p.66 p.108 p.

34
_ Supercomputers _ Tony Fadell Gets _ Behind the Scenes of
and Killer Storms Back at Silicon Valley Stranger Things, Season 2

p.80
in the Time of

When
androids
behave
just

how
will
humans
behave
with
each
other?

by Alex Mar
november 2017
| it's uncanny
 25.11
LAUNCH

HE HAS ALREADY CHOSEN

THE NEXT MONSTER.

PAGE 66

NOV 2017 DAN WINTERS 0 0 3

 25.11
FE ATURES

108
Payback Time
Tony Fadell created the iPod
and Nest, then lost control
of them. His next project could
be his most ambitious yet:
taking on Silicon Valley itself.
BY ADAM FISHER

80
Love in the Time
of Robots
Hiroshi Ishiguro builds
androids. Beautiful, realistic,
uncannily convincing human
replicas. But his true quest
is to untangle the ineffable
nature of connection itself.
BY ALEX MAR

98
Invisible Forest
For years, timber barons
in the Amazon have
sent lumber to the US by
the shipload. But many
of the groves they harvested
from were pure fiction.
BY RICHARD CONNIFF

NOV 2017 NADAV KANDER 0 0 5

 CONTENTS

25.11
24 Whats the Deal
Cracking the
construction code GADGET LAB
3 Launch 24 Angry Nerd 49 Fetish: Switch Blades
Noted by the editor Taylor Swift is a lizard person Stone Ageinspired slicers

10 Release Notes 50 Head-to-Head: Cyber Chefs

Behind the scenes of this issue 26 Ready to Rock
The director of Thor casts himself App-controlled induction burners

12 Comments
Reader rants and raves 28 Just Google It 52 Gearhead: Rich Pour
A short history of a newfound verb Essentials for a perfect cup of joe

30 Infoporn: Data Leaks 54 Fetish: Cool Whip

AALPHA The rise of hacking and phishing The best immersion blender ever

32 Mapping the Future 56 Top 3: Temp Workers

Cartography stages a comeback Instant-read kitchen thermometers

15
58 Gearhead: Upper Crust
34 The right tools make baking your
own pizza as easy as pie

60

Argument Benchmark: Saran Wrap

On the moral failings of Twins Speak From WWII plane protector to
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook The Duffer brothers on the return microwave staple
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
of Stranger Things

62 Too Many Ingredients

18 Past Master 38 Our Selfies, Ourselves Ready-to-cook meal kits are conve-
Meet tech archivist Leslie Berlin An analysis of social media nient, but the recipe needs tweaking
self-portraits

20 Invasion of the Food Bots

One robo-ramen, coming right up 38 How to Finsta
Tips for your fake
Instagram account FILE: //
22 40 The Moon or Bust 66 Into the Vortex
The Martians Andy Weir on his new The quest to build computer
novels lunar colony models of massive superstorms
BY BRANTLEY HARGROVE

42 Mr. Know-It-All
Should I confess my internet stalking
to my date?
BY JON MOOALLEM
SIX BY SIX
44 Grain, Elevated
A defunct silo becomes an amazing 118 Stories by Wired readers
new museum

The Feline Gaze 46 Antisocial Media

A cat of Instagram makes Not every message has to go viral ON THE COVER
his MoMA debut BY CLIVE THOMPSON Sculpture for Wired by ELASTIC

0 0 6 NOV 2017
 RELEASE NOTES

face were so gentle,

says Mar, author of
the occult explora-
tion Witches of Amer-
ica. A lab assistant
spoke through it in a
very sweet voice,
and I was completely
sold. In Japan, she
Rebecca says, people laugh
Flint Marx off the American fear
Are selfies the prod- that robots will over-
uct of a self-obsessed throw ustheyre
generation? Rebecca actually more likely
Flint Marx, who got to become our com-
into them before panions, and in the
camera phones were course of her report-
even a thing, doesnt ing, Mar began to
necessarily think so, accept the idea of
and in Our Selfies, human-android rap-
Ourselves, on page port. We think were
38, she explores so unique and that
(with the help of a we require human
selfie semiotician) beings to interact

PHOTOGRAPHS BY REBECCA FLINT MARX (FLINT MARX); LAUREN JOSEPH (MURROW); HEIDI HARTWIG (MAR); HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES (THE KISS)
what celebrities from with, she says. That
James Franco to may not be true.
Amber Rose are
really saying when
they put pictures of
themselves on social
media. Sometimes

selfies are just a
show of shallow
Wireds David Moretti vanity, says Flint
(center) at Elastic with
the production stu- Marx, who also
dios art director Max writes about
Ulichney (left) and cre- food-serving robots Lauren Murrow
ative director Andy Hall. on page 20. But Senior editor Lauren
sometimes they are Murrow edits fea-
ALMOST HUMAN a way of asserting tures that are 6,000
your identity and words long and
who you want to be front-of-book stories
portrayed as. that are 600 words
long. She also has an
eye for micro-fiction:

L
Each month, she sifts
through thousands
OVE IN THE TIME OF ROBOTS (page 80) grapples with a robot- of submissions to
pick a six-word story
icists lifelong questboth timeless and ultramodernto (the form dates back
truly understand another person. For the accompanying to a famous piece
cover, the first image that came to my about baby shoes,
generally attributed
mind connecting man and machine was Alex Mar to Ernest Heming-
Robby the Robot holding a human fig- When Alex Mar vis- way) to be illustrated
ure on the movie poster for the 1956 film ited legendary on Wireds back
android maker Hiro- page. Her advice?
Forbidden Planet, says creative director shi Ishiguro (Love in Be original, unex-
David Moretti. So he called Elastic, the Santa Mon- the Time of Robots), pected, and a little
ica, California, production studio behind the title she at first found his weird. Think youve
toddler-sized robot got six words of
sequences for HBO shows like Game of Thrones and the stuff of my worst literary genius burn-
Westworld. Moretti and the Elastic team didnt nightmares. But as ing a hole in your
just take inspiration from iconic images of robots, she cradled the bot brain? See page
in Ishiguros lab, her 118 for next months
thoughthey also drew from classical depictions resistance melted. assignment and
of human connection, like Auguste Rodins The Kiss. Its movements and start micro-writing.

0 1 0 ANNA GOLDWATER ALEXANDER NOV 2017

 COMMENTS
From an online
onliine
exchange regarding
Robopocalypse
KEEP CALM AND INTERNET ON Not, James Suro
wieckis essay
arguing that auto
mation wont take
away all our jobs.
WIRED has always been optimistic about the future. But we know Its true that pro
ductivity growth
things can get scary. In the September issue we looked at what we is low, and its
called the Great Tech Panic of 2017 to put our anxieties into perspec also true that this
tive. James Surowiecki marshaled economic data to cut through the means AI isnt
taking away jobs
fear of AI replacing workers. Nicholas Thompson chronicled Insta right now.Thats
grams attempts to make its platform kinder, and Virginia Heffer
Heffer because AI doesnt
nan meditated on how to escape from the uncanniest of valleys, the exist yet. My best
read of the evi
internet. In confronting fear, we swear by hard numbers, clear analy dence is that well
sis, and respectful debate (and maybe some controlled breathing). see the first glim
mers of true AI in
about 10 years
so of course its not
Re: The Confessions: What if your secrets became public?
WE WOULD BECOME IMMUNE
TO IT QUICKLY AND WOULD BE
FURTHER DESENSITIZED.
Marley Mane on Facebook
Re: Trolls Across
America: Where
the toxic comments
Re: Mr. Nice Guy: Instagrams fine, but Id worry about censor come from toxic cities. Fwiw,
Kevin Systrom wants to clean up ship. How confident is Instagram The data showing
the &#%$@! internet that its algorithms will encour Vermont to be the
Systroms got a point, but I also age the activity they are trying to state with the most
think unsavory comments have promote? Im glad theyre trying internet trolls is due,
become an expected part of the to make social networks better in part, to the old
internet. As long as users can places, but at what cost? percapita challenge.
block unwanted comments, its Conrad Fickett on Facebook We have one of the
0 1 2 NOV 2017
@WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM
reflected
refl
flected in the
current productivity
statistics.
Kevin Drum, writer,
MotherJones.com
Id want to see
more evidence of
job displacement
coming from the
information tech
nology we already
havemuch of
which can simulate
our analytical capa
bilities just fine
before I believe
that AI will replace
[all human skills]
and the jobs that
rely on them.
Ezra Klein, founder,
Vox.com
smallest state pop
ulations. A few bad
apples can really
skew the data.
Michael on
wired.com
Youre absolutely
right; thats some-
thing we mention in
the story when we
talk about the least
almost twice as many
comments come from
Vermont than from
taciturn North Dakota,
which has a larger
population. Sarah
Fallon, articles editor
ARGUMENT

THE RECKONING
WHOLL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
FOR FACEBOOK? ALPHA

by Virginia Heffernan

JUST AFTER THE collapse of the

World Trade Center in 2001, Les-
lie E. Robertson, the twin tow-
ers chief engineer, plunged into a
period of moral reckoning.
As a young hotshot in the
1960s, Robertson had defied
the engineering establishment
to erect the iconic skyscrapers.
Now, at age 73, he brooded. Over
and over, observers suggested
that the arrogant silhouette of
the towers was their undoing.
Robertson seemed surpassingly
sad. He emailed a colleague in
verse: It is hard /But that I had
done a bit more / Had the tow-
ers stood up for just one minute
longer / It is hard. As The
Wall Street Journal reported,
when asked at a public forum if
he wished he had done anything
differently, he wept.
But Robertson also conducted
a careful audit of his work. The
blueprints, the physics, the math
came in for close review. He knew
he had designed the buildings
expressly to brook the impact
of an airliner. But flaming jet fuel
had brought them down. He con-
cluded that inoculating the tow-
ers against those all-consuming
fires would not have been fea-
sible. You could always
prepare for more and more

