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HOW THE U.S. ALMOST KILLED
THE INTERNET
AND WHY IT STILL COULD
BY STEVEN LEVY
SPECIAL REPORT
P. 62





Honestly
WKLV LV P\ RIFH
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Thats why I got an 8" Windows tablet. Its
small and light, but powerful enough to
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so I can get stuff done anywhere.
Dell Venue 8 Pro
$
299
99

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EVERYTHI NG
YOU NEED T O DO E VERYT HI NG YOU WANT
I NTRODUCI NG THE ALL- NEW 2014 CHEROKEE

88 Bred to Perfection
What happens
when Monsanto, the
master of genetic
modification, decides
to take natures path?
BY BEN PAYNTER
76 The Data Miners
Guide to Romance
Even in the era of
online dating, nding
a mate isnt easy. WI RED
pored over data from
top matchmaking sites
to see what makes
a profile irresistible.
BY CAITLIN ROPER
82 Love, Actuarially
How one man hacked
OkCupid to find
the girl of his dreams.
BY KEVIN POULSEN
FEATURES 22.02
96 Welcome to
Zappotopia
Dozens of startups are
flocking to the Nevada
desert, where Zappos
CEO Tony Hsieh is
building a community-
powered, whimsy-
driven tech mecca.
BY SARA CORBETT
62
How the US Almost Killed the Internet
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other tech
titans have had to fight for their livesagainst
their own government. Inside their year from
hell, and why the web will never be the same.
BY STEVEN LEVY

0 1 0 FEB 2014
ON THE COVER
Illustration by Christoph Niemann
34
Talkin Bout Your
Generation
How the slackers passed the
baton to the next suckers
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
29 Fresh Threads
Scratch-and-snif
jeans?
ULTRA
30 Q&A: Rick Rubin
The legendary music
producer talks Spotify, the
Beasties, and Kanye
BY BRIAN RAFTERY
32 Angry Nerd
RoboCop, stay in costume!
No Stamp Necessary
How Someecards became
the hilarious Hallmark
of the Internet
37 Flight Simulator
Luca Iaconi-Stewart is
building the ultimate
paper airplane
38 Secrets, Stars,
and Bones
Things to do and see
in Los Angeles
Q:
41 Sideways Ice Smasher
The Russian Baltika vessel
breaks through ice by
moving sideways
42 Olympic Tricks
Building a slopestyle course
44 Whats Inside
Trojan Tingly Warmth
Lubricant
46 Mr. Know-It-All
On autistic whales,
hate-tweeting, and
social media charity
BY JON MOOALLEM
GADGET LAB
49 Fetish: Vitra Miniatures
Tiny versions of design icons
like Eames La Chaise are
too small to sit in,
unless youre Tinker Bell
50 My Space: Jad Abumrad
The Radiolab cohost
takes us into his studio
54 Head-to-Head:
Premium Compact
Cameras
Nikon Coolpix A vs.
Fujilm X100S
56 Split Screen:
Travel Apps
Essential iOS and Android
tools for booking and
organizing your journeys
58 Billions Served
Usernames are broken.
The way were identied
online needs to catch up
to the modern Internet.
BY MAT HONAN
ASK A FLOWCHART
Is the NSA spying on me?
BY ROBERT CAPPS
110
ISSUE 22.02
12 Network Efects
Whats happening in
the WIRED world
17 Re:Wired
Readers sound of on
guest editor Bill Gates and
projects that help humanity
18 Release Notes
Behind the scenes
of this issue
INFOPORN
The licensed sets (hi, SpongeBob!)
that saved Lego
ALPHA
22 The End of Then
Past? Present? Online it
all lives together in one
big timeless universe.
BY PAUL FORD
24 Cashing in on
Climate Change
For some investors,
catastrophe is a safe bet
24 Jargon Watch
Keep up with the latest
additions to our lexicon
26 Homo Sapiens Secrets
Think youre not a
Neanderthal? Sorry.
21
28

IN 1960, THE REVOLUTIONARY REGIME IN CUBA ILLEGALLY CONFISCATED
ALL THE BACARDI COMPANYS CUBAN ASSETS WITHOUT COMPENSATION
AND FORCED THEM OUT OF THE COUNTRY. THE BACARDS LOST THEIR
BUSINESS AND THEIR HOME, BUT AS HISTORY HAS PROVEN, NOT THEIR
SPIRIT. THEY SIMPLY STARTED OVER SOMEWHERE ELSE.
O F B A R S
KICKED OUT
O T H E R S A R E K I C K E D
O U T O F
COUNTRIES
S O M E M E N A R E
LIVE PASSIONATELY. DRINK RESPONSIBLY.
2014. BACARD, BACARD UNTAMEABLE and the BAT Device are trademarks of Bacardi & Company Limited. Bacardi U.S.A., Inc., Coral Gables, FL. Rum - 40% Alc. by Vol. BACARDI.COM

F
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0 1 2 FEB 2014
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Why you
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EDITOR IN CHIEF
I have two webbed toes
on each foot.
We asked:
Whats the most
private thing
youre willing to
admit?
While I usually sport a
shaved head, I also enjoy
slapping on a cosplay wig
every now and then.
theres a cryptogram
tattooed on my back.
The solution might
lead to treasure.
Nickelback
is on my iPod
(and even on
my recently
played list).
My celebrity crush:
Clint Eastwood.
I own Corey Harts
first three releases
on vinyl (the singer,
not the slugger).
I have the worlds
itchiest back.



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I sometimes throw my
hubbys things away
when hes out of town,
in an effort to cut
down on clutter.
We asked:
Whats the most
private thing
youre willing to
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Ive seen Amlie
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I can roll my stomach
muscles like a belly
dancera dubious talent
that helped win over my
then-future wife.
My real height.

Move into a New World
When the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
awarded me a grant to pursue a project on child
labor, I chose the Olympus OM-D. Its so small and
responsive, it became an extension of my eye. It
allowed me to capture amazingly crisp, clear images
and the details I needed to tell my story.
-Larry C. Price, Olympus Visionary
Shot with an OM-D.
I NT RODUCI NG
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The exceptionally professional
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FEB 2014 0 1 7
RE:WIRED
YOU DONT NEED tax-deductible megabucks to
give back to the world. But it doesnt hurt.
We dedicated our December issue to scientists,
designers, and humanitarians who are making
an outsize impact, like polio vaccinators
staring down the Taliban and economists
using randomized controlled trials to ght
poverty. Bill Gates guest-editedand he
brought a pal (see right) for an epic discussion
about technology and global progress.
RE: LIKE MINDS,
ISSUE 21.12
Clinton and Gates
are right. Americans
shouldnt be jealous of
other countries for
catching up; they should
embrace it. Were all
humans, and getting rid
of that national men-
tality will go a long way
toward making the
world a safer place.
Koopication, on YouTube
RE: ALL I WANT, ISSUE 21.12
THE JUICE BOX, A PORTABLE POWER SOURCE
DREAMED UP BY BILL GATES, LOOKS SWIPED
FROM THE DIARIES OF NIKOLA TESLA.
Brandi Alexander, on FACEBOOK
RE: ISSUE 21.12
What a pleasure
to read a
magazine devoted
to technology
for making the
world better
rather than gross
self-indulgence,
and to ideas of
substance rather
than for-prot
frivolity.
David Thomson
of Lawrenceburg,
Kentucky, via email
GLOBAL GIANTS
RE: THE SURGE, ISSUE 21.12
Informative and well-written story about polio
eradication. I was surprised, however, to see no
mention of the CIAs phony vaccination campaign
[in Pakistan] during its attempt to kill Osama bin
Laden. This deception undermined the essential
trust between local people and medical authori-
ties. It may have even led to the deaths of several
medical workers, while making it harder for vacci-
nation teams to access already suspicious areas.
Peter Braden of Madison, Wisconsin, via email
RE: THE SEAWATER SOLUTION, ALPHA, ISSUE 21.12
SURFING IS A GOOD WAY TO COPE
WITH CYSTIC FIBROSIS. HOW COOL
WOULD IT BE TO FILL THAT RX?
Russell Neches (@ryneches), on Twitter
RE: THE VIEW FROM 250 MILES UP,
ALPHA, ISSUE 21.12
How can you talk about
treating Earth like a huge
spaceship without mention-
ing R.Buckminster Fuller?
His 1968 book Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth
introduced millions to the idea.
Crawford Irvine of San Diego, via email
UNDO, ISSUE 21.12 The writer of Prime the Pump is Timothy Lesle (Alpha). The author of How
Not to Be Wrong is Jordan Ellenberg. The founder of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and
Civil Society is Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (Mr. Know-It-All, Q). The writer of The Seawater
Solution is Ariel Ramchandani (Alpha). The author of Rescue Squad is Mark Yarm, not
Greg Miller (Alpha). The Etn BoostTurbine pictured in Wish List was model 4000, not 2000.

RELEASENOTES
0 1 8 FEB 2014
Rock God
To capture music pro-
ducer Rick Rubin (and his
legendary beard) in his
natural habitat (page 30),
photographer Christian
Weber headed to Shangri-
La, Rubins famed record-
ing studio in Malibu,
California. Designed
for Bob Dylan, Shangri-La
has hosted everyone from
Eric Clapton and Van
Morrison in the early
1970s to Adele and Muse
today. Rubin denitely
had a rock-and-roll vibe,
says Weber, whose
work has appeared inGQ
andSpin: Rick doesnt
wear shoes, and he likes
to wear all white.
Voice of Reason
WIREDs Know-It-All column has a new Mis-
ter: Jon Mooallem, whos also a contribut-
ing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
In this issue, Mooallem tackles burning
questions about Twitter morals and autistic
whales (page 46). You can trust him on ani-
malshis book on the subject, Wild Ones,
was a New York Times notable book of 2013.
Another Brick in the Chart
To help visualize the data for this
months Infoporn about Lego
(page 21), we undertook interlock-
ing eforts. Senior editor Sarah
Fallon headed to a Lego store for
bulk bricks; IT guru Chris Becker built
our charts piece by piece. Final tally:
$378.65, 420 bricks, 12 gurines,
and eight stafers gathered around
the table waiting their turn to play.
Drawing Las Vegas
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wants
to transform the barren land-
scape of downtown Las Vegas
(Welcome to Zappotopia,
page 96). The work isnt done
yet, so we asked illustrator Josh
Cochran to imagine the neigh-
borhoods future. He turned
it into a hipster playground
with a giant praying mantis and
pirate ship carousel.
Love by Numbers
Theres a trick to nding love online, Caitlin
Roper reports in The Data Miners Guide
to Romance (page 76). But it turns out
that WIRED stafers arent so wired when it
comes to matters of the heart.
I MET MY
PERSON IRL.
NO WAY, NO HOW. MET MY BELOVED
THROUGH IT.
IVE USED IT
BUT DIDNT
MEET ANYONE
AMAZING.
I MET SOMEONE,
AND IT WAS BLISS
UNTIL WE SPLIT.
I PARTNERED UP BEFORE
THAT NEWFANGLED
TECHNOLOGY CAME ALONG
(CLANK, CLANK).
Whats your experience with online dating?
CHRIS BECKER

$
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Claims: Speed claim based on comparison of national carriers average 4G LTE download speeds for Android and Windows smartphones and iPhone 5. Reliability claim based on data transfer completion rates
on nationwide 4G LTE networks. LTE is a trademark of ETSI. 4G LTE not available everywhere. Screen images simulated. 2014 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. All other marks used herein are the
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Lego, pre-millennium: stackable bricks, generic yellow-headed characters, revenue
sputtering. Lego today: Crushing the toy industry under its interlocking feet, hav-
ing overtaken Mattel and Hasbro as the most protable toymaker in the world. Thats
partially due to licensing deals, which, starting in 1999, added icons like Darth Vader
and Batman to the mix. Many other properties followedand The Lego Movie, out
in February, features many of our favorite modular heroes meeting for the rst time.
Here are some of the character lines that helped make it happen.
AN EMPIRE
OF BUILDERS
How Legos band of licensed
heroes conquered the world.
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THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY,
novelist L.P. Hartley wrote. They
do things differently there. He
penned that in 1953, but in the digi-
tal era the past is now present and all
around us: Millions of out-of-print
books and historical videoclips,
black-and-white movies, nearly
forgotten TV shows and pop songs
are all available with a credit card
or in many cases for free. It used to
be that, for economic and techno-
logical reasons, this cultural history
was locked away. Libraries and cor-
porate archives kept a small subset
of it available, but the rest was in
storage, out of reach. The reversal
has happened in just the past decade.
We are now living in a history glut;
the Internet has muddled the line
between past and present.
The transformation was slow at
first, and hardly anyone besides
librarians noticed. Project Gutenberg,
founded in 1971, was a cheerfully
radical efort to turn old books into
text les. When the web came along,
the Online Books Page appeared and
began listing links to thousands of
digitized titles. Then, after the turn
of the millennium, the pace rapidly
accelerated: Google set up Google
Books, Amazon launched Kindle,
and Archive.org started scanning
public-domain works from libraries.
Meanwhile, shifts in the economics
of music, lm, and video set of an
explosion in the digitization of back
catalogs, until then the furtive ter-
ritory of file - sharing pirates. Spo-
tify and Netix, Apple and YouTube
have all now built enormous busi-
nesses based on organizing the past
for commercial exploitation. Sud-
denly we nd ourselves living in an
online realm where the old is just as
easy to consume as the new. Were
approaching an odd sort of asymp-
tote, as our past gets closer and closer
to the present and the line separat-
ing our now from our then dissolves.
By PAUL FORD
argument

Six decades after Hartley wrote
his famous line, the past is no lon-
ger a foreign land. Instead weve
brought a weirdly literal truth to Wil-
liam Faulkners famously sphinxlike
aphorism: The past is never dead.
Its not even past. Take the Ken-
nedy assassination, for instance. In
honor of the events 50th anniver-
sary last November, CBS streamed
four straight days of its news broad-
cast from the period surrounding
the killing so you could experience
what it had been like in real time. Or
consider this: World War II bufs can
download radio broadcasts and lis-
ten to the rise of Hitler or the news
from D-Day as you would have heard
them back then.
More often, though, we dont
immerse ourselves in history; its
just there whenever we want it, liv-
ing right alongside the present. We
can trace ideas backward in time,
either by searching Google Books
or (for a sum) through thousands of
academic journals, using a few key-
words to nd sources that once were
the sole domain of historians. Pick
any historical subject and the Inter-
net will bring it to life before your
eyes. If youre interested in vaude-
ville, youll nd videos galore, while
college football scholars can browse
Penn States 1924 yearbook, complete
with all the players names and posi-
tions. And every day, more history
keeps washing up. Not long ago the
news went out that a Philadelphia
woman named Marion Stokes had
recorded 140,000 VHS tapes of local
and national news from 1977 to her
death in 2012. Her collection has been
acquired by the Internet Archive, and
soon it will trickle onto the web.
This omni presence of the past has
weird efects on contemporary cul-
ture. Take any genre of music, from
death metal to R&B to chillwave, and
the cloud directs you not just to simi-
lar artists in the present but to deep
wells of inuence from the past. Yes,
people still like new things. But the
past gets as much preference as the
presentMozart, for example, has
more than 100,000 followers on Spo-
tify. In a history glut, the idea of fash-
ionability in music erodes, because
new songs sit on the same shelf as
songs recorded ve, 25, and 55 years
ago, all of them waiting to be discov-
ered. In this eternal present, every-
thing can be made contemporary.
Perhaps the biggest result of the
history glut is that manag ing all
that history becomes the crucial
act, both commercially and intellec-
tually. Wikipedia is cataloging his-
tory, but to do so it needs to keep up
an epic accounting of its own his-
torythe billion-plus edits, each a
record of human activity, that have
built the encyclopedia over the
years. Companies like Spotify and
Netix are mining the past as they
host it, looking at their own enor-
mous usage logs and analyzing that
data to draw connections between
types of people and types of music.
Theres an irony here: All of the
data were collecting, all of the data
points and metadata, is history itself.
Much as we marvel at Babylonian
clay tablets listing measures of grain,
future generations will nd just as
much meaning in our log files as
they will in the media we consume.
Sure, Frank Sinatra sang a bunch of
songs; sure, Jennifer Lawrence was
a big star in 2014. But the log les
tell you who listened, and when, and
where they were on the planet. Its
these massive digital archivesand
the records that show how we used
themthat will be the dening his-
torical objects of our era.
FEB 2014
PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a program-
mer who is writing a book about
web pages for Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. He wrote about HTTP in
issue 21.05.
illustration by Med Ness
023

FORGET BITCOINsavvy investors bet on water. Global warming is chang-
ing the planet: Melting ice caps cause oods, fresh water vanishes, rising
temperatures shift arable regions and spread disease-carrying bugs. In his
new book, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, McKenzie
Funk investigates the proteers cashing in on the planets woes. Engineers
excited to see their seawall technology in action are just the tip of the ice-
bergfor some investors, catastrophe is a safe bet. 1UA oREENBERo
The heads of state
SOME LIKE IT HOT
CASHING IN ON
CLIMATE CHANGE
JARGON
WATCH
C
H
R
I
S
T
I
A
N

N
O
R
T
H
E
A
S
T


feb 2014 024
Business
Insurance companies
LIKE: Allstate, State Farm HOW
THEYLL PROFIT: More frequent
natural disasters means insurers
can hike rates, and natural
disasters are great advertising.
Articial-snow makers
LIKE: IDE Technologies HOW
THEYLL PROFIT: Snowmakers help
skiers and snowboarders ignore
shorter seasons and undependable
weather.
Oil and natural gas companies
LIKE: Shell, BP HOW THEYLL
PROFIT: Melting ice will expose
untapped reserves in the Arctic
and newly navigable seas for
smoother shipping.
Gene giants
(Big Ag and genetic engineers)
LIKE: Monsanto, Oxitec HOW
THEYLL PROFIT: Modied seeds
fare better, and engineered mosqui-
toes ght the spread of diseases.
Financial service rms
LIKE: Schroders, Summit Global
Management HOW THEYLL PROFIT:
Investors are buying water rights
and farmland, because drought and
food shortages can mean big prot.
Arctic nations
LIKE: Greenland, Canada, Russia
HOW THEYLL PROFIT: Fish, greener
pastures, and water become more
plentiful up north, while drought-
stricken nations pay for resources.
communications
ngerprinting
v. / k -
'
my-n -'k-sh nz
'-ger-
'
print-i /
Wiretapping to map out communi-
cations networks used by foreign
leaders, so that those networks
can easily be monitored during a
future political crisis. According
to leaked documents, the NSA has
extensively ngerprinted govern-
ment communications in Iran.
stanene
n. / 'sta-
'
nn /
A novel form of tin, one atom thick,
that in theory conducts electricity
with zero resistance. It takes its name
from stannum, Latin for tin, and
graphene, an atom-thick form of
carbon. Computer chips with stan-
ene wires would run at unprece-
dented speeds without overheating.
GPS bullet
n. / 'j 'p 'es 'b -l t /
A sticky GPS tracking device that
can be red from a grill-mounted
launcher during a police chase,
allowing cops to peel of and ambush
the suspect later. Police cars in four
states are now packing GPS ammo,
at a cost of up to $500 a round.
GROs
n. pl. / 'j 'r 'z /
Genomically recoded organisms.
GROs are created by altering DNA
codons to incorporate novel amino
acids in the proteins they make,
which could be used in new drugs
and biofuels. Unlike GMOs, GROs
are so genetically tweaked that
scientists dont expect them to
interbreed with wild organisms.
JONATHON KEATS
jargon@WIRED.com
lexicon


FEB 2014 026
Photograph by Christian Kryl By Ashik Siddique
Alpha GEEK
WE THINK OF NEANDERTHALS as the
losers in a pre historic battle against
the smarter Homo sapiens sapiens.
Its still not a compliment to be called
a Neanderthal, says Svante Pbo,
genetics director at the Max Planck
Institute in Leipzig, Germany. But
his work shows that we are more
like them than we thought.After
20-plus years of pioneering tech-
niques for extracting DNA from
bones, Pbo led the group that
sequenced the first extinct homi-
nid genome in 2010. What he found
upended dogma: Humans migrating
out of Africa interbred with Nean-
derthals rather than merely replac-
ing them, and people of Eurasian
descent could carry a whopping
4percent Neanderthal DNA.Next
up is sequencing Neanderthal
predecessor Homo heidelbergensis.
At 400,000 years old, the DNA sam-
ples could be four times olderand
are far more degradedthan any
previously sequenced hominids, but
Pbos team has a new method that
can recover genomes more easily
than ever before. Ultimately, he wants
to pinpoint why it was our ancestor
who took over instead of another pri-
mate. Not that were complaining.
THE SECRETS OF
HOMO SAPIENS
TRACKING OUR
ANCIENT PAST

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not overwhelmed. Youre not underwhelmed. Youre justwhelmed.





