Inhaltsverzeichnis für October 2018 in WIRED

“Why WIRED? Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the main stream media is still groping for the snooze button.” So began the founding manifesto of this magazine. It’s an awesome document: 216 words of vim, bold font, and attitude. And thanks to the accidental SEO-juju of a factual error (typhoons in Bengal are actually called cyclones), its most famous phrase would forever refer Google searchers to the manifesto. In any event, it made you want to read the darn thing. According to the manifesto, the magazine was birthed into being because the rest of the press was too busy with malarkey to “discuss the meaning or context of social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” The year…

When we launched WIRED, we were accused of being Panglossian optimists. I embraced that as a badge of honor. The Digital Revolution was reinventing everything, and that was good. Twenty-five years on, that optimism is no longer justified—it’s necessary. Indeed: militant optimism. WIRED’S premise was that the most powerful people on the planet weren’t the politicians or generals, priests or pundits, but the people creating and using new technology. The state and politics were obsolete. We no longer needed to subcontract our responsibility for society to distant capitals. By using the new tools now radically empowering individuals, we could, ourselves, work directly on making a better world. Of course, the entrenched institutions being displaced weren’t giving up. Like the mainstream media. We used to joke that The New York Times…

Despite all the grifting, thieving, speculation, and wild price swings you’ve heard about, bitcoin and other decentralized digital currencies are clearly here to stay. Boosters think cryptocurrencies and the distributed ledgers called blockchains they depend on will reinvent the financial system. Neha Narula, who studies them full time, and Joi Ito, who has been following digital money since the dawn of the web, talk about what that reinvention might look like. First IP address: 199.100.7.5 First time I wore chain mail: “Feeding Caribbean reef sharks on a wreck.” First time I sold anything for cryptocurrency: “When we sold music for Ecash on our server in 1997.” WIRED: What are some of the implications of cryptocurrencies for average people? NARULA: First of all, the way we fund productivity is going to…

“Louis and I knew wired needed to call attention to itself or it would disappear without a trace. For pure snarky attitude and tweaking the powers that be, nothing beat Spy magazine. Its deeply arbitrary departments like the Spy List were hilarious—and made folks pay attention. Tired/Wired was our version of that.” —John Plunkett, FOUNDING CREATIVE DIRECTOR “Tired/Wired became one of many ways we made fun of a centralized New York vs. the decentralized future—Tired: Manhattan, Wired: the Well. It was always the last thing Louis and I worked on to close the issue.” “Eventually, though, the joke was on us—Tired: Founders, Wired: Condé Nast.”…

Melinda Gates knows that successful tech companies have a way of minting money. A computer scientist, she joined Microsoft, the company that her future husband cofounded, in 1987. She has spent the past two decades directing the riches her family accrued toward helping others through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. More recently, she started her own firm, Pivotal Ventures, which helps women succeed in tech. In January, Gates traveled to Kenya, where she met Shivani Siroya, the founder of a startup that calculates its version of a credit score and grants small loans. Gates and Siroya share a belief that technology, paired with resources and creativity, can help generate wealth everywhere. SHIVANI SIROYA: I was working in India when I started lending people money in my spare time. Maybe…

“Just Outta Beta inevitably served as an unholy sanctuary for product managers outta their minds. But once in a while, we identified a next big thing, like ReplayTV and PayPal.” —Bob Parks, FORMER EDITOR OF JUST OUTTA BETA Astronomer (Release: 2018) Alex Pietrow made a splash in 2017 when he published endearingly lo-res photos of the moon and Jupiter shot with a 2-bit Game Boy camera. The Dutch PhD student quadruples his bit count with his latest retro project, an astrophotography videogame he developed for the Atari 2600. You can buy the cartridge for $18 and plug it into the late-’70s console, or just play for free online. To earn points, swing the beam of a telescope through the night sky to photograph a moving celestial object. But watch out…