NOV 2017 DOUG CHAYKA 0 1 5


extreme events, but there has to be a risk
analysis of whats reasonable, Robertson
told a Newsweek reporter. In his reckoning,
Robertson managed to avoid the twin seduc-
tions of defensiveness and self-savagery
and took responsibility for his work.
Mark Zuckerberg, an engineer in another
key, has also seen his magnum opus breached,
with a force that may yet shatter it. Over the
past two and a half years, Facebooks integrity
as a place that helps you connect and share
with the people in your life has been all but
laid to wasteas it has served as a clearing-
house for propaganda, disinformation, fake
news, and fraud accounts. More serious still:
Facebook may not just have been vulnera-
ble to information warfare; it may have been
complicit.
But Zuckerberg has been unaccountably
slow to make earnest amends. In November,
fresh off the US election, he rejected as crazy
the idea that fake news on Facebook had influ-
enced the race. When President Obama report-
edly urged Zuckerberg to take seriously that
Facebook could be exploited by hostile pow-
ers intent on undermining democracy, even
then Zuckerberg shrugged.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg whistled in the
dark, lighting off on a 50-state walkabout
dense with Insta opportunities. It looked for
all the world like he was running for president
himself. That impression was bolstered when
he later hired Joel Benenson, a former cam-
paign adviser to Obama and Hillary Clinton.
As the summer wore on, it became unmis-
takable that Facebooks problems ran deeper
than fake news. In June, Facebook officials
reportedly met with the Senate Intelligence
Committee as part of that bodys investiga-
tion into Russias election interference. In
August the BBC released an interview with
a member of the Trump campaign saying,
Without Facebook we wouldnt have won.
At last, in September, Facebook broke its
silence. The company admitted it had received
payments for ads placed by organizations
likely operated out of Russia. These were
Virginia Heffernan (@page88) wrote about
the internets uncanny valley in issue 25.09.
0 1 6 NOV 2017
ALPHA
troll operations with a wide range of phony
ads designed to fan the flames of American
racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for
gunsas well as to build opposition to Clinton.
Zuckerberg announced that the ads had been
turned over to Congress, and he intimated that
an internal investigation at Facebook would
likely turn up more such ad deals: We are
looking into foreign actors, including addi-
tional Russian groups and other former Soviet
states, as well as organizations like the cam-
paigns, to further our own understanding of
how they used all of our tools.
The statement sounded more like fact-
finding than soul-searching. Zuckerberg
seemed to be surveying a different Facebook
from the one that allowed possibly Kremlin-
backed entities to target people who like
hate speech with racist propaganda. A Face-
book like that would need a gut renovation;
Zuckerbergs Facebook just needed tweaks.
Facebook is indeed a new world order. It
determines our digital and real-world behav-
ior in incalculable ways. It does all this with-
out any kind of Magna Carta except a vague
hypothesis that connectivity is a given good.
And yes, its largely unregulated, having styled
itself as nothing more than a platforma
Switzerland pose that lets it seem as benign
as its bank-blue guardrails, which stand as a
kind of cordon sanitaire between Facebook
and the rest of the unwashed internet.
In 2006, a college kid talked me off Myspace
and onto Facebook by insisting that Facebook
was orderly while Myspace was emo and
messy. That kid was right. Facebook is not
passionate; its blandly sentimental. It runs
on Mister Rogers stuff: shares and friends and
likes. Grandparents and fortysomethings are
not spooked by it. Like the animated confetti
that speckles Facebooks anodyne interface,
our lives on Facebookthe bios and posts
seem to belong to us and not to the companys
massive statehouse, which looks on indif-
ferently as we coo over pups and newborns.
(Or is it a penal colony? In any case, it keeps
order.) Facebook just is the internet to huge
numbers of people. Voters, in other words.
But that order is an illusion. Nothing
about Facebook is intrinsically organized
or self-regulating. Its terms of service change
fitfully, as do its revenue centers and the ratio
of machine learning to principled human
FACEBOOK IS A
NEW WORLD ORDER
WITHOUT ANY KIND
OF MAGNA CARTA.
stewardship in making its wheels turn. The
sheen of placidity is an effect of software
created by the same mind that first launched
Facemasha mean- spirited hot-or-not
comparison sitebut then reinvented it as
Facebook, an online directory, to prevent
anyone from shutting it down. The site was
designed to make the libertarian chaos of
the web look trustworthy, standing against
the interfaces of kooky YouTube and artsy
Myspace. Those places were Burning Man.
Facebook was Harvard.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose book about
Facebook, Anti-Social Media, comes out next
year, describes Zuckerberg as a bright man
who would have done well to finish his educa-
tion. As Vaidhyanathan told me, He lacks an
appreciation for nuance, complexity, contin-
gency, or even difficulty. He lacks a historical
sense of the horrible things that humans are
capable of doing to each other and the planet.
Zuckerberg may just lack the moral frame-
work to recognize the scope of his failures
and his culpability. Like Robertson, he was
a defiant hotshot when he launched Face-
book. Maybe he still is. Its hard to imagine
he will submit to truth and reconciliation,
or use Facebooks humiliation as a chance
to reconsider its place in the world. Instead,
he will likely keep lawyering up and gun it
on denial and optics, as he has during past
litigation and conflict.
To be sure, unlike on 9/11, there are no mass
casualties; theres no flaming wreckage. But
that may only heighten how important it is
for Zuckerberg to take responsibility. Because
there are 2 billion of us on Facebook. Were
all inside his tower. And, heaven help us, we
have nowhere else to go.
 ALPHA

FROM THE
VALLEYS
VAULT:

LUNCH GOALS
Eating off-campus once
promoted cross-industry
pollination, Berlin says.
Todays in-house kitchens
have their benefits, but I
do wonder what is lost.

MIXED FEELINGS
Now, tech is a big critic of
big government. But after
facing competition from
Japanese manufacturers
in the 80s, the microchip
industry was saved only
by tariffs and legislation.

THE STARTUP MYTH

The Valley has always
had huge companies,
not just scrappy startups.
They bring in all the
engineers and then they
all leave. Thats where
startups come from.

PAST MASTER
WHO: Leslie Berlin, SILICON VALLEY job perks are
project historian mythic. Self-replenishing snacks.

HAIR AND MAKEUP BY SARA CHESTNUTT-FRY; ILLUSTRATIONS BY LEANDER ASSMANN

for the Silicon
Unlimited vacation. A pile of

TECHS ARCHIVIST
Valley Archives
at Stanford Uni- stock options. But as much as
versity these professional entrapments
might seem like a dotcom-era
LAST BOOK: The Man Behind
the Microchip: phenomenon, the practice of sweetening the deal for tech employees dates back to the 70s
Robert Noyce as a way to ward off labor unions. Happy workers, explains Stanford historian Leslie Berlin,
and the Invention
are less likely to agitate for better conditions. That insight is just one of many in Berlins
of Silicon Valley
(2005) new book, Troublemakers. While piecing together a timeline of the Valleys early history
picture end-to-end sheets of paper covered in black dotsBerlin was amazed to discover a
NEW BOOK: Troublemakers:
period of rapid-fire innovation between 1969 and 1976 that included the first Arpanet trans-
Silicon Valleys
Coming of Age, mission; the birth of videogames; and the launch of Apple, Atari, Genentech, and major VCs
told through such as Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. I just thought, What the heck was going on
profiles of seven
in those years? she says. Another surprising reveal? The (relative) lack of sexism. Con-
key pioneers
trary to assumptions that Silicon Valley has always been hostile to women, Berlin points
to a highly publicized push in the late 60s to make tech more inclusive. If even the tiniest
fraction of the terrible stories were hearing about today are true, she says, then the indus-
try is moving backward. Sexism is not inherent in the Valleys DNA. Maybe not, but its
now as synonymous with modern-day company culture as free snacks. Nitasha Tiku

0 1 8 AMY HARRITY NOV 2017

 ALPHA Coffee Maker

Avoid barista side-

INVASION OF THE
eye by getting your
coffee from a six-axis
robotic arm named
Gordon. Built by Mit-

KITCHEN BOTS
subishi, Gordon has
been steaming and Dorm Droid
pouring espresso
drinks in a glass- Leave it to a bunch
enclosed San Fran- of MIT students to
BURGER FLIPPERS, pizza tossers, and latte frothers, watch cisco kiosk, Cafe X, upgrade their din-
since January. Its like ing hall options by
your backs: Gordon, Sally, and Kona are coming for you. Over a java ATM, minus designing a fully
the past few years, a growing army of efficient cost-cutting overdraft fees. automated mini-
robots has arrived to automate food prep tasks, from mak- restaurant. At Spyce
Greens Goddess Kitchen, the robot
ing ramen to spicing curry. R e b e c c a F l i n t M a r x
chef needs less than
Launched by Red- five minutes to cook
wood City, California, meals such as jam-
startup Chowbotics balaya or chickpea
in April, Sally is an coconut curry. Noth-
Automat-style box ing is served on a
filled with 21 canisters plastic tray.
of chopped ingredi-
ents. She can whip Noodle Duo
up over 1,000 salad
combinationspre- Ninety-second
sumably while pon- ramen doesnt have
dering the gender to come in a micro-
politics of whoever wavable cup. Since
decided to name 2015, twin robots
a calorie-counting Koya and Kona have
salad robot Sally. been concocting
made-to-order bowls
Pizza Machine at Toyako, in Shang-
hai. The pair can boil
At Zume Pizza in water, cook noodles,
Silicon Valley, robots ladle broth, and dole
prep dough balls out veggies, meat,
into thin-crust pies, and eggs in less than
dispense and spread two minutes.
the sauce, and trans-
fer pizzas to and Burgermeister
from 800-degree
ovens. The pizzas are Robotics company
delivered in trucks Momentum Machines
outfitted with doz- has built a fully auton-
ens of smart ovens omous beast capable
to keep the pies hot. of grilling 400 burg-
The secret sauce? ers an hour. Though
Predictive analytics. Momentum has yet to
open its first location
(slated for San Fran-
cisco), expectations
are highand the
buns are brioche.
JARGON WATCH ILLUSTRATION BY LEON EDLER

JARGON brug n. / 'brug / A bug thats a drug. An intestinal bacterium in the Prevotella genus,
often lacking in people with multiple sclerosis, has been shown to suppress the disease

WATCH
if given orally. Its proof that gut flora can fight diseases outside the gut. 1-D printer
n. / wun-d 'prin-t r / A device that makes robots by bending a length of wire (with in-
'
line motors) into fancy shapes. Tell it you need, say, a camera bot that can shimmy up
a pipe and itll design and build one in 15 minutes. angel particle n. / 'n-j l 'pr-ti-k l / A sub-
atomic particle that is its own antiparticlematter and antimatter all at once. The spooky speck,
recently detected in a lab test, could help make quantum computers viable. JONATHONKEATS

0 2 0 GABRIEL SILVEIRA NOV 2017

 Instagram
comments on
Oscar!!!
@janetbordeninc: Oscar
and an Emmy!
@greedeepeedee:
Gmork!
@ojaiphoto:
@neilmarcello: Right
from Stephen Kings Pet
Sematary!
@dodgemedlin: Theres
your Platonic ideal of a
lunatic cat right there.
@janet.escalona4431:

@jasonreinhold: Gold
@gracefullyweird: Made
my day
@marlinseigman:
Classic.
@gabibobu: If that isnt
the very illustration of
DRAMA, I dont know
what would be!
@seanwelchfoto: Great
and slightly horrific.

ALPHA

THE FELINE GAZE

E WAS an Instagram
STEPHEN SHORE
artist way before
r there was Insta

GRAMS AT MOMA
gram. He shot to prominence in
f
the 70s with carefully composed
snapshots of parking g lots,
l pancake
breakfasts, and camping ing trips,
beautiful banalities that future Instagrammers would try to emulate. Now that Shore e is
PORTRAIT COURTESY OF STEPHEN SHORE

actually on the platform, he averages a post a dayand a retrospective of his work, open
@stephen.shore
ing at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art in November, shows off three years worth of his
grams. Including (obviously) a portrait of his beloved Himalayan cat, Oscar. Visitors will scan
Followers
Shores feed on iPads, preserving the social media experience of the fingerflicking scroll and
97.5K
the luminous screen. Oh, and dont compare his animal photography to your own. When I
take a photo of my cat, Im well aware that there are millions of cat pictures on Instagram, Po s t s

he says. The image has to be strong and not depend on it simply being a cat picture. In this 1,145

moment with Oscar, the light was just right to highlight the deep pools of his eyes and the Exhibition Dates
ferocity of his gaze. Shore assures us his cat doesnt look this scary IRL. AnnaVlasits November 19 to May 28

0 2 2 STEPHEN SHORE NOV 2017

 ANGRY NERD

NOT ... READY

FOR IT

ALPHA

WHATS THE DEAL

CRACKING THE
CONSTRUCTION CODE Taylor Swift, pop cultures perfect
princess, is a member of the ser-
pent race. She knows this, Reddit
knows this, the Trilateral Com-
SILICON VALLEYS LATEST AXIOM: Move fast and build things. VC firms expect to mission knows this. I couldnt
invest $375 million in construction tech this yeara 420percent increase from care less. What does make me
2014. Its one of the last massive industries to be disrupted, says Darren Bechtel, squirmy, however, is that she has
stopped trying to conceal her
founder of Brick and Mortar Ventures (and kin to the eponymous construction true slithering self from the pub-
giant). Investors like him envision streamlining a process that has traditionally lic. Once, there was denial: Just
required teams of contractors to build a single house. The so-called constructech last year, when internet truthers
filled her Instagram with snake
industrys unlikely darling, Katerra, builds homes by controlling every step of the emoji, Taylor had the platform rid
process, from fabricating walls to installing doorknobs. Despite the fact that the her feed of snakes, Saint Patrick
founders have never worked in the building industry, the startup secured a $130 style. Mirage, maintained. But
now? Shes coming out. Teasers
million Series C round earlier this year. Katerra CEO Michael Marks, former head for her November album, Repu-
of Flex and Tesla, argues that it takes an outsider to shake things up: Amazon tation, began with the image of
didnt come from within the retail industry; Airbnb didnt come from the hos- ::shudder:: a flickering serpent
head. Look what you made me
pitality industry. Construction software startups are seeing similar enthusi- do, she hisses repeatedly in the