TALKIN BOUT
YOUR GENERATION
Indeed, MTV was frequently
blamed for turning Xers into a
post-literate generation, as a Ran-
dom House publicist snied. And if
their moronic, ironic pop culture
wasnt grating enough, they were
constantly whining about their eco-
nomic lot, having graduated into
the recession of the early 90s. A
typical headline in The Washington
Post snarled, crow ui, crYsAsiis.
Now, Im 45 years old, which places
me right in the middle of Generation
X. I remember reading these sneer-
ing op-ed pieces all the time.
But then something funny hap-
pened. Gen X punditry diedvery
suddenly.
Check the data. If you plug Gen-
eration X into Googles Ngram
search enginewhich tracks the
occurrence of words and phrases
in booksyou find that the term
exploded in use around 1989, climb-
ing steeply throughout the 90s. But
in 2000 it peaked and began declin-
ing just as rapidly. You see a similar
pattern in major newspapers, where
the term boomed to more than 2,000
in 1995, then declined to just over
800 last year. Its been years since
Ive heard it as an insult.
What changed? Well, it probably
wasnt the actual personality traits
of Gen Xers. Despite constant hand-
wringing over generational shifts,
the basic personality metrics of
Americans have remained remark-
ably stable for decades, says Kali
Trzesniewski, a scholar of life-span
changes. And anecdotally, nobody I
knew in the 90s is much dierent
now. Grayer, maybe.
No, only one thing has changed.
Generation X stopped being young.
By the turn of the millennium,
Gen Xers were rounding the cor-
ner into their thirties and forties.
They started buying houses, get-
ting into government, and running
businesses, and the emptiness of the
Ben wiseman
alpha 028 clive thompson
BACK IN THE EARLY 90S, boomer pundits across America declared
Generation X a group of apathetic, coddled, entitled slackers. Born
between roughly 1961 and 1981, they lacked any political idealism
stuck in a terminal cynicism, as The Dallas Morning News observed.
Gormless narcissists, their intimacy and communication skills
remain at a 12-year-old level, one expert wrote. Even Matt Groening,
creator of The Simpsonsone of Generation Xs most inuential mas-
terworkscomplained that theres no intellectual pride or content to
this generation. The dominant pop culture is MTV and the Walkman.

libels thrown at them soon became
screamingly obvious. Think about
it: Barack Obama, born in 1961, is a
Gen Xerwhich kind of makes the
whole slacker label bankrupt.
The real pattern here isnt any
big cultural shift. Its a much more
venerable algorithm: How middle-
aged folks freak out over niggling
cultural diferences between them-
selves and twentysomethings. In
the 50s, senators fretted that
comic books would ofer courses
in murder, mayhem, [and] robbery
for youth. In the 80s, parents wor-
ried that Dungeons and Dragons
would pollute and destroy our
childrens mindsand that the
Walkman would turn them into
antisocial drones. This pattern is
as old as the hills. As Chaucer noted
in The Canterbury Tales, Youth
and elde are often at debaat.
I bring this up because it seems
that we Gen Xers are now doing
our part to perpetuate the cycle.
We write many of todays endless
parade of op-eds snarking at mil-
lennials, intoning darkly about
the perils of Snapchat and sighing
nostalgically over the cultural glory
of the mixtape. Again, just look at
the data: In Ngram, the term mil-
lennials begins to explode in the
late 90s just before Generation
X collapses. We passed the baton
to the next sucker.
My prediction? Hold fast, millen-
nials. This current wave of punditry
will peak and then start declining
six years from now. In 2020, about
half of you will have turned 30.
Youll no longer be youngand
therefore no longer scaryand
todays rhetoric about your enti-
tlement and narcissism will evap-
orate. Youll be in charge. I cant
imagine what youre going to say
about the kids being born today.
Email: clive@clivethompson.net
Scented jeans
dont smell
on the hanger.
You have
to scratch
to release
the perfume.
M
I
N
T
:

A
L
A
M
Y
Lupine hammack
The same
coating
thats on
your nonstick
pans make
these pants
spill-proof.
fashion

YEARS BETWEEN
THE ORIGINAL
ROBOCOP AND THE
NEW REMAKE
27
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 32
LENGTH, IN INCHES, OF LUCA IACONI
STEWARTS MODEL BOEING 777, MADE
ENTIRELY OF MANILA FOLDERS AND GLUE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 37
FORTY-EIGHT
11,500,000
VISITS SOMEECARDS.COM RECEIVES
EACH MONTH...........................................p. 34
NUMBER OF YOUTUBE VIEWS OF
EMINEMS BERZERK
68,553,300............... p. 32
CUBIC FEET OF CEMENT USED IN THE FOUN
DATION OF L.A.S WILSHIRE GRAND CENTER
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 38
583,200

THE GRAMMYS TAKE PLACEjust as this issue hits stands; if youre
watching, dont be surprised if you hear Rick Rubins name a few
times. Though hes not up for an award himself, the producer
and Def Jam Recordings cofounder could earn some thank-yous
for his work on nominated albums like Black Sabbaths 13 and 3
Kanye Wests Yeezus. That he had a hand in Wests most divisive
album to date shouldnt surprise; the minence grise has been
ahead of the curve for three decades now, whether pioneering
compression techniques that kicked of the loudness war of
the mid-2000s or agitating for subscription-based music mod-
els well before Spotify. He sat down with at his Malibu
home to discuss his three-decade career as guru, executive,
seer, and onetime honorary Beastie.
always listening to good music. The
last one I discovered that way was an
English singer and producer named
Sampha. I heard about him through
Chance the Rapper.
You were cochair of Columbia
Records from 2007 to 2012.
When you rst started, you
arranged for several employ-
ees to get a private tour of
New York Citys Museum of
Modern Art. Why?
The idea was to remind everyone:
Were in the art world. Its not purely a
business transaction that were think-
ing about. Were curators of great art.
Surround yourself with great art; feel
the power of it and how its presented.
Thats how we treat our artists, and
thats how we treat our music.
Whyd you take the job?
I thought it would be a challenge,
doing what I do with artists on more
of a company level. And it was fun.
We hired a lot of great people, signed
a lot of great artists; we took a com-
pany that was creatively dormant and
turned it into whats probably the most
viable of the major labels today.
Did you clash with the old
guard while you were there?
There were clashes of ideas. I saw so
much potential, but there was a sort of
resistance to change: Well, we dont
do it that way. I wouldnt say I fought
about things, because I wasnt there
to ght. Its the same in the studio: If
an artist brings me in, they want me
there for my opinion. Sometimes they
take it, sometimes they dont. Thats
their prerogative.
Can you give an example?
As part of the negotiations, I said,
Wouldnt it be great if we could make
all the packaging eco-friendly? They
agreed to it, but then there was always
a reason not to do it.
Its been three decades since
you and Russell Simmons
released the rst LL Cool J and
Beastie Boys singles on Def
Jam. What were your expecta-
tions when you put them out?
Zerowe were making records to
make our friends laugh. I always
thought Id have a real job and music
would be my hobby.
What did you think your real
job would be?
Youvebeenpredictingasub-
scription-based music model
for more than a decade. Is
Spotify what youd hoped for?
Yes and no. Now you can hear any-
thing you want, whenever you want,
wherever you wantthats great.
But knowing what to listen to hasnt
been completely gured out yet. What
I originally thought was, if I had a ser-
vice like that, all Id want to do is DJ all
day. But once I had it, I realized that
I really dont like having to DJ. I like
being surprised by what comes on
next. I like it coming to me.
So until that happens, how do
you discover new artists?
I dont look at music blogs much. I still
feel like the best way to hear about
things is word of mouth. Luckily, I get
to talk to a lot of artists, and theyre
by Brian Raftery Christian Weber
THE CHART WHISPERER
LEGENDARY PRODUCERRICK RUBIN
LOOKSBACKAND AHEAD
0 3 1
F E B 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
Contributing editor BRIAN RAFTERY
(@brianraftery) wrote about Bob
Odenkirk in issue 21.11.

0 3 2
F E B 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
A NG R Y NE R D
Rubin with
Jay Z and
Def Jam
cofounder
Russell
Simmons
in 2011.
Daniel Nyari
For more ANGRY NERD,
go to video.WIRED.com.
J
O
H
N
N
Y

N
U
N
E
Z
/
G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
how youre going to phrase over this,
and then Ill develop it into more of
a song. With Eminem, he has a very
clear vision of what he wants to do
vocally. We were working in two dif-
ferent roomsme on tracks and him
on vocals. We got a lot done.
With Yeezus, though, Kanye
came in having already
recorded much of the music.
My role on that was diferent. He and
I went through loads of diferent pro-
ducers versions of the songs, pick-
ing and choosingand in some cases
doing additional new productionto
create new tracks for these songs. Hed
say, Instead of adding things, try tak-
ing things away. He thought of it as a
minimal album.
Will you go to the Grammys?
[Shakes head.] I went once, in the 80s.
I dont make music to win something.
Its about self-expression and making
these beautiful things. Someone com-
ing up to me in the street and saying,
Wow, I heard so-and-so: That really
moved me. I know how much of a role
music played for me as a kid. I didnt
have a lot of friends; I didnt feel con-
nected to a lot of things. I felt most at
home in my life with my eyes closed
connecting to music.
I was on track to be a lawyer. I was
supposed to take my LSATs not long
after we signed our deal for Def Jam.
After a rift with the Beasties,
you patched things up over
the years. Were you in touch
with Adam Yauch before he
passed away in 2012?
I was. More via email, but yeah. We all
grew up together, and we all think of
each other as we were then. Its prob-
ably diferent for those guys, because
they spent more time together. But for
me, its like a time capsule.
What happens when you rst
sit down with an artist?
The first step is conversation and
feelinggetting a sense of rapport,
a feeling of likemindedness. Discuss-
ing material and helping edit whats
best are next, and then developing
more, if needed.
Did that change on Eminems
Marshall Mathers LP 2?
Usually, with rap artists, we start
from scratchtalking about music
or maybe listening to music. Then Ill
play some rough sketches. If they have
a vocal idea, I might say, Let me hear
ROBOCOP
,
STAY
IN COSTUME!
A REMAKE OF ROBOCOP?! I would
not buy that for a dollar. Its
enough of an outrage that the new
lm replaces the scathing satire of
Reagan-era privatization and vigi-
lantism with dumb commentary
about drones. But I have some seri-
ous doubts about how well star Joel
Kinnaman can ll Peter Wellers
helmet. Its not the performance
Im worried about; Kinnamans an
excellent actor. But when Robo-
Cops face is the moviegoers only
link to his onetime humanity, there
had better be a hyper-photogenic
jaw peeking outeven though the
helmet in the remake is retractable
and RoboCop dofs it as casually
as if hes opening the sunroof on
his car. I get it: Hollywood pays big
bank for a bankable star, so it wants
to highlight his mug. And Kinna-
mans is ne. But Wellers? Wellers
was magnicent. Perfect lips that
werent too plump or too thin. Chin,
teeth, philtrumall awless. Give
him a Kirk Douglas dimple and hed
have the whole package. (This isnt
homoeroticism. Its canon!) Holly-
wood, I nd you in violation of
superhero bylaw 3.1, section A: Any
feature that sticks out of a super-
heros costume must be perfect!


A COMBINATION OF deadpan humor and old-timey drawings has
transformed Someecards into the Hallmark of the web, with
7million unique visitors a month. How else could you deliver a
romantic note like Just sending a preemptive apology, since
Valentines Day cant possibly live up to your expectations?
Cofounder and head writer Brook Lundy designed the cards to
be the antithesis of the musical color-bomb ecards of yesteryear.
He issues a daily assignment to contributors and matches the
wittiest responses to anachronistic illustrations culled from
image databases. We talked to Lundy about how Someecards
has redened (and proted from) the lowly ecard. BZ cARsoN
Ecards:
When you
care, but not
enough to
buy a stamp.
Whats the Someecards style?
Sarcastic? Cynical?
Id say honest. Its probably closer to
Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld,
because its a bit absurd too. We like
to play of the minutiae of life and call
attention to it in a funny way. When
youre being honest, stuf comes out
that people usually dont talk about
because its dark, dirty, or inappropriate.
Youre trying to be more
honest than funny?
Its the goal. Does everyone really hate
Red Sox fans? Do womens nipples get
erect when its cold? Thats the fact-
checking were always doing. If you nail
the honesty, you dont have to work too
hard at the make-it-funny part.
And you make money this way?
The cards are free, but we make money
from the ones we create for advertisers
like Ford and Clorox. Weve made them
for shows like The Walking Dead and
Modern Family. We combine the tone
of Someecards with the voice or plot
points of the show and release them
online the same way as our other cards.
How many cards do you create
each day?
We aim for six to 10, but it depends on
the day and whats happening. Ecards
about Obamacare, no one gives a shit
about. But if Miley Cyrus does some-
thing crazy, that can give us fodder
for the day. Kim Kardashian getting
engaged, that was a gold mine.
0 3 4
F E B 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
WIRED.com/subscribe
Powered by Cond Nast.
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0 3 7
F E B 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
Mark Mahaney
A
L
A
M
Y
5 0 DAY S
5 Y E A R S
BOEING CAN BUILD a 777 in 50 days.
Luca Iaconi-Stewart can build one
tooin five years. True, Iaconi-
Stewart made his 1:60-scale jetliner
out of manila folders and dabs of
glue, but its almost as complicated
as the real deal, down to the retract-
able landing gear.
The idea for the project grew out
of his love of airplanesand the
massing models he made from
manila paper in a high school archi-
tecture class. Soon after he found a
super-detailed diagram online of an
Air India 777-300ER, Iaconi-Stewart
was drawing forms in Adobe Illus-
trator, printing them on manila, and
wielding his X-Acto knife. Theres
something rewarding about being
able to replicate a part in such an
unconventional medium, he says.
Iaconi-Stewart devoted an entire
summer just to the seats (20 min-
utes for an economy seat, four to six
hours for business class, and eight
hours for first class). Tweezers
helped. He designed the engines
in about a month and assembled
them in four. The tail he rebuilt
three times. When his classes at
Vassar took up too much timehe
actually stopped work on the 777
for two years because of college
Iaconi-Stewart dropped out. Im
fortunate to have parents willing to
give me a fair amount of latitude,
he says. Theyre going to have to
give a little more: When this proj-
ect is nished, probably early this
year, he might start building an even
bigger model. vicioriA iANc
FLIGHT SIMULATOR
THE ULTIMATE PAPER
AIRPLANE
T I ME T O B U I L D

0 3 8
F E B 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
SHERMAN
OAKS
CENTRAL
LOS ANGELES
V
e
n
ic
e
B
lv
d
INGLEWOOD
VENICE
HOLLYWOOD
2
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
:

J
U
S
T
I
N

M
E
Z
Z
E
L
L
;
M
A
P
:

B
R
O
W
N
B
I
R
D
D
E
S
I
G
N
;

W
I
L
S
H
I
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E

G
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A
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D
:

C
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O
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L
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O
MOST POPUL AR F I L MI NG L OC AT I ONS I N 2 01 3, B Y N U MB E R O F P R O D U C T I O N D AY S : VE NI CE B E ACH 3 7 6 , GRI F F I T H PARK
2 9 1 , DI S NE Y S GOL DE N OAK RANCH 2 2 6 , HE RAL D E X AMI NE R B UI L DI NG 1 2 9 , DOCKWE I L E R S T AT E B E ACH 1 2 8 , WI L L ROGE RS S T AT E
B E ACH 1 2 5 , L OS A NGE L E S CE NT E R S T UDI OS 1 1 7 , P OI NT DUME B E ACH PARK I NG L OT 1 1 2 , L I NDA VI S T A COMMUNI T Y HOS P I T AL 1 0 8
SEE
Visit the
1
Page
Museum at the
La Brea Tar Pits
to gawk at fos-
sils and watch
researchers
brush sand
of new nds.
Theres noth-
ing dinosaur-
ish about the
berquirky
2
Museum of
Jurassic Tech-
nology, but
curios like the
notes from
a 19th-century
Russian space-
travel theo-
rist are just as
delightful. Gaze
up at the astro-
nomical stars
at
3
Grifth
Observatory,
but ditch the
human star
tours and visit
the
4
Holly-
wood Museum
for your lm
x. It houses
the Silence of
the Lambs dun-
geon, plus four
oors of cos-
tumes from
Star Wars and
other classics.
DO
Meltdown
Comics is
legendary for
its huge col-
lection and
new-release
Wednesdays,
but dont
miss the com-
edy acts in
back at the
5
NerdMelt
Showroom.
Download apps
like
6
Secret
StairsSilver
Lake1 and
7
Our Malibu
Beaches to
explore hidden
staircases and
little-known
spots for public
beach access.
8
Its a Wrap
sells togs
straight from
the studios, so
you can walk
around wear-
ing a shirt from
Dexter. If you
prefer your
memorabilia
in your hands
instead of on
your back,
try
9
Larry
Edmunds
Bookshop, the
oldest book-
store in Holly-
wood, for
posters, auto-
graphs, books,
and scripts.
WAYPOINTS
LOS ANGELES
GREEK EATS:
Petros in Man-
hattan Beach
the best Greek
food. Dont be
surprised if you
see a Lakers
player at the
table next to
you. JEANIE
BUSS, PRESI-
DENT OF THE
L.A. LAKERS
IN FEBRUARY, LA drivers will have
to contend with an extra commute
challenge: 2,000 trucks carrying
concrete for the new Wilshire Grand.
Owned by Korean Air, the 1,100-foot-
tall mixed-use skyscraper (the tall-
est building west of the Mississippi)
will feature a hotel lobby on the
70th oor. When I went to Disney-
land as a kid and saw the Matter-
horn in the distance, I knew I was
going to go there, says Chris Mar-
tin, master architect of the project.
We want our guests to look at this
building, see the top, and want to go
there. So lets take them to the top.
But even if you dont go way up high,
theres plenty to do on the ground
in the city of angels. siz cArsoN
THE WI LSHI RE GRAND // THE FOUNDATION SLAB IS 18 FEET THICK AND THE AREA OF A
FOOTBALL FIELD // THE BUILDING WILL HAVE 73 FLOORS AND A ROOFTOP POOL
SECRETS
,
STARS
,
AND BONES
AN INSIDE LOOK ATL.A.
4
5
8
9
1
3
2
7
6
Wilshire
Grand site



041
C
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B
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;

Q
:

B
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M
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G
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P
O
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vladimir shelest
SIDEWAYS
ICE SMASHER
roll and crush
Instead of smashing ice
head-on, the angled hull
lets the ship roll over
the ice and use its weight
to do the cracking.
propulsion
Three 360-degree
thrusters let the ship
navigate sideways
to attack the ice at a
30-degree angle.
oil filter
The Baltika can also help
with oil spills. The unique
hull guides oily water
into a hatch, where a
skimmer tank separates
the oil from the water.
ballast
Inside, water and fuel
are pumped between
tanks so the ship
doesnt roll over.
wide swath
The Baltika cuts a 160-
foot path through
ice, allowing tankers
to follow in its wake.
The Baltika isnt adriftits breaking ice. Debuting in
the Gulf of Finland in early 2014, the Russian-owned
ship will be the rst to travel sideways through the
frozen stuff. Although smaller than a normal ice-
breaker, its oblique angle of attack lets it carve a
larger pathwide enough for commercial ships
to follow. You would conventionally need two ice-
breakers to make the same channel, project manager
Mika Willberg says. The Baltika can crack through
ice about 2 feet thick, but the ships patent holder,
Aker Arctic, has a larger ship in the works to cut trade
routes through heavier Arctic ice. siz cArsoN

OLYMPIC TRICKS
THE KEY TO
SLOPESTYLE
kagan mcleod
Jumps lead to more
speed, more air,
and cooler tricks.
Forsell puts the big-
ger ones at the bot-
tom of the course,
so the spectators
have a great view.
The event draws a
lot of inspiration
from urban skate-
boarding; in addi-
tion to several types
of rails, slopestyle
can even include
staircases.
When Forsell manages
to t a fourth jump
(courses normally
have three, includ-
ing Sochis), riders
can build up enough
speed to execute
ultratricky moves like
the triple cork.
Forsell builds courses
about 10 days before
an event; that way he
can adjust everything
based on snow con-
ditions. For exam-
ple, he might change
the angle of a jump
so riders dont over-
shoot the next one.
Nine times out of
10, Forsell works
with articial snow.
It contains less air,
its more solid, and
it gives him better
control over quality.
IF YOUR WINTER-OLYMPICS meh has been frozen in place
ever since you watched curling in 2010, weve got good
news. Slopestyle, a new freestyle skiing/snowboard event
in which riders y through an obstacle course, will blow
the broom right out of your hand. Unlike other events
based on speed or a specic course design, slopestyle is
about originalitythe tricks that athletes can manage
on courses that change with each competition. Thats the
challenge facing Sochi course designer Anders Forsell.
We try to create something that oers as many options as
possible, he says of building the 550-meter run. Forsell
generally tries to visit the site in summer to get a good
look at the terrain. Then he turns to AutoCAD software
to design the slope and jumps, which he usually builds
rst with dirt. Once its go time, snowcats push the white
stu into place. iiisi crAic
042
DATAS T REAM // AVERAGE T OOT H FAI RY PAYOUT PER T OOT H, BY US REGI ON
NE W E NGL AND: $ 5 . 00 // S OUT H CE NT RAL : $ 4. 6 0 // PACI F I C: $ 4. 3 0 // MI D AT L ANT I C: $ 3 . 8 0 // UP P E R MI DWE S T : $ 3 . 7 0 // S OUT H AT L ANT I C: $ 3 . 1 0 // S OUT HE AS T :
$ 3 . 1 0 // GRE AT P L AI NS : $ 2 . 80 // MOUNT AI N WE S T : $ 2 . 3 0

Whos trolling who?
THE PATENT TROLL CAMPAIGN ISNT JUST ABOUT PATENT TROLLS
Its about a group of companies that want patent law rewritten in their favor to
weaken the patent rights of all inventors.
Get the facts. Keep innovation strong.
Visit SavetheInventor.com
This wake up call brought to you by the Innovation Alliance.

MENTHOL
Best known for
creating a cool
sensation in con-
sumer products
like cigarettes
and cough drops,
menthol triggers
TRPM8also
known as cold and
menthol recep-
tor1an ion chan-
nel protein that
alerts nerve cells
when it detects
coldness. So why is
this pepperminty
substance in a
warming lubricant?
It likely provides
thatpromised
tingly feeling.
Plus, menthol
can moderate the
imaginary heat
generated by this
product, so your
skin doesnt feel
like its on re.
DIMETHICONOL
This kissing cousin
of dimethicone is
added to lotions
and conditioners,
because it leaves
a satiny coating on
skin and hair. Like
dimethicone, it has
a backbone of
alternating silicon
and oxygen atoms
and comes in a
range of viscosi-
ties. The diference
is that dimethi-
conol has had its
tips snipped of
and replaced with
hydroxyl groups
oxygen atoms
bound to hydro-
gen. It puts the
OH, OH in your
personal lubricant.
VANILLYL BUTYL
ETHER
It smells like des-
sert and can trick
nerves into per-
ceiving heat, prob-
ably by ipping
the switches of
the protein TRPV1,
which lets calcium
penetrate nerve
cell membranes.
VBEs hexagonal
head is identical to
that of capsaicin,
the molecule that
gives peppers their
punch, so both
substances push
the same biochem-
ical buttons. Luck-
ily, the sweet ether
is far less intense
and irritating than
its spicy brother.
DIMETHICONE
Few substances
have sex written
all over them like
this family of sili-
cone polymers.
A friction ghter
here, dimethicone
really gets around.
Short-molecular-
chain variants can
be found in breast
implants; networks
of rubbery long-
chain dimethicone
comprise the silky
skin of sex dolls.
Not in the mood?
You can also nd it
in a wide variety of
household caulks.
WHATS INSIDE
TROJAN TINGLY
WARMTH
LUBRICANT
For more WHATS INSIDE,
go to video.WIRED.com.
Feb 2014 044 BY AARON ROWE
Todd Tankersley

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
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Christoph Niemann
I PUT THIS question to Laurel Brait-
man, author of the forthcoming Ani-
mal Madness: How Anxious Dogs,
Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants
in Recovery Help Us Understand Our-
selves. Her book chips away at the prej-
udicial idea that humans are the only
animals to feel and express emotion
in complex and surprising ways and
shows that animal minds can be just
as diverse as our own.
Why not? Braitman answered glee-
fully. This was followed by a long chain
of other, more nuanced thoughts and
historical anecdotes. And then, nally,
Braitman told me about A27.
046 BY JON MOOALLEM
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL
CAN WHALES BE AUTISTIC?
A27 was an orca, one of 32 that a
marine biologist named Naomi Rose
studied for several years in British
Columbia while investigating the
social dynamics of male orcas in the
wild. There was something very dif-
ferent about this guy. He behaved
oddlyinscrutably. Rose explained, for
example, that hed go on tail-slapping
jags for several minutes, repeatedly
smacking the water with his rear n.
Orcas are normally extremely social
animals. But A27 didnt interact much
with other orcas except his mom. I
ended up thinking he was developmen-
tally stunted, Rose told Braitman.
So, was A27 autistic? Who the hell
knows? Does the story of A27 present
only the most excruciatingly thin evi-
dence that a whale could be autistic?
Yes, it sure does. But as Braitman asks,
what would it even mean to apply a
human label like autism to an ani-
mal? We have only the most hesitant
understanding and denition of autism
in our own species, and the barest con-
cept of the inner lives of nonhumans.
So listen, heres your answer: The
world is full of difference and mys-
tery. Certainty surfaces only inter-
mittently, like blacksh spouting from
beneath a deep blue tide.

