered from his main source of
stability, Haas swiftly succumbed to his worst
impulses. His behavior turned increasingly
erratic, and his body withered from lack of
food. By the summer of 2017, his mother,
Judith Wallace Huff, had become alarmed
enough to intervene. She convinced her
son to move, sans girlfriend, into a vintage
camper on her remote 30-acre property. He
white-knuckled his way through opiate with-
drawal with only a patchy satellite internet
connection to salve the pain.
All was going well until the autumn chill
set in. Haas complained that the camper,
which lacked heat and adequate natural
light, had the aura of a jail cell. One night after
Thanksgiving, he ran off into the Appalachian
forest and went roaming for days. He was
eventually arrested for breaking into a back-
woods church in an attempt to stave off frost-
bite, and returned to his mother’s care. Haas
would later claim that he’d had a profound
spiritual experience while on his forest trek:
He said he sensed a phantasmic deer along-
side him as he hiked, and that the animal
taught him “to walk in the world again.”
Wallace Huff knew her son was deeply
unhappy in the camper, so in December she
helped him move to Columbus, the place
in Ohio where he seemed likeliest to find
work. She rented him a furnished apart-
ment and stocked it with groceries. When
January came, however, Haas had to move
into a homeless shelter. But he was finally
sober and, despite his dismal circumstances,
clawing himself toward something better.
He sold loose cigarettes to other shelter res-
idents and used a public library to send his
résumé far and wide.
Haas’ luck began to change when he met
a woman at a coffee shop who invited him
to stay at her apartment. This was Charles
Ford’s friend. Soon enough he was crash-
ing with Ford, who in turn connected him
with Etienne Fieri. Within four months, he
was a cofounder of one of the most prom-
ising blockchain startups in Columbus.
When he spoke to old acquaintances about
his meteoric rise from vagrant to entrepre-
neur, he radiated clarity and joy. “It was the
first time he’d been totally coherent since
he went off to Ohio University,” says Mike
Czarnecki, a childhood friend. “I was so
happy for him, so happy I could almost cry.”
A
FTER RETURNING to Warren
C o u n t y, t h e d e t e c t i v e s
assigned to the Haas case
attempted to check out
Charles Ford’s bizarre story.
The manager of the BP station
where Ford filled his gas tank
and bought snacks said there was no way
the credit card system had malfunctioned
for 45 minutes; 20 minutes was the absolute
maximum downtime. The cops also talked
to the clerk for whom Ford said he’d bought
a double cheeseburger. She told detectives a
man had offered to bring her food but never
returned to the store.
On November 7, police records show, the
investigators called Judith Wallace Huff to
see if she knew anything about her son’s
older friend, whose story seemed to be dis-
integrating. She told them she’d spoken
to Ford in mid-September after Haas had
been missing for two weeks and that she’d
been struck by something he’d told her: He
said that Haas would be discovered dead
in a field. (Ford did not respond to multiple
requests for comment.)
 THE DETECTIVES TRIED TO WHEEDLE

A CONFESSION FROM FORD BY ASSURING HIM

THEY’D UNDERSTAND IF SOME CALAMITY HAD

O C C U R R E D BY AC C IDE N T—SAY, A HE ROI N OV E R-

DOSE THAT LED TO A HASTY EFFORT TO DISPOSE

OF H A A S ’ B ODY.

That same day the detectives asked Ford
to come to their headquarters in Lebanon,
the seat of Warren County. They grilled him
for hours about the oddities and inconsis-
tencies in his statements, particularly the
fact that he never once called Haas’ cell
phone after the day his friend vanished. The
investigators told Ford they were certain
this was because he knew Haas was already
dead. But Ford countered that he’d seen
Haas remove the batteries from his phone,
as a way to avoid being tracked by satellites,
so there would have been no point in calling
him. (Haas used one phone for voice calls,
one for the internet, and one as a PDA.)
The detectives tried to wheedle a con-
fession from Ford by assuring him they’d
paucity of soft tissue. On November 8, Haas’
skeleton was transported to the Human
Identification Center at the University of
Indianapolis. Krista Latham, the forensic
anthropologist who runs the center, metic-
ulously cleaned the bones, using a combi-
nation of water and enzymatic detergents.
She was able to identify a significant wound
that appeared to have occurred around the
time of Haas’ death: a fracture at the top of
the left femur, near where the leg connects
to the pelvis. The femur is the largest bone
in the body, and breaking it usually requires
a tremendous amount of force—like getting
hit by a car or falling from a great height.