WHATS THE DEAL ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM AVERY; ANGRY NERD ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR;
asm: Procore, which creates project management systems for contractors, hit lead single, the video for which is
seething with snakes. Sweet Tay-

BLACK FRIDAY ILLUSTRATIONS BY WREN MCDONALD; BLACK FRIDAY SOURCE: CATCHPOINT

unicorn status in late 2016, and VCs including Andreessen Horowitz and Google
lor, she declares, is dead; Snake
Ventures have invested nearly $40 million in Flux, a data-sharing platform tai- Taylor is ascendant. This, fellow
lored to architects, engineers, and contractors. Now, if only the new constructech mortals, is a violationand not
crew could bring down the price of California real estate. Jake Bullinger just of her dark kinds long-kept
anonymity. In unzipping her skin-
suit to reveal the lizard innards
within, Taylor threatens to expose
the gross, skin-crawly secrets of
brand-building in 2017. Her songs
and image are now so self-refer-

BLACK FRIDAY BLACKOUTS: LAMEST EXCUSES
ANNOYING
BEST BUY (2014)
SITE FAILURE: 2+ hours
EXCUSE: Were sorry. Site
is currently unavailable.
TARGET (2015)
SITE FAILURE: 40+ minutes
EXCUSE: Please hold tight.
So sorry, but high traffics
causing delays.
EXCUSE: [504 error message]
NEIMAN MARCUS (2015)
SITE FAILURE: 30+ hours
E XCU S E : Were currently EXCUSE: Back in a few.
making improvements to
your shopping experience.
EXPRESS (2016)
SITE FAILURE: 3+ hours
EXCUSE: As soon as a
spot opens up well put you
right through.
ENRAGING
PAYPAL (2015)
SITE FAILURE: 1.5+ hours
MACYS (2016)
SITE FAILURE: 6+ hours
Were getting a makeover.
ential, so meta, that they might as
well be a set of Russianly nested
Ouroborosian snake dolls. There
is venom in this world, people,
and sugary pop music, with its
wholesome exteriors and man-
ufactured chemical simplicity,
is the antidote. We must, for our
sanity, buy into it. Yet Tay, evil
hyperintelligent xenobeast that
she is, is forcing us to confront
the terrors withinimperiling the
blissful ignorance so necessary
for our survival. As a species.
JA S O N K E H E

0 2 4 NOV 2017
 ALPHA
READY TO ROCK
THOR DIRECTOR
SUITS UP
Tall Order
Because Korg is
nearly 8 feet tall,
Waititi had to pretend
as though he were
towering over his
scene partners, while
they had to play to
a Korg cutout loom-
ing a foot and a half
above Waititis head.
Head Gear
Not only did Waititi
have dozens of
sensors on his face,
he also wore a helmet
with a selfie cam so
postproduction could
map his expressions
to Korgs.
Maxi-Me
A lot of the scenes
with me and Chris
[Hemsworth] were
improvised, Waititi
says. The more we
messed around on
set, doing voices and
things, the more we
cracked up at this
character who was
just a version of me.
0 2 6 NOV 2017
BETWEEN ALL THE superheroes and supervillains, direct-
ing a Marvel movie takes an effort that verges on the
superhuman. But when he was making Thor: Ragnarok,
Taika Waititi had to do more than wrangle Thor, Loki,
and the Hulk; he also cast himself as Korg, the stone-
man gladiatorial fighter who becomes Thors new mate.
I usually put myself in my films, says Waititi, who played
a vampire in his 2014 horror spoof, What We Do in the
Shadows. Turning into Korg, though, required more
than fangs and makeup. In addition to a mo-cap suit, he
also had to lug around a camera rig, battery packs, and
Korgs face, all while acting (and joking) alongside Chris
Hemsworths God of Thunder. Did he ever have to call
Cut! on himself? All the time, Waititi says. And yet
that couldnt have been as awkward as directing super-
stars in a skintight onesie. Angela Watercutter
Pajama Party
A mo-cap suit let
Waititis movements
be tracked so they
could be re-created
in CGI. You have
these pajamas on,
and youre covered in
tiny Ping-Pong balls,
he says. Luckily for
his dignity, he wasnt
alonecastmates
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JASIN BOLAND/2017 MARVEL STUDIOS
and the stunt crew
were often clad in
gray leotards too.
Slower Motion
Im not a method
actor, so I didnt cover
myself with rocks,
Waititi says. But he
did learn to rein in
his hand-waving to
appear more stone-
warrior-like. Even so,
his gestures had to
be slooowed dooown
in postproduction.
 ALPHA
JUST GOOGLE IT
A SHORT HISTORY OF
A NEWFOUND VERB
A BRAND REACHES its apotheosis when it slips into the
vernacular as a generic nounBand-Aid, Kleenex, even
Dumpster. Anyone elses dad still say Dempster Dump-
ster, for the brothers who patented it in 1939, and alas,
arent around now to copyright Dempster Dumpster Fire?
To become a verb is even less common. To Hoover for to vacuum
comes to mind. To Skype, meaning to make a video call, shows mod-
est promise, but since video chatters need to agree on software, its
unlikely Skype can ever stand in for FaceTime or WhatsApp. The rare
tech company to achieve verbal dominion over a whole category of
digital experience is of course Google, with to Google.
Early on, Larry Page used the verb form two months before the
company launched in September 1998. The cutie-pie locution showed
up on a listserv for Google-Friends when the search engine lived at
http://google.stanford.edu/. (Dont bother; its too late to join Google-
Friends.) After a brief update to his new product, Page signed off to
his merry crew, Have fun and keep googling! His companys search
index is now more than 100 million gigabytes. Evidently, we did.
And thus for insiders, to Google started as an intransitive verb;
a pastime without an object; search for searchs sake; a Sunday drive
through cyberspace. But by 2002 we layfolk had gotten our mitts
on it and knew what Google was really forforensics, stalking, the
transitive stuff. Have you Googled her yet? Willow asks Buffy in the
final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Shes 17! cries Xander, find-
ing some nice prurience in the word. Corrects Willow: Its a search
engine. The next year, the American Dialect Society named Google,
transitive verb, the most useful word of 2002. The Oxford English
Dictionary minted it in June 2006.
Google, verb, did instantly seem like a fragment of verse wed needed
since the information superhighway of the 1990s first threatened us
with vertigo. Supplying the illusion of order to the jerry-built tubes
and their effluvium has long been the role of the big commercial tech
companies. Googles mission is to organize the worlds information.
Its Faustian. But to Google, of course, does not mean to organize;
it means to submit to Googles organization while pretending youre
blazing a bespoke passage through the information
Schwarzwald, over the information Rockies, and
around the information Horn.
Part of the shared pretending done by Google
By Virginia Heffer- and anyone who uses it is to act as if information
nan (@page88), on the web already existed in some kind of natu-
the author of Magic
and Loss: The Inter- ral state prior to Googles mission to organize it.
net as Art. Instead, information in its present form is, in fact, a
0 2 8 BEN WISEMAN
product of Google and would be nothing with-
out the companys decision to recognize it as
Googleable, rank it in the algorithms esoteric
hierarchy, and incentivize its renovation so
it might make itself prettier to Google. To
Google something, therefore, is to accept
the fiction that Google is both the whole infor-
mation worldand the only path through it.
What a racket. How did we ever start
believing that a highly limited set of visual
and symbolic datawords, numbers, and
images without depthmake up the entirety
of the worlds information? You cant Google
taste, scent, or touch; sound searches are janky.
Google engages barely two of the five human
senses and tells us thats the whole world.
Chinas search engine, Baidu, while
benighted by censorship, nonetheless has
the far better name. Baidu derives from
Green Jade Table in the Lantern Festival,
a Song dynasty poem by Xin Qiji about the
annual festival during which maidens left their
houses to be seen and courted. The poems last
line is, Hundreds and thousands of times, for
her I searched in chaos / Suddenly, I turned
by chance, to where the lights were waning,
and there she stood.
As the Baidu corporate site explains, the
companys name evokes the search for a
retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour.
Organizing the worlds information sounds
ambitious. On the other hand, searching for
retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour
partakes of the romance that the frayed old
internet once used to suggest. But it some-
times seems we have organized and Goo-
gled that romance out of existence. And the
beauty we once searched expectantly for has
retreated for all time.
NOV 2017
 ALPHA

INFOPORN

THE EVOLUTION
THE WAYS THAT bad guys take our digi-
tal stuff are constantly changing: Com-

OF DATA LEAKS
panies have gotten smarter about how
they secure information, but hacking
and phishing are risingfast. Based on
data from CyberScout and the Identity
Theft Resource Center, we created a series of contour lines showing how frequently organizations
were compromised by various methods over time. Areas with shallow slopes mean things are hov- Relative Data
Breach Volume
ering around the status quo. Color bands that are close together mean the type of attack is quickly
getting more (or less) frequent. So, dont be the weakest link: Enable two-factor authentication,
use a password manager, and never, ever click on that random attachment. Seth Kadish FEWER MORE

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

THESE ATTACKS DOUBLED

FROM 2015 TO 2016.

Hacking, Skimming, and Phishing

SYS ADMINS: REMEMBER TO REVOKE

PRIVILEGES FROM FORMER EMPLOYEES.

Insider Theft

2017 NUMBERS ARE PROJECTED. SOURCES: CYBERSCOUT, IDENTITY THEFT RESOURCE CENTER
FIRMS INADVERTENTLY RELEASED
PERSONAL DATA ONLINE 109 TIMES IN 2015.

Weak Corporate Internet Security

BETTER SECURITY PROTOCOLS MEAN THAT

STOLEN OR LOST DEVICES STAY LOCKED.

Data Breached from Lost/Stolen Devices

ANY TYPE OF BREACH COULD EXPOSE THE DATA

OF THOUSANDS (OR MILLIONS) OF PEOPLE.

Leak by Outside Vendor

0 3 0 NOV 2017
 ALPHA
CHARTGEIST
by jon j. eilenberg

MAPPING THE FUTURE

Google Stamp
Yet another row
of stuff above your

CARTOGRAPHY
A M MAKES
KES
search results
Engaging
swipe-based
storytelling

A COMEBACK
M

Wait ... is
this Snapchat?!