CHARTGEIST
Spreading
rumors about
Redbox u
An original
drama about
some variety
of criminal
Charge a fee
to stop the
When did you
mail back Top
Gun? emails
Pretend the
last season
of Arrested
Development
never
happened
Reviving Qwik-
ster as a stream-
ing porn service
Popcorn on
demand
Netixs Plans for Growth
Controller for
casual games
with a Duh!
button
Sonic the
Hedgehog
rewall
Device that
tracks your
eyes and says,
My playable
content is up
here Another
damn glove
A robot
that jumps
around for
the Kinect
while you sit
on the couch
Autoposted
videoclips of
folks naked-
playing
Britneys
Dance Beat
Popularity of Future
Game Console Innovations
If Im waiting at an airport gate
for my ight, is tweeting about
the horrible smell of egg salad
the woman next to me is eating
an acceptable way to vent? Or is
it an act of moral cowardice?
Picture it: California, 1878. A new and
curious device, the telephone, is pop-
ping up across the state. And this thing
is really stupendousan unmistak-
able success, one newspaper raves.
Other papers print a poemWhit-
manesque in its exuberant use of excla-
mation pointsthat says the telephone
can be used by lovers to express their
longing when separated by great dis-
tances! (The humblest of words like
angels fly / A thousand miles in the
ash of an eye, / You hear before they
are said!) The climate of telephone
wonder is so adrenalized that when a
man claims to receive phone calls from
the dead, it does not seem impossible.
Now look at our phones. Really look
at them. Theyre incredible! Im read-
ing that terrible poem from 136 years
ago on my telephone right now! Just
conjured it out of the ether, like the
voice of a dead man! And yet we take
it all for granted.
Which is to say: Tweeting about that
woman and her egg salad is an act of
moral cowardice. Actually, its worse.
Its a betrayal of your fellow human
being but also, somehow, a betrayal of
your phoneof its potential, itscapac-
ity for good. Youre using technology
thats meant to cohere people over long
distances to callously alienate yourself
from a person next to you. Youre tak-
ing something beautiful and using it to
ing something ugly.
Weve come a long way since 1878.
Were so staggeringly interconnected
now. Theres no such thing as time
and space. Its all been smashed, jum-
bled, and melded together. In this new
dimension we inhabit, a tweet can stink
worse and waft farther than the stench
of any egg salad.
feb 2014
KISS ME,
MOM
NO TUNG
I LOVE
IE8
BRONY4U
TL;DR
DO NOT
EAT
Least Romantic Candy Hearts
Friends often ask me to mention
their project or cause in my social
media streams, but I feel that
promoting their art opening or
charity 10K or posting pictures of
their baby will demean my brand.
How do I deect these requests?
Do you know what happens when a
hippopotamus dies? Well, it falls over,
rst of all. But then the carcass grad-
ually lls with gasses as the animals
insides rot. It sounds gruesome, but
that decomposing corpse also repre-
sents upwards of 2 million caloriesa
big bonanza of nourishmentand all
the vultures and hyenas and scaveng-
ing big cats that happen across a dead
hippo would love nothing more than to
break in and start digesting that good
stuf. Sometimes, however, they cant.
Sometimes the hippo hide is too thick
and rubbery for any animal to tear into.
And if nothing can puncture the skin
if the hippopotamus proves impen-
etrableit will simply get more and
more bloated until, nally, it explodes.
Sounds to me like your social media
presence is like that hippopotamus: a
lockbox of very special material that
everyone wants a piece of. The only
way to keep it that way is to thicken
your skin. Say no, rmly, and dont let
those hyenas and vultures get to you.
On the other hand, you may just be
awfully pompous. If youre truly so con-
cerned with bolstering your author-
ity as a curator and defending the
integrity of your brand from friv-
olous asksif youre being so cal-
culated and cynical about the whole
thingthen, Id argue, your Facebook,
Instagram, and whatever else is basi-
cally dead inside. Its as dead as that
hippo, bloated and sprawled in the dust.
Stop walling it of from the Circle of
Life. Let a baby picture or a charity 10K
pop it from time to time. Let all that
gas rush out.
Need help navigating life
in the 21st century? Email us at
mrknowitall@.com.

2013 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
Options shown.
toyota.com/priusfamily

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PETITE
MODERN
$135 AND UP FETISH VITRA MINIATURES COLLECTION
Youve probably seen Charles and Ray Eames La Chaise chair, but never quite
like this. Everything is in the right place. Everything is made of the right
material. But its way too small for you to sit on. The 1:6-scale reproduc-
tion of the couples 1948 design is part of the Vitra Miniatures Collection,
which specializes in tiny, high-delity versions of modern furniture master-
pieces. Like its full-size inspiration, its made of molded berglass, steel
rods, and wood. But this seat measures a scant 5.4inches high, 9.8inches
long, and 5.6inches deep. If you love the concept but want a diferent look,
youve got many minuscule options; there are 68 classic designs in the col-
lection. Next step: training your cat to perch on them.
BY TI M MOYNI HAN SUN LEE

2
3
1
0
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0
THE SOUND SCIENTIST
When Jad Abumrad, cohost of
the on-air amazingness that is
Radiolab, wants to prep a show
for broadcast, he uses WNYCs
studio. But hes most productive
when left alone in his home
studio, where he spends hours
manipulating the sounds and
efects that give Radiolab its
trademark sonic complexity.
This is where I scratch, Abum-
rad says. His space is the audio
equivalent of a sketchbook, and
its full of wonderful toys.
BY JOE BROWN DUSTI N AKSLAND
MY SPACE RADIOLAB S JAD ABUMRAD
2. MOOG SONIC SIX
I got this ve years
ago, because I could
aford it, Abumrad
says of the 1970s-
era synth respon-
sible for some of
the darker sci-
sounds on Radiolab.
Its ugly and its
harsh and I love it.
3. ROLAND JUNO-60
Produced from
1982 to 1984, this
highly sought-
after 61-key ana-
log synthesizer is
the source of many
of those dreamy,
serene sounds you
hear on the show.
1. AKG K702
HEADPHONES
If you want to hear
Radiolab like Abum-
rad hears it, listen
through a pair of
AKG K702s. These
studio-specic cans
are his faves and
one of two pairs of
headphones he uses
to mix every show.
$300


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8. APOGEE
SYMPHONY I/O
Any sound not
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Thats what the
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$2,500
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When perform-
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Radiolabs com-
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Abumrad uses Pro
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No surpriseits
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choice for record-
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everywhere. $700
7. SOUND CON-
STRUCTION DESK
When Abumrad
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grant, the rst
thing he bought
was this custom
audio desk from
Sound Construc-
tion, a company
in his hometown
of Nashville.
4. M-AUDIO
AXIOMPRO49
Though it looks
like a piano key-
board, this is a
49-key MIDI con-
troller. Its able
to play and manip-
ulate any sound
you can create
or load onto your
PC. Abumrad
uses it for almost
everything he
composes. $450
6. MILLENNIA
HV-3C PREAMP
Abumrad prefers
to plug his micro-
phone into this
clean-sounding
stereo preamp
when recording
his own voice.
Solid-state elec-
tronics keep
the delity true.
I hear myself
through this and
think, I like that
guy. $2,059
10. NOVATION
LAUNCHPADS
When Radiolab
does live shows,
Abumrad loads
many of the crazy
sound efects
and scene transi-
tions into easy-
to-launch triggers.
He then res
them of with this
fully program-
mable 64-button
keypad. $170
MY SPACE
CONTI NUED

N E T WO R K . D E TA I L S . C O M
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With big sensors and high-quality lenses, these pocketable cameras can crank out pro results.
BY TI M MOYNI HAN SUN LEE
BEST FOR: Landscape and street pho-
tographers who want an easier-to-use,
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BEST FOR: Seasoned shutterbugs who
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NIKON COOLPIXA
FUJI FILM X100S
These are xed focal length cameras
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cant quite match the X100Ss bright
lens, and its autofocus lags a bit. Still,
its the clear choice if you want a
smaller camera with straightforward
operation. Its lighter and simpler, and
its control scheme is perfectly painless.
Its bulkier and pricier than the Cool-
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benets start with the glassa xed
35-mm-equivalent eld-of-view lens
with an f/2.0 aperture that yields
excellent low-light shots. Fujifilms
autofocus system is also noticeably
faster than Nikons, and youll gener-
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The main trade-of is ease of use: With
tricky controls that may confuse even
the most experienced photographer,
the X100S is not a camera for rookies.
$1,100
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Stories of Innovation

0
5
8
his has probably happened to you: You hear about some cool
new app or game or service, rush to sign up, and discover that
another person has already snagged the username you wanted.
Its a bummer and a bad rst impression for a new service.The
username just wasnt built to withstand what the Internet has
become. Its a vestige of an earlier era, when a large service had
thousands of users. Today, despite the billions of people online,
were still designing for the sparse old days.In the late 90s,
I would have thought MetaFilter might have like 10,000 users
max, says Matt Haughey, creator of the popular online com-
munity. Haughey was also an early designer for Blogger, one
of the rst democratized online publishing platforms. For
Blogger, I thought, this is pretty amazing, and wouldnt it
be great if millions of people used it? I thought, someday we
might reach 5million or so.Those kinds of numbers, ambi-
tious at the time, seem like nothing now. Blogger, which was
acquired by Google, currently hosts tens of millions of blogs;
MetaFilter has upwards of 60,000
accounts. But while weve built these
systems to scale for machines, weve
generally done a poor job of scaling
them for humans. We havent really
gotten our heads around what having
much of the planet online means, and
nothing reects this better than the
username quandary.
When online communities were just
starting out, our digital watering holes
relied on unique usernamesand not
only for person-to-person interaction.
The servers used them to ID people
logging on. This became the estab-
lished practice, and it wasnt a prob-
lem in those early days, when it could
take months or even years for the good
names to get snapped up. Now that can
happen in a day. Take the sele sharing
service Shots of Me. It is precious.
But because Justin Bieber backs
the company, his horde of Beliebers
jumped on it almost instantly; within
hours of the launch, I couldnt get the
username I wanted.
That sucks. One of the best things
about the online world is how it lets
us be whoever we want to be. We
shouldnt have to sacrice that just
because someone else got there rst.
Facebook is handling this problem
pretty wellan infinite number of
John Smiths can use the service with
no confusion. On Twitter, conversely,
demand for its supply of usernames
is so high that people routinely buy,
sell, and even steal valuable handles
company names, rst names, celebrity
names, and so on.
The solutionand the key toFace-
books successis surprisingly sim-
ple: Identity online should take a cue
from the physical world. You are more
than your name; your face, your birth-
day, your location, and the company
you keep all help others figure out
who you are. Oh, youre Mats friend
Joe from New York? Thats right, I
remember you. We can use all those
same cues digitally, as Facebook does.
Yes, our data has to attach to unique
identifiers to live on a server, but
only the machines need to see those.
Theyre just like the Social Security
numbers we use in meatspace to dif-
ferentiate people with the same name.
Ultimately were all just numbers
to computers anyway. Its kind of
counterintuitive, but the best way
to be whoever you want to be is to
be nothing more than a number to
everyone but your friends. That means
there can always be more than one
Mat Honanwhich, trust me, is an
awesome idea.
Email mat_honan@.com.
The way were identied online needs to catch up to the modern Internet
BILLIONS SERVED
MAT HONAN
TAVI S COBURN
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0 6 1 FEB 2014
NSA vs. the Internet 62 | Dating, By the Numbers 76 | The Love Hacker 82 | Monsanto Goes Green(ish) 88 | Zappotopia 96
FEATURES | 22.02
Triboro


0 6 3
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by Steven Levy

0 6 4
STEVEN LEVY (@stevenlevy) is a
senior staf writer at and
the author of Crypto.
connected with him. Now, collab-
orating with documentary film-
maker and Snowden confidante
Laura Poitras, he was going to
extend the story to Silicon Val-
ley. Gellman wanted to be the rst
to expose a top-secret NSA pro-
gram called Prism. Snowdens
files indicated that some of the
biggest companies on the web had
granted the NSA and FBI direct
access to their servers, giving
the agencies the ability to grab
a persons audio, video, photos,
emails, and documents. The gov-
ernment urged Gellman not to
identify the firms involved, but
Gellman thought it was impor-
tant. Naming those companies
is what would make it real to
Americans, he says. Now a team
of Post reporters was reaching out
to those companies for comment.
It would be the start of a chain
reaction that threatened the
foundations of the industry. The
subject would dominate head-
lines for months and become the
prime topic of conversation in
tech circles. For years, the tech
companies key policy issue had
been negotiating the delicate
balance between maintaining
customers privacy and provid-
ing them benefits based on their
personal data. It was new and
controversial territory, some-
times eclipsing the substance of
current law, but over time the
companies had achieved a rough
equilibrium that allowed them
to push forward. The instant
those phone calls from report-
ers came in, that balance was
destabilized, as the tech world
found itself ensnared in a fight
far bigger than the ones involv-
ing oversharing on Facebook
or ads on Gmail. Over the com-
ing months, they would find
themselves at war with their
own government, in a fight for
the very future of the Internet.
But rst they had to gure out
what to tell the Post. We had 90
minutes to respond, says Face-
books head of security, Joe Sul-
livan. No one at the company had
ever heard of a program called
Prism. And the most damning
implicationthat Facebook and
the other companies granted the
NSA direct access to their servers
in order to suck up vast quantities
of informationseemed outright
wrong. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was
taken aback by the charge and
asked his executives whether it
was true. Their answer: no.
Similar panicked conversa-
tions were taking place at Google,
Apple, and Microsoft. We asked
around: Are there any surrep-
titious ways of getting infor-
mati on? says Kent Wal ker,
Googles general counsel. No.
Nevertheless, the Post pub-
lished its report that day describ-
ing the Prism program. (The
Guardian ran a similar story
about an hour later.) The piece
included several images leaked
from a 41-sl i de NSA Power-
Point, including one that listed
the tech companies that par-
ticipated in the program and
the dates they ostensibly began
fully cooperating. Microsoft
came first, in September 2007,
followed the next year by Yahoo.
Google and Facebook were added
in 2009. Most recent was Apple,
in October 2012. The slide used
each companys corporate logo.
It was like a sales force boast-
ing a series of trophy contracts.
Just a day earlier, the public had
learned that Verizon and prob-
ably other telephone compa-
nies had turned over all their call
records to the government. Now,
it seemed, the same thing was
happening with email, search
history, even Instagram pictures.
The tech companies quickly
issued denials that they had
granted the US government
direct access to their customers
data. But that stance was com-
plicated by the fact that they
did participateoften unwill-
inglyin a government program
that required them to share data
when a secret court ordered them
to do so. Google and its counter-
parts couldnt talk about all the
details, in part because they were
legally barred from full disclosure
and in part because they didnt
know all the details about how the
program actually worked. And so
their responses were seen less as
full-throated denials than mealy-
mouthed contrivances.
They hardly had the time to
figure out how to frame their
responses to Gellmans account
before President Obama weighed
in. While implicitly confirming
the program (and condemning
the leak), he said, With respect
to the Internet and emails, this
does not apply to US citizens and
does not apply to people living
in the United States. This may
have soothed some members of
the public, but it was no help to
the tech industry. The majority of
Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and
Yahoo customers are not citizens
of the US. Now those custom-
ers, as well as foreign regula-
tory agencies like those in the
European Union, were being led
to believe that using US-based
services meant giving their data
directly to the NSA.
The hard-earned trust that the
tech giants had spent years build-
ing was in danger of evaporating
and they seemed powerless to do
anything about it. Legally gagged,
they werent free to provide the
full context of their coopera-
tion or resistance. Even the most
emphatic deniala blog post by
Google CEO Larry Page and chief
legal officer David Drummond
headlined, What the did
not quell suspicions. How could
it, when an NSA slide indicated that
anyones personal information was
just one click away? When Drum-
mond took questions on the Guard-

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Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse, one tech executive says. We just were not believed.
zohar lazar

ian website later in the month, his
interlocutors were hostile:
Isnt this whole show not just a
face-saving exercise after you
have been found to be in cahoots
with the NSA?
How can we tell if Google is
lying to us?
We lost a decade-long trust in
you, Google.
I will cease using Google mail.
The others under siege took
note. Every time we spoke it
seemed to make matters worse,
an executive at one company says.
We just were not believed.
The fact is, the government
cant put the genie back in the
bottle, says Facebooks global
communications head, Michael
Buckley. We can put out any
statement or statistics, but in the
wake of what feels like weekly
disclosures of other government
activity, the question is, will any-
one believe us?
At an appearance at a tech con-
ference last September, Face-
books Zuckerberg expressed
his disgust. The government
blew it, he said. But the con-
sequences of the governments
actionsand the spectacular
leak that informed the world
about itwas now plopped into
the problem set of Zuckerberg,
Page, Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer,
Steve Ballmer, and anyone else
who worked for or invested in a
company that held customer data
on its servers.
Not just revenue was at stake.
So were ideals that have sustained
the tech world since the Internet
exploded from a Department of
Defense project into an intercon-
nected global web that spurred
promises of a new era of comity.
The Snowden leaks called into
question the Internets role as a
symbol of free speech and empow-
erment. If the net were seen as a
means of widespread surveillance,
the resulting paranoia might afect
the way people used it. Nations
outraged at US intelligence-gath-
ering practices used the disclo-
sures to justify a push to require
data generated in their countries
to remain there, where it could
not easily be hoovered by Amer-
ican spies. Implementing such a
scheme could balkanize the web,
destroying its open essence and
dramatically raising the cost of
doing business.
Silicon Valley was reeling,
collateral damage in the war on
terror. And it was only going to
get worse.
steve brodner

0 6 7
oritize winning favor with the
government that regulates them.
Technology companies are
another matter. Its almost a cli-
ch when tech CEOs claim that
without the trust of their users,
they would have no business. They
depend on customers willingness
to share information. In exchange,
those customers receive more
and better services, and expect
that the companies will keep
their personal data private and
secure and will be transparent
about any exceptions. Users had
no reason to think their informa-
tion would be handed over to the
government without a warrant.
At least one company chal-
lenged those requests as uncon-
stitutional. Yahoo waged a secret
battle in the FISA court to resist
turning over user data. But it was
for naught. An August 22, 2008,
order determined that the govern-
ments interest in national secu-
rity, along with safeguards in the
program, outweighed privacy
concerns in a manner consistent
with the law. A subsequent appeal
went nowhere. Yahoos unsuccess-
ful challenge set a marker for those
who might resist in the future: The
FISA request program was legal,
and any company that failed to
cooperate would risk the con-
tempt charges specied in the law.
The requests mi ght have
offended some of the large tech
companies but werent logistically
challenging. None say they were
forced to make significant infra-
structure changes as a result. Gen-
erally they would divert requested
data to special equipment owned
by the government. In some cases
they even hosted the equipment on
company property.
But compliance wasnt always
as easy for smaller companies.
For example, the government
demanded that Lavabita secure
email startup that allowed users,
including Snowden, to encrypt
messageshand over the keys
to Snowdens communications.
Lavabit could not do so without
exposing the information on all its
customers and ultimately folded
rather than comply.
There appear to be smaller ways
to resist, though. The government
can request the information, but
they cant compel how the infor-
mation is given, says Twitters
general counsel, Vijaya Gadde.
You can make it easy or you can
make it hard. Google also says
it pushes back when a request is
overly broad. Pocketbook issues
present a subtler means of resis-
tance. FISA requires the govern-
ment to reimburse companies for
the cost of retrieving informa-
tion. Google says that it doesnt
bother to charge the government.
But one company says that it uses
that clause, hoping to limit the
extent of the requests. At rst, we
thought we shouldnt charge for
it, says an executive of that com-
pany. Then we realized, its good
it forces them to stop and think.
In the end, though, there is a
greater financial motive to coop-
erate. Large companies do a lot of
business with the government, one
top technology executive points
out. Its hard to look at the gov-
ernment officers and say, Were
ghting you on thisoh, and can I
have that $400 million contract?
Tech companies also grew more
vocal in their requests to publicize
the number of FISA requests they
received. They were only allowed
to release reports that tally all
government requests, including
those from civil court and law
enforcement. (The raw numbers,
often in the low thousands, dont
seem scary, but they lack con-
text.) Google, Yahoo, Facebook,
and Microsoft petitioned the FISA
court to loosen the gags, and a long
list of technology firms, includ-
ing Apple and LinkedIn, submit-
ted amicus briefs in support. But
the government led passionately
opposing briefs and prevailed.
WHILE TECH COMPANIES didnt know
the name Prism before June, they
came to understand that it refers
to a program several years old, in
which they turn over specied data
to the government, often without
formal warrants, for national secu-
rity purposes. The programs legal
justication derives from a series
of laws, renewals, and extensions.
The Foreign Intelligence Security
Act of 1978, widely referred to as
FISA, created a secret court that
blesses information requests. The
FISA Amendments Act of 2008
carved out a new section of the
law, 702, which gave legal cover
to the warrantless surveillance
programs operated in total secrecy
under President Bush; queries are
often called 702s. The NSA cites
the FISA Amendments Act as the
specic legal basis for Prism. More
covert surveillance practices (out-
side of Prism) are justied under
Reagan-era Executive Order 12333,
which authorized the NSA to col-
lect pretty much any data from
outside the US that concerns for-
eign persons.
In a sense, Prism is a child of
the Patriot Act, which set a post-
9/11 tone for the sacrice of some
civil liberties in service of national
security. It was passed in the mid-
dle of a huge, understandable
fear, says US senator Ron Wyden
(D Oregon), who voted for it and
is a member of the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee. I felt it had a
time stamp on it. Nobody reading
it would be inclined to think of bulk
collection of data on millions and
millions of Americans.
Some companies seemed per-
fectly comfortable turning over
information about their customer
bases to the NSA. Verizon has
never denied passing along its
key billing information, includ-
ing the number and duration of
every call made by each of its mil-
lions of customers. In a way, this
isnt surprising. Telephone com-
panies dont sell themselves on
trust, and customers have few
expectations of their relationship
with those quasi-monopolistic
behemoths. Instead of catering
to consumers, telcos seem to pri-
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The clash illustrates a seem-
ingly irresolvable conict. While
Silicon Valley must be transpar-
ent in many regards, spy agencies
operate under a cloak of obfus-
cation. There is certainly a rea-
son for the secrecy; evil doers who
use an Internet service presum-
ably might be less likely to keep
using it if they were aware that
the company was sharing com-
munications with the NSA. But one
of the disturbing consequences of
secret programs is the destruc-
tive shroud of doubt they cast over
everything they touch. Months
after Snowdens leak, basic facts
about Prism remain elusive. How
much information is actually col-
lected by the program? Exactly
what kind of cooperation did the
companies ofer after those dates
specied on that NSA PowerPoint
slide? The companies contend that
in addition to what they cant say,
theres plenty they dont know.
Were still guessing, says
Richard Salgado, Googles direc-
tor of information security and
law enforcement. Were not the
author of those slides. We have
no idea where they got some of
that information.
The question goes to issues of
a highly classied nature, says
Tekedra Mawakana, Yahoos head
of global public policy.
ALL SUMMER, the tech companies
tried to deal with the fallout from
Prism, while the NSA tried to g-
ure out how to respond to the
Snowden leaks. And then things
got uglier for both sides.
In October, a Snowden leak
exposed a program in which the
NSA, without the knowledge or
cooperation of the companies
involved, managed to collect the
address-book data of millions
of people. The Washington Post
reported that over the course of a
single day, the NSA had collected
444,743 email address books
from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail,
82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from
Gmail, and 22,881 from unspecied
other providers. The practice was
says Eric Grosse, Googles head of
security. Then we found ourselves
in an arms race with certain nation-
state actors [with a reputation
for cyberattacks]. And now were
in an arms race with the best
nation-state actors. Primarily,
the US government.
But perhaps the most authentic
expression of betrayal came from a
relatively unknown Google security
engineer named Brandon Downey
in a post on his personal Google+
account. He prefaced his message
by stating that he was speaking
only for himselfbut he might as
well have been channeling his col-
leagues across the industry:
Fuck these guys.Ive spent the
last ten years of my life trying
to keep Googles users safe and
secure from the many diverse
threats Google faces. Ive
seen armies of machines DOS-
ing Google. Ive seen worms
DOSing Google to nd vulner-
abilities in other peoples soft-
ware. Ive seen criminal gangs
figure out malware. Ive seen
spyware masquerading as tool-
bars so thick it breaks comput-
ers because it interferes with
the other spyware.Ive even
seen oppressive governments
use state-sponsored hacking
to target dissidents. But
after spending all that time
helping in my tiny way to pro-
tect Googleone of the greatest
things to arise from the inter-
netseeing this, well, its just
a little like coming home from
War with Sauron, destroying
the One Ring, only to discover
the NSA is on the front porch
of the Shire chopping down the
Party Tree and outsourcing all
the hobbit farmers with half-
orcs and whips.
Since the revelations, many com-
panies have been beeng up their
security. Googles Grosse had long
pushed to implement encryption
on data both as it moved across
public networks and within the
companys data centersa tactic
the company had begun to pursue.
We were partway through deploy-
ing when we learned how far the
NSA had gotten, Grosse says. The
hypothetical thing we were wor-
ried about was nally happening.
Yahoo, which has lagged in
adopting additional encryption,
vows to strengthen it, including
on traffic between its data cen-
ters, by the end of March. There
is nothing more important to us
than protecting our users privacy,
CEO Marissa Mayer said in a state-
ment. Facebook and Microsoft
plan to phase in a technique called
Perfect Forward Secrecy, which
drastically limits the informa-
tion an intelligence agency might
be able to access by using many
more secret keys to encode data.
(Google and Twitter already use
it.) Previously, cracking a single
cryptographic key would open
a treasure trove of information,
but with forward secrecy, even
sophisticated cryptoanalysis gets
you only a small portion of the
loot. The point of such measures,
wrote Microsofts Smith in a blog
post, was to ensure that govern-
ment access to data is decided
by courts rather than dictated by
technological might.
But even strong encryption
wont necessarily keep out the
NSA. Another Snowden- generated
scoop, this one a collaboration
between ProPublica and The New
York Times, detailed the agencys
spectacular recent success in
cracking popular forms of cryp-
tography. The tactics include using
purloined or company- supplied
keys to decode all the messages
of a major Internet service and
exploiting unreported vulnera-
bilities in software systems. Some
documents raised the possibility
already suspected by some in the
crypto communitythat the NSA
helped promote weak encryption
standards that it knows how to
crack. It is a well-known princi-
ple of cyber security that any aw
will eventually be discovered and
exploited. If in fact the NSA was not
reporting known security holes,
then it risked exposing domestic
information and secrets to evil-
doers. It may even have allowed
foreign governments to snatch
high-value corporate secrets.
The NSA is willing to compro-
mise the security of everything
to get what they want, security
expert Bruce Schneier says.
Think about the damage this
does to America, says US Repre-
sentative Rush Holt (DNewJer-
sey) who is the rare member of
Congress with a PhD in physics
and one of a number of legislators
pursuing measures that would
curtail the NSAs activities. The
NSA is saying, Weve got to make
sure the encryption has aws so
we can decrypt. Isnt that the pin-
nacle of arrogance? No one else
knows how to do it or is as smart
as we are. They wont realize
weve degraded our product. But
the truth always comes out. And
America is worse of because of it.
A
categorized internally at the NSA
as an upstream method to collect
data as it ows through the Inter-
net, as opposed to downstream
methods, like Prism, in which
information was provided directly
from the source. (In an earlier story
about Prism, the Post printed a
slide detailing the two approaches,
which instructed analysts: You
should use both.)
Then Gellman and his Post team
revealed documents detailing how
the NSA, working with its British
counterpart, GCHQ, had hacked
into the trafc that moved exclu-
sively on the private ber connec-
tions linking the respective data
centers of Google and Yahoo. The
codename for this upstream pro-
gram was Muscular.
In one sense, the news cleared
up a mystery that had been baf-
ing the companies. It provided
us a key to nally understanding
what was going on, says Micro-
softs general counsel, Brad Smith.
We had been reading about the
NSA reportedly having a massive
amount of data. We felt that we
and the others in the industry had
been providing a small amount of
data. It was hard to reconcile, and
this was a very logical explanation.
Still, news of the government
raid on data-center trafc hit the
industry with the visceral shock
of having ones home robbed. The
betrayal was most strikingly illus-
trated in a PowerPoint slide that
showed how the NSA had bypassed
Googles encryption, inserting a
probe as data moved from its
servers across the open Internet.
Between two big cloudsone rep-
resenting the public Internet, the
other labeled Google Cloud
there was a little hand-drawn
smiley face, a blithe emoji gotcha
never meant to be seen by its vic-
tim. Googles Drummond wrote an
indignant statement to the Post,
describing the company as out-
raged. Yahoos director of secu-
rity, Ramses Martinez, endorses
the sentiment. It was news to us,
he says of Muscular. We put a lot
of work into securing our data.
Its one thing to object to a legal
process that one believes is uncon-
stitutional. Its quite another to be
working for an American company,
charged with protecting the pri-
vacy of customers, and nd that
the eyes staring across from you on
the virtual Maginot Line of cyber-
defense are those of the United
States of America.
At first we were in an arms
race with sophisticated criminals,