understand if some calamity had occurred by
accident—say, a heroin overdose that led to a
hasty effort to dispose of Haas’ body. “I think
you’re a good person, and I think you ended
up in a really bad situation that there was
no good answer to,” one of the interrogators
said. “You tried to solve the situation as best
you could, because you’re a problem-solver,
you’re an entrepreneur.” But Ford could
not be shaken from his denials, even when
informed that a cadaver dog had perked up
upon coming into contact with his Saturn.
After a polygraph exam during which he
was flagged for one instance of deception,
Ford was allowed to go back to Columbus.
But the detectives quickly prepared a search
warrant for his phone data and a subpoena
for his bank records. The suspected crime
was listed as murder.
Though they had zeroed in on a person
of interest, the investigators still could only
guess at how Haas had died: The Warren
County Coroner’s Office had been unable to
establish a cause of death, due to the body’s
T
HOUGH THE Warren County
detectives had expressed con-
fidence in their hunch about
Charles Ford, the mechanic
was vindicated by his phone
and bank records. Verizon’s
location data confirmed that
Ford had explored the roads near the BP sta-
tion on the afternoon of August 31. And his
debit card statement listed an $11.21 pur-
chase at a Burger King in Springboro, the
last place Ford said he’d looked for Jerold
Haas. There was zero evidence that he’d
driven seven miles south to Clarksville to
dump a body.
Now back at square one, the detectives
sent out a press release asking members of
the public to report “anything suspicious in
the area” where Haas had disappeared. A
local TV station and the Dayton Daily News
picked up the appeal, and tips came trick-
ling in.
The most credible potential witnesses
were all residents of a cul-de-sac called