Appropriateness
of Platform for Chronicling
Family Thanksgiving

Snapchat Twitter
Memoirs Verrit
Legal
Filings Instagram

Therapists Facebook
CARTOGRAPHY IS THE new code. Increasingly, everything from your takeout delivery Couch
to your UberPool route is orchestrated not just by engineers but by cartographers.
Between 2007 and 2015, the number of grads earning masters degrees in cartog-
raphy increased anually by more than 40 percent on average. And as advanced Reasons
satellites, digital mapping tools, and open source geographical software progress, Were Excited for
the demand for cartographers is projected to grow nearly 30 percent by 2024. Justice League
Modern cartographers are as much data analysts as they are map producers.
Flagship GIS systems by software companies like Esri have been democratized
by an explosion of open source alternatives like Carto and MapBox. We are
absolutely inundated with volumes of geospatial data, says Mike Tischler,
director of the US Geological Surveys National Geospatial Program, but with
no means to effectively use it all.
Which is why, as tasks from house-hunting to solving public health crises
depend on sophisticated map integration, cartography grads are being snapped
up by Silicon Valley. Ten years ago someone with geospatial expertise may have
been siloed from the engineering team, says Grubhub CTO Maria Belousova.
Today a huge portion of our team works on spatial search and route optimi-
Gal Gadot back as
zation. Data-savvy mappers are charting that digital frontier. Matt Jancer Wonder Woman

0 3 2 TIM ENTHOVEN NOV 2017

 ALPHA

ROSS DUFFER: SWEATER BY A.P.C., JEANS BY A.P.C., SHOES BY NEW BALANCE, WATCH BY TUDOR. MATT DUFFER: SHIRT BY A.P.C., TROUSERS BY BILLY REID, WATCH BY TUDOR IN HERITAGE BLACK BAY S & G ON BROWN AGED LEATHER STRAP
STYLING BY ANNA SU/ART DEPARTMENT, ASSISTING BY ANDREA MEHEFKO; GROOMING BY SIMON RIHANA /ART DEPARTMENT; PROP STYLING BY WARD ROBINSON
Q&A

TWINS
SPEAK
STRANGER
THINGS
COEN. WACHOWSKI. DUPLASS. There are a lot of famous siblings making movies and TV
together, but right now theres only one name in the identical-twins category: Duffer.
That would be Matt and Ross, the 33-year-old North Carolina natives who pitched

RETURNS Netflix the eight-hour Spielberg movie otherwise known as Stranger Things. One year
and 18 Emmy nominations later, the writer-directors are heading into season two of
the pulp-culture sleeper hit with more on their minds than finding an 80s-shaped
stone they havent yet overturned. Were trying to introduce concepts and ideas that
can sustain us for at least a few more seasons, says Matt. (Hes the one with longer
hair.) Theres still plenty of Reagan-era nostalgia on deck, from Ghostbusters to Drag-
ons Lair, but the cast is deeperand the Upside Down upside-downier than ever.
Were dealing with another dimension, Matt says, so anything is possible.
Anything, it turns out, but delaying puberty in your teenage stars. PeterRubin

0 3 4 JOE PUGLIESE NOV 2017

 ALPHA TELEVISION

The internet loves MATT: Its getting work show would.

Stranger Things dangerously close We were joking about
and it has sugges- to where Winona leaving her there
tions. How do Ryders character but then suddenly
you shut out that will be able to that cliffhanger felt
chatter when its watch herself! right to us.
time to write?
ROSS: Lucas came There are a lot
MATT: Im so tired of out in 1986. of writing partner-
talking about Barb! ships in entertain-
[Laughs.] MATT: We do have ment. There arent
her watching a a lot of twins.
ROSS: I dont go on Michael Keaton
Reddit, because I movie this year, so Im MATT: Weve been
know thatll be quick- happy about that. making movies since
sand and I wont the fourth grade,
be able to get out. It seems impossible so it feels pretty nat-
Thankfully, Netflix for shows to sneak ural. Our taste is so
had green-lit a writ- up on people nowa- identical that we
ers room before daysyet Stranger can just share a look
we officially got Things did just that. and communicate
renewed, so most of Did you have any quite a lot.
writerdirectors: Matt and Ross Duffer age: 33
the beats of season anxiety going in that hometown: Durham, North Carolina best known for: TV
two were figured out it was going to sink? ROSS: Up through sseries Stranger Things less known for: 2015 horror flick
ahead of time. college, we saw Hidden binge-watch recommendations: Friday Night Lights,
MATT: Theres so every movie The Last Airbender, Freaks and Geeks, Big Little Lies, Rick
Those kids are much content out together. We have and Morty 80s references in season two: Ghostbusters,
growing fast. Did there, even good the same life, many Gremlins, Escape From New York, Temple of Doom, Poltergeist
you have to work shows get lost. Netflix of the same life expe- scariest horror creation of all time: Pinhead. Hellraiser
scarred us. favorite food to stress-eat on set: Bojangles
around that? isnt spending movie- riences, so were
fried chicken biscuits
level marketing
ROSS: Sometimes moneythey want MATT: as synced
I forget until I look people to find this up as you can possi-
back at season one stuff through word bly be. That doesnt
they were so little of mouth. mean we dont have
and adorable. Like major disagreements.
Gaten Matarazzo, ROSS: Its even worse
who plays Dustin, now. Im glad we ROSS: Because MATT: It helps you ROSS: Not that were MATT: but first, we
looked like a little came out last sum- someone is wrong catch issues before more difficult, but we actually gave in and
muppet. But now, and mer, because now about something you start spending a push harder for the took out all of the
even more so into theres something occasionally. ton of money mak- things that we want. bad language, and
season three, these new every week. ing it. There was one the kids got really
are full-on teenagers. Does that mind meld sequence in season MATT: Were a big upset. Then I wrote
How does Netflixs have its limits in the two where I felt we pain in the ass. Netflix saying Ive
MATT: The scary all-at-once release creative process? messed it up in the got this army of 11-
thing is youre shoot- model affect the writing stage, and What kinds of things and 12-year-olds and
ing for half a year way the storyline MATT: The writing for we went back and are you pushing for? theyre pissed off that
and season two takes unfolds? us is the hardest, but redid it. But you really we cut all the lan-
place over the course also the most import- need to not do that. MATT: Its been much guage. At least let us
of, like, a week, so MATT: Weve written ant. You want to get [Laughs.] easier this year, but shoot alternate takes.
you cant have some- for network televi- to the next part of it, just getting profanity That was, like, the
one have some sion, where you have to production, but it So how do you top into the show was a day before we started
major growth spurt. to worry about hitting doesnt matter how season one? big argument. shooting. And then
Youll hear changes these ad breaks, you beautifully made it is Netflix said OK.
in their voice, but have to worry about if somethings wrong MATT: Before this, we ROSS: When Netflix
you cant do much 42 minutes and 10 with the story arc. had never really done saw the first two ROSS: Theyre much
about puberty. Except seconds exactly. anything that any- episodes, they real- more foulmouthed
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

maybe shift the pitch. ROSS: Thats the best body seemed to care ized this is fine, its in season two than
ROSS: With episode thing about having about. So its like, OK, not going to turn off in season one, but in
Youve said you five in the first sea- someone elseits we can do something families real life its far worse.
want the show to son, when Nancy like a constant bull- that people like, and Im like, I cannot
run four or five sea- goes in the tree, I shit filter. that gives you con- believe that came out
sons. Where does remember being like, fidence. But then it of your mouth.
that leave us? its not satisfying to also gives you a little
have her saved at the bit of ammunition to
end, the way a net- push for things.

0 3 6 NOV 2017
 ALPHA

OUR SELFIES, OURSELVES

SELFIE OR USIE? Mayfair or Lo-Fi? Bathroom mirror or drivers seat? In her
new book, The Selfie Generation, writer Alicia Eler combines memoir, cultural
criticism, and historical analysis to explore the phenomenon, from its roots in
self-portraiture to its current position in the zeitgeist. The selfie is grossly misun-
derstood, Eler says. Critics like to use it as evidence that millennials are stupid
and narcissistic, but they fail to contemplate the versatility of the form. We asked
the selfie semiotician to interpret these celebrity shotsthough can anyone ever
really understand whats going on with James Franco? Rebecca Flint Marx
HOW TO FINSTA
If youre sick of overthinking your
Instagram, what you need is a fake
account. Its called a finsta, and its
a second feed only for your clos-
est friends. You know, so you can be
your unfiltered, spontaneous, truly
authentic self. J U ST I C E N A M A ST E

Instas Finstas

Take 100200 No plandids,

photos to find not ever. Post
the ones that a photo of

PHOTOS
look effortless yourself mid-
Samuel L. Jackson Lindsay Lohan January Jones and natural sneeze.
aka planned
candids, aka
This is a typical usie or This is a classic meta If you look at Jones other plandids.
groupie photo. A celeb selfie: The reflection in selfies, youll notice the
who constantly posts her sunglasses lends a tilt-shift filter is her thing.

PHOTOS BY @SAMUELLJACKSON; @LINDSAYLOHAN; @JANUARYJONES; @JAMESFRANCOO; @AMBERROSE; @LENADUNHAM;

selfies might be accused heightened visual aware- Its slightly manipulative
of being lonely or self- ness. The car selfie is less in that it gets you to focus Short and witty. Free-associate.
CAPTIONS

absorbed. Here, Jackson
is showing hes social
with a capital S; hes mes-
saging that he knows
how to have a good time.
deliberate than the bath- on her face. And yet the Stoop to taking Rant. Describe
room selfie in that its usu- photo implies a certain photos just to a rock. Cry.
fit your clever Average length
ally taken out of boredom. casualnessmessy hair,
caption idea. is six sentences.
But the car can also be a no makeup. Shes saying,
class-related signifier. Hey, Im just like you.

Unless youre Post four times

Insta-famous, before noon
POSTING
RATE OF

limit yourself to or not at all for

one post every two months.
few days (and Whatever.
only during high-
traffic hours).

If half an hour Theres no

MANAGING

passes and you minimum

LIKES

have < 40 likes, but its nice if

erase the post. a few friends
acknowledge
your brilliance.
FINSTA ILLUSTRATION BY KUOCHENG LIAO

James Franco Amber Rose Lena Dunham

Franco has been called This reminds me of early She doesnt take selfies
FOLLOWERS
NUMBER OF

the king of selfies. Celebs
use I woke up like this
selfies to convey authen-
ticity, but hes using
Instagram to re-create a
Renaissance paintings
like Vanity by Hans Mem-
ling, in which a naked
white woman is looking in
a mirror. Such depictions
because she wants you No limit. Who cares!
Scrounge for
to desire her. Shes say- more.
ing Fuck it and embrac-
ing imperfection, which is
radical in the context of
RAUNCH

teen idol archetype. He
doesnt reveal anything:
Its all meant to capitalize
on James Franco.
are now seen as misogy-
nistic. But this is a multi-
racial woman projecting a
position of power.
celebrity branding. Peo- Dont post Definitely post
ple are often unsettled by pictures of your pictures of your
butt. butt.
selfies because theyre
jarring to social norms.

0 3 8 NOV 2017
 ALPHA

On picking a setting
thats more realistic
than Mars:
I wanted to choose

THE MOON
GOOGLE CANT RESIST a moon shot, but this the most likely loca-
tion for the first off-
one is literal: A decade ago, the company Earth settlement. You
announced the Google Lunar X Prize$20 can have shipping

OR BUST
million for the first private firm to build a and trade with the
moon, as well as
robot that can soft-land on the surface of the tourism. Traveling
moon, travel 500 meters, and beam hi-def there would be like
Andy Weir going from Europe to
video back to Earth. Now, after multiple extensions and a couple of flameouts, five on His New North America in the
teams are racing toward the March 2018 launch deadline, and the cutest contender Lunar Colony 1800s: Its a trek, but
might be the MX-1E, an R2-D2shaped lander designed by space startup Moon Express. realistically the jour-
At roughly the size of Danny DeVito, the MX-1E fits inside a launch vehicle from part- ney only takes about
In Elon Musks a week.
nering company Rocket Lab; once the craft detaches and shoots moonward, its engine fever dreams, were
and thrusters slow it down so the moons gravity can help gently guide its descent. Bob already looping On oxygenating the
Richards, a self-described space entrepreneur and Moon Express cofounder and around the moon Artemis colony:
in spaceships. Eighty-five percent
CEO, envisions a future in which the moon is mined for resourcesnot necessarily And possibly even of the rocks on the
for export back to Earth but to power further space travel, using Luna as a launching vacationing in an surface of the lunar
point. (Moon water could provide the hydrogen and oxygen needed to make rocket elaborate lunar highlands are anor-
colony like the one thite, which contains
fuel, for example.) As for full-on lunar colonies? I love the thought of kids looking Andy Weir imagines aluminum as well as
up and seeing lights on the moon, Richards says. Guess you cant have a moon shot in his new novel, a massive supply of
without a little bit of cheese. Justice Namaste Artemis. Being oxygen. Smelting alu-
Weirhe of the minum in the quan-
According to WIREDs resident physicist, Rhett Allain, even by nearly doubling the value of platinum (one meticulously tities necessary to
of the moons most valuable metals) miners would need to export more than 23 million kilosthe weight researched space- construct and main-
of 55 International Space Stationsto break even. See WIRED.com for his full analysis. survival thriller tain Artemis would
The Martianyou produce so much
know he just had excess oxygen
to science the shit eight atoms for every
out of it. J.n . two of aluminum
that they would be
constantly venting it.
2.5 FT

On travel costs:
Lets say, based on
my calculations, it
costs $7,020 to get
a human body to the
orbital space station,
4.4 FT Telescope including luggage.
But for every kilo-
gram of payload, you
need an additional
3.73 kilos of fuel. So a
551 LBS Solar panels one-way ticket to the
moon comes out to
about $33,000.