0 6 9
Certainly the tech companies
felt worse of. In November, the
German newsweekly Der Spiegel
another recipient of Snowden
leaksdescribed an NSA/GCHQ
exploit that seemed tailor-made
to erode trust. In an attempt to
gain access to the Brussels-based
telecommunications rm Belga-
com, the agencies set up bogus
versions of sites like Slashdot and
LinkedIn. When employees tried
to access the sites from corpo-
rate computers, their requests
were diverted to the phony repli-
cas, which the spies used to inject
malware into their machines.
Using considerable understate-
ment, LinkedIns general counsel,
Erika Rottenberg, says, We are not
happy that our intellectual prop-
erty is being used in that way. It is
not hard to see why. If foreign cus-
tomers cant know whether they
are using a legitimate social net-
work or a spy-created fake, they
are liable to log of altogether.
For years, companies from
espionage-happy countries like
China have been spurned by over-
seas buyers who didnt trust their
products. Now its Americas
turn. And that is already having
an impact on young companies
looking to grow internationally.
Right now, our ad business is 95
percent US-based, says David
Karp, founder of Tumblr. As we
start to take this business over-
seas, were running up against
stricter EU laws, particularly on
privacy, as part of their reaction
to US practices on the Internet.
The other day I saw my first
pitch that exploited the situation,
says Brad Burnham, a managing
partner at Union Square Ventures.
It was a Dropbox clone that told
us, Were in Europe and we have a
government that doesnt snoop!
Though the major companies have
not yet reported losing large
amounts of business, they do
acknowledge that their overseas
customers are worried. Forrester
Research estimates that as much
as $180 billion could be lost due
in large part to overseas compa-
nies choosing not to patronize the
American-based cloud. American
companies are feeling shellacked
by overeager surveillance, says
US senator Wyden. It reduces
our competitiveness in a tough
global economy.
Even so, a decline in trust, or
even business, is not the tech
companies biggest worry in the
post-Snowden era. Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg believes that the
route. In Germany, where the
NSA bugged the phone of chan-
cellor Angela Merkel, there is
talk of a similar scheme, called
Schengen routing. Ren Ober-
mann, chief executive of Teu-
tonic giant Deutsche Telecom,
seemed to endorse the principle
at a European cybersecurity con-
ference. In the pre-Snowden world,
such a proposal would have been
hooted down. But now Obermann
was speaking to an audience that
was all but armed with pitchforks,
ready to storm the listening posts
of American spooks.
The Internet was built with-
out reference to international
borders, and that has allowed
for huge innovation, Yahoos
Mawakana says. But how does
it function when countries try to
pin the cloud to the ground? What
if Indonesia pins, Brussels pins,
and Brazil pins? Will companies
invest equally across the world?
One of the worst efects could be
to dampen the prospects of startup
companies. Would Facebook or
YouTube ever have gotten of the
ground if they had to gure out how
to store their data in dozens of dif-
ferent countries? More and more
markets, like Brazil, are working
on passing laws that would basi-
cally say, You cant do business
here unless you physically house
user data in our country, Karp
says. Thats an incredibly expen-
sive proposition for Tumblr, but its
impossible for the aspiring young
company that wants to build some-
thing for everyone to use over the
entire world.
The US needs to help fix this
problem, Zuckerberg says. But
the Obama administration wor-
ries that any US government
attempts to do so will only for-
tify the resolve of other nations
to balkanizeto prove that they
will not be bullied. So its up to the
industry to make the case.
Previously, companies could
argue that balkanization would
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inherent value of the Internet will
keep his users coming to the big
online services. But he is among
those who fear that the NSA reve-
lations have unleashed a potential
backlash from other nations that
could hurt not only those com-
panies but the net itself. Part of
the reason the US blew it is that
governments around the world
are now threatening the security
of the Internet by passing their
own laws that permit intrusions
on Internet users, he says.
Zuckerberg is referring to a
movement to balkanize the Inter-
neta long-standing efort that
would potentially destroy the web
itself. The basic notion is that the
personal data of a nations citi-
zens should be stored on servers
within its borders. For some pro-
ponents of the idea its a form of
protectionism, a prod for nation-
als to use local IT services. For
others its a way to make it eas-
ier for a country to snoop on its
own citizens. The idea never
posed much of a threat, until
the NSA leaksand the fears
of foreign surveillance they
sparkedcaused some countries
to seriously pursue it. After learn-
ing that the NSA had bugged her,
Brazilian president Dilma Rous-
sef began pushing a law requiring
that the personal data of Brazil-
ians be stored inside the country.
Malaysia recently enacted a simi-
lar law, and India is also pursuing
data protectionism.
To most people familiar with
Internet protocols, this sounds
crazy. Googl es Drummond
refers to the resultdozens of
independent Internets that dont
communicate with one another
as splinternets. Its not real-
istic and very shortsighted,
LinkedIns Rottenberg says. How
is that even implemented? If Im a
Brazilian resident and Im travel-
ing, I cant get my data?
Its not just developing econ-
omies that are considering this

Any phone
call has to go
through a
telco, which
collects data
about the call.
because the
FISC orders them
to do so. It also gags
them from disclos-
ing the orders.
The request is processed
by the FBIs Data Intercept
Technology Unit.
An NSA analyst identies
a target (or targets) and makes
a formal request.
Dedicated employees
(at Facebook or Google, for
example) receive the request.
Dataincluding emails,
chat logs, and videosis sent to
the FBI via a dedicated channel
like secure FTP.
INFORMATION BASED ON REPORTING BY ASHKAN SOLTANI, THE WASHINGTON POST, FOREIGN POLICY, THE GUARDIAN, SD-
DEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, AND TAGESSCHAU, AS WELL AS COURT DOCUMENTS AND DOCUMENTS LEAKED BY EDWARD SNOWDEN.
To nd a needle, our
federal overlords have
argued, they must rst
gather the haystack. In
the process, the National
Security Agency has
scooped up lots of data on
Americans: call records,
emails, address books,
and more. Congress, the
White House, and the
Foreign Intelligence Sur-
veillance Court (FISC)
oversee the spy agencys
activities, but the leaks
of former NSA contrac-
tor Edward Snowden have
revealed just how much
has been kept from the
public. We compiled the
best available information
to show how the agency
and its global partners
likely tapped into the
backbone of the Inter-
net and have reached into
tech company data cen-
ters. CAMERONBIRD
AND DAVID KRAVETS
INTERNET !"#"
PHONE $%#"&"#"
The NSA can
look at call
metadata from
friends of friends
of friends of sus-
pected terrorists.
The nations telecom companies, both landline and mobile, are believed
to forward all call metadata (domestic and international) to the NSA.
That includes the phone numbers of both parties involved, international
mobile subscriber identity numbers, calling card numbers, and the
time and duration of the conversation. Its allowed because (at least
according to the NSA and FISC) the Patriot Act says its allowed.
The NSA has compelled at least nine major tech companies to gather data on selected surveillance targets. In essence, Google,
Facebook, Microsoft, and others have acted as providers for the NSA, sending the agency data on demand through
dedicated channels or by hand. According to the NSA, that collection is limited to foreign targets outside the USthose the agency
is 51 percent condent are not Americans. That may be true, but plenty of US persons are caught in the sweep.

gibabytes
Amount of
data computer
scientist Edward
Felten estimates
the program
generates daily.
billion
Estimated number
of calls made in or
to the US every day.
billion
Number of global
cell phone location
records the NSA
collects daily. Use
a burner as a work-
around and youll
trigger red ags
with the spooks.
Anatomy
of a Spy
Network
Telcos
NSA
NSA
Analyst

MICHAEL GEORGE HADDAD

Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court
The telcos pass
that metadata
to the NSA

We know that, without tech companies consent, the NSA has bulk-collected con-
tact and buddy listseven entire email address booksas they move across global
data lines. Plenty of the data is from individuals who are not targets. Below, the
number of address books collected on a single day in 2012.
OK, so you dont make calls and you dont have any friends (or friends of friends)
with overseas connections. You never email your granny in Kent. The NSA cant
touch you, right? Wrong. Google and Yahoo load-balance their data centers, shift-
ing info to and from locations around the world via cables that the GCHQ and NSA
have accessed as part of a joint program called Project Muscular. Google and Yahoo
have vowed to secure their internal data ows, but until then, watch what you say.
!"#$%"&'$()
!+$+ ,(-$(%#
CODE CRACKING
The NSA and GCHQ
have broken much
of the online encryp-
tion methods used
by Internet companies
and have reportedly
argued on behalf of
weak encryption stan-
dards. The US efort,
dubbed Project Bull-
run, began about a
decade ago. By 2015,
the GCHQ has said,
it hopes to decrypt
codes used by as many
as 15 major Internet
companies and
300 virtual private
networks (VPNs)
that big corporations
often maintain for
offsite workers.
UK
7KH FRQVWLWXWLRQDOLW\ RI
the bulk-phone collec-
tion program is at the
center of several legal
battles across the US.
A Supreme Court chal-
lenge isnt likely anytime
soon, so the collection
may continue unabated.
One federal judge has
already declared that the
program likely infringes
on the Fourth Amend-
ment, saying James Mad-
ison would be aghast.
,Q WKH 8. WKUHH JURXSV
have brought a lawsuit,
alleging British privacy
rights were infringed
by US Prism activity
last year as well as by
a similar UK program.
The case is ongoing.
Google Yahoo
data centers
TAPPED UK-BOUND
FIBER-OPTIC CABLES
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The US cannot legally tap fiber-optic Internet cables laid on Ameri-
can soil without a court order. But thanks to a loophole, the UK can
and does within its own borders. Called Project Tempora, the Gov-
ernment Communications Headquarters program taps into transat-
lantic ber-optic cables of telecoms, with or without their assistance.
The GCHQ can collect email messages, recordings of phone calls, Facebook entries, and browser his-
tory as part of its dragnet. The cables run throughout the globe, meaning this is a massive amount of
datanot necessarily originating or terminating in the UKwhich the GCHQ makes available to the NSA.
Legal Battles
!"#$%&'
TEMPORA
YAHOO HOTMAIL FACEBOOK GMAIL OTHERS
The NSA can review phone
connections two or three
hops out from a suspi-
cious seed number. It gets
exponential: If Joe, a sus-
pected terrorist, calls 50
people, thats one hop,
and all of those 50 can be
analyzed. Then say that
each of those 50 peo-
ple calls 50 people. Now
2,500 individuals can also
be examinedthats the
second hop. Whoever gets
a call from any of them
also can be subject to a
digital pat-down; those
125,000 people are the
third and final hop.
Up to 3 Hops
Without their assis-
tance, the NSA
grabs records from
Yahoo and Google
networks as they
move between
data centers. In
one month last
year, it processed
181,280,466
records.
VERIZON
BRITISH TELECOM
VODAFONE CABLE
INTEROUTE
GLOBAL CROSSING
LEVEL 3
VIATEL
Seed
call
1st hop
2nd hop
3rd hop

give the citizens of those arti-
ficially isolated countries less
choice and more censorship and
snooping. But thats a hard sell
now that Snowden has revealed
that the USthrough its tech
companiesis the one snooping
on the rest of the world.
THIS ISNT THE COMPANIES fault.
They were compelled to do it. As
a nation, we have a responsibil-
ity to stand up for the companies,
both domestically and interna-
tionally. That is our nations best
interest. We dont want our com-
panies to lose their economic
capability and advantage. Its
for the future of our country.
Those words could have come
from a policy spokesperson for
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or
Yahoo. Or one of the legislators
criticizing the NSAs tactics. Or
even a civil liberties group oppos-
ing the NSA. But the source is US
Army general Keith Alexander,
director of the NSA. Still, even as
he acknowledges that tech compa-
nies have been forced into a tough
position, he insists that his pro-
grams are legal, necessary, and
respectful of privacy.
The NSA is legendarily tight-
lipped, so much so that for decades
it refused to publicly acknowledge
its own existence. But, in one of
the less heralded consequences
of the Snowden revelations, it has
apparently realized that it must
defend itself to the press. And so,
on a crisp day in early November,
I am invited to visit its imposing
glass-walled headquarters in Fort
Meade, Maryland. After submit-
ting my personal datainclud-
ing the serial number of my tape
recorderI pass through three
security checkpoints and park my
car in a specied space. Eventually
I take a seat in a conference room
bedecked with patriotic posters
that trumpet national security
and privacy. I am introduced to
general counsel Rajesh De; Anne
Neuberger, the NSAs point person
for partnerships with the private
sector; and Rick Ledgett, a deputy
director who heads the agencys
Media Leaks Task Force, a position
created last summer for Snowden
damage control.
And then the top man enters, a
surprise participant who wants
to set the tone for the interview,
staying for the rst 20 minutes of
a session that will last more than
two hours. Trim in physique and
efcient in expression, Alexander
has a charismatic condence that
clearly has aided him in ascending
to a key role in national security.
That program, by itself, is the
hornets nest, Alexander says
in reference to Prism. It is the
hornets nest that [enables] the
NSA to see threats from Pakistan
and Afghanistan and around the
world, share those insights with
the FBIwho can look inside
the United States, based on their
authoritiesand nd out, is there
something bad going to happen
here? Alexander cites the case
of Najibullah Zazi, the radical
Islamist who planned to bomb the
New York City subways in 2009,
implying that information col-
lected under the Prism program
led to his capture.
My concern is that, without
knowing the facts, people will say,
Lets put that hornets nest away.
We sure would like to get rid of that
hornets nest. We would like to give
it to somebody else, anybody else.
But we recognize that if we do that,
our nation now is at greater risk for
a terrorist attack. So were going to
do the right thing; were going to
hold on to it, let people look at the
options. If there is a better option,
put it on the table.
Oddly, at heart, the NSAs com-
plaints sound remarkably similar to
those of the tech companies: People
dont understand us. No one knows
how the NSA works, Ledgett says.
Its always been a black box, Enemy
of the State movies, stuf like that.
0 7 2
People dont understand the NSAs
checks and balances.
Thats one of the key points
these ofcials want to make: While
the NSA might collect a lot of data,
rules and oversight limit the extent
to which privacy is compromised.
In an earlier speech, Alexander
said, You need the haystack to
nd the needle. Simply gathering
the haystack is benign, the ofcials
claim, because ample protections
exist to constrain any searches of
that information. De refers to the
comprehensive collection of voice
call metadata as one of the most
highly regulated programs in the
entire federal government. He
describes in detail the multiple
times it has been reauthorized in
Congress and the courts, the lim-
ited number of people who have
access to it, and the oversight
employed to make sure that they
use it as directed. (In December a
federal judge ruled that the col-
lection of phone metadata is likely
unconstitutional, but stayed his
order pending appeal.)
Similar controls exist for Prism,
which the NSA views as its most
important tool. Gmail is the
most popular terrorist mail ser-
vice in the world, one official
says. Second place is Yahoo. Its
not because Google and Yahoo
are evil, its because they ofer a
great service.
Exactly how much informa-
tion the NSA ultimately collects
with Prism it wont say. Accord-
ing to the Snowden leaks, on
April 5, 2013, there were 117,675
records in the Prism database.
If these targets have contact with
people inside or associated with
the United States, Prism can wind
up collecting tons of informa-
tion about Americans. Between
Prism and upstream collection
procedures like Muscular, the NSA
winds up with plenty.
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Ledgett identies several steps
by which the NSA winnows data
to exclude Americans email,
search queries, and seles. We
are responsible for minimizing
the collection of US personal infor-
mation, he says. However, this
process so far has been largely
self- regulated, and recent declas-
sied FISA court documents indi-
cate that the NSA has fallen short
on multiple occasions; the court
has criticized the NSA for over-
collecting or failing to properly
lter its content.
The officials paint a picture,
though, of a system that funda-
mentally works. They describe a
rigorous training process. They
tell me that respect for bound-
aries is drilled into the psyche of
NSA employees from the day they
are hired. (As for one embarrass-
ing incident, in which employees
tracked their romantic partners,
the ofcials emphasize its rarity
and point out that the abuses were
caught by the NSAs own system
of frequent polygraph tests.) Led-
gett provides an example of what
happens when someones informa-
tion is mistakenly analyzed. The
agency, he says, had tracked a high-
value target in South Asia for over
a decade before learning that he
had once applied for a green card
making him, under NSA rules, a US
person. As soon we discovered
that, Ledgett says, we dropped
collection on him under our Execu-
tive Order 12333 authority and can-
celed 14 years of reports.
Critics charge that while there
is not yet any evidence of massive
abuse of the NSAs collected data,
there is also no guarantee that a
future regime wont ignore these
touted protections. These offi-
cials discounted that possibility,
saying that the majority of NSA
employees wouldnt stand for such
a policy. If that happened, there
would be lines at the Inspector
Generals ofce here, and at Con-
gress as welllonger than a Dis-
neyland line, Ledgett says. (The
fates of several NSA employees-
turned-whistleblowers indicate
that anyone in that hypothetical
queue would be in for a ride far
wilder than anything in Anaheim.)
The NSA acknowledges that
news of its activities has put US
technology companies in a bind.
But the solutions are elusive, even
for a seemingly easy problem like
letting companies share more
detail about the national secu-
rity requests they receive. We
have a shared interest in trans-
The NSA is willing to compromise the security of everything
to get what they want, one cryptographer says.