As Apple’s head of design, Jony Ive is responsible for everything from the curves at the edge of the iPhone’s screen to the haptic bup of an Apple Watch notification. When asked to name a person who will make a measurable impact on our future, Ive points to Evan Sharp of Pinterest. “He understands that complex problems can be simplified and often resolved visually,” Ive says. “Nuance and subtlety characterize his work. He doesn’t just address a functional imperative.” WIRED: Jony says he likes your work on Pinterest, that the design brings a sense of order to a chaotic bunch of images and text. EVAN SHARP: The layout of Pinterest is designed to give you control over browsing. If you think about browsing as a concept, animals browse for food…

“When WIRED first decided to publish an advice column, it didn’t have a name. Mr. Know-It-All was something my sister used to call me.” —Mark Robinson, FEATURES EDITOR Should we be our raw authentic selves, or strike a pose? This feels like a quintessential dilemma of the digital age, but artists and philosophers have been grappling over this one for centuries, really. ¶ And you will be happy to know that the artists generally side with you! As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Wilde meticulously crafted his image as a Victorian poncy intellectual aesthete, posing for brooding emo publicity shots in a huge fur-fringed coat. (The dude would have…

“Increasingly, interns were being asked to do genuinely dangerous things. We knew the format had run its course when the ‘objects’ graduated to explosives and grappling hook guns.” —Adam Rogers, DEPUTY EDITOR, WHO CONCEIVED MOST DANGEROUS OBJECT IN THE OFFICE First there were exploding hoverboards. Then came the e-scooter wars. Now Segway is courting the “mobility” market with these $400 electric skates. Unlike the clunky Rollerblades of your youth, these gliders have no boots or straps—just grippy platforms that hold your shoes in place. (That is, until you hit a minuscule crack in the sidewalk, at which point you’ll be catapulted forward, praying you’ll stick the landing.) Each hefty, 8-pound skate gyro-balances on a single wheel; you control the direction and speed by pressing down with your toes. If you’re…

When it came into being in 2006, Twitter seemed perplexing. Publishing teensy, 140-character updates? Whatever was that good for? Twitter seemed like a ghastly mashup of the preening narcissism and nanosecond attention spans that defined the worst trends in digital culture. Tim Ferriss, writer of productivity books, called it “pointless email on steroids.” Who cares what you had for lunch? But critics misunderstood it. What Twitter truly portended wasn’t small, it was huge. As I argued in my first-ever WIRED column more than a decade ago, Twitter represented a massive shift in the way we pay attention to one another. The status update took off and we entered the era we still inhabit: the age of awareness. Before the age of awareness, people conversed via blog posts, threads in discussion…

“I had a reputation around the office for being this nitpicking pop culture pedant. I was raised that way. When I was a little kid seeing Star Wars for the first time, I remember my dad leaning over during the climactic scene to tell me that, scientifically, there would be no air to carry the sound of the Death Star’s explosion in the vacuum of space.” —Chris Baker, FORMER SENIOR EDITOR AND WRITER OF ANGRY NERD FROM 2010 TO 2016 We’re All Sunk Furious pop cultural obsessiveness seemed like righteous, antagonistic fun when we started this column eight years ago. But somewhere along the line, that particular strain of hyperbolic fanboy zealotry curdled. Maybe it’s because geek culture is no longer niche—quibbling about Wakanda’s vibranium reserves is different when Black…

When Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom met Karlie Kloss through friends in 2012, he had no idea who the supermodel was. He had launched his mobile photo-sharing app two years before, and he was a “typical tech guy,” he says, oblivious to culture. She was a jet-setting entrepreneur with an interest in coding. (They spent a morning making pancakes for friends; Systrom’s now wife, Nicole Schuetz, later filled him in.) Three years later, partially inspired by her friendship with Systrom, Kloss founded Kode With Klossy, which hosts a free camp where teenage girls learn the fundamentals of Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Swift. The pair got together to discuss the tech gender gap—from the top down and the ground up. Apple or Android? “I have to have both, to be able…