On moon food,
Used for Hydrogen since potato farming
landing, these peroxide as isnt practical:
legs also a fuel source If all food had to
help the craft means the
MX-1E could be imported from
hop across
the moons theoretically Earth, theres no way
surface. refuel with low-income workers
moon H2O2. could afford to eat.
So my solution was
gunk. Gunk is primar-
ily chlorella, an algae
ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH GWILY

that can be grown in

baths. Its nutrient-
Engine parts rich and grows by
are 3-D doubling. Not nec-
printed out
essarily delicious,
of the heat-
resistant though, so I created
superalloy different flavorings,
Inconel. like tandoori chicken.

0 4 0 CRISTIANO RINALDI NOV 2017

 ALPHA
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL
: BEFORE A DATE, I LIKE TO DO A
LITTLE ONLINE RESEARCH ON THE
PERSON. IF I FIND INTERESTING
STUFF, SHOULD I BRING IT UP?
by jon mooallem
Sir John Hawkins was a British slave trader who voy-
A: aged through what is now Florida in 1565. The landscape
Hawkins traversed was murky, disorienting, wilda
new world that no European could easily comprehend.
Hawkins tried his best to make sense of what he saw. But in addi-
tion to being a morally despicable trafficker of humans, he was
also, apparently, a moron. For example, when he saw animal horns
being worn around native peoples necks, he decided they must
be unicorn horns. From there, Hawkins employed his own spe-
cial brand of extrapolative idiot-logic to deduce that there must
be lions in Floridabecause, as the historian Andrea Smalley
writes, the enmity between lions and unicorns was well known,
and no beast could exist without its enemy. Hawkins was only
one of many explorers groping boneheadedly through America
and transmitting their awestruck, staggering wrongness back to
the societies from which they came. (Another early traveler named
Job Hortopeven the guys name sounds preposterousreported
catching a 23-foot-long, porcine-headed aquatic dragon by baiting
a fish hook with a dog.) Still, if you were living in Europe and curi-
ous about the entirely new-to-you second half of the planetwhich:
of course you wereyou had little choice but to wade through this
kind of intelligence gathered by egregious, hooey-slinging buffoons.
0 4 2 NISHANT CHOKSI
Have you ever been to Florida? I happen
to love it. Sure, the state is still heavily
mythologized, owing largely to the inter-
nets fascination with tawdry, meth-heavy
#FloridaMan memes. But no one, whatever
they think of Florida, still reflexively pic-
tures a landscape of gamboling unicorns or
hog-faced sea dragons. Nor, Im guessing, did
most early American settlers arrive there
expecting to find such beasts. Instead, visitors
have successively managed to recognize the
many actual, sublime wonders of the place
for themselves: My list includes a memory
of plaintive oaks lining a country road in the
Panhandle, the Its a Small World ride at
Disney World, Angela Bassett, citrus.
My point is not just that information
gleaned from afar is often wrong. Its that we
canif we want tocompartmentalize infor-
mation of questionable credibility and stay
open to learning the truth firsthand. We can
resist marrying ourselves to prior knowledge,
and instead let it pique our sense of adven-
ture and discovery, our sense of romance.
I think most reasonable people understand
this. So first off: Yes, I think its OK to bring
up your exploratory Googling on a date.
The truth is, we move through life pre-
ceded online by a disjointed, sometimes
ungracefully translated travelogue of where
weve already been. Id argue that playing it
cool, and pretending you hadnt bothered to
glance at any of this material before a date, is
odd and maybe even a little insulting.
Of course, I assume you are decent and
kind and know how to bring up your discov-
eries in good tastetreating what youve
read delicately, using it to open a meaningful
conversation and not just hammering your
counterpart with their most mortifying social
media deep-cuts. And I also assume you know
that your Googling does not make you more
of an authority on this person than the per-
son themself. (Duh.)
Insteadand please, let me have this one
little spasm of optimism and romanceyou
understand that every date is a voyage. When
you come ashore at the noodle house or caf
or bar, you hope to finally glimpse the sec-
ond, heretofore-missing hemisphere of your
world. Naturally youll have read up a little
first. Because you were excited. Because you
couldnt wait to discover it all for yourself.
Write to mrknowitall@wired.com.
NOV 2017
 ALPHA

DESTINATIONS

GRAIN, ELEVATED
ART IN THE ROUND
POETS SEE THE WORLD in a grain of sand. Futurist architect Mat Cash
found inspiration in a grain of corn. As group leader at Heatherwick
Studiothe avant-garde design firm behind Googles upcoming Moun-
tain View and London campusesCash was tasked with transform-
ing Cape Towns century-old grain silo complex into the new Zeitz
Beneath the Skin
Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. The building, shuttered in 2001,
was once the tallest in sub-Saharan Africa, its 100-foot bins capable The complexs
of storing 30,000 tons of grain. Cashs design winks at the facilitys 42 silos had been
original purpose: He carved a kernel-shaped cavity into its heart using painted yellow in
the 80s, rising from
a 20-ton hydraulic breaker. The resulting cathedral-like atrium is the landscape like
now a celebration of art instead of agriculture. Ashlea Halpern giant sticks of butter.
Cashs team restored
the concrete facade.
It felt like archaeol-
ogy, scraping away
100 years of skins to
reveal something
beautiful, he says.
Carving Concrete
Excising interior sec-
tions of the grain
silos threatened the
structural integrity
of the building. Engi-
neers reinforced
each tube with a new
concrete sleeve.
Now on View
The museums 100
galleries showcase
the work of contem-
porary African art-
ists such as Kudzanai
Chiurai of Zimbabwe
and Wangechi Mutu
of Kenya.

W H I L E I N C A P E T O W N / / E AT : S A M P L E WAG Y U B I LT O N G A K I N D O F FA N C Y S O U T H A F R I C A N B E E F J E R K YAT T H E T E S T K I T C H E N , LO C AT E D I N A N O T H E R
R E P U R P O S E D B U I L D I N G , T H E O L D B I S C U I T M I L L . / / S T AY : R E T I R E T O O N E O F T H E S E V E N G L E A M I N G A I R S T R E A M T R A I L E R S PA R K E D O N T H E R O O F
O F T H E G R A N D D A D D Y H O T E L . / / D O : A D M I R E T H E W O R L D S F A S T E S T C AT S AT C H E E TA H O U T R E A C H , A S A N C T U A R Y F O R T H E E N D A N G E R E D F E L I N E S .

0 4 4 IWAN BAAN NOV 2017

 ALPHA
CLIVE THOMPSON
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA
NOT EVERY MESSAGE
HAS TO GO VIRAL
RECENTLY, ROB BESCHIZZA a coder and the managing editor
of Boing Boingreleased a stripped-down blogging tool called
txt.fyi. Write something, hit Publish, and voil: your deathless prose,
online. But heres the thing: txt.fyi has no social mechanics. None.
No Like button, no Share button, no comments. No feed showing
which posts are most popular. Each post has a <meta> tag telling
search engines not to index it, so it wont even show up on Google.
The only way anyone will see it is if you send them the URL or post
it somewhere. txt.fyi is a tool for putting stuff onlinebut with-
out the usual features to help something become a pass-around
hit. I call it antiviral design. Most platforms work in precisely
the opposite fashion. Theyre casinos of quantification, designed
to constantly tell us whats blowing up and what isnt. We peer at
our feeble posts on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn and pray for
likes, for hearts, for a big-smile emoji. Our attention is magneti-
cally drawn to anything with a huge share number beneath it
what psychologists call the social proof: If lots of people are paying
attention to something, we figure its worth our notice too. This
lust for virality deforms how we think in public. What do you get
if you mentally focus-group every utterance before you post it?
Stuff thats panderingly dull (best not to offend anyone) or that
leans into the kabuki hysteria of a sick burn (offend everyone!).
Posts designed specifically to hack the attentional marketplace.
0 4 6 ZOHAR LAZAR
With txt.fyi, Beschizza was trying to play-
fully push back. I wanted something where
people could publish their thoughts with-
out any false game of social manipulation,
one-upmanship, and favor-trading, he says.
This is what I found so interesting about his
creation. Its antivirality doesnt necessarily
prevent a post from becoming wildly popu-
lar. (A txt.fyi URL shared on, say, Facebook
could perhaps go viral.) But its design favors
messages to someone, not everyone.
So, does antivirality actually affect what
people do and say? Beschizza isnt sure.
Out of pro-privacy principle, he doesnt
regularly look at the logs of his service. But
once, during some debugging, Beschizza
discovered someone using txt.fyi to write
letters to a deceased relative. It was touching
and weirdly human, precisely the sort of
unconventional expression we used to see a
lot more of online. But today we sand down
those rough edges, those barbaric yawps, in
the quest for social spread. Even if you dont
want to share something, Medium or Tumblr
or Snapchat tries to make you. They have the
will to virality baked in.
When you think about it, the very met-
aphor of going viral suggests bleak side
effects. In the physical world, it means an
infectious payload spreading uncontrollably.
Smallpox, Ebola, avian flu: super viral con-
tent, dude! Reframe virality like that and
you start to understand the emergence of
white supremacy online or the hot-zone dog-
piling of Gamergate. If social networks are to
eliminate hate on their platforms, theyll have
to fight the exquisitely gameable mechanics
of virality they themselves built.
Now for the caveats. As Beschizza admits,
txt.fyi is just a tiny experiment. (There are
a few others like it, including SaidSo.me.)
Its hard to make a service like this go big,
because you cant easily make ad money on
an un-metricked platform. And hey, there are
healthy, nontoxic reasons were interested
in whats popular online: Some great social
good (like Black Lives Matter) has relied on
the viral spread of online posts.
Nonetheless, Id love to see some of
Beschizzas principles injected into our
socialmedia ecosystem. A bit of antivirality
could be precisely the inoculation against
extremism that our culture needs.
Write to clive@clivethompson.net.
NOV 2017
 Edge of
Belgravia
Ceramic
Onyx Knife
Set and
Black
Diamond
Block

COOK

FETISH
THE KEY TO SUCCESS in the #paleo lifestyle is consuming a great many meats,
and the perfect implements for carving roast beast are these Stone Age
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SWITCH
and the soft, graspable handles wont punish your paws during marathon cubing
STYLING BY DANIELLE SELIG

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BLADES
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Your prehistoric ancestors would be proud. C A I T L I N H A R R I N G TO N

NOV 2017 ROBIN STEIN 0 4 9

 COOK
GADGET LAB Hestan Cue

HEAD-TO-HEAD
BEST FOR: Dedicated
chefs du home

The well-designed you wont scorch your

CYBER CHEFS
11-inch saut pan has caramel or vulca-
a secret: a built-in nize your mango-chili
temperature sensor, shrimp. After you get
allowing the app, pan, the hang of the app-
and induction burner guided recipes, go
to communicate. And freestyle and punch
Let these app-controlled smart induction burners since the pans sen- in the exact tempera-
give you an in-home cooking class. JOE RAY sor monitors the heat, ture you want.