0 7 4
parency, says general counsel
De, who adds that the NSA is pre-
paring its own report to disclose
the total number of requests and
user accounts from all companies
combined. Yet the NSA continues
to oppose eforts to break down
the numbers: It might provide a
road map for enemies to use the
least scrutinized services.
The ofcials profess not to worry
about companies using stronger
cryptography to protect users
from intrudersincluding those
in Fort Meade. We applaud the
use of encryption, Neuberger says.
We support better security. But
they imply that if the techniques
make the NSAs job more difcult,
the agency might miss vital clues.
And the NSA insists that, despite
the implications of those Snowden-
leaked documents, it does not
engage in weakening encryption
standards. The same standards
we recommend are the standards
we use, Ledgett says. We would
not use standards we thought were
vulnerable. That would be insane.
The officials wont deny the
NSAs use of software vulnera-
bilities but portray their general
behavior as protective.
We are heavily biased toward
defense, Ledgett adds, citing one
case in which the NSA discovered
a serious vulnerability in one com-
panys software that could have
impacted users all over the world.
We talked about it for a few days
internally and decided it was so
critical to the entirety of the US
government and most of Amer-
ica that we disclosed [the vulner-
ability to that company]. We could
have made hay on that forever on
a huge range of targets.
During the conversation, the
officials could barely contain
the frustration they feel about
how the worldand their fellow
Americansviews them post-
Snowden. They have read Bran-
don Downeys heartbroken lament
about his own government break-
ing into his beloved data center.
They understand that journal-
ism conferences routinely host
sessions on protecting informa-
tion from government snoops, as
if we were living in some Soviet
society. And they are aware that
multiple security specialists in
the nations top tech corpora-
tions now consider the US gov-
ernment their prime adversary.
But they do not see any of those
points as a reason to stop gath-
ering data. They chalk all of that
negativity up to monumental mis-
understandings triggered by a lone
leaker and a hostile press. NSA
employees see themselves as deal-
ing with genuine deadly threats to
the nation, and it makes them crazy
when people assume that spooks
at Fort Meade are intent on steal-
ing their privacy.
Its almost delusional, Ledgett
says. I wish I could get to the high
mountaintop to scream, Youre
not a target!
THE PROBLEM, of course, is not
merely one of misunderstanding.
It is largely a consequence of the
inexorable rise of digital technol-
ogy. In a sense, the tech compa-
nies are more like the NSA than
they would like to think. Both have
seized on the progress in comput-
ing, communications, and stor-
age to advance their respective
missions. (When you think of it,
Googles original mission state-
mentto collect and organize
the worlds informationmight
also apply to the activity at Fort
Meade.) Both have sought to ful-
fill those missions by amassing
huge troves of personal informa-
tionand both offer trade-offs
that seemingly justify the prac-
tice. Google, Facebook, and oth-
ers argue that they can use that
information to improve the lives
of their customers far in excess
of any discomfort that may come
from sharing that data. The NSA
believes that its necessary to draw
on that information to prevent a
replay of 9/11 or worse. Both have
established elaborate self- policing
procedures to minimize abuse and
claim to strictly follow the external
constraints that limit their activi-
ties. When either makes a mistake,
it invariably vows to do betterat
least when its overreaches become
public. Of course, the comparison
goes only so far. If the NSA doesnt
connect the dots, the door is open
to catastrophe.
Throughout the fall, legislators
introduced a number of bills that
would demand more transparency
and oversight, or even outlaw the
collection of bulk information alto-
that we may regret even modest
constraints on the NSA. Former
Microsoft research head Nathan
Myhrvold recently wrote a hair-
raising treatise arguing that, con-
sidering the threat of terrorists
with biology degrees who could
wipe out a good portion of human-
ity, tough surveillance measures
might not be so bad. Myhrvold
calls out the tech companies for
hypocrisy. They argue that the
NSA should stop exploiting infor-
mation in the name of national
security, he says, but they are
more than happy to do the same
thing in pursuit of their bottom
lines. The cost is going to be
lower efciency in nding terror-
ist plotsand that cost means
blood, he says.
Thats the way the government
sees it too. In a white paper last
summer, the Obama administration
argued that collecting the details of
everyones phone behavior is justi-
ed, because the program is about
forward- looking prevention of the
loss of life, including potentially on
a catastrophic scale.
But even if the spy programs are
viewed as justied, and whether
they are tempered or not, were
still left with the most sickening
aspect of the Snowden revela-
tions: The vast troves of infor-
mation gathered from our digital
activities will forever be seen as
potential fodder for government
intelligence agencies. A lot of
people became inured to wor-
ries about Little Brotherpri-
vate companiesknowing what
we bought, where we were, what
we were saying, and what we were
searching for. Now it turns out
that Big Brother can access that
data too. It could not have been
otherwise. The wealth of data we
share on our computers, phones,
and tablets is irresistible to a gov-
ernment determined to prevent
the next disaster, even if the efort
stretches laws beyond the com-
prehension of those who voted
for them. And even if it turns the
US into the number one adversary
of American tech companies and
their privacy-seeking customers.
I was naive, says Ray Ozzie,
who as the inventor of Lotus Notes
was an early industry advocate of
strong encryption. I always felt
that the US was a little more pure.
Our processes of getting infor-
mation were upfront. There were
requests, and they were narrow.
But then came the awakening,
he says. Were just like every-
body else.
T
gether. The tech companies have
been lobbying Congress to get at
least some of those provisions
into law. In December they speci-
ed their preferencesincluding
no bulk data collection of Inter-
net communicationsin an open
letter, then forcefully stated their
case in a meeting with President
Obama. The next day, the White
House released a 300-page report
from the advisory panel he had
appointed to review NSA practices.
Free nations must protect them-
selves, the report stated, and
nations that protect themselves
must remain free. Its 46 recom-
mendations call for tempering
the breadth of NSA activities to
accommodate privacy concerns,
revealing more NSA operations to
outside scrutiny, engaging in bulk
data collection only when justied
by concrete national security con-
cerns, and refraining from some of
the dark-side hacker practices that
erode condence in private tech.
But civil liberties groups were
disappointed that the panel did not
make a stand against bulk data col-
lection. At least one suggestion
that bulk personal data be retained
by companies instead of the govern-
mentmight present a headache
for the tech industry. Would Google,
Facebook, and similar rms be seen
as archivists for spies?
The president has indicated that
early this year he would identify
which recommendations he would
endorse. (Some would require leg-
islation.) While the programs in
question may have begun under the
previous administration, Obama
has made it clear that he is not giv-
ing up his 702s. As the president
has said, FISA is an important tool
in our effort to disrupt terrorist
plots, Caitlin Hayden, a National
Security Council spokesperson,
wrote in a statement to . He
believes that there are steps we can
take to give the American people
additional confidence that there
are added safeguards against abuse,
including putting in place greater
oversight, greater transparency,
and further constraints on the use
of this authority.
Nicole Wong, the nations dep-
uty chief technology ofcer (and
former chief privacy lawyer for
Google), emphasizes the govern-
ments good intention: Were
trying to prevent another Boston
bombing, she says. In a world
where we have those threats, what
can we live with? Is it more trans-
parency, is it less collection?
There are others who argue
For the latest NSA news and analysis, go to WIRED.com/nsa.

edel rodriguez
Tumblr founder David Karp says that storing user data country by country is an incredibly expensive
proposition for Tumblr, but its impossible for the aspiring young company.

We get it, Cyrano. You want
your prole to show how
witty and soulful you are.
But stick with words that
work. Heres a chart of some
of the most commonly used
terms in OkCupid proles,
ranked according to the
average attractiveness
rating* of the people who
use them. Save the sonnets
for the second date.
15
MALES
FEMALES
ZOMBI ES SKI LLS THRI LLER
TI TANI C SLEEP TRI VI A
80S
STRI KE
SURFI NG
SURF
YOGA
SKI I NG
THE OCEAN
SAVED!
CONFI DENCE
DEDI CATI ON FLOWER
NORMALI TY
HAI R
MATTER ENDER S GAME CHRI STI ANS KI LL HI DI NG
SOMETHI NG NEW
THE BOOKS
THE TI ME FAI TH VEGETARI ANI SM
TRYI NG NEW THI NGS
CHOCOLATE
VEGAS
MY COMPUTER HOUSE
TREES
BATMAN SWEETNESS REDEMPTI ON
VAMPI RATES DI ETS
ANYMORE
DEXTER LAUGHI NG DOCTORS RANDOMNESS
KARAOKE BABI ES VAMPI RES
MY FAMI LY
MYSTERI OUS
HABI TS
WALKI NG
NONFI CTI ON
NI GHT EXPLORI NG
LONDON
MOOD
MEDI TATI ON
D. R. U. G. S.
MATRI X GEARS
BLUE EYES
RAPPI NG MY WAY FRUI T
BURGER THEATER
ALI EN I CE VARI ETY AMERI CANS WAR
PEOPLE
ALI ENATI ON
VOI CE
ATHLETE
LET ME KNOW
KI SSI NG
OPERA
GOI NG TO THE MOVI ES SUBJECTI VI TY
MORNI NGS
C++ HI STORI ES COMMUNI SM
REGGAE SWEETS
I TALI ANS
TECHNOLOGY BEATS BURNED
FUTURAMA QUESTI ON I PODS
MAKI NG PEOPLE SMI LE
LOVE
BOOKS
TENNI S
A+
MATI NG
RELI GI ON PLANETS
ONE THI NG
I DO
TEACHERS OCEANS
GI RLFRI ENDS SPARES
WI FE LOVE MUSI C THE GREAT GATSBY
RESPECT PHI LOSOPHERS
MEETI NG NEW PEOPLE NURSI NG SATURDAYS ANYONE GOI NG OUT
FRI ENDS FAMI LY
MYSTERY!
FLYI NG
HATE
WORKAHOLI C
HI KI NG
WORRY MORALI TY
EVERYONE ELSE
I NDI AN
TATTOOS BREAKFAST
HEAVY METAL MEET NEW PEOPLE
FOODI ES CLEANI NG GREEN
GI ANTS POWER
KARAOKE
NETFLI X AWESOME FOCUSI NG GENRE
STAR WARS LEADI NG THE FUTURE
HARD WORK
ENTERTAI NMENT
CRACK
PHOTOGRAPHY
BLOOD
TEETH
WEDDI NGS
AMPED CATS
STRAI GHT
DARKNESS
PASSI ON LI VE MUSI C
DOCTOR WHO HOUSES
OLD SCHOOL MAKE UP I NSTRUMENTS
NI RVANA SPORTS
LI PS
EDI T HOPE MY SMI LE PLANNI NG LORD OF THE RI NGS
RETI REMENT
SUCKI NG
MESSAGES
PUPPI ES
SLEEPI NG
ATTRACTI VENESS
ON THE BEACH
TRUCK
C STARS!
PASSPORTS
NCI S QUESTI ONI NG
GEEK! FACE EATI NG
BASKETBALL CLEAN
DRAGON
Get Out More
Pastimes are sexy, but pick a sport that really moves
the needle. Here are the seven activities that ranked
highest.* (Basketball, baseball, and kickball? No thanks.)
Surng ........................................ 1
Yoga ............................................. 3
Skiing ...........................................4
Golf .......................................... 57
Biking ...................................... 64
Hiking ...................................... 66
Running................................... 86
Yoga ............................................ 3
Surng ....................................... 4
Running.................................... 23
Skiing ....................................... 29
Tennis ...................................... 50
Dancing .................................. 70
Biking........................................ 85
RANK OUT OF 1,000 RANK OUT OF 1,000
MALES FEMALES
0 7 6
!"#$ &
'()* +,-.
/,)(0
LEARN TO SURF
Its a hot activity for
both genders.
*Based on ratings
by OkCupid
prole viewers
1,2(3
"'# 4("( 253#.6!
7-54# ",
6250 251750 7511,000
R
A
N
K
t
i
p

LONDON
NYC
YOGA
SURFI NG
ATHLETE
SMOKE
VACATI ONS ELECTRI C
DRI VEN
LEADI NG
MY EYES STAGES GREY S ANATOMY
WARS
TRYI NG NEW THI NGS
RELAXI NG WRI TI NG RADI OS REALI TY CHI CAGO
FAMI LY LAUGH DAUGHTER
EARRI NGS
SCRUBS
SLOWNESS
COLD MY HAI R
HOLI DAYS
OPENNESS
PHI LOSOPHY
ACCEPT
I HOPE
LAZI NESS
CHANGE MOTHERS
30 ROCK LOVE TRUCK
MATRI X VOLUNTEERS
HEROS
ONE DAY
HUNTER
HAPPY WOOD
FUCK
GEARS
WORRY EXPLAI NI NG EASY PLANNI NG
EUROPE
EXAMPLE
GRI LLI NG
MODELS
MY CATS MY CHI LDREN
NEW PLACES SEXUALLY SPARK
RESPECT FI CTI ONAL
CAREFUL SHARI NG FRI ENDS GOOFY SUBJECTI VI TY
RECI PES CHEESY BASKETBALL
BLUE EYES
I TALI ANS
TEXAS
RADI OHEAD LUCKY
AND MORE
THE OCEAN
STATES
ARCHER
PI NK
WORK OUT
MATI NG STAR TREK
MORALI TY HURT GAMES
WALKI NG ORI ENTEERI NG
POETRY
EYES
WASTED
PRI DE
PROFI LER
NEW YORK
NORMALI TY
CREATI VI TY
DAD
PUZZLES DRAGONS GOD
TEXT
FI TNESS HI KI NG
TEACHERS
RI NG CHI CK FLI CKS
SOCI ALI SM DAYS ZOMBI E
TAKEN PROBLEMS
MY JOB PEOPLE AWESOME CRI ME BOY
RELI GI ON OKAY DRAMA
ADVI CE
DOCTOR
FOODI ES
MY OWN
DAMNED CLEANI NG
AWARENESS
THE TI MES
CAUSES
PULP FI CTI ON
STRI KE
QUESTI ONI NG RAPPI NG
OUTDOORS SHORTS HORROR MOVI E
THI NKI NG THEATER
SHOOTI NG
NEED
THE OFFI CE
OXYGEN
FESTI VALS PI ZZA
SUSHI
BLUE
NURSI NG TRUST WI FE BEST FRI ENDS
NETFLI X
FASHI ON ACTI NG
COMMUNI SM
SOCI ETY THE BI G BANG THEORY
WEDDI NGS AMERI CA MY MOM
CLEAN ANARCHY
TALKATI VE
TECHNO
HOMELAND
SEX CONVERSATI ON
PHYSI CS
SOMETHI NG NEW ADVENTURE TI ME
GEEKS HARD HEAVY METAL
WOMANI ZER
HI STORY
CHARMED
FAI RS
PASSI ON
SEEI NG
MONEY
MEDI TATI ONS
COUCHES CARTOONS
ENJOY TWI LI GHT
TATTOOS CHOI CE LAPTOPS
ANI MATI ON METAL
TECHNOLOGY
Go Against Type
Discarding outmoded
gender ideals makes you
more attractive. Heres
how three examples rank in
the top 1,000 prole words:
MALES
MY CHILDREN
ELECTRONICS
CRAFT
FEMALES
MALES FEMALES
MALES FEMALES
44
790
183
978
49
912
TAT UP OR NOT
Inked men outperform,
but women who mention
tattoos do not.
DROP THE MIC
Save it for the shower:
Unless youre Bruno Mars,
karaoke isnt sexy.
!"
DONT MENTION HIM
God is poorly rated
all around, so uphold
the separation
of church and date.
t
i
p
t
i
p
zohar lazar
t
i
p
Finding love isnt easyeven on online dating sites. WIRED is here to
help. We pulled data from Match.com and OkCupid to help you mas-
ter the art of lamour. Call it the algorithm method: 25 tips for writ-
ing the perfect prole, selecting the right photo, and understanding
your audience. Follow these mathematically proven guidelines and
we bet youll nd a statistically signicant other by Valentines Day.
#$ &'()*(+ ,-./,
I NFOGRAPHI CS BY
JOSEF REYES

The single most
attractive band you
could mention?
is the most attractive work-related word in mens
profiles. In womens, its the second-least attractive.
Loving lOLcats is great. Being
a cat fancier? No. using the
word cats is more attractive
than talking about my cats.
!"#$!"%"&#
Read the Critics
The better reviews a movie or TV show receives, the more
attractive it is to potential paramours. So go ahead and men-
tion your Pulp Fiction addiction, but shut up about The Big
Bang Theory eps clogging your DVR.
Hey guys, keep
your clothes on!
SHIRTLESS TANK TOP
SUIT JACKET
COLLARED
SHIRT TSHIRT
Clothing worn by top-rated
men in prole photos.
Keep your photos fresh,
and swap out your pri-
mary photo frequently.
You look like a new user,
and people who might
have missed you before
are more likely to give
you a second look.
Jim Talbott,
director of consumer insights,
Match.com
STRAIGHT
FEMALE
LESBIAN
STRAIGHT
MALE
GAY MALE
1 Homeland
2 Arrested
Development
3 Eternal
Sunshine of
the Spotless
Mind
4 Pulp Fiction
5 The Ofce
6 Archer
7 Game of
Thrones
8 Dexter
9 30 Rock
10 South Park
11 Wall-E
12 Alien
13 Lost
14 Weeds
15 Scrubs
16 How I Met
Your Mother
17 The Walking
Dead
18 The Matrix
19 Lord of the
Rings
20 Sherlock
21 Batman
22 Star Wars
23 Bones
24 Greys
Anatomy
25 The Big Bang
Theory
26 Twilight
27 Star Trek
28 Doctor Who
29 NCIS
OKCUPID ATTRACTIVENESS RATING
M
E
T
A
C
R
I
T
I
C

R
A
T
I
N
G
29
28
24
25
23
100
26
21
19
27
22
18
11 3
4
10 6
8
16
14
9
5
7
17
20
13
1
90
80
70
60
50
40
40 45 50 55 60 65
15
12
2
MOVIES
TV
'()* ,
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RADIOHEAD
32% 28%
16% 11%
7% 6%
1,000
1
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W
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E

F
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F
T
:

P
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T
;

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;

G
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.

P
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S

S
P
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A
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:

S
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A
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B
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M
I
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B
U
R
T
O
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.
R
A
N
K
t
i
p
Senior editor CAITLIN ROPER (@caitlinroper) interviewed
Alfonso Cuarn in issue 21.10. Additional reporting by Katie
M. Palmer and Biz Carson.
mikey burton
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Chicago
4%5
67#89
467#89
274
766

Jim Talbott
Christian Rudder, cofounder/president, OkCupid
0 7 9
Smile!
Especially
with
teeth.
Percentage of hottest photos with ...
SMIRK
NO FACE
DUCK FACE
SMILE, NO TEETH
NO SMILE
Prime yourself to be
open to new experi-
ences before you write
your prole essay.
Higher levels of open-
ness correlate with bet-
ter contact rates.
SMILE W/TEETH
!"# $%!&!
Sele or candid? Duck face or toothy grin? Inside or outdoors? To gure
out the elements of a perfect prole pic, we asked OkCupid to pull
the photos of 400 of the highest-rated proles* in 10 major US cities.
Theres no need to have a prole picture of yourself
with a fake mustache. Youre wacky, we get it.
*Photos used by permission
54%
23%
13%
6%
2%
2%
t
i
p
'() +,-.
',/ 01/234,
t
i
p 48% of the most popular gay men are snapped
outdoors. Even more in Atlanta (80%).
414,2.
40-5/
2600/
)0172,89
Seles may be acceptable
for women (45% of top-
ranking straight women
used them, as did 42% of
lesbians), but not for men
(13% straight, 25% gay).
t
i
p
+(:, ,), ;0-/(;/
<3/6 /6, ;(+,7(
88% of the hottest users are looking straight
into the camera in their prole photos.
t
i
p
San
Francisco
New York
Atlanta
Miami
Memphis
Los
Angeles

its 28% better for a male to
refer to females as men who Use
its 16% Better for a female
to refer to herself as a
than girls.
get 31% more
contacts from the
opposite sex.
than a woman.
!"#$%& "$%'( )*+,
0 8 0
GAY MALES STRAIGHT MALES
Give Them What They Want
You may think your eyes are your best feature, but if youre a lesbian, youre better of touting your legs. Heres a look
at what Match.com users describe as their most attractive attribute, and what their suitors are actually looking for.
Know Who Strays
From the Faith
Heres how often people who cite
religion as a deal-breaker contact
singles outside their religion.
Gay men are interested in
-./0 / 12304 / 5360 / 3730
Straight women are checking out your
048/-12 / 12304 / 5360 / 9:44
3.7% 4.7% 6.9% 7.4%
ATHEIST
BUDDHIST/
TAOIST
LESS THAN
$25,000
MALE
$25,001 TO
$35,000
CHRISTIAN/
CATHOLIC
CHRISTIAN/
LDS
CHRISTIAN/
PROTESTANT
JEWISH
MUSLIM/
ISLAM
SPIRITUAL BUT
NOT RELIGIOUS
0 12.5% 25%
$35,001 TO
$50,000
$50,001 TO
$75,000
$75,001 TO
$100,000
$100,00 TO
$150,000
$150,001+
Dont Chase That Sugar Mama
Some women arent kidding when they say theyll only date rich guys. Men are more exible
about money. Heres how likely people are to break their stated nancial requirements.
45%
25%
46.5% 50.8% 8.1% 8.1%
9.5% 5.7% 5.4% 7.9%
7.3% 7.1% 11.7% 10.0%
2.8% 8.2% 13.4% 8.4%
0.3% 0.7% 7.8% 10.9%
9.2% 8.9% 6.9% 8.5%
13.6% 6.5% 9.2% 9.1%
0.5% 0.4% 7.1% 8.0%
FEMALE
MALE
043; =
8;4>/>?3 @8. 78:. 4-.634 -:A>3B13
HAIR
EYES
LIPS
CHEST
ARMS
STOMACH
BUTT
LEGS
FEET
HAIR
EYES
LIPS
CHEST
ARMS
STOMACH
BUTT
LEGS
FEET
SELFDESCRI BED
BEST FEATURE
SELFDESCRI BED
BEST FEATURE
MOST I MPORTANT
TO SUI TORS
MOST I MPORTANT
TO SUI TORS
Mind Your Manners
It pays to be respectful, approachable, and grammatical.
FEMALE
t
i
p
Source: Match.com
zohar lazar

Peak Hours Vary
G
r
i
n
d
r
T
i
n
d
e
r
M
a
t
c
h
/
O
k
C
u
p
i
d
LESBIANS STRAIGHT FEMALES
Sunday Is for Lovers
Log in during peak activity, when
youll have maximum choice and the
best chance to make a quick match.
Know When to Do It
Bad news, players: Its probably not happening on the rst date. But if
you havent made a move by date six, youre likely in the friend zone.
*YES, FOOT FETI SHES APPEAR I N THE DATA.
FRI . AND SAT.
SUN. THURS.
Lesbians are looking for
!"#$ / $%&'()* / +,%% / "-"$
Straight men prize a womans
.%&'()* / /0'$ / +,%% / 1"#$ / 2""%3
6.5% 7.9% 10.0% 7.0%
Grindr
Match/
OkCupid
Tinder
1 OR 2 DATES
60%
60%
54.3% 56.8% 10.5% 7.3%
10.6% 8.8% 9.7% 7.8%
5.0% 4.6% 9.2% 4.9%
3.0% 0.6% 9.5% 12.2%
0.6% 0.6% 11.9% 13.4%
5.5% 5.7% 11.0% 10.4%
7.8% 12.6% 12.5% 8.5%
0.6% 0.6% 1.3% 8.5%
3 TO 5 DATES 6+ DATES MARRIAGE
HOW LONG DO YOU WAIT TO HAVE
SEX WITH SOMEONE YOU REALLY LIKE?
IDEALLY, HOW OFTEN
WOULD YOU HAVE SEX?
DAILY 3 OR 4/WK 1 OR 2/WK LESS
0%
0%
30%
30%
STRAIGHT FEMALE
STRAIGHT MALE
LESBIAN
GAY
BI
If you try to lure everybody, youll end up with nobody. Better to ne-tune
your approach. Trying to win over a curious Buddhist? Hoping to date outside your tax
bracket? Looking for the best time to nd fellow horndogs? Weve got you covered.
HAIR
EYES
LIPS
CHEST
ARMS
STOMACH
BUTT
LEGS
FEET
HAIR
EYES
LIPS
CHEST
ARMS
STOMACH
BUTT
LEGS
FEET
SELFDESCRI BED
BEST FEATURE
SELFDESCRI BED
BEST FEATURE
MOST I MPORTANT
TO SUI TORS
MOST I MPORTANT
TO SUI TORS
M
P
E
R
C
E
N
T
A
G
E

O
F

W
E
E
K
L
Y

V
O
L
U
M
E
16
15.5
15
14.5
14
13.5
13
T W TH F SAT SUN
1 2PM
1 PM
2PM
3PM
4PM
5PM
6PM
7PM
8PM
9PM
10PM
try
to keep
pace,
okay?
Source: OkCupid

Howone man hacked okcupid Tofind
the girl of his dreams.