Secret rabbit hole obsession: Action movies First computer: Sinclair ZX8O I’ve had deafness since I was little. My sister was born with congenital deafness, and my dad has some too. You’re not really in the cool gang in my family if you don’t have some hearing loss. ¶ When I joined Microsoft, in 2005, I led European operations that provided customer service for Hotmail and other products. I also became a leader in the company’s disability community. At one point, I wrote a white paper on accessibility and later launched a support department for customers with disabilities called the Disability Answer Desk. It now takes around 200,000 calls per year. The people who staff it know the etiquette, the language, the technologies to use—for example, using video to chat with…

Geetha Murali’s mother grew up in Chennai, India, in a family in which child marriage was common. When she was 13, she rebelled and went to school instead. “Education became a driving force in her life,” Murali says. “She instilled that obsession in me.” Murali went on to earn two master’s degrees (in statistics and South Asian studies) and a PhD. In 2013, as the chief development officer of literacy nonprofit Room to Read, she caught the attention of Susan Wojcicki, who later joined the board. Inspired by her own 9-year-old daughter, Murali shared her picks for budding technologists. Guilty tech addiction: “Asking Alexa and Siri to tell me jokes.” Favorite meme: “A Kermit meme that reads, ‘COME TO THE DARK SIDE. WE HAVE COOKIES.’” Lab Girl by Hope Jahren…

The Colophon in WIRED’s first issue was a list of the hardware and software used to produce the magazine. It mentioned the music too: Seal, k.d. lang, Thelonious Monk. Over the years, Colophon has credited fashion blunders, cheap thrills, and other distractions for helping to get the issue out. Then, in 2007, Colophon was put on ice—and readers raised hell. A few months later, it reappeared. That month’s topic? “Readers who helped get Colophon back.” —Joanna Pearlstein, DEPUTY EDITOR FOR NEWSROOM STANDARDS THINGS THAT WILL HELP US GET OUT THE NEXT 25 ISSUES: Flawless voice-to-text transcription tech; Steven Universe, season six; cookies, cakes, crisps, cobblers, and crumbles; a candy drawer stocked with CBD gummies and airplane bottles of rum; Fallonberg Heavy Industries; Alyssa Walker; fond memories of Chelsea Leu; the…

When you ask the most influential people in tech and business to nominate who they think will shape the future, they often suggest names they know from work or from their philanthropic efforts. We pulled those connections together into an infographic; call it the worldwide web of Silicon Valley.…

Favorite household chore: “I do the dishes every night. Other people volunteer, but I like the way I do it.” Age when I first saw a computer: 13 Few things trouble me as much as the fact that many cutting-edge medical advances aren’t available to everyone who needs them. Many lifesaving procedures require specialized equipment and trained technicians. If you don’t have a lot of money or live near a major hospital, you’re out of luck. Stephen Quake wants to change that. By sampling the small amount of genetic material that circulates in the bloodstream, he’s replacing invasive, often painful procedures with cheaper, easier blood tests. He’s built a career out of turn ing highly specialized procedures into something simple that can be done anywhere, including the most remote places…

Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis spent the 1980s and early ’90s designing machines worthy of the new millennium. But by 1995 he realized that he had never given much thought to what lay on the other side of the year 2000. “Those three zeros,” he wrote in an essay for wired, “form a convenient barrier, a reassuring boundary by which we can hold onto the present and isolate ourselves from whatever comes next.” To see beyond that barrier, he felt, humanity needed the slowest machine possible: a mechanical clock that would tick faithfully for 10,000 years. This past winter, inside a mountain on Jeff Bezos’ sprawling West Texas ranch, Hillis and his colleagues began assembling the device. It is housed in a cylindrical 500-foot shaft cut into solid limestone.…

Peter Thiel sometimes seems bored by mainstream tech. “You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions,” he said during a debate in 2013. “But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs.” ¶ It was perhaps this sense of unfulfilled potential that drew him to Palmer Luckey, the never boring inventor who made the first prototypes of the Oculus Rift as a home-schooled 17-year-old. Luckey has since created Anduril, a military tech company also funded by one of Thiel’s VC firms. He talked with wired about his visions of the future. WHEN DID YOU MEET PETER THIEL? I was 19 years old, maybe 20. Founders Fund was one of the first investors…