0 9 2
Shepherds Way that runs along the western
boundary of Bill O’Bryan’s estate—about a
half-mile from where Haas’ skeleton was
found and on the other side of the prop-
erty’s soybean field. Among them was an
elderly woman who said she’d been star-
tled one mid-September morning to see
a disheveled man in her wooded back-
yard. He was furtively peeking out from
behind a tree but soon melted back into
the mosquito-infested forest, where only
well-equipped outdoorsmen usually dare
to tread.
Two more sightings came from a man
and his father-in-law, who said they’d seen
someone fitting Haas’ description walk-
ing along the shoulder of State Route 22
in early September, possibly with a bed-
Haas vanished from this Clinton County, Ohio, gas station while a friend was buying snacks.
roll slung beneath his backpack. They had
thought it odd that anyone would be walking
in the late-summer heat, let alone dressed
in heavy black pants. The father-in-law
added that a friend of his, an ardent hunter,
had placed a deer feeder in the area behind
Shepherds Way, and he’d been surprised to
discover that someone had been using the
barrel-shaped contraption as a crude stove.
In light of what they’d learned from
Clarksville locals, the Warren County
Sheriff’s Office sent out a team of seven
officers on November 21 to comb the thick
woods that lie between the soybean field
and Shepherds Way.
They made their first crucial discovery
in a clearing covered with autumn leaves.
A thin tree along the clearing’s edge had a
cord running from high up on its trunk to
an anchor in the ground, and someone had
draped a tarp over the taut line to form a
basic shelter. Close by was some burnt
wood, arranged in the criss-cross pattern
of a campfire.
This makeshift campsite was near a
ravine with a small creek at its bottom,
an offshoot of a larger stream to the south
called Todd Fork. Two detectives hiked
down the gorge and waded through the
mucky water, which was then only a few
inches deep. They soon encountered a
mound of mud-caked leaves and bro-
ken branches. On top of the pile rested a
zipped-up black backpack.
When they picked up the pack, they
could see it was soaked through and cov-
ered with debris. Inside was Haas’ ruined
computer hardware, as well as an assort-
ment of less sophisticated items: seven light-
ers, a canister of pepper spray, electrical
tape, blue work gloves, a Nissan hood orna-
ment, a copy of the New Testament, three
unwrapped Magnum condoms, and an ear
of unshucked corn that bore char marks
from roasting.
A new and convincing theory of Haas’
demise now came into focus, one that had
nothing to do with foul play. It was clear that
Haas’ mental health had frayed as he strug-
gled to launch Tessr, a venture on which he’d
pinned his hopes for personal redemption.
The closer he’d gotten to success, the more
anxious he’d grown at the prospect of being
absorbed into the conventional world he’d
long rejected. Haas had a history of deal-
ing with such inner turmoil by running off:
He’d gone to Florida to become a vagrant
after dropping out of college, and he’d fled
into the mountains of southeast Ohio while
grappling with the realization that he’d
squandered years on drugs. That walkabout
yielded a spiritual insight that had renewed
his sense of purpose.
So as he smoked outside the BP station
on August 31, it seems entirely in character
that Haas might have made an abrupt deci-
sion to bail on the high-pressure life he’d
built in Columbus. All of us have probably
daydreamed about taking a step or two back
from the exhausting din of technology. But
the overwhelmed Haas took that common
fantasy of simplicity and molded it into some-
thing far more frightening and pure: He chose
to abandon all community and comfort to
become a hermit, swapping the stress of Tessr
for the solitude of the Ohio wilderness.
After walking or hitchhiking the seven
miles between the BP station in Clinton
County and Bill O’Bryan’s estate, Haas prob-
ably survived in the Clarksville woods for
weeks, foraging food and camping supplies
from the farms that line State Route 22. As
he lost weight due to the meagerness of
the meals he cooked over open flames, he
took to using a vine to hold up his pants. He
seems to have never interacted with another
soul, as if uttering a single word to someone
might spoil his scraggly little Eden.
The fractured femur—a potentially fatal
injury if bleeding was heavy and untreated—
could have occurred in a number of ways.
One detective theorized that Haas scaled a
tree near the ravine to reach a deer stand,
then accidentally tumbled out. Or maybe
he walked too close to the edge of the ravine
and lost his footing. In either scenario, Haas
would have been separated from his back-
pack upon smashing into the rock-strewn
creek below; if conscious, he might have
watched in anguish as the bag was swept
downstream. Somehow the badly injured
Haas pulled himself out of the ravine and
crawled for nearly half a mile through a
labyrinth of soybean plants before reaching
another stretch of verdant forest. Then he
flopped against the base of a honeysuckle
tree and closed his eyes to rest.
If this sad narrative is true, it leaves a vex-
ing mystery. The injured Haas could have
inched toward Shepherds Way or Route 22,
both of which are closer to the area where
he likely had his accident. He could have
flagged someone down to take him to a
hospital. Was he so disoriented from phys-
ical trauma and caloric deprivation that he
couldn’t discern the shortest path to help?
Or did he purposefully continue to avoid
human contact even after it became appar-
ent that doing so would mean his doom?