0 8 3
God
Diverse
Mindful
Tattoo
Samantha
Green
by Kevin Poulsen
LOVE,
actuarially
Dog

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Chris McKinlay was folded
into a cramped fth-oor cubicle in UCLAs math sci-
ences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from
his monitor. It was 3 in the morning, the optimal time
to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado
that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The sub-
ject: large-scale data processing and parallel numeri-
cal methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked
open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.
McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was
one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance
through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Har-
mony, and hed been searching in vain since his last
breakup nine months earlier. Hed sent dozens of cutesy
introductory messages to women touted as potential
matches by OkCupids algorithms. Most were ignored;
hed gone on a total of six rst dates.
On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler
crunching out machine code in one window, his for-
lorn dating prole sitting idle in the other, it dawned
on him that he was doing it wrong. Hed been approach-
ing online matchmaking like any other user. Instead,
he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.
OkCupid was founded by Harvard math majors in
2004, and it rst caught daters attention because of
its computational approach to matchmaking. Mem-
bers answer droves of multiple-choice survey ques-
tions on everything from politics, religion, and family
to love, sex, and smartphones.
On average, respondents select 350 questions from
a pool of thousandsWhich of the following is most
likely to draw you to a movie? or How important is
religion/God in your life? For each, the user records an
answer, species which responses theyd nd accept-
able in a mate, and rates how important the question
is to them on a ve-point scale from irrelevant to
mandatory. OkCupids matching engine uses that
data to calculate a couples compatibility. The closer
to 100 percentmathematical soul matethe better.
But mathematically, McKinlays compatibility with
women in Los Angeles was abysmal. OkCupids algo-
rithms use only the questions that both potential
matches decide to answer, and the match questions
McKinlay had chosenmore or less at randomhad
proven unpopular. When he scrolled through his
matches, fewer than 100 women would appear above
the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in a
city containing some 2 million women (approximately
80,000 of them on OkCupid). On a site where com-
patibility equals visibility, he was practically a ghost.
He realized hed have to boost that number. If,
through statistical sampling, McKinlay could ascer-
tain which questions mattered to the kind of women
he liked, he could construct a new profile that hon-
estly answered those questions and ignored the rest.
He could match every woman in LA who might be right
for him, and none that werent.
Even for a mathematician, McKinlay is
unusual. Raised in a Boston suburb, he graduated from
Middlebury College in 2001 with a degree in Chinese.
In August of that year he took a part-time job in New
York translating Chinese into English for a company
on the 91st oor of the north tower of the World Trade
Center. The towers fell five weeks later. (McKinlay
wasnt due at the ofce until 2 oclock that day. He was
asleep when the rst plane hit the north tower at 8:46
am.) After that I asked myself what I really wanted to
be doing, he says. A friend at Columbia recruited him
into an ofshoot of MITs famed professional black-
jack team, and he spent the next few years bouncing
between New York and Las Vegas, counting cards and
earning up to $60,000 a year.
The experience kindled his interest in applied math,
ultimately inspiring him to earn a masters and then a
KEVIN POULSEN (@kpoulsen) is s
investigations editor.

0 8 5 FEB 2014
PhD in the eld. They were capable
of using mathematics in lots of dif-
ferent situations, he says. They
could see some new gamelike
Three Card Pai Gow Pokerthen go
home, write some code, and come
up with a strategy to beat it.
Now hed do the same for love.
First hed need data. While his dis-
sertation work continued to run on
the side, he set up 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a
Python script to manage them. The script would search
his target demographic (heterosexual and bisexual
women between the ages of 25 and 45), visit their pages,
and scrape their proles for every scrap of available
information: ethnicity, height, smoker or nonsmoker,
astrological signall that crap, he says.
To nd the survey answers, he had to do a bit of extra
sleuthing. OkCupid lets users see the responses of oth-
ers, but only to questions theyve answered themselves.
McKinlay set up his bots to simply answer each ques-
tion randomlyhe wasnt using the dummy proles to
attract any of the women, so the answers didnt mat-
terthen scooped the womens answers into a database.
McKinlay watched with satisfaction as his bots
purred along. Then, after about a thousand proles
were collected, he hit his rst roadblock. OkCupid has
a system in place to prevent exactly this kind of data
harvesting: It can spot rapid-re use easily. One by one,
his bots started getting banned.
He would have to train them to act human.
He turned to his friend Sam Torrisi, a neuroscien-
tist whod recently taught McKinlay music theory in
exchange for advanced math lessons. Torrisi was also
on OkCupid, and he agreed to install spyware on his
computer to monitor his use of the site. With the data
in hand, McKinlay programmed his bots to simulate
Torrisis click-rates and typing speed. He brought in
a second computer from home and plugged it into the
math departments broadband line so it could run
uninterrupted 24 hours a day.
After three weeks hed harvested 6 million questions
and answers from 20,000 women all over the country.
McKinlays dissertation was relegated to a side proj-
ect as he dove into the data. He was already sleeping in
his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment
entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a
thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.
For McKinlays plan to work, hed have to nd a pat-
tern in the survey dataa way to roughly group the
women according to their similarities. The break-
through came when he coded up a modied Bell Labs
algorithm called K-Modes. First used in 1998 to ana-
lyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data
and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava
Lamp. With some ne-tuning he could adjust the vis-
cosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagu-
lating it into a single, solid glob.
He played with the dial and found a natural resting
point where the 20,000 women clumped into seven
statistically distinct clusters based on their questions
and answers. I was ecstatic, he says. That was the
high point of June.
He retasked his bots to gather another sample: 5,000
women in Los Angeles and San Francisco whod logged
on to OkCupid in the past month. Another pass through
K-Modes conrmed that they clustered in a similar way.
His statistical sampling had worked.
Now he just had to decide which cluster best suited
him. He checked out some proles from each. One clus-
ter was too young, two were too old, another was too
Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated
by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie
types, musicians and artists. This was the golden clus-
ter. The haystack in which hed nd his needle. Some-
where within, hed nd true love.
Actually, a neighboring cluster looked pretty cool
tooslightly older women who held professional cre-
MCKINLAY
WATCHEDAS
HIS BOTS
PURREDALONG,
ANSWERING
OKCUPID
QUESTIONS.

o
0 8 6 FEB 2014
ative jobs, like editors and designers. He decided to go
for both. Hed set up two proles and optimize one for
the A group and one for the B group.
He text-mined the two clusters to learn what inter-
ested them; teaching turned out to be a popular topic,
so he wrote a bio that emphasized his work as a math
professor. The important part, though, would be the
survey. He picked out the 500 questions that were most
popular with both clusters. Hed already decided he
would ll out his answers honestlyhe didnt want
to build his future relationship on a foundation of
computer-generated lies. But hed let his computer
gure out how much importance to assign each ques-
tion, using a machine-learning algorithm called adap-
tive boosting to derive the best weightings.
With that, he created two proles, one with a photo
of him rock climbing and the other of him playing gui-
tar at a music gig. Regardless of future plans, whats
more interesting to you right now? Sex or love? went
one question. Answer: Love, obviously. But for the
younger A cluster, he followed his computers direc-
tion and rated the question very important. For the
B cluster, it was mandatory.
When the last question was answered and ranked,
he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Ange-
les sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of
women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down and
down and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by,
from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.
He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid
members are notied when someone views their pages,
so he wrote a new program to visit
the pages of his top-rated matches,
cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-
old women on Monday, another
thousand 40-year-old women on
Tuesday, looping back through when
he reached 27-year-olds two weeks
later. Women reciprocated by visit-
ing his proles, some 400 a day. And
messages began to roll in.
I havent until now come across
anyone with such winning numbers,
AND I nd your prole intriguing, one woman wrote.
Also, something about a rugged man whos really good
with numbers Thought Id say hi.
Hey thereyour prole really struck me and I wanted
to say hi, another wrote. I think we have quite a lot
in common, maybe not the math but certainly a lot of
other good stuf!
Can you really translate Chinese? yet another asked.
I took a class briey but it didnt go well.
The math portion of McKinlays search was done.
Only one thing remained. Hed have to leave his cubi-
cle and take his research into the eld. Hed have to
go on dates.
HED BEEN
ON MORE
THAN 55 DATES,
EACH ONE
DUTIFULLY
LOGGED
IN A LAB
NOTEBOOK.
On June 30, McKinlay showered at the UCLA
gym and drove his beat-up Nissan across town for his
rst data-mined date. Sheila was a web designer from
the A cluster of young artist types. They met for lunch
at a cafe in Echo Park. It was scary, McKinlay says. Up
until this point it had almost been an academic exercise.
By the end of his date with Sheila, it was clear to both
that the attraction wasnt there. He went on his second
date the next dayan attractive blog editor from the
B cluster. Hed planned a romantic walk around Echo
Park Lake but found it was being dredged. Shed been
reading Proust and feeling down about her life. It was
kind of depressing, he says.
Date three was also from the B group. He met Alison at
a bar in Koreatown. She was a screenwriting student with
a tattoo of a Fibonacci spiral on her shoulder. McKinlay
got drunk on Korean beer and woke up in his cubicle the
next day with a painful hangover. He sent Alison a follow-
up message on OkCupid, but she didnt write back.
The rejection stung, but he was still getting 20 mes-
sages a day. Dating with his computer-endowed pro-
les was a completely diferent game. He could ignore
messages consisting of bad one-liners. He responded
to the ones that showed a sense of humor or displayed
something interesting in their bios. Back when he was
the pursuer, hed swapped three to ve messages to get
a single date. Now hed send just one reply. You seem
really cool. Want to meet?
By date 20, he noticed latent variables emerging. In
the younger cluster, the women invariably had two or
more tattoos and lived on the east side of Los Angeles.
In the other, a disproportionate number owned mid-
size dogs that they adored.
His earliest dates were carefully planned. But as he
worked feverishly through his queue, he resorted to
casual afternoon meetups over lunch or cofee, often
stacking two dates in a day. He developed a set of per-
sonal rules to get through his marathon love search.
No more drinking, for one. End the date when its over,
dont let it trail of. And no concerts or movies. Noth-
ing where your attention is directed at a third object
instead of each other, he says. Its inefcient.
After a month of dating equally from both of his pro-
les, he decided he was spending too much time on the
freeway reaching east-side women from the tattoo
cluster. He deleted his A-group prole. His efciency
improved, but the results were the same. As summer
drew to a close, hed been on more than 55 dates, each
one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had
led to second dates; only one had led to a third.
Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem
issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to ques-
tion his calculations.
Then came the message from Christine Tien Wang, a
28-year-old artist and prison abolition activist. McKin-
lay had popped up in her search for 6-foot guys with

About how long do you want
your next relationship to last?
One night
A few months to a year
Several years
The rest of my life
Say youve started seeing some-
one you really like. As far as
youre concerned, how long will
it take before you have sex?
12 dates
35 dates
6 or more dates
Only after the wedding
Have you ever had a sexual
encounter with someone
of the same sex?
Yes, and I enjoyed myself
Yes, and I did not enjoy myself
No, and I would never
No, but I would like to
How important is religion/God
in your life?
Extremely important
Somewhat important
Not very important
Not important at all
after page of formulas and equations in McKinlays tight
handwriting, ending in a neatly ordered list of women
and dates, a few terse notes about each. Tien Wang
leafs through it, laughing at some of the highlights.
On August 24, she notices, he took two women to the
same beach on the same day. Thats horrible, she says.
To Tien Wang, McKinlays OkCupid hacking is a funny
story to tell. But all the math and coding is merely
prologue to their story together. The real hacking in a
relationship comes after you meet. People are much
more complicated than their proles, she says. So
the way we met was kind of supercial, but everything
that happened after is not supercial at all. Its been
cultivated through a lot of work.
Its not like, we matched and therefore we have a
great relationship, McKinlay agrees. It was just a
mechanism to put us in the same room. I was able to
use OkCupid to nd someone.
She bristles at that. You didnt nd me. I found you,
she says, touching his elbow. McKinlay pauses to think,
then admits shes right.
A week later Tien Wang is back in Qatar, and the
couple is on one of their daily Skype calls when McKin-
lay pulls out a diamond ring and holds it up to the web-
cam. She says yes.
Theyre not entirely sure when theyll get married.
Theres research to be done to determine the optimal
wedding day.
blue eyes near UCLA, where she was pursuing her mas-
ters in ne arts. They were a 91 percent match.
He met her at the sculpture garden on campus. From
there they walked to a college sushi joint. He felt it
immediately. They talked about books, art, music. When
she confessed that shed made some tweaks to her pro-
le before messaging him, he responded by telling her
all about his love hacking. The whole story.
I thought it was dark and cynical, she says. I liked it.
It was rst date number 88. A second date followed,
then a third. After two weeks they both suspended
their OkCupid accounts.
I think that what I did is just a slightly more
algorithmic, large-scale, and machine-learning-based
version of what everyone does on the site, McKinlay
says. Everyone tries to create an optimal prolehe
just had the data to engineer one.
Its one year after their rst date, and McKinlay and
Tien Wang have met me at the Westwood sushi bar
where their relationship began. McKinlay has his PhD;
hes teaching math and is now working on a postgradu-
ate degree in music. Tien Wang was accepted into a one-
year art fellowship in Qatar. Shes in California to visit
McKinlay. Theyve been staying connected on Skype,
and she has returned for a couple of visits.
At my request, McKinlay has brought his lab note-
book. Tien Wang hasnt seen it before today. Its page
Love is a data feld
1
2
McKinlays code found that the women clustered into statistically identi-
able groups who tended to answer their OkCupid survey questions in similar
ways. One group, which he dubbed the Greens, were online dating new-
bies; another, the Samanthas, tended to be older and more adventuresome.
Heres how each cluster answered four of the most popular questions.
The Questions
1
2
3
4
3
4
QUESTION Dog Green Mindful Tattoo God Samantha Diverse

0 8 8

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In
a windowless base-
ment room decorated
with photographs
of farmers clutching
freshly harvested
vegetables, three polo-
shirt-and-slacks-
clad Monsanto execu-
tives, all men, wait
for a special lunch.
A server arrives and
sets in front of each a
caprese- like salad
tomatoes, mozzarella,
basil, lettuceand
one of the execs,
David Stark, rolls his
desk chair forward,
raises a fork dramati-
cally, and skewers
a leaf. He takes a big,
showy bite. The other
two men, Robb Fraley
and Kenny Avery,
also tuck in. The room
lls with loud, intent,
wet chewing sounds.
Eventually, Stark looks up. Nice crisp
texture, which people like, and a pretty
good taste, he says.
Its probably better than what I get out
of Schnucks, Fraley responds. Hes talking
about a grocery chain local to St. Louis,
where Monsanto is headquartered. Avery
seems happy; he just keeps eating.
The men poke, prod, and chew the next
course with even more vigor: salmon with
a relish of red, yellow, and orange bell pep-
per and a side of broccoli. The lettuce is
my favorite, Stark says afterward. Fraley
concludes that the pepper changes the
game if you think about fresh produce.
Changing the agricultural game is what
Monsanto does. The company whose name
is synonymous with Big Ag has revolution-
ized the way we grow foodfor better or
worse. Activists revile it for such mustache-
twirling practices as suing farmers who
regrow licensed seeds or lling the world
with Roundup-resistant superweeds. Then
theres Monsantos reputationscorned by
some, celebrated by othersas the fore-
most purveyor of genetically modied com-
modity crops like corn and soybeans with
DNA edited in from elsewhere, designed to
have qualities nature didnt quite think of.
So its not particularly surprising that
the company is introducing novel strains of
familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto
and endowed by their creators with powers
and abilities far beyond what you usually
see in the produce section. The lettuce is
sweeter and crunchier than romaine and
has the stay-fresh quality of iceberg. The
peppers come in miniature, single- serving
sizes to reduce leftovers. The broccoli has
three times the usual amount of gluco-
Benefort
(broccoli)
LAUNCHED
Fall 2010
AVAILABILITY
Year-round
TRAIT
Compared to
standard broccoli,
contains up to three
times the amount
of glucoraphanin,
a compound
that increases
antioxidant levels
METHOD
Crossbreeding
commercial broccoli
with a strain
growing wild in
southern Italy
REGION GROWN
Arizona, California,
Mexico
PRICE
$2.50 per pound
BEN PAYNTER (paynter.ben@gmail.com)
wrote about inatable mascot costumes
for kids with autism in issue 20.08.

0 9 1 FEB 2014
raphanin, a compound that helps boost
antioxidant levels. Starks department,
the global trade division, came up with all
of them. Grocery stores are looking in the
produce aisle for something that pops, that
feels diferent, Avery says. And consum-
ers are looking for the same thing. If the
team is right, theyll know soon enough.
Frescada lettuce, Bella Fina peppers, and
Benefort broccolicheery brand names
trademarked to an all-but-anonymous
Monsanto subsidiary called Seminisare
rolling out at supermarkets across the US.
But heres the twist: The lettuce, pep-
pers, and broccoliplus a melon and an
onion, with a watermelon soon to follow
arent genetically modied at all. Monsanto
created all these veggies using good old-
fashioned crossbreeding, the same tech-
nology that farmers have been using to
optimize crops for millennia. That doesnt
mean they are low tech, exactly. Starks divi-
sion is drawing on Monsantos accumulated
scientic know-how to create vegetables
that have all the advantages of genetically
modified organisms without any of the
Frankenfoods ick factor.
And thats a serious business advan-
tage. Despite a gaping lack of evidence
that genetically modied food crops harm
human health, consumers have shown a
marked resistance to purchasing GM
produce (even as they happily consume
products derived from genetically modi-
ed commodity crops). Stores like Whole
Foods are planning to add GMO disclosures
to their labels in a few years. State laws may
mandate it even sooner.
But those requirements wont apply to
Monsantos new superveggies. They may be
born in a lab, but technically theyre every
bit as natural as what youd get at a farmers
market. Keep them away from pesticides
and transport them less than 100 miles and
you could call them organic and locavore too.
JOHN FRANCIS QUEENY formed Monsanto
Chemical Works in 1901, primarily to pro-
duce the artificial sweetener saccharin.
Monsanto was the family name of Queenys
wife, Olga. It was a good time for chemi-
cal companies. By the 1920s, Monsanto
had expanded into sulfuric acid and poly-
chlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, a coolant
used in early transformers and electric
motors, now more famous as a pernicious
environmental contaminant. The company
moved on to plastics and synthetic fabrics,
and by the 1960s it had sprouted a divi-
sion to create herbicides, including the
BellaFina
(bell pepper)
LAUNCHED
Fall 2011
AVAILABILITY
Year-round
TRAIT
A third the size of
regular bell peppers
when ripe, minimizing
waste and allowing
for exibility while
cooking
METHOD
Selectively breeding
plants with smaller
and smaller peppers
REGION GROWN
California, Florida,
North Carolina
PRICE
$1.50 per three-
pepper bag
Melorange
(melon)
LAUNCHED
Winter 2011
AVAILABILITY
December
through April
TRAIT
Tastes up to 30
percent sweeter than
cantaloupe grown
in winter
METHOD
Crossbreeding
cantaloupe and
European heritage
melons with a
gene for a fruity
and oral aroma
REGION GROWN
Arizona, Central
America
PRICE
$3 per melon

Vietnam- era defoliant Agent Orange. A
decade later, Monsanto invented Roundup,
a glyphosate- based weed killer that farmers
could apply to reduce overgrowth between
crops, increasing productivity. In the early
1990s, the company turned its scientic
expertise to agriculture, working on novel
crop strains that would resist the efects of
its signature herbicide.
Now, breeding new strains of plants is
nothing new. Quite the opposite, in fact
optimizing plants for yield, avor, and other
qualities dened the earliest human civi-
lizations. But for all the millennia since
some proto-farmer rst tried it, success-
fully altering plants has been a game of pop-
ulation roulette. Basically, farmers breed
a plant that has a trait they like with other
plants they also like. Then they plant seeds
from that union and hope the traits keep
showing up in subsequent generations.
Theyre working with qualities that a
biologist would call, in aggregate, pheno-
type. But phenotype is the manifestation
of genotype, the genes for those traits. The
roulettelike complications arise because
some genes are dominant and some are
recessive. Taking a tree with sweet fruit and
crossing it with one that has big fruit wont
necessarily get you a tree with sweeter, big-
ger fruit. You might get the oppositeor a
tree more vulnerable to disease, or one that
needs too much water, and on and on. Its a
trial-and-error guessing game that takes
lots of time, land, and patience.
The idea behind genetic modication is to
speed all that upanalyze a species genes,
its germplasm, and manipulate it to your
liking. Its what the past three decades of
plant biology have achieved and continue
to rene. Monsanto became a pioneer in
the eld when it set out to create Roundup-
resistant crops. Stark joined that effort
in 1989, when he was a molecular biology
postdoc. He was experimenting with the
then-new science of transgenics.
Monsanto was focusing on GM com-
modity crops, but the more exciting work
was in creating brand-new vegetables for
consumers. For example, Calgene, a little
biotech outfit in Davis, California, was
Monsanto knew it couldnt just genetically modify
EverMild
(onion)
LAUNCHED
Fall 2010
AVAILABILITY
September through
March
TRAIT
Mild and sweet, less
tear-inducing
METHOD
Selecting for
individual plants that
have lower levels
of pyruvate, which
afects pungency,
and lachrymatory
factor
REGION GROWN
Pacic Northwest
PRICE
$0.70 to $2 per pound