Sorry, skeptics: Virtual reality is growing faster than you thought it would. You’re just looking in the wrong place. Millions of people are leaving their homes for the visceral experience of location-based VR, which has become a billion-dollar business. WHAT IT IS Location-based entertainment encompasses theme parks, arcades, entertainment centers like Dave & Buster’s, and even movie theaters. In this context, VR can be as simple as a business buying a few Oculus Rifts and PCs and charging people to play popular games in public. However, companies like the VOID and Dreamscape Immersive have set themselves apart by breaking through arcade walls and creating bespoke, high-end experiences where people can roam freely. Users can even share real-world props that are tracked in VR. WHY IT WORKS It’s not that people…

“3 Smart Things grew out of the way WIRED editors would talk to each other. In meetings, someone would inevitably say, ‘You know what’s cool about that …’ Now it’s become this horrifying thing on Twitter: some blowhard swooping in and going, ‘Actually …’ ” —Adam Rogers, DEPUTY EDITOR 1. A chemist at Corning accidentally created what would become Gorilla Glass in 1952 when a furnace overheated by 300 degrees, producing the world’s first synthetic, shatterproof glass-ceramic. A decade later, the company’s researchers bolstered its composition with aluminum oxide, then treated it to a scorching salt bath, which shoves aside small sodium ions in favor of larger potassium ions. 2. The same glass that shields smartphones is also whizzing around the speedway in the windshield of Ford’s GT race cars,…

I discovered ProPublica about two years ago and became interested in it right away because of its mission: To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism. It’s independent, it’s nonpartisan, and it’s powered mainly by philanthropy. ProPublica actually measures success by whether it sparks real-world change. This was a new take on a business model that I hadn’t really thought a lot about. The most recent ProPublica story that stood out to me was the publication of the audiotape of immigrant children being held in a US Customs and Border Protection facility. There have also been a number of stories on wrongfully convicted folks that have prompted cases to be reopened. I’ve watched how…

SWEET DEAL CITROBACTER IS HANGRY! IT’S IN YOUR BELLY AND CAUSING BLOATING AND THE RUNS. HAVING ENOUGH FOOD TO MUNCH ON CALMS THE MEAN BACTERIA DOWN. ONCE I BLOCK THESE ABSORPTION CHANNELS, TASTY SUGARS WILL STAY PUT IN THE GUT! MWAHAHAHA. LESSON: GIVE CITROBACTER WHAT IT WANTS—SUGAR! TAMING THE TUMMY HAS NEVER BEEN SWEETER. GUT PUNCH WHEN SALMONELLA CAUSES FEVER, YOUR OVERTAXED IMMUNE SYSTEM TELLS YOUR BRAIN TO SHUT OFF YOUR APPETITE. BUT THE SALMONELLA BUGS NEED TO EAT—AND SOME HAVE THE POWER TO OVERRIDE THE SYSTEM. GOOD SALMONELLA COULD REACTIVATE YOUR APPETITE, STYMIEING THE BAD GUYS. FEELING FOOD-POISONED AND UNHUNGRY? SLURP DOWN SOME SLRP! GROWTH FORMULA BOTH THESE MICE HAVE PNEUMONIA—BUT ONLY ONE IS WASTING AWAY. WAR RAGES WITHIN—EVIL BURKHOLDERIA THAILANDENSIS HAS INVADED THE LUNGS. DOWN IN THE INTESTINES, FRIENDLY E. COLI SENSE…

What’s more alive—library stacks or the internet? Seems plain as day: The living one clamors and bleats. The one that’s dark and smells of mildew is dead. But it hasn’t always been obvious. At the turn of the century, when the web was a wake for victims of dotcom crib death—Pets.com, eToys.com, gazoontite.com—it was a morbid place to be. Occasionally it could seem alive, sure, as brush fires are alive. Bright, but not long for this world. No one knew if even Amazon and Priceline would survive, and they almost didn’t. Grooved into the nervous systems of anyone who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s was also a persistent fear of disappearing data. “Computers” were identified with caprice. Everyone knew the ice-blood dread of having whole term papers…