$500
Tasty One Top

BEST FOR: Food-porn

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Tastys smart kitchen

appliance ties in with
its app, which mimics
the companys mes-
merizing recipe vid-
eos, slicing them into
easy-to-follow steps.
An on-burner sensor
and a probe ther-
mometer allow for
precise cooking, from
searing to sous vide.
Youll need your
own induction-ready
pan, but the low price
makes that add-on
purchase easier
to swallow.

$175

0 5 0 NOV 2017
 GADGET LAB
COOK

GEARHEAD 1

RICH POUR
Java fanatics know that absolute control is key to
crafting the perfect cup of coffee. JOERAY

1 2

Baratza Virtuoso Acaia Pearl Scale

Pro baristas will tell Keep close tabs on

you that burr grind- the weight of beans
ers are the way to and the amount of
go for a uniform grind. water you pour with
Baratzas conical this smart scale thats
crusher excels accurate to within
at producing a wide a tenth of a gram.
range of grind sizes, Connect with the
and it cuts down on Acaia Coffee app to
fines, the powdery look up appropriate
bits that can make bean-to-water ratios
your brew bitter. and brewing times. 2

$249 $150

December
Dripper

Most pour-over drip-

pers lack moving
parts. The Decem- 3
4
bers cone twists
so you can control
the flow, modulat-
ing between three
speeds or cutting
it off completely by
opening and closing
the holes in the base.

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4 5

Heath Ceramics Fellow Stagg

Stack Mug Pour-Over Kettle

Sip from a mug Gorgeous to look at

thats a winner on and lovely to hold,
two fronts: The the Stagg kettle has
space-saving stack- an analog thermom-
able design is eter that monitors
timeless, and the water temperature.
hand-glazed ceramic Together, the swan-
vessel is made in necked spout and
California by workers weighted handle
who get health and allow for a smooth
5 retirement benefits. and steady pour.

$30 $69 and up

0 5 2 NOV 2017
 GADGET LAB
COOK

FETISH
COOL WHIP Braun
MultiQuick
9

YOU MUST WIELD A
wicked scepter
to rule the Land of
Smoothies. With
its 700-watt motor,
Brauns latest immer-
sion blender blows
through foodstuffs
that lesser sticks cant
crackice cubes,
raw potatoes, or even
a peeled avocado
with pit (if you crave
those bitter tannins).
Below the soft grip
is a compression
zonepush down
and the spinning
slicer moves closer
to the bottom of your
vessel, ensuring
every last bit of basil
and garlic becomes
pesto. Squeezing
the trigger speeds
up the blades and
takes your mix from
chunky to smooth.
No apron? No prob-
lem. Those funk-
ily shaped feet are
designed to keep
splatter to a minimum.
MICHAEL CALORE

$150

0 5 4 NOV 2017
 COOK
GADGET LAB 2

TOP 3
Etekcity
Lasergrip 1080

Is that skillet hot

TEMP WORKERS
enough to properly
sear your sous vide
filet mignon? With
an infrared thermom-
1 eter, youll always
know. Point this guns
Assess any sauce, sugar solution, or saut pan in seconds with a OXO Good Grips red laser at any sur-
cool instant-read kitchen thermometer. MICHAEL CALORE Thermocouple facebe it grill, pan,
or pizza stoneand it
The circular hinge can accurately gauge
on this contortionist the temperature to
lets the probe pivot the tenth of a degree
up to 225 degrees from 14 inches away.
so you can use it with
your right or left $21
hand. The center but-
ton allows for rota- 3
tion of the hot poker
1
without singeing ThermoWorks
your skin. Flip the ThermoPop
orientation and the
screen auto-flips for The ThermoPops
right-side up display. thin 4.5-inch probe
is long enough to
$100 slide deep into the
thickest rump roasts
to ensure the center
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reading when you
have to pierce the
beast sideways.

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0 5 6 NOV 2017
 COOK
GADGET LAB Dreamfarm Scizza Pizzacraft
Pizzeria Pronto
Stovetop Oven

GEARHEAD
Getting clean cuts on
your sausage-topped
slices can be a frus- Cramped kitchen
trating task. Ditch keeping you from tak-

UPPER CRUST
the flimsy wheel and ing your crust to the
wield some sturdy next level? Fuhged-
scissors instead. The daboutitplop the
Scizzas lower blade Pronto onto your gas
includes a nonstick, stovetop and youll
nylon spatula tip that have a 600-degree
The right tools will make baking your own from- slides underneath pizza oven. Just
scratch pizza as easy as pie. JORDAN MCMAHON the crust as you snip add dough and your
making it a breeze favorite toppings and
to lift and serve once you can delete that
your slice is free. Dominos app.

$30 $180

Tillman 50
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Pizza is greatburn-
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Avoid skin grafts and
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Tilit Color Joseph Joseph

Block Apron Twist Grater

Youll be slinging The cheese you

flour, olive oil, and require comes
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an apron. The waxed ded cheese is a
canvas and selvage crime against human-
denim Color Block ity.) Toss the old box
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0 5 8 NOV 2017
 COOK
GADGET LAB WHEN THE U.S. NAVY was shipping fighter planes overseas
during World War II, it protected its birds from saltwater

BENCHMARK
corrosion by spraying them with a new plastic film. Made
out of polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC) and dubbed Saran
by its manufacturer, Dow, the wrap resisted moisture and

WRAP GENIUS
How a WWII plane protector evolved into the ideal product for
an age of microwaves and leftovers. JONATHONKEATS
chemical decay. Its tight molecular bonds even sealed in
odors, a quality that led the Army to coat soldiers stinky
boots with PVDC. But peacetime left Dow without a regu-
lar buyer. After aborted efforts to use Saran in car seats
static buildup shocked drivers buttsengineers found
a way to eliminate its plasticky scent and unappetizing
green tint, repackaging Saran as a food-friendly cling
wrap. PVDC could be stretched over the top of any con-
tainer, keeping meals fresh and preventing them from
stenching up the fridge. But PVDC was feared to be an
environmental toxin, so beginning in 2004 Saran Wrap
underwent a chemical makeover. Now made out of a
chlorine-free polyethylene, its not as clingy as the orig-
inal and may not stick to airplanes, but its still admira-
bly odor-resistant. Perfect for keeping tonights carrot
cake from smelling like last nights garlic-artichoke dip.

$3

Saran Wraps tight

molecular bonds block
pungent odors.

0 6 0 NOV 2017
 GADGET LAB
COOK
TOO MANY
INGREDIENTS
Ready-to-cook meal kits are the epitome of internet-fueled
convenience. But the recipe still needs tweaking. JOE RAY
RECENTLY, SOMEONE ASKED me if I thought people were cooking at
home less frequently than they used to. I bristled at the query, prob-
ably because I was worried that it might be true. Wasnt everyone out
there watching cooking shows then turning off the TV, getting out their
mason jars, and whipping up Alton Browns watermelon rind pickles?
Anyone fretting over Americas culinary decline can attempt to
find solace in the burgeoning popularity of meal kits, those boxes
that arrive on your doorstep filled with every ingredient you need
for (typically) three meals for two. Just unpack, follow the cooking
instructions, and youve got a fresh, healthy repast, no grocery store
trip necessary. Less than a year ago, meal kits had cultlike cachet.
The startups offering these dinners-in-a-box sported aspirational
names often involving the word chef; other monikers sounded
0 6 2 NOV 2017
like rejected Lucky Charms marshmallows.
Blue Aprons IPO this summer, along with
Amazons entry into the field and its pur-
chase of Whole Foods, show that meal kits
are likely headed for the mainstream. The
allure is understandable. I tested four services
and found that almost every meal was a hit,
and I was cooking dishescurries, soups, a
maple-glazed tempehthat I almost other-
wise never made at home.
But there is a problem: While meal kits
may be convenient, their near-brazen anti-
environmentalism should make your stom-
ach ache. Inside the cardboard box youll
typically find insulation, goopy ice packs,
and a bunch of tiny plastic bags and boxes
and jars for, say, four sprigs of parsley, a
tablespoon of vegan butter, and a shot of
mirin. While many purveyors use some Earth-
friendly packaging, and Blue Apron will pro-
vide shipping labels for sending back certain
items, all that stuff had to be produced in the
first place. To be sure, as long as you eat all
the vittles, food wasteestimated by the
USDA to be in the tens of millions of tons each
yearis practically nil. But the rise of meal kit
services leaves us with a dilemma, weigh-
ing personal convenience against adding to
already overflowing landfills.
There are some promising efforts that could
go a long way toward alleviating this problem.
National chains such as Kroger and (surprise!)
Whole Foods have test-marketed kits that you
can pick up in a ready-to-go bag that requires
less packaging. Perhaps AmazonFresh Pickup
will follow suit, making it easy to order a meal
kit right before you leave work and grab it on
the way home at the most convenient pickup
location, which could now include any Whole
Foods in the country.
Hopefully the waste issue gets solved,
because meal kits can be a potent gateway
drug. By using them, we might realize that
we enjoy standing in front of a stove, prepar-
ing a nice weeknight meal, and spending time
together. We could open a bottle of wine from
the shop around the corner. Then we could
light a candle, relax, and appreciate the food
we made for each other. Sounds lovely, doesnt
it? We might even decide to forget the meal
kits altogether and start preparing things
ourselves from scratch.
Joe Ray (@joe_ Maybe wed actually
diner) writes get around to making
about food and
kitchen technol- those watermelon rind
ogy for WIRED. pickles after all.
 FROM MILD TO MONSTROUS
Since 2007, US scientists have used the Enhanced Fujita
scale to rate six classes of tornadoes, each one more
FILE://WEATHER intense and destructive than the last. C H E L S E A L E U

A rare photograph of a supercell,

the enormous, rotating breed of
storm known for dropping tornadoes.
EF-0
Wind speed: 6585 mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 3
Likely damage: Tree branches snap
Average frequency: 678/year
EF-1
Wind speed: 86110 mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 31
Likely damage: Tree trunks uprooted
Average frequency: 378/year