W
HETHER intentionally or
not, Haas destroyed Tessr
by retreating into the
woods. Even if the hard
drives in his backpack
could be salvaged, the
ever-paranoid Haas—a
self-described “tinfoil hat guy”—had ren-
dered them unreadable with strong
encryption. The code he wrote for Tessr’s
0 9 4
blockchain seems fated to be locked away
for good. Emanuel Sylvia briefly toyed
with pushing forward with the company
to honor the memory of his cofounder, but
the task was just too daunting. “I could not
keep going,” Sylvia wrote to Haas’ mother in
February. Jerold “was more of a friend than
my partner and with the code gone, I lost
all motivation.” (Sylvia says he still plans to
launch his “educational blockchain” and
that it will be named after Haas.)
Judith Wallace Huff has dealt with her
incalculable grief by becoming an amateur
gumshoe. Holed up on her rustic property
high in the Appalachian foothills, she has
filled several notebooks with observations
about Tessr’s investors, the criminal records
of Clarksville residents, and the alleged short-
comings of the Warren County Sheriff’s Office.
She is especially incensed by the detectives’
failure to follow up on a clue she gleaned
from one of Jerold’s pseudonymous Twitter
accounts, @CompositionFore. Wallace Huff
kept close tabs on the account throughout
September 2018, hoping to detect a glimmer
of activity that might indicate her son was
still alive. As of September 22, the three most
recent posts were all dated August 27—four
days before Jerold disappeared:
“This just in: At one point in time, having
things meant things.”
“Ran out of phenibut feel ambivalent
about it.”
“Numerous time in my life when I’d
thought I was being the most selfless & con-
siderate, in retrospect I found I was egocen-
tric. Might have learn’t a valuable lesson.”
When Wallace Huff next checked the
account, on September 25, those posts had
been deleted. What was left at the top of the
page was Jerold’s last surviving post from
August 27—the most cryptic of his musings
from that day:
“Meanwhile: Anachrists”
Wallace Huff has repeatedly asked the
Warren County Sheriff’s Office to contact
Twitter and obtain information about the
IP address that was used to delete Jerold’s
tweets—data that might give her a better
sense of how long her son survived in the
woods, and whether he ever leeched off
someone’s Wi-Fi to satiate his internet addic-
tion. But the investigators said that Twitter
would need to perform “extensive engineer-
ing efforts” to recover information that is “not
necessary,” and declined to follow up.
Wallace Huff has not given up on the
notion that her son might have been mur-
dered. The story that makes the most sense
to her is that Jerold secluded himself in the
forest to engage in a 30-day religious fast,
which would explain the New Testament
in his backpack. Maybe he had an accident
while in a weakened state, or maybe he
crossed paths with someone whose malev-
olence he was too naive to recognize. “His
biggest flaw was that he had a loyalty for
friends and a trusting nature,” Wallace Huff
says. “This trait caused him to be hurt and
betrayed more than once.”
Wallace Huff wants to recover the tangi-
ble items found in Jerold’s backpack, since
they constitute nearly all the possessions
her son left behind. But the Warren County
Sheriff’s Office has refused to release the
property to her. “I realize we have closed this
investigation,” a deputy wrote to her in May,
“but we feel obligated to maintain custody
of the items we have to assist with further
investigation should that become necessary
in the future.” Nor has Wallace Huff been
able to visit the woods where her son lived
and likely perished: Bill O’Bryan will not let
her come on the property, according to law
enforcement. (O’Bryan did not respond to
requests for comment.)
The rest of Haas’ legacy is located primar-
ily on SoundCloud, where he uploaded doz-
ens of original tracks as both tonehog and
CompositionFore. The evolution of his music
offers a glimpse of how Haas’ perception of
himself may have changed through years of
unfulfilled promise. The danceable beats of
his collegiate rave days steadily gave way to
ominous industrial noise, and finally to
shapeless sonic experiments with titles like
“High Fidelity Hate” and “Robotic Oompa
Loompa March,” which all but a few listeners
will find intolerable. These last songs, which
the middle-aged Haas produced while grap-
pling with the burdens of his past, feel
explicitly designed to confound, to upset,
even to invite scorn. It is almost as if Haas
derived pleasure from being on the knowing
side of a cosmic joke—a joke that only
someone as cursed by narrow brilliance as
he was could ever hope to understand.
Brendan I. Koerner (@brendankoerner) is
a wired contributing editor and author
of The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror
in the Golden Age of Hijacking. He wrote
about the rapid pace of evolution in urban
wildlife in issue 27.10.
 Mystical powers that helped
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SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS WIRED 27.12

IN SIX WORDS, SKETCH THE PLOT OF STAR WARS: EPISODE XXI

LUKE, I AM YOUR
GREAT-GRANDSON. —@uniquetoybox via Twitter

HONORABLE MENTIONS: FAMILY PROBLEMS CONTINUE TO RUIN GALAXY. @JOHNBORANJR VIA INSTAGRAM // Each month we publish a six-word story—and
SKYWALKER DESCENDANTS DISCOVER SITH ON EARTH. PAUL HADDEN VIA FACEBOOK // SELF-DRIVING DEATH STAR it could be written by you. Submit your story
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0 9 6 ILLUSTRATION / MAXIME MOUYSSET

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