“When I was assigned First to Market, I had no idea how VC funding really worked. I prepared by watching Shark Tank to learn about valuation.” —Victoria Tang, FORMER WIRED RESEARCH EDITOR AND FIRST TO MARKET WRITER Facial Recognition Smartphone users who unlock their device with a glance already understand the creeptastic potential of facial-recognition technology. In China, so do shoppers, airline passengers, ride-share hailers, and students. Unconstrained by strict privacy protections and buoyed by AI-enabled state surveillance—and hefty government investment—Chinese startups are leading the race to ID your face. SenseTime $620 million, Series C, May 2018 VCs and state investors contributed millions to make this company the highest valued AI startup, worth more than $4.5 billion. That money funds Asia’s largest AI training database, fueled by more than 8,000…

Ten cents won’t get you much in the American health care system—maybe a Band-Aid, if your HMO is feeling generous—but in parts of India, where nearly a quarter of the world’s blind population lives, it will cover the cost of a vision screening. Across the state of Tamil Nadu, the Aravind Eye Care System has set up a network of rural teleconsultation centers, each one supervised by a trained technician. When a patient comes in, the technician performs a basic workup, snaps photos of the inside of the eye, and sends a digital report to one of Aravind’s doctors, who calls in a diagnosis and a course of treatment. According to R. Kim, chief medical officer at Aravind’s hospital in Madurai, nearly 2,000 patients take advantage of these services every…

MARIA STRESHINSKY: When I was really young, I went to the New Games Tournament. STEWART BRAND: Oh my gosh, in Marin County? That’s amazing. STRESHINSKY: I’ve been thinking about all the different things that you’ve helped create. BRAND: Do you remember the New Games at all? STRESHINSKY: I remember the Earthball. BRAND: Ah, good. Well, it was mythic then, enough to stick to a small child. “My friend and I had a matching set of patchwork overalls (it was the mid-‘70s!), and our artist drew them into his illustration.” —Maria Streshinsky, EXECUTIVE EDITOR Here’s the thing about Stewart Brand: He has spent a lifetime creating mythic things that stick. The New Games Tournament was a festival of wackadoodle and wild games meant to get people outside, playing, but also—and more…

Viruses are nature’s Trojan horses—they replicate by smuggling their genes into a host’s cells, turning them into mini virus factories. So in the late ’80s, researchers got the clever idea of sucking out the viral innards and inserting good genes to fight diseases. Then, in a 1999 clinical trial, a teenager died from a horrific immune response to one of those so-called viral vectors. Today, immune risk still limits approval of gene therapies. ¶ Enter the silicage. Using AI to interpret images from cryo-electron microscopy, scientists at Cornell recently discovered this cagelike orb, which forms naturally in solutions of soap and silica. Turns out, the shape is similar to some viruses, and researchers think silicages could also be used to deliver genes. Coat them with the kind of binding peptides…

One of the best things in life is seeing a younger generation emerge. It’s like a little taste of the future. When WIRED asked me to choose a next-generation trailblazer, I realized that I was lucky enough to have a very, very hard decision. There are so many people who make me optimistic for our future. But getting the economics of the information age right will be the foundation for getting any of it right. My Microsoft colleague Glen Weyl, coauthor of Radical Markets, is tackling the core issues: What does human dignity mean in a highly automated future? How can we regain agency over the data we produce? If these don’t sound like economic questions, then get ready to encounter the future of economics. We can’t just complain about…

Somewhere around 1997 I was filling my car with gas, and I spotted a web address on a small orange sticker on the pump. It was an ad of some kind; I don’t remember what for, but I do remember having a realization: The mass adoption of the internet was real. Against all odds, a disturbance in the force had unleashed an entirely new culture outside the established channels, and now commerce was flocking to where the action was. But the main event had hardly started. The main event—the great cascade that was unthinkable before it became obvious—was what you might call the rise of the bottom. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, masses of people who had previously been ignored as inert, dumb, or passive were awakened by…