0 6 6
EF-2
Wind speed: 111135 mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 111
Likely damage: Houses shift
Average frequency: 110/year
EF-3
Wind speed: 136165 mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 246
Likely damage: Walls collapse
Average frequency: 34/year
EF-4
Wind speed: 166200 mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 332
Likely damage: Houses destroyed
Average frequency: 9/year
EF-5
Wind speed: 201+ mph
Total fatalities, 200716: 327
Likely damage: Use your imagination
Average frequency: >1/year
Into the Vortex
Storm chasers,
megacomputers,
and the quest
to understand the
extreme weather
thats battering
the world.
by brantley hargrove
A MONSTER WAS
coming to central Oklahoma.
Early in the evening of May30,
2013, Cathy Finley and her
partner, Bruce Lee, were driv-
ing along a back road near the
small town of Guthrie, Oklahoma,
30miles north of the states capi-
tal, when they spotted Tim Sama-
ras and two members of his crew
leaning against a white sedan and
looking out over the low hills.
Samaras, an old friend of the cou-
ples and one of the most famous
storm chasers in the country, was
in the area for the same reason
as Finley and Leethey were all
severe-weather researchers, and
a tornado was on its way.The
three friends had known each
other for almost a decade,
and in 2007 they helped
found Twistex, a group
MITCH DOBROWNER
 FILE://WEATHER
dedicated to gathering atmo-
spheric data to better under-
stand tornadoes. Whenever a
storm threatened to spin up a
twister, the Twistex team would
gas up the chase vehicles and
assume familiar roles: Samaras
would try to get as close as pos-
sible to the funnel to deploy his
measurement probes, and Finley
and Lee would slice through the
storm in sedans outfitted with
roof-mounted weather stations,
gathering data that radar and
weather balloons miss. A reputa-
tion for fearlessness landed the
Twistex team a spot on a real-
ity show called Storm Chasers,
which featured their exploits
for three seasons until Discov-
ery Channel canceled the show
in 2011 due to low ratings. Fund-
ing for Twistex dried up, and
the members went their sep-
arate ways, meeting up when-
ever serious wind threatened to
blow through the plains.
When they reunited on the
back road near Guthrie, all three
wanted nothing more than to
take on the coming tornado
together the way they used to.
But with no source of cash to
field an entire chasing team, this
season was a no-go. Besides,
the most recent forecasts indi-
cated that the next days storm
would reach peak intensity once
it entered the Oklahoma City
metro area during rush hour,
and Finley and Lee had long
since sworn off pursuing twist-
Superstorm
soundings are
very rare: Its
hard to take
measurements
when all hell is
breaking loose.
0 6 8 NARAYAN MAHON
ers down crowded streetstoo
dangerous, too hard to collect
good data. They decided to pack
up their gear and head home to
Minnesota, leaving Samaras and
crew to chase the storm.
During the long drive back the
following day, Finley followed
the storm on her laptop through
radar tracking and live footage
from spotters and news heli-
copters. Forecasters had been
wrong about one key detail
the tornado let loose in wide-
open farm country, about 25
miles west of the city. It mea-
sured about 212 miles across,
easily the widest anyone had
ever seen. Its peak wind veloci-
ties registered at least 290 mph
STORM CHASERS
and possibly much higher, about
the fastest on record. And its
main funnel rode the southern
rim of its parent storm for nearly
40 minutes, moving back and
forth along a wide, wobbling arc
like a menacing grin. Knowing
Samaras as well as she did, Finley
guessed he was having the time
Bruce Lee, along with Cathy
Finley, drove through storms
collecting data on tornadoes.
of his life right in the thick of it.
Back at home in Minnesota,
as Saturday turned to Sunday,
the phone rang around 1 am,
rousing Finley and Lee from a
deep sleep. Lee, rangy and well-
muscled, slipped out of bed and
padded across the house toward
the kitchen. The phone went
quiet, then rang again, and he
answered it. It was a former
student from the University of
Northern Colorado, where he
and Finley used to run the small
meteorology department. His
voice shaking, the man said he
had it on good authority that
three bodies found on a desolate
Oklahoma back road belonged
to Samaras, his 24-year-old
son (and videographer) Paul,
and meteorologist Carl Young.
Finley heard a curious tenor
in Lees voice from the bedroom
and came to his side. Shes a tall
woman from western Minnesota
farm country with almond eyes,
and she and Lee were unsure
whether they should grieve or
wait for confirmation. Night gave
way to day, and as the windows
began to pale with the approach
of dawn, they got a call from
another former Twistex col-
league confirming the worst.
In the days that followed, Fin-
ley retreated to her neglected
garden, where she took her
anger and grief out on the weeds.
Meanwhile, Lee pieced together
what happened: Samaras had
been driving his Chevy Cobalt
hundreds of yards north of the
tornadoand at times much,
much closerlikely thinking
he was tracking parallel to the
twister at a safe distance. But
something caused the funnel to
swing fast toward the vehicle,
engulfing it. Samaras might have
thought he had studied enough
tornadoes to guess this ones
movements, but whatever signs
or signals he typically relied on
to anticipate a twisters path (its
heading, the stage of its devel-
opment, the direction of the
wind) had failed him. He may
have thought he had the right
information, but he didnt.
Based on radar measure-
ments, the tornado had
EF-5-level wind speeds. The
Enhanced Fujita scale assigns
every tornado a number from 0
to 5 based on how much destruc-
tion the wind speeds inflict. The
damage from an EF-0 could just
NOV 2017
 FILE://WEATHER
as easily be accomplished with
a strong wind gust. An EF-5, on
the other hand, in which winds
exceed 200 mph, leaves behind
scenes of devastation reminis-
cent of razed Japanese cities.
Asphalt gets scoured off roads.
Vehicles get tossed the length
of a football field. The EF levels
in between account for vary-
ing degrees of destruction, and
despite decades of research, sci-
entists still dont understand
exactly how the air we breathe
can suddenly strip a home down
to its concrete slab. Weve put a
man on the moon and unlocked
the secrets of the atom, but the
inside of a tornado is, in many
respects, still a mystery.
What scientists do know is
that extreme storms like the
one that killed Samarasand
the hurricanes that ripped
through Texas, Florida, and the
Caribbean this summerare
likely to develop with greater
frequency and intensity. Accord-
ing to a recent study in the Amer-
ican Journal of Climate Change
that analyzed 42 years worth
of tornadic atmospheric indi-
cators, the supertornado that
killed Samaras should occur in a
stable climate, on average, once
every 900 years. But when the
researchers accounted for fac-
tors such as atmospheric insta-
bility and warming oceans (both
associated with climate change),
they confirmed what the rest of
us already know from watching
the news: Once-in-a-millennium
storms no longer require 1,000
years to recur. No scientist can
say for certain whether climate
change is to blame for the sever-
Brantley Hargrove
(@BrantHargrove)
is the author of
The Man Who Caught
the Storm, a biogra-
phy of Tim Samaras,
coming soon.
NOV 2017
ity of any single storm. They
only know that they have to fig-
ure out what creates and sus-
tains these storms, fast. Better,
richer data and more powerful
computers would help forecast-
ers build ever more predictive
storm models. They could tell
those in a tornados path not
only that a monster is coming,
but what kind. Warnings would
be longer, more precise, more
urgent. Lives would be saved,
families left intact.
For decades, Finley and Lee
had lost themselves in the vast-
ness of the plains, immersed in
the puzzle of mesoscale weather
patterns, part of something far
larger than themselves. Sama-
NARAYAN MAHON
ras and the other chasers were
a second family to thema
storm family, Finley says.
And storm chasing, she adds,
is about watching each oth-
ers backs. Samaras and his
crew died, Lee says, because
there was nobody watching
their backs. Because there
Cathy Finley, a storm chaser
and a founding member of
Twistex.
was nobody, and nothing, to
tell them where the great storm
was headed next.
AT THE EDGE OF
emerald fields of corn and soy-
beans sits the National Peta-
scale Computing Facility, the
crown jewel of the University of
Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
The 88,000-square-foot glass-
covered facility looks like a fancy
convention center, and its sur-
rounded by a black steel fence
strong enough to stop a speed-
ing Mack truck. Past a retina
scanner and through a heavy-
gauge steel door resides a com-
puter named Blue Waters. Its
bigspanning 10,000 square
feetand its made up of 288
matte-black rack towers that
house the 27,000 nodes that are
the key to its power. Each node
holds two microprocessors, not
unlike a stripped-down PC but
faster than anything youll find
at Best Buy.
Since powering up in 2013,
Blue Waters has been one of
the few computers in the world
capable of processing the biggest
of big data sets, encompassing
everything from the evolution of
the universe to the global spread
of flu pandemics. Its also one of
the only machines in the world
that can model the staggering
complexities of a supertornado,
which is exactly what an atmo-
spheric scientist named Leigh
Orf spent the better part of 2013
failing to do.
At the time Orf was chair of
the Earth science department
at Central Michigan University,
a school in the small town of Mt.
Pleasant. Weather has always
been on my radar, so to speak,
Orf says today. The fascination
began in the early 70s, just after
bath time in his boyhood home
in Ludlow, Massachusetts, when
a concussion ripped through the
house with the ferocity of a pipe
bomb. The wall in his sisters bed-
room was blown outpaneling
everywhere, insulation smok-
ing, wires red-hot and glowing.
It scared the living shit out of
me, he says. Orf wouldnt enter
the room for months. He was 5,
and he has been obsessed with
weather ever since.
A dozen or so years later, when
he arrived at the University of

STORM CHASERS
WisconsinMadison and fell
in love with coding, he learned
about the community of scien-
tists who had been using com-
puters to simulate storms since
the 1970s. In the earliest render-
ings, most computers couldnt
re-create any features of a tor-
nado that were less than a kilo-
meter wide or tall, meaning they
could re-create the broad con-
tours of a storm but none of its
important details. Over time,
driven in part by advances in
microprocessing power, scien-
tists gradually sharpened the
resolution from 1 kilometer to
500 meters and eventually to 100
meters, the storm and the tor-
nado steadily coming into focus.
Not focused enough for Orf,
though. After spending the early
2000s studying what he con-
siders low-resolution simula-
tions (with features rendered
within 250 to 500 meters), Orf
came to believe that the only
way to understand how and why
a supertornado forms was to
re-create one in superfine res-
olution30 meters, meaning
it could render any detail of a
storm so long as it measured
at least 100 feet long or wide.
Compared to the 1-kilometer
resolution of early simulations,
thats the difference between the
blocky pixelation of Atari and the
eerie verisimilitude of Xbox One.
To achieve that level of detail, it
would take Orfs personal com-
puter a decade to simulate a sin-
gle stormand thats only if it
could handle the data and mem-
ory load, which it couldnt. He
would need a computer that
could process hundreds of tera-
bytes of data, over and over and
over again. A supercomputer,
really, only one that hadnt yet
been invented. So he waited.
He spent the next decade forg-
ing connections with scientists
at research facilities around the
world. And when the $360 mil-
lion Blue Waters system came
online after two years of con-
struction, one of those connec-
tions, Bob Wilhelmson, a pioneer
of storm modeling who taught at
the U of I, reached out to Orf. With
Wilhelmsons help, Orf got nine
months of access to Blue Waters
to create what no researcher
ever had: a simulated EF-5 tor-
nado that could be studied, and
simulate an EF-5 tornado.
maybe even reverse-engineered,
revolutionizing our understand-
ing of storms that have otherwise
defied comprehension.
On his first day of access in
December 2012, he logged on
from his office in Michigan, keyed
in a PIN to access the encrypted
network, and prepared to upload
a trove of data known as a sound-
ing. Every day, National Weather
Service stations all over the
country release weather bal-
loons to gather yard-by-yard
accounts of how pressure, tem-
perature, relative humidity, and
wind speed change from the
surface to altitudes as high as
20miles in the sky. This collec-
tion of data, to the untrained eye,
Leigh Orf had nine months
with a supercomputer to
ates a supertornado isnt found
looks like an Excel spreadsheet
filled with numbers. To translate
these raw numbers into a digi-
tal storm, Orf would use CM1, a
program that uses the meteoro-
logical data in any given sound-
ing to simulate a near-infinite
combination of weather con-
ditions. An environment that
produces a tornado in the real
world should spark a similar
He needed
a massive
supercomputer,
one that hadnt
been invented
yet. So he
waited.
result in a CM1 simulation, at
least in theory. And Orf would
then be able to manipulate cer-
tain parametersincreasing and
decreasing the amount of fric-
tion from the ground, tweaking
the way the model handles tur-
bulenceto determine which
factors are most critical in build-
ing, sustaining, and driving a
supertornado.
Processing all the data in a
sounding and creating a sim-
ulation could take Blue Waters
anywhere from a few hours to
a few days, depending on the
amount of data being crunched,
and Orf didnt want to waste
any time with unnecessarily
complicated soundings. The
first sounding he uploaded
was synthetic, a simple com-
posite built by scientists that
contained all the atmospheric
ingredients believed to cause
tornadoes. As Orf began to play
with the synthetic atmosphere,
though, Blue Waters would only
produce what he calls wussy-
ass tornadoes. He spent days
adjusting different variables
decreasing the evaporation rate
of rain, for examplebut nothing
worked. Whatever it is that cre-
in synthetic soundings, and after
months of trial and error Orf
knew he needed to do some-
thing different. Screw this,
he remembers telling his wife.
Im going to Mother Nature.
A friend from the Univer-
sity of North Dakota offered
Orf a sounding from a real-life
EF-3. Yet even the real thing,
when uploaded into the model,
spawned nothing more than
what Orf calls spin-ups, tran-
sient tornadoes he has little
0 7 1
 FILE://WEATHER STORM CHASERS