0 9 3 FEB 2014
building a tomato it called the Flavr Savr.
Conventional tomatoes were harvested
while green, when theyre tough enough
to withstand shipping, and then gassed
with ethylene at their destination to jump-
start ripening. But the Flavr Savr was engi-
neered to release less of an enzyme called
polygalacturonase so that the pectin in its
cell walls didnt break down so soon after
picking. The result was a tomato that farm-
ers could pick and ship ripe.
In the mid-1990s, Monsanto bought Cal-
gene and reassigned Stark, moving him
from Roundup research to head a project
that almost accidentally gured out howto
engineer avor into produce. He began tin-
kering with genes that afect the produc-
tion of ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, an
enzyme that correlates to higher levels of
glycogen and starch in tomatoes and pota-
toes. Translation: more viscous ketchup
and a French fry that would shed less water
when cooked, maintaining mass without
absorbing grease. And he succeeded. The
texture was good, Stark says. They were
more crisp and tasted more like a potato.
They never made it to market. Aside from
consumer backlash, the EPA deemed Star-
Link corn, a new biotech strain from another
company, unfit for human consumption
because of its potential to cause allergic
reactions. Another genetically modded
corn variety seemed to kill monarch but-
teries. Big food conglomerates including
Heinz and McDonaldswhich you might
recognize from their famous tomato and
potato productsabandoned GM ingredi-
ents; some European countries have since
refused to grow or import them. Toss in the
fact that production costs on the Flavr Savr
turned out to be too high and its easy to see
why Monsanto shut down Starks division
in 2001. Large-scale farms growing soy or
cotton, or corn destined for cattle feedor
corn syrupwere happy to plant GM grain
that could resist big doses of herbicide. But
the rest of the produce aisle was a no-go.
Furthermore, genetically modifying
consumer crops proved to be inefficient
and expensive. Stark estimates that add-
ing a new gene takes roughly 10 years and
$100million to go from a product concept
to regulatory approval. And inserting genes
one at a time doesnt necessarily produce
the kinds of traits that rely on the interac-
tions of several genes. Well before their
veggie business went kaput, Monsanto
knew it couldnt just genetically modify its
way to better produce; it had to breed great
vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases
a company mantra: The best gene in the
world doesnt x dogshit germplasm.
What does? Crossbreeding. Stark had an
advantage here: In the process of learning
how to engineer chemical and pest resis-
tance into corn, researchers at Monsanto
had learned to read and understand plant
genomesto tell the diference between
the dogshit germplasm and the gold.
And they had some nifty technology that
allowed them to predict whether a given
cross would yield the traits they wanted.
The key was a technique called genetic
marking. It maps the parts of a genome that
might be associated with a given trait, even if
that trait arises from multiple genes working
in concert. Researchers identify and cross
plants with traits they like and then run mil-
lions of samples from the hybridjust bits
of leaf, reallythrough a machine that can
read more than 200,000 samples per week
and map all the genes in a particular region
of the plants chromosomes.
They had more toys too. In 2006, Mon-
santo developed a machine called a seed
chipper that quickly sorts and shaves of
widely varying samples of soybean germ-
plasm from seeds. The seed chipper lets
researchers scan tiny genetic variations,
just a single nucleotide, to figure out if
theyll result in plants with the traits they
wantwithout having to take the time to
let a seed grow into a plant. Monsanto com-
puter models can actually predict inheri-
tance patterns, meaning they can tell which
desired traits will successfully be passed
on. Its breeding without breeding, plant
sex in silico. In the real world, the odds of
stacking 20 diferent characteristics into a
single plant are one in 2 trillion. In nature,
it can take a millennium. Monsanto can do
it in just a few years.
And this all happens without any genetic
engineering. Nobody inserts a single gene
into a single genome. (They could, and in
fact sometimes do, look at their crosses by
engineering a plant as a kind of beta test.
But those arent intended to leave the lab.)
Stark and his colleagues realized that they
could use these technologies to identify
a cross that would have highly desirable
traits and grow the way they wanted. And
they could actually charge more for it
all the benets of a GMO with none of the
stigma. We didnt have those tools the
rst time around in vegetables, Stark says.
Also in 2005, Monsanto bought the
worlds largest vegetable seed company,
Seminis. Think of it as a wholesale supplier
of germplasm. It turned out Seminis came
with another benet: something in the pipe-
line that Stark could turn into his divisions
rst test product. A decade prior, swash-
buckling plant scientists had discovered
on the limestone clifs of western Sicily a
strain of Brassica villosa, ancestor of mod-
ern broccoli. Thanks to a gene called MYB28,
this weedy atavist produced elevated lev-
els of glucoraphanin. Starks team bred
further enhancements to that antioxidant-
increasing compound into a more familiar-
looking plantgood old broccoli.
In 2010 Monsanto started test- marketing
the new crop, calling it Benefort. The strat-
egy was coming together: enhanced pre-
mium veggies for an elite buyer. Benefort
broccoli came in a bag of ready-to-cook
floretsso convenient!labeled with a
bar graph telegraphing how its antioxi-
dant levels stacked up against regular
broccoli and cauliower. It sold, but Mon-
santo researchers knew that future veg-
gies would need a more compelling hook.
Everybody already knows that theyre sup-
posed to eat their broccoli.
Starks group had one last angle: avor.
In produce, avor comes from a combina-
its way to better produce. It had to breed great vegetables to begin with.

0 9 4 FEB 2014
tion of color, texture, taste (which is to say,
generally, sweetness or lack of bitterness),
and aroma. But the traits that create those
variables are complicated and sometimes
nonobvious.
For example, Monsanto created an
onionthe EverMildwith reduced lev-
els of a chemical called lachrymatory factor,
the stuf that makes you cry. That wasnt too
hard. But making a sweet winter version of
a cantaloupe took more efort. Starks team
rst found genes that helped a French melon
keep from spoiling after harvest. Through
crossbreeding, they learned to keep those
genes turned on. Now farmers could harvest
the melon ripe, and it stayed ripe longer with
full aroma. But the researchers didnt stop
therethey also made sure the fruit had
the gene for citron, a molecule associated
with fruity and oral aromas. They called
the nal product the Melorange.
FIGURING OUT THESE relationships takes
place at a sophisticated sensory and genet-
ics lab perched amid hundreds of acres of
experimental farmland in the rural, sun-
scorched outskirts of Woodland, a farming
town in Californias ag belt. White-coated
scientists hover amid tubs full of fruits
and vegetables in a lab, probing them
with the intensity of forensic investiga-
tors. Penetrometers measure squishiness.
Instruments called Brix meters track sugar
content. Gas spectrographs, liquid chro-
matographs, and magnetic resonance
imagers isolate specic aromatic mole-
cules and their concentrations.
Eventually volunteers eat the experimen-
tal foods and give feedback. In one tasting
session, sensory scientist Chow-Ming Lee
passes out ve plastic cups lled with bite-
size squares of cantaloupe, harvested from
outside and brought in from a store, to a
dozen melon growers and distributors.
Each cup is labeled with a three-digit code.
Score sheets have two columns: Sweet/
Flavorful and Juicy.
After sampling each batch and writing
down their assessments, the participants
punch their scores into devices that con-
nect to Lees laptop, which plots the rooms
general sentiment on a screen along a four-
quadrant grid ranging from low to high a-
vor on one axis and low to high juiciness
on the other. None of the melons manage
to crack the upper corner of the far right
quadrant, the slot Monsanto hopes to ll: a
sweet, juicy, crowd-pleasing melon.
In the adjoining elds a few hours later,
Monsanto breeders Jef Mills and Greg Tolla
conduct a diferent kind of taste test. There
they slice open a classic cantaloupe and
their own Melorange for comparison. Tollas
assessment of the conventional variety is
scathing. Its tastes more like a carrot, he
says. Mills agrees: Its rm. Its sweet, but
thats about it. Its at. I take bites of both
too. Compared with the standard canta-
loupe, the Melorange tastes supercharged;
its vibrant, fruity, and ultrasweet. I want
seconds. Thats the shtick, Mills says.
Of course, sweeter fruit isnt necessar-
ily better fruit, and its perhaps no surprise
White-coated scientists hover amid tubs of fruits
that critics of Monsanto are unconvinced
that this push toward non-GM products
represents good corporate citizenship.
They question whether these new fruits
and vegetables will actually be as healthy as
their untweaked counterparts. In 2013, for
example, consumer-traits researchers pro-
totyped their Summer Slice watermelon,
designed with a more applelike texture (to
cut down on the dreaded watermelon-juice-
dripping-down-your-chin phenomenon
that has scarred so many childhoods). But
the denser texture made it taste less sweet.
So Starks team is breeding in a higher sugar
content. Is that unhealthy? No one really
knows, but its certainly true that the law
doesnt require Monsanto to account for
Frescada
(lettuce)
LAUNCHED
Spring 2012
AVAILABILITY
Year-round
TRAIT
Crisp leaves with a
longer shelf life, plus
146 percent more
folate and 74 percent
more vitamin C than
ordinary iceberg
lettuce
METHOD
Crossing iceberg
lettuce with
romaine lettuce
REGION GROWN
Arizona, California
PRICE
$2.25 to $2.50
per pound

companys steady stream of acquisitions,
which suggests a continuing commitment
to the produce aisle. It owns a greenhouse
in the Guatemalan mountains, where the
dry, warm air allows three or four growth
cycles a yeargreat for research. In 2008
Monsanto bought De Ruiter, one of the
worlds biggest greenhouse seed compa-
nies, and in 2013 it picked up Climate Cor-
poration, a big-data weather company that
can provide intel on what eld traits might
be needed to survive global warming in a
given region. Mark Gulley, an analyst at
BGC Financial, says the company is fol-
lowing the virtuous cycle approach; it
spends heavily on marketing and pours
much of the proceeds back into R&D.
The new crops keep coming. In 2012
Monsanto debuted Performance Series
Broccoli, a conventionally bred line that
stands taller, enabling cheaper, faster
mechanical harvesting as opposed to
handpicking. Breeders are also growing
watermelons with the green-and-white-
striped rind patterns familiar to US con-
sumers but also the tiger-striped variety
favored in Spain and the oval jade version
loved by Australians. Its supposed to
remind you of where you grew up, says
Mills, the Monsanto melon breeder. That
suggests the division plans to be a player in
the trillion-dollar global produce market.
For his part, Stark hopes that when
Monsantos affiliation with some of its
best sellers becomes more widely known,
the company might win back some trust.
There isnt a reputation silver bullet, but
it helps, he says. In that basement dining
room at Monsanto headquarters, he waxes
rhapsodic about the lettuce long after he
has cleaned his plate. During a recent trip to
Holland, where Frescada is gaining popular-
ity, Stark saw folks peeling leaves straight
off the heads and munching them with-
out dressing, like extra-large potato chips.
People just ate it like a snack, which was
not the intent, but Stark trails of and
looks around the room. His napkin is still
on his lap. Hes savoring the potential.
potential long-term efects. (The FDA con-
siders all additive-free, conventionally bred
produce to be safe.) Nobody has ever tin-
kered with sugar levels the way Monsanto is
attempting; its essentially an experiment,
says Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocri-
nologist and president of the Institute for
Responsible Nutrition. The only result
they care about is prot.
Monsanto, of course, denies that charge.
Make fruit taste better and people will eat
more of it. Thats good for society and,
lets face it, good for business, Stark says.
Monsanto is still Monsanto. The com-
pany enforces stringent contracts for
farmers who buy its produce seeds. Just
as with Roundup Ready soybeans, Mon-
santo prohibits regrowing seeds from the
new crops. The company maintains exclu-
sion clauses with growers if harvests dont
meet the standards of rmness, sweetness,
or scentpending strict quality-assurance
checks. The goal is to get the products rec-
ognized by the consumer, trusted, and pur-
chased, Stark says. Thats what I really
want. I want to grow sales. But he gets coy
about the companys longer-term agenda.
Im not sure we ever really projected what
kind of market share well have, he says.
The vegetable division cleared $821 million
in revenue in 2013, a signicant potential
growth area for a $14billiona-year com-
pany that leans heavily on revenue from
biotech corn and soy. More telling is the
and vegetables, probing them with the intensity of forensic investigators.
Agriculture giant Monsanto may be best known for genetic modicationlike cre-
ating corn that resists the efects of Monsantos weed killer Roundup. But when it
comes to fruits and vegetables you buy in the store, genetic modication is of the
menu. Monsanto thinks no one will buy Frankenfoods, so the company is tweaking its
efortscontinuing to map the genetic basis of a plants desirable traits but using that
data to breed new custom-designed strains the way agronomists have for millennia.
Heres how it worksand how the results difer from GMO crops. Thanks to this cross
between high and low tech, a new era of super-produce may be upon us. VICTORIA TANG
The Old Way
1 Identify plants
with recognizable,
desirable traits.
2
Crossbreed those
plants together.
3
Grow the
ofspring.
4
Wait to see if the
traits show up.
Repeat as necessary.
The Genetic
Modication Way
1 Identify plants or
other organisms with
recognizable, desir-
able traits.
2 Isolate the genes that
manifest those traits.
3 Use enzymes to clip
out those genes and
paste them into the
genomes of other
plants, or inject them
using a gene gun
(for real) or by piggy-
backing them on a
bacteria or virus.
4 Grow the plant with
the inserted gene.
If the gene has suc-
cessfully incorpo-
rated into the plant,
youll have a novel
phenotype.
The New
Monsanto Way
1 Identify plants with
recognizable, desir-
able traits.
2 Crossbreed the
plants.
3 Sift through the of-
spring genome for
known markers for
desirable traits.
4 Grow only the plants
with those markers.
I Cant Believe Its Not GMO

Dozens of startups are flocking to the Nevada desert, where ZAPPOS CEO TONY HSIEH is building a

community-powered, whimsy-driven tech mecca. Watch out for the flame-throwing party mantis.
p
e
t
e
r

b
o
h
l
e
r
BY SARA CORBE T T

area about a mile north of the neon blitz of the Strip into an entre-
preneurial tech nirvana. He was hoping to lure a raft of startups to
join him, ofering $50million in seed money, a supportive business
community, and helpful infrastructure. He wanted to do it all fast,
recruiting 10,000 new residents within a span of ve years while
adding restaurants, bars, a members-only dog park, a climbing gym,
coworking spaces, a medical center, and a highly enlightened pre-
school. He was simultaneously going to relocate more than a thou-
sand Zappos employees to spify new headquarters in the middle
of this spify new neighborhood. Never mind that neither Hsieh nor
many of the people hed hired had any experience in urban renewal
or community development or the notorious grinding slowness of
making change in a big city: The website for the Downtown Proj-
ect, as Hsiehs enterprise was formally known, cheerfully declared
its intention to transform downtown Las Vegas into the most
community-focused large city in the world.
He views all of these things as a particu-
lar sort of investment. The mantis, which
was built for Burning Man and is made of
sculpted and riveted steel and mounted
on a truck, is something Hsieh snapped
up for no other reason than he liked it and
thought that a giant pyrotechnic mantis in
his neighborhood on the north side of Las
SARA CORBETT (yocorbett@gmail.com) is the author of A House
in the Sky. This is her rst article for .
ony Hsieh,
CEO of Zappos,
owns a party
bus, a party
house, and what
could be termed
a party insect
a 40-foot-
long praying
mantis that
shoots re from
its antennas.
0 9 8
Vegas might make people smile. The party house was bought for
similar reasons, because Hsieh likes parties, and though he already
often invited friends and neighbors to his sprawling and minimally
furnished apartment, having a house nearby only expanded the
possibilities for fun. (Plus it had a backyard pool.) The bus, a vin-
tage school bus, got everyone where they needed to go.
The 40-year-old Hsieh is legendary for building, in Zappos, a com-
pany that has managed to be both hugely successfulmore than
$2billion in annual salesand hugely high-spirited. One of Zappos
ofcial corporate goals is to create fun and a little weirdness. It
is consistently ranked among the best US companies to work for.
Late in 2011, Hsieh became even more legendary by announcing
almost larkishly that hed be leading a $350million efort to reju-
venate a blighted stretch of Las Vegas downtown, home to some
lower-end casinos and motels and not a whole lot else. His plan was
to spend much of his own personal fortune to transform this lifeless

In November 2012, I make the rst of sev-
eral visits to see what Hsieh is building out
in the Nevada desert. Almost immediately I
am ushered onto the party bus. As will prove
to be true of a lot of things in the neighbor-
hood, the bus belongs to Hsieh but seems to
be used communally. Theres a fully stocked
bar at the back. There are 1970s concert post-
ers pasted to the ceiling. For a while it was
idling in a vacant lot, its stereo cranked high,
but now a boisterous group of party goers is
taking it to a nearby outdoor arts festival.
Just before the driver jams the bus into gear,
I find a seat amid 60 or so mostly young,
mostly tech-oriented women and men who
have either moved to Vegas from out of state
to get involved with the Downtown Project
or have drifted to the downtown neighbor-
hood, if only for an evening, to celebrate
the general transformative spirit of things.
There are some pasty programmer-types
on the bus, some Zappos employees, some
random friends. Hsiehs cousin Jennifer,
who has moved from the Bay Area, is here.
So is Augusta Scott, an older woman wear-
ing a backward-facing baseball cap, who
describes herself as Zappos in-house life
coach. A pair of guys who look like frat
boys but introduce themselves as hackers
hold two cups of beer each.
People on the bus talk about the bus
which is, in fact, a member of a eet of party
buseswith clear afection. They speak
with equal enthusiasm about another bus,
the Delivering Happiness bus, which Hsieh
uses for 11th-hour road trips, like the time
not long ago when everyone piled in and
rode to Arizona to visit an alpaca farm
because, as a blond woman sitting near me
Across from me on the bus sit two men and a woman, members
of a band called Rabbit. A month earlier they uprooted themselves
from Florida and are now livingalongside many of the other
people on the busin the Ogden, an apartment building where
Hsieh leases a number of units and loans them out as live/work
spaces, sometimes in conjunction with coveted startup nanc-
ing. The members of Rabbit dont have nancing, though, or even
a business idea. They have come simply because Hsieh saw them
perform once at a venture-capital conference in Hawaii, told them
he liked their music, and invited them to move to Las Vegas. Other
than that, they arent sure why theyre here.
This is the rst of many odd conversion stories I will hear as
I come and go from Las Vegas, checking in on the nirvana-in-
the-making and Hsiehs growing tribe of recruits: For many
reasonsand sometimes for no reasonpeople seem ready to
drop everything and move to Vegas, as if pulled in by a tractor
beam, lured by Hsiehs below-the-radar charisma, his enormous
ambitions, and an ethos that combines the idealistic, artistic
communalism of Burning Man with the can-do workaholism of
21st- century digital entrepreneurialism.
The whole thing is kind of crazy, says a band member named
Devin, who spent the afternoon working on a sideline freelance
job composing a TV ditty about vege tables.
Emma, the bands vocalist, says, Here youre just surrounded
by people who are huge dreamers.
It is getting hard to talk now, because the stereo volume has
been bumped up and the dreamers around us are all singing. The
bus turns a corner. I am not sure how to feel. Even by the stan-
dards of the tech industry, which exists on the semi permeable
membrane between municence and megalomania, it seems out-
landish. I am wondering how, in an area without a supermarket,
dry cleaner, or single patch of greenery and in a Trumpied city
full of celebrity DJs, Cirque du Soleil trapeze acts, and y-by-
night gamblers but without a signicant population of software
developers, web designers, or venture capitalists, downtown
Vegas will ever compete with Silicon Valley or even Austin or
Boulder. Im wondering how realistic it is to think that a man
standing near me could pump such a vast amount of his own cash
into a place like this, into an idea like this, to x and bolster on
the scale that things need xing and bolstering, and make any of
it last. I have questions about the plausibility of everything, this
grand, civic chimera.
explains almost professorially, Tony has a thing about llamas.
And alpacas, if you think about it, are a lot like llamas.
Standing in the aisle beneath a revolving disco ball and dressed in
a blue T-shirt and jeans is Hsieh himself. His black hair is buzz-cut.
He wears a mirthful Mona Lisa half smile. Nearly every reporter who
has ever met Hsieh has felt compelled to comment on the fact that
he doesnt speak much, that he maintains an alert but unreadable
expression, that for someone who runs one of the highest-revenue
online retailers in the country he is inexplicably and even confound-
ingly mild. But those who know him best seem to appreciate him
for exactly this trait. Hsiehs genius, they say, lies in his tendency
to hang back and observe. He is said to be, above all, a masterful
judge of character and a lover of quirk. Both of these traits helped
him build the ofbeat and chummy corporate culture that distin-
guishes Zapposwhere one of the standard job-interview ques-
tions is On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?and now they
seem to be informing his efort to populate downtown Las Vegas.
Tony collects people, someone tells me later. You almost dont
even realize youre being collected.
Tony collects people.
You almost dont
even realize youre
being collected.


josh cochran

1 0 0

Life in Tony Hsiehs downtown Las Vegas
ofers an intriguing blend of work and
fun, all sufused with a hacky can-do spirit
and a dedication to the community. Plus,
theres an awesome rooftop pool.

But nobody else seems worried. People are singing Ob-La-Di,
Ob-La-Da, and then when Journey comes on, they begin to sway
soulfully, crooning, When the lights go down in the citeeeeee
and the sun shines on the baaaaay
The bus deposits us at the arts festival, amid food trucks and
art stalls and rivers of wandering people. Hsieh waves for me to
join the small pack that is following him. We buy some barbecue
and beer and then nd our way to a stage where a California band
called the Dance tronauts is playingthree DJs dressed in astro-
naut garb, spinning trance music while surrounded by female danc-
ers in furry moon boots. Hsieh says that he himself hired them to
come perform tonight. In fact he joined some other investors to
buy the operating rights to the whole First Friday arts festival in
Las Vegas, which has been around for 11 years but has been under-
going a resurgence since the management change. Hes given it
an infusion of money, hired a few new people, and dialed up the
Dance tronauts. All this too is part of the plan.
We dance for a whileme, Hsieh, Augusta the in-house life
coach, the hackers, and the blonde who explained about llamas.
The music pulses. The onstage dancers strut while a DJ uses a little
cannon to shoot smoke rings at the crowd. The air grows vapor-
ous. The eect is dreamy and odd, almost as if weve unhooked
from one world but havent quite arrived at the next. After a while,
Hsieh taps me on the shoulder.
Come see something, he says.
It is late now, and we lope across a darkened parking lot. The
lot is lled with art trucksmassive, functional, kinetic, scrap-
metal sculptures mounted onto vehicles. But theyve all been
shut down for the night. Except for one. At the far side of the lot,
dramatic against the desert sky, is a two-masted pirate ship built
on a gooseneck trailer and strung with lights and wind- shredded
ags. As we draw closer, I hear music playing. A woman dressed
as a bare- midried pirate wench is dancing by herself on the bow.
Hsieh and I board the ship. On its deck is a collection of carou-
sel horses made of welded metal. Without really discussing it,
we each nd a horse and get on. Someone must have pressed a
button, because the horses start to move, lifting and falling as
the pirate woman, seemingly unaware of our presence, keeps
dancing up front. After a minute, Hsieh stands up on the back of
his metal horse, so I stand up on mine too. He leads and I follow.
There is no reason not to.
We are on the edge of the city. Las Vegas, vast and improb able,
lies glittering ahead in the distance. From my vantage point, Hsieh
is only a silhouette. He looks like an explorer on the prow of a boat,
gazing wordlessly at a lit-up horizon. Already my questions are
beginning to recede. Ive read the early news coverage of what Hsieh
is doing here, and almost always the headlines play o the most
predictable of Las Vegas tropes. This is Hsiehs sic cAmsii. He
is roiiiNc iHi oici. Everything is HicH siAxis. You can
almost feel the media sweating, maybe a touch gleefully, on Hsiehs
behalf, calculating the odds on whether hell ever pull it o. Stand-
ing on his horse, though, Hsieh seems impervious.
After a time, the horses shudder to a stop and we both climb
down. We cross the parking lot, weaving between art trucks that
lie like giant slumbering animals, heading back to find all the
people from the bus. Hsieh, who hasnt said much the whole eve-
ning, seems suddenly energized, tweaked by weird pirate magic.
Doesnt it make you think, he says, about whats pos sible?
1 0 2
Zach Ware
(above), Hsiehs
right-hand man.
Once-decrepit
casinos are being
renovated as
social hubs.