When Sean Parker was young, he cofounded Napster and changed the way we listen to music. In his twenties, he helped jump-start Facebook and changed the way we interact with each other. Now, at age 38, he’s set on changing something else: the way we treat disease. The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which he founded in 2016, has dedicated $250 million toward using new technologies like Crispr to teach the human body to vanquish cancer. Alex Marson is a scientist building the tools to do just that. His research at UC San Francisco and the Parker Institute rejiggers the DNA of T cells—your immune system’s sentinels—to better recognize and attack malignant mutineers. Parker and Marson sat down to talk about Crispr, genome editing, and the most exciting coding language…

When she met Jill Tarter more than two decades ago, one of Margaret Turnbull’s first questions was, “How can somebody work with you?” Tarter was leading the Center for SETI Research at the time; Turnbull was an astronomy student. The next summer, Tarter took Turnbull on as an intern. Identifies as: “Earthling. You are one (if you’re not, be sure to let me know). You should proudly declare that fact on social media.” So began their hunt for aliens and alien tech, and in 2003 they published a catalog of potentially habitable star systems. Over the years, though, Turnbull moved away from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A NASA-funded astrobiologist, Turnbull now lives in Wisconsin and studies planets that might support life of any sort. Tarter, based in California, doesn’t…

We won, was the problem. WIRED tumbled into the mid-2000s in a whirlwind of validation and confusion. The main justification for our claim that the digital revolution would reshape the world had been brash confidence and what our founding editor in chief calls “militant optimism” (see page 26). And then, somewhere around 2003, it turned out to be true. Everyone got email—on their phones! Genomes were getting sequenced. Songs were getting downloaded. Algorithms were getting refined. The people we’d covered because they were merely interesting, ambitious, or cool were now famous and influential. Companies we’d written about for their good ideas were solidly profitable and worth giant, sticky gobs of money. So, yay! But also, uh-oh. The dog had caught the car. Back then, as now, WIRED editors would ask…

JENNIFER PAHLKA: We should all look through Anand Giridharadas’ eyes. For years, Anand has been observing and writing about change. He rejoices in the dynamism and prosperity that have come with technological change and a global economy, but he also sees the many people left behind. In his most recent book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand trains his focus on elite do-gooders. He offers a tough appraisal, and many people in Silicon Valley and San Francisco tech circles aren’t going to like it. Anand’s vision for fixing the world relies not on the generosity of the rich but on democratic governance. It is a vision that is desperately needed. “Are we ready to hand over our future to the elite, one supposedly world-changing initiative…

Favorite rabbit hole: Camera gear. “I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading reviews of some mirrorless Nikon I’ll never buy.” People generally associate the word radical with extreme. But I prefer to think of the word in reference to its Latin origin: radix, the root of the issue. My friend Malkia Cyril is a radical in the truest sense of the word. Malkia’s work goes right to the root of government surveillance: that it’s fundamentally about power and control, not simply safety and security. ”My sister and I made a FOIA request for my mother’s FBI file. They located 1,422 pages responsive to our request.” Malkia is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a national network…

“I figured out the upside of fake news long before 2016. Easiest money I’ve ever made freelancing.” —Elise Craig, FREQUENT WRITER OF REAL OR FAKE Since 2009, Dude Perfect—five guys from Texas A&M—have spent their lives creating trickshot videos with everything from basketballs to boomerangs and crossbows. Millions of subscribers have watched them break world records. JuanGTA, a Colombian Grand Theft Auto fiend, started out by posting videos of himself narrating backstories for in-game characters. In 2016, he landed a job as a Spanish-language writer for the franchise’s next installment, out in 2020. British YouTuber KSI’s original shtick was recording himself playing FIFA, but 4 billion or so views later, he moved on to a very public feud with a controversial vlogger/wannabe actor that culminated in a pay-per-view boxing match.…