When I first visit, the Downtown Projects headquarters
are located in a wide, uorescent-lit, linoleum-oored room in the
back of an old check-cashing outt on Fremont Street. The build-
ing itself is unremarkable, a narrow midblock storefront with a
couple of dingy back rooms, but Hsieh is clearly fond of it. Mostly
he seems charmed by the sign out front, a wedge-shaped marquee
that reads, in utilitarian block letters, cHicxs cAsHio, which
hes opted to keep in place even after installing his team of about
a dozen people in the back omces. Around the neighborhood, the
omces are known simply as Check-Cashing.
See you at Check-Cashing, Hsieh calls out to coworkers he
passes on the sidewalk or bumps into on the elevator at the Ogden.
Just saying the words seems to make him happy.
The buildings storefront is occupied by one of the Downtown
Projects rst small-business investments, a boutique clothing
store called Coterie, run by an exuberant woman named Sarah
Nisperos. An old friend of Hsiehs, Nisperos has been granted
a $350,000 investment. Her business, located on an otherwise
largely barren block, represents a toehold of prosperity in an
area obviously unaccustomed to prosperity. Some of the neigh-
borhoods more down-on-their-luck residents still totter in on
the first of the month hoping to cash government-assistance
checks but nd instead racks of high-end cocktail dresses and
$40-a-pair mens boxer shorts.
This clearly is the dissonance of transformation. If the Strip is
where visitors sweep in on a tide of promise and ride the wave of
a classic 48-hour all-you-can-everything binge, the downtown
area is the place where grizzled lifers, the people who dont ever
manage to leave, eventually wash up. There is no glitz to be found
downtown. There is instead a very old casino, the El Cortez. Theres
the Downtowner motel, a tattoo parlor, and a pizza place owned
by an Albanian who goes by Uncle Joe.
Joe, whom I meet during a walk with Hsieh, tells me about how it
used to be, not long ago. Street ghts all the time, he says, waving
a hand in front of his face, as if erasing the memory from an invis-
ible chalkboard. It was bad around here. Every day it was bad.
Since Hsieh and his friends began moving into the neighbor-
hood, Joe reports, crime is down and pizza sales are up. Way up.
Things are changing, he says. By this he seems to mean that the
roughness of the neighborhood has been balanced somewhat by
the handfuls of idealistic tech people who now live and work and
generally spend time on his block. The
Ogden, which has 248 condominium units,
had been only about 20 percent occupied
in May 2011 when Hsieh moved in. A year
later, the building is full, with 40 percent
of it leased by the Downtown Project and
the rest appearing to have been snapped
up by young professionals.
Hsieh greets Joe like he greets everyone
he encounters on the street, stopping delib-
erately to chat with a casual familiarity.
Hsieh has steady brown eyes and sculpted
cheekbones that funnel down toward his
mouth. He smiles often but just barely, con-
tributing to an air of general unappabil-
ity. The son of two Taiwanese immigrants,
he was raised in Northern California and
spent his early years experimenting with
entrepreneurship, selling earthworms,
greeting cards, and later, as a student at
Harvard, pizza. His rst business after col-
lege was an Internet advertising startup
called LinkExchange, cofounded in 1996
with his friend Sanjay Madan. They sold
it two years later for $265 million. Hsieh,
24 at the time, was rich, but he realized
that he hadnt been happy.
In his 2010 book, Delivering Happiness,
which is one part autobiography and one
part chipper how-to on building a strong
corporate culture like the one at Zappos,
Hsieh describes how LinkExchanges rapid
growth led to a dissolution of its values and
a lack of community. Too many people, he
concluded, were motivated by money and
short-term reward. Too few were having
fun. For him, going to work had become a
drag. For the company, he wrote, it was like
death by a thousand paper cuts.
Hsiehs life since then is perhaps best
described as a sustained eort to never,
under any circumstances, feel that way
again. He joined Zappos as CEO in 2000,
the year after it was founded, and quickly
instilled an aura of almost fanatically good
vibes, urging employees to form personal
connections with customers, compiling
an annual Culture Book in which workers
share what Zappos means to them, and
providing everything from a nap room to
frequent parades. The company has main-
tained that spirit even as it has grown. In
2009 Amazon purchased the company for
more than $900 million, but it has allowed
Zappos to retain its independence. Hsieh
still serves as CEO, though much of his
time is dedicated to the Downtown Proj-
ect. (When I ask whether the company is

STARTUP FANTASYLAND
Tony Hsieh is revitalizing downtown Las Vegas by investing
in ambitious tech companies and playful small businesses.
Here are some of them. KATIEM. PALMER
Zappos
1 Turntable
Health
2 Downtown3rd
Farmers Market
3 Downtown Proj-
ect headquarters
4 Vegas StrEATS
food trucks
5 Inspire Theater
6 Work in Progress
7 The usr/lib
Worklounge
8 Stitch Factory
9 9th Bridge
School
10 The Hydrant
Club dog park
11 Coterie
12 Gold Spike
hangout space
13 Silver State Pro-
duction Services
14 Fremont East
Studios
15 Worlds Largest
Airstream Hotel
16 Airstream 2 Go
17 La Comida
18 The Beat Coffee-
house & Records
19 Uncle Joes Pizza
20 Eat
21 Mamitas Restau-
rant and Market
22 Wild
23 The Bunkhouse
Saloon
24 CrowdHall
25 Fandeavor
26 Movieline
27 Wellthily
28 Teamly
29 Container Park
30 Fergusons
Motel site
31 John E. Carson
Hotel building
32 The Ogden
33 8th Street
Apartments
34 Towne Terrace
Apartments
Tech startups Restaurants
Mixed-use developments Real estate
Small businesses Coworking spaces Community
Romotive has grown from three employees
to 15 and now leases 11 units in the Ogden.
We speak while sitting at a table in Romo-
tives main apartment/ofce. Behind us, in
an open kitchen, Bobby Walter, who serves
as company accountant as well as in-house
chef, unwraps packages of sausages to put
into a lunchtime jambalaya for the team.
Rinaudo concedes that it has been harder
to persuade new hires, especially people
with families, to uproot themselves and
move here, but hes rm about the benets
of being in Vegas. Space for both living and
working is readily available, making it easier
for the company to grow.
Its easy to nd a kind of autonomy here
too. Rinaudo describes Hsieh as a bene-
cent and hands-off godfather, happy to
ofer advice when needed but never hover-
ing or second-guessing. Rinaudo is pleased
to launch a company away from what he
calls the mercenary ADD of the Bay Area.
sufering at all given his divided attention, Hsieh answers with
a icker of defensiveness: I would say that putting my time into
the neighborhood is actually the best thing I could be doing for
the company right now.)
As we amble around downtown Las Vegas, Hsieh carries a Mac-
Book Air under one arm and keeps the other hand jammed into a
pocket of his jeans. He seems, in his mind, to be carefully tracking
what everyone around him is doing, how they contribute to the
overall plan. During the course of a couple of days, Hsieh intro-
duces me to probably 40 people, often while hes standing in the
glaring sunlight on the Fremont Street sidewalk, never once for-
getting a name or a critical detail, never failing to emphasize both
the whimsy and the ambition of his people and their plans.
This is Zubin, he says. Hes going to revolutionize health
care. Or This is Candin. Shes making an educational videogame
about American presidents, where they have stghts and stuf.
Many of the people we encounter are the beneciaries of the
Downtown Projects largesse, having received seed money from
Hsiehs VegasTechFund. Of the $350million total commitment,
$200million is going toward buying real estate in the neighbor-
hoodHsieh and his team are snapping up old motel complexes
and commercial buildings that havent flourished in decades.
Another $50million has been earmarked for small businesses,
$50million goes to the TechFund, and $50million more is being
steered toward improving education, including the development
of a private preschool.
Hsieh, for his part, seems delighted in his seedling investments.
Somepeople have gone through an informal pitch process. Others
appear to be friends, or friends of friends, whose business plans
have been vetted by members of the Downtown Project team.
Some of the startups that the TechFund has invested in include
a digital-media branding company, a car-sharing network, and
a robotics company called Romotive whose three founders relo-
cated from Seattle and are now working out of the Ogden, shipping
miniature iPhone-powered robots from a spare bedroom on the
21st oor. Of all the new companies in residence on the downtown
frontier, Romotive appears to be growing the fastest.
We didnt come here for the money, cofounder Keller Rinaudo
tells me during my 2012 visit, explaining that the company has rst-
round funding from the TechFund and several other sources. Instead,
he says, they were motivated by the intimacy of the Las Vegas entre-
preneurial community. Since its move to the desert a year earlier,
In Las Vegas, theres
a chance of building
a tribe of people
who love each other.
1 0 4

Here we can build our own culture from scratch, he says. Out
there, the access to capital is so easy and everybody wants to be
the founder of their own company. Loyalty is less valued. He
pauses to look back at Walter standing over the stove, tending
to a pan of sizzling chopped vegetables. I dont think theres a
chance there of building a tribe of people who love each other,
he says, and thats what weve built here.
ny time I go to downtown Las Vegas, Hsieh seems to be in
deliberate public orbit, tending to the growing tribe. He lingers
in the lobby of the Ogden, chats people up at a cofee shop called
the Beat, and stops to visit the architects charged with many of
the grand-scale conversions under way: A run-down Motel6 has
been razed to make room for an outdoor mall, which will be built
out of stacked shipping containers; a corner building that previ-
ously held a 7-Eleven is being refashioned into a 150-seat theater
called Inspire. By the time I visit in spring 2013, the Downtown
Projects staff has grown so big they have left Check-Cashing
and are operating out of various other coworking spaces and
newly opened cafs around the neighborhood. Dropping by
Coterie one afternoon, Hsieh props his laptop on a shelving
unit stufed with graphic T-shirts and CONTINUED ON PAGE 106
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spends 20 minutes answering emails.
He refers to what he is doingthe open
and ambulatory nature of his daysas being
collisionable. Hsieh is a believer in the idea,
popular in organizational psychology, that
random, unplanned interactions between
people often yield the most innovative results.
His life, as I witness it, involves the same raft
of scheduled business meetings youd expect
any busy CEO to have. (Hsiehs daily agenda,
along with those of most Downtown Proj-
ect team members and even visiting guests,
is rigorously maintained by one of several
time ninjas on staf.) But those meetings
almost always take place in a bar or a cofee
shop or an open workspace, leaving plenty of
room for casual bump-ins and idle chat on the
edges. I see him kick of meetings with whis-
key shots. I see him rush of to get his head
shaved in front of hundreds of Zappos employ-
ees for the companys bald and blue mass-
shaving event held with the Blue Man Group.
More than once, I watch him rearrange other
peoples dinner plans so that new parties can
be added to the table. Or he may expand his
own plans, collecting tag alongs as he moves
around until, by the end of the night, what
might have started as an intimate get- together
now includes a wandering ock of 20 or more.
Visiting entrepreneurs continuously roam
the neighborhood. Many of them are from
the Bay Area, in Las Vegas for a few days to
check out the scene and meet with those who
have already staked a claim here. Some seem
clearly on the hunt for Hsiehs coveted invest-
ment money. Others appear merely curious
about the broader attempt at alterna- culture.
Hsieh squires bloggers, celebrities, and bil-
lionaires around town, looping them through
the neighborhood and over the sweltering
sidewalks, pointing out whats already there
and, more important, whats still to come. Elon
Musk has walked around. Ashton Kutcher
has walked around. Tyra Banks has walked
around. Everybody collisions, almost patho-
logically, with everybody.
Its the Downtown Projects big bet, Hsieh
says, that a focus on collisions, community,
and colearning will lead to happiness, lucki-
ness, innovation, and productivity. Its not
even so big a bet, he adds. Research has
been done about this on the ofce level. Its
just never really been applied in a consoli-
dated way to a city revitalization project.
Much of the collisioning and communing
is taking place at Eat, a restaurant owned by
Natalie Young, a chef who never had her own
place until Hsieh and the Downtown Project
blessed her with a generous startup invest-
ment and help with everything from account-
ing to permitting. The restaurant is surrounded
by vacant properties and faces an empty lot.
Like Coterie, it has the feeling of an outpost,
but one that has been embraced with a kind of
were-all-in-this- together brand of ferocity. On
a winter day early in 2013, the restaurant teems
with chattering customers at lunch. Young is
working more hours than she imagined pos-
sible and turning a prot several months ahead
of schedule. It is the community, she says, that
is respon sible for her success. Around down-
town, the community is often referred to as if
it were a single organism, a living thing. Hsieh
has frequently invoked the idea, oft- repeated
by his acolytes, that any business should be
evaluated not just on its return on investment
but its ROCreturn on community. If any of it
sounds odd and cultish, Young doesnt care.
Once a month I have to come out and take a
picture because the scenery changes so much,
she says, describing the neighborhood. The
changes here are no joke. When people hear
me speak they say, You drank the Kool-Aid,
and Im like, Yup, and it tastes real good.
All this, Hsieh says to me one after-
noon in May, is kind of a semi- brainstorm. We
are outdoors, on a corner lot that sits between
the Ogden and the old Las Vegas city hall, soon
to house Zappos new headquarters. Its 100
degrees out, but Hsieh seems unfazed. He steps
through a gate leading to a fenced outdoor
courtyard and waves me inside. This is the
Gold Spike Hotel and Casino, freshly purchased
by the Downtown Project and in the throes of
being reimagined for the community.
Until recently, the Gold Spike advertised
Sexy Blackjack and $1 Shots and featured
waitresses in high heels and short shorts. Now,
though, having been shuttered for a hasty reno-
vation, its reopening, without its casino, as a
smoke-free bar and restaurant and 24-hour
hangout space. The former casinos res-
taurant menu has been upgraded to include
healthier food like lettuce cups and portobello
burgers. The video poker and slot machines
have been stripped from the bar area, replaced
by free high-speed Wi-Fi, an electrical outlet at
every other barstool, anda hallmark of Hsieh-
ian whimsya giant cornhole game, a giant ver-
sion of Jenga, and a giant shufe board court.
It can seem, just as Hsieh says, like down-
town Las Vegas is one enormous in- progress
brainstorm, a fantastically bankrolled exercise
in municipal free association. At his apartment
in the Ogden, where he often hosts meetings,
Hsieh maintains a wide
wall covered in multi-
colored Post-it notes
filled with ideas from
the community about
what the neighborhood
still needs. (Hardware
store! Gay bar! Commu-
nity garden! Cupcakes!)
Rather than actively
recruit personnel to ll
various niches, Hsieh
and his team encour-
age people who show
interestor who inter-
est themto come visit,
stay for a while, and nd
their own way. Newcom-
ers sometimes live for months free of charge in
the Ogden, courtesy of Hsieh, with no require-
ment but that they collision freely and enthu-
siastically with others.
Doubters have no place in the ecosystem.
Pragmatists stand little chance. A love of
hyperbole prevails. Hsieh and his crew have
plans to build the countrys largest rock-
climbing wall, to install the fastest free public
Wi-Fi, to develop the most innovative trans-
portation system. At a meeting discussing the
construction of the dog park, Hsieh suggests
they build the worlds largest re hydrant to
plunk at its center. Because, well, why not?
We do things kind of hacky is how Zach
Ware, one of Hsiehs top deputies at the
Downtown Project, puts it. Ware, a clean-
cut, 32-year-old former product develop-
ment manager at Zappos, is spearheading
mul tiple projects around townthe renova-
tion of city hall, the construction of cowork-
ing spaces, the transportation system, which
will be membership-based and include shared
cars, bikes, and even planes.
Hsiehs tight-knit utopia, however, has
endured some setbacks. In January 2013, in
an incident that rocked the downtown com-
munity and made headlines around the coun-
try, a well-known entrepreneur named Jody
Sherman committed suicide on a quiet coun-
try road outside of Las Vegas. He had moved
his company, Ecomom, from Los Angeles in
2011, having been the recipient of one of the
TechFunds rst investments. Within weeks
of his death, the company folded, leaving 28
employees out of work. Not long afterward,
Romotive, the robot company and crown
jewel of Vegas-based start ups, having closed
its second round of funding, announced it
was moving its operations to San Francisco.
In a pained- sounding open letter, Rinaudo
thanked the Downtown Project and commu-
nity members profusely, saying that the move
was necessitated by his companys need to be
in close proximity to strategic partners and
to woo brilliant senior talent.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the community
spun Romotives departure as positive, proof
of Hsiehs vision of Las Vegas as a startup
I dont want to leave
this place, one
Zappotopian says, but
sometimes I do.
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incubator. We think it demonstrates that
downtown Las Vegas is an awesome place to
launch and build a company, Ware said at the
time, reminding everyone of the more than 20
other promising start ups still in residence.
There are smaller, more predictable issues
as well. A recent East Coast college grad tells
me that he nds the dating pool to be lamen-
tably small. I walk into one of the elevators
at the Ogden late one night and overhear
a residenta member of the tech commu-
nitycomplaining tipsily to a friend about
the claustrophobia that comes from knowing
everybody around you, collisioning with the
same people all the time. I dont want to leave
this place, he says, but sometimes I do.
One afternoon in September, I go for
another stroll around downtown Las Vegas
with Don Welch, a former New York invest-
ment banker who is now in charge of small
businesses for the Downtown Project. Another
season has passed. The wheel has revolved
again, bringing Hsiehs neighborhood another
click closer to maturation. As in previous visits,
I still pass empty lots and abandoned buildings
and sidewalk brochure dispensers advertis-
ing irii coiiici ciris iN Your room.
There are still some sun-beaten drunk people
loitering on Fremont Street. The morning news
still carries reports of neighborhood crime.
But maybe because Ive now been here a few
times, or maybe because I am with Welch
who has spent the past two years working
with Hsieh, who sees the neighborhood as he
doesI notice these things less.
The new Zappos campus is now fully built,
and the rst groups of employees have moved
in. A 65-acre open-access Wi-Fi network is in
the works. The outdoor mall made of ship-
ping containers looks half nished. An Air-
stream village and an outdoor concert space
are nearly complete (having been overseen in
part by some members of Rabbit who are now
formally employed by the Downtown Project).
Ground has been broken on a neighborhood
medical center. The long- discussed preschool
(overseen by Welchs wife, Connie Yeh, who
is also Hsiehs rst cousin) has enrolled its
rst class of students. Everywhere we look,
some sort of change seems to be under way.
This is going to be a ower shop with an
architect studio up top, Welch says, gestur-
ing to part of a two-story hotel building they
are reno vating, with mul tiple wide windows
fronting the street. This is going to be a juice
bar, he says, his nger moving between win-
dows. Thats going to be a sushi place over
there, with a doughnut shop next to it. And
up there will be a yoga space. A block later,
he is at it again: This is going to be a fried-
chicken place. This will be a vegan restaurant.
He shows me the future nail salon and wine
bar and places where they are still waiting for
city permits to come through. (Everything
takes longer and is more expensive than we
thought it would be, Welch admits.)
Its easy to believe in all thats coming.
And Im not the only one. Over the months, a
second ary wave of immigrants and investors
has been drawn to downtown Las Vegas
people outside the Downtown Project but
clearly inspired by it. Tech businesses are being
launched out of low-slung ranch houses along
an area informally known as the startup block.
A New Yorkbased videogame company is
renovating a space not far from the Ogden and
has said it will bring 150 employees to the city.
A couple of new restaurants have popped up,
bringing more foot tramc to Fremont Street.
One evening, the community gathers to cele-
brate the opening of a Mexican restaurant
called La Comida, owned by Michael Morton, a
well-known restaurateur. Hsieh himself shows
up, as does his giant praying mantis art truck,
which is parked on the street in front of the res-
taurant, its spiny arms lofting over the crowd,
its triangular headoperated by a driver sit-
ting behind its wingsswerving left and right,
as if to take in the scene. Every few minutes,
from its pipelike antennas, it lets out a cannon-
like noise and shoots plumes of gas re rippling
into the dark sky. It is charming and mystical
and just plain funny. But it feels almost deant
too, as if its pushing back against the worlds
less wacky, less idealistic people, its skeptics
and doubtersall the people who might never
believe an urban neighborhood can be built
primarily on friendliness and free thinking.
On my last night in Vegas, I meet up with a
few people on the patio of a Fremont Street
bar called Park. One of them is Cathy Brooks,
who spent 20 years working in communica-
tions and tech start ups in San Francisco before
moving to Las Vegas in early 2013, drawn by
Hsieh and his plans. She is now the owner of
the much-anticipated dog park, called the
Hydrant Club. Already Brooks is feeling a sen-
timental sort of pride. Even if what were
doing doesnt succeed to everyones wildest
dreams, and I actually believe it will, she says,
downtown has already changed.
The sun is setting when a strapping guy with
an easy smile shows up and orders a beer. This
is Gerome Sapp, the 33-year-old founder of
a social media company called Fluencr.com,
which hes in the process of transplanting from
Austin. Seven days earlier, he formalized a
round of funding from Hsiehs TechFund. Since
then hes been driving around with a real estate
agent, looking for a place to live. It turns out
that, beyond the genial community of entre-
preneurs and artists, not everyone sees down-
town as Tony Hsieh does. I keep telling her I
want to be downtown, Sapp announces to the
people at the bar table. But she says, No, no.
Dont do that. Downtowns a ghetto.
He shrugs and shakes his head, as if aston-
ished by the agents blindness, as if she sees
nothing where he sees everything. It is, after
all, only a matter of perception. You just need to
get on the bus. She can think what she wants,
Sapp says, grinning at everyone around him,
but this is my place.
1 0 8
COLOPHON
Last Thanksgivukkah for thousands of years,
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day 7,250 years ago when an early human
laid down indelible footprints in the Mexican
desert; 21-Decthats when the print maga-
zine went to press; tea for two; date shakes;
October 13, 2012, when our OkCupid hacker
met his future wife for sushi; May Day at
Tacolicious; The Dusted Sessions.
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1 1 0 FEB 2014
by Robert Capps
A FLOWCHART
IS THE NSA
SPYING ON ME?
DO YOU USE A
COMPUTER?
YES NO
WOW.
BET YOU THOUGHT
YOU WERE SAFE.
A CELL PHONE?
YES NO
DO YOU ACCESS
THE WEB?
YES NO
DO YOU USE
GOOGLE?
YES NO
DO YOU USE
YAHOO?
YES NO
EVER BOMB A
PUNCH LINE?
YES NO
JOKES ON YOU!
DO YOU USE A
TELEPHONE?
YES NO
VOIP OR SKYPE?
YES NO
VERIZON?
YES NO
DO YOU CALL
PEOPLE WHO HAVE
VERIZON?
YES NO
DO YOU USE
FACEBOOK?
YES NO
DO YOU USE
EMAIL?
YES NO
ARE YOU FRIENDS
WITH SOMEONE FROM
ANOTHER COUNTRY?
YES NO
BUT YOU MAKE
PHONE CALLS, RIGHT?
YES NO
DO YOU
WORK FOR THE
NSA?
YES NO
ARE YOU THE
DIRECTOR?
YES NO
EVER SEARCH FOR
HOW TO MAKE A BOMB?
YES NO
ARE YOU WEARING
A TINFOIL HAT?
YES NO
EVER MENTION
A BOMB TO SOMEONE
ONLINE?
YES NO
yes
OK, maybe not.

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The Seiko Nation is progressively connected by a drive for relentless innovation. Landon Donovan shares Seikos passion for progress. With winning moves,
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When youre not wearing it, it goes to sleep. Put it on, the hands return to the correct time. With a perpetual calendar, its another way Seiko puts progressive
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2
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AVAI LABLE AT
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