THE SIMULATED SUPERTORNADO

Leigh Orfs detailed storm simulations allowed him, Cathy Finley, and Bruce Lee to spot a
never-before-seen feature of a tornado: a helix-shaped tube of air racing around the central
funnel. Theyve dubbed it the streamwise vorticity current, and it could be a breakthrough in
understanding how the worlds worst twisters work. C H E L S E A L E U

THE VORTEX:
This thick column
of orange stuff is a
bunch of swirling air
that forms the vortex
ANTICYCLONIC VORTICES: The chaotic air around
of the tornado.
a tornado is filled with many smaller vortices, some
of which eventually get absorbed into the growing
funnel. In Orfs simulation, these are color-coded by
the direction the air is rotatingblue indicates that REAR
the air is spinning clockwise; red, counterclockwise. FLANK

FORWARD
FLANK

STREAMWISE VORTICITY CURRENT: COLD POOL: A region of cold

This spiraling river of air flows upward from the air beneath the storm, formed
tornados forward flank into the core of the storms by evaporating rain, that feeds the
updraft, and the researchers believe that the low streamwise vorticity current.
pressure helps sustain and drive the tornado.

interest in. Orf would alternate
between genuine and syn-
thetic soundings over the fol-
lowing months, never spinning
up anything close to a super-
tornado. With each day bring-
ing him closer to his Blue Waters
deadline, he realized that if he
intended to simulate a beast, he
needed to find an EF-5 sound-
ing. But superstorm soundings
are exceedingly rare, since mea-
surements must be taken near
the twister as it forms, and thats
a little tricky when all hell is
breaking loose. There is also no
2013, with just a few weeks left
before his time with Blue Waters
ran out, Orf got an email from
Lou Wicker, a scientist at the
National Severe Storms Labo-
ratory and a former student of
his mentor, Wilhelmson. Wicker
heard about Orfs project and
wanted to help, and his email
included a file, a warning, and a
winking emoji: Be careful with
this sounding, Wicker wrote.
It could damage the machine.
The storm happened on
May24, 2011. Like the one that
would kill Samaras two years
drilling rig three times. It was
an EF-5. Orf loaded the sound-
ing into CM1, and even before it
formed a tornado the simulation
went haywire, depicting wind
speeds in the storms updraft
that had never been documented
in nature.
Orf suspected the problem
wasnt with the data in the
sounding but with CM1 (or at
least the way he was using CM1).
For the clouds and rain and wind
to swirl in the virtual world as
they do in nature, Blue Waters
had to communicate the move-
nated units of time, called time
steps, that Orf could increase and
decrease in CM1 as needed. The
lower the time step, the faster
the wind speeds possible in the
programs simulation. A lower
time step also meant longer
processing times, meaning Orf
would have fewer opportunities
to run simulations during his
precious remaining days with
Blue Waters.
Orf took the risk. He first short-
ened the time step to 0.3sec-
ond, uploaded the sounding, and
let Blue Waters run. Two hours
COURTESY OF LEIGH ORF

centralized database stocked
with ready-made superstorm
soundings, even at the National
Weather Service.
Then, at the end of August
later, its winds ripped through
the plains at more than 200mph.
Along its 63-mile path it killed
nine people, injured nearly 200,
and rolled a 1.9 millionpound
ment of air between its 27,000
nodes, which acted like an inter-
connected grid. These nodes had
to talk to each other and pro-
cess the data in single, coordi-
passed and the system failed.
He then shortened the time step
to 0.25 second. Thirteen hours
went by, and it failed again. Then,
shortly before 10am on Septem-

0 7 2 NOV 2017
 FILE://WEATHER
ber 16, 2013, he initialized the last
simulation he would be allowed
to run on Blue Waters. He set a
time step of 0.2second, and since
Blue Waters would require the
better part of the day to process
the data, Orf logged off and tried
to think about anything other
than tornadoes. When he logged
back on at 6 pm, he expected
to find that the simulation had
blown up again.
It hadnt.
The model appeared sta-
ble, and he saw something big
and exceptionally violent on
his screena tornado. As CM1
translated the EF-5 sounding, the
tornado kept getting wider.The
intensity, path length, dura-
tionit all matched the char-
acteristics of the real storm.
Orf had just simulated the first
high-resolution EF-5 tornado
along with its parent supercell
thunderstorm, and anything
researchers had ever wanted to
learn about how a supertornado
is born, and how it maintains its
size and strength, was inside
it. All he needed was someone
to help him make sense of it all.
FIVE MONTHS LATER,
on February 1, 2014, Orf flew to
Atlanta for the annual meeting
of the American Meteorolog-
ical Society. With an iPad full
of vivid video clips of his simu-
lated supertornado, he paraded
through the halls of the Omni
Hotel. After years of toiling
underground, he was at last
No scientist
had ever seen
a simulated
storm like
that before.
0 7 4 NOV 2017
ready to show his storm to the
public and enlist other scien-
tists to help him analyze it.
Thats when he ran into two
familiar faces: Finley and Lee.
The world of severe-weather
science is small; everyone knows
everyone. Orf hadnt seen Lee or
Finley since the death of their
friends in Oklahoma the previ-
ous year, and he told them how
relieved he was that they hadnt
chased that day. He then pulled
them aside, turned on his iPad,
and showed them what he had.
Their jaws hung slack. The way
the rain curtains slid around the
tornado, the way the funnel rode
the edge of the storm like a col-
umn made of cloud and dust: Lee
and Finley had seen all this in
nature but never in a simulation.
Twistex had spent years gather-
ing snippets of data from storms,
but their work was like shining a
penlight into the pitch black of a
cavern. The pieces didnt form the
big picturethe grand schematic
of a supertornados internal and
largely inscrutable machinery.
This was the big picture, and
they asked Orf to replay the video
half a dozen times. They knew
they were seeing a simulated
storm as no scientists had ever
done before, and when Orf asked
for their help analyzing the simu-
lation, they jumped at the chance.
On a chilly afternoon this past
winter, Finley peered into the
guts of the supertornado Orf had
first shown her three years ear-
lier, her face washed in the glow
of the monitor. School had let out
for the holidays, and the halls
of Saint Louis University were
mostly empty. Since that day in
Atlanta, Finley and the others
had reoriented their lives around
the simulation. Orf is now at the
University of Wisconsin, and the
folks at Blue Waters have granted
him an additional two years of
accessas close as one gets to
carte blanche.
In her office, Finley let her eyes
roam over all the currents she
STORM CHASERS
could never see out on the plains.
It makes for hypnotic viewing,
as though Orf had peeled away
the skin of the supertornado to
reveal its viscera and sinew. She
and Lee can now release digital
trackers into the simulated tor-
nado, a little like injecting con-
trast dye to image blood vessels
on a CT scan. They could zoom
in on where most of the activity
takes place throughout a torna-
dos evolution. And their dis-
coveries will help guide storm
chasers on the ground as they
try to measure and track storms
from a safe distance.Were going storms such as Harvey and Irma
to be able to target our observa-
tions to see if we can see in the
real world what Leighs team is
seeing in their simulations, says
Jeff Snyder, a research scientist
at the Cooperative Institute for
Mesoscale Meteorological Stud-
ies who knows Finley and Lee
from storm conferences.
One of their discoveries calls
into question a central assump-
tion of many storm researchers.
For years Finley and Lee studied
a downdraft at the rear flank of
tornadoes, and like most of their
colleagues they believed it played
a crucial role in perpetuating the
twisters life cycle. Their simula-
tions, however, suggest that most
of the action during the genesis of
a tornado happens near the front
of the storm, with a spinning riot
of air, or what theyve christened
a streamwise vorticity current,
that pushes air upward more
forcefully. Its a theory they still
need to prove, but if it holds up
to further testing and observa-
tion, Finley says, weve been
focusing on the wrong thing all
this time.
It will take Finley, Lee, and Orf
years to fully understand this
particular EF-5, and they plan
to simulate an ensemble of dif-
ferent supertornadoes, hoping
to draw out their common fea-
tures. Theyll soon benefit from
even greater computer power.
The coming age of exascale com-
putingand the transition from
silicon toward carbon nanotubes
and chips made from gallium
nitride or graphenewill offer
processing times magnitudes
faster than the petascale comput-
ing at Blue Waters. That means
resolutions impossible just a few
years ago. Five meters, maybe
even less.
It could also mean the power
to capture and analyze the inner
workings of hurricanes like
Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria.
Whereas the widest tornadoes
measure 2 1 2 miles across,
are 100 times as wide. Thats a
lot more meteorological data to
process and analyze, and once
the next generation of supercom-
puters comes online, scientists
might finally have the processing
power to create something with
the richness and detail of Orfs
EF-5an operational model that
spans the entire globe, produc-
ing hi-res simulations of ongo-
ing hurricanes.
But thats all on the horizon.
In the meantime, Finley, Lee, and
Orf are focused on Blue Waters,
and Orf has already chosen the
next monster to fire across its
nodes. This sounding was buried
inside archives used by govern-
ment forecasters and research-
ers, and Orf only discovered it
two years ago. It took place on
the late afternoon of May 31,
2013, near El Reno, Oklahoma.
It killed Samaras, his son Paul,
and Carl Young. For however
long it takes, Orf, Finley, and Lee
will study the simulated super-
tornado from the safety of their
laptops, breaking it down and
building it up and searching for
answers in a storm of code.
 FE ATURES | 25.11

friederike hantel 0 7 9
081

BY
ALEX
MAR

PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
CAIT
OPPERMANN

HIROSHI
ISHIGURO
BUILDS
ANDROIDS.
BEAUTIFUL,
REALISTIC,
UNCANNILY
CONVINCING
HUMAN
REPLICAS.
ACADEMICALLY,
HE IS USING
THEM TO
UNDERSTAND
THE MECHANICS
OF PERSON-
TO-PERSON
INTERACTION.
BUT HIS TRUE
QUEST IS TO
UNTANGLE THE
INEFFABLE
NATURE OF
CONNECTION
ITSELF.

THIS
ARTICLE IS A
COLLABORATION
BETWEEN
WIRED AND
EPIC MAGAZINE.
It is summer 2002, mid-morning in a university research lab on the edge
of Osaka, Japan. Two girlsboth dressed in pale yellow, with child-puffy
cheeks, black shoulder-length hair, and bangsstand opposite each other
under fluorescent lights. More precisely: One is a girl, 5 years old; the other
is her copy, her android replica. They are the same size, one modeled on
the other, and they are meeting for the first time. The girl stares hard
into the eyes of her counterpart; its expression is stern and stiff. It seems
to return her gaze. A man is videotaping the pairhe is the father of
one, creator of the otherand from off-camera he asks, Would you like
to say something? The girl turns to him, disoriented. She turns back to
the android. Talk to her! he says. Hello. The girl repeats the word,
quietly, to her robot-self. It nods. Her father feeds her another line:

Lets play.
The android wiggles its head. Her father chuckles behind the camera.
But the girl does not budge. She simply stares at her double, the look on
her face one of focus and perhaps concern. Each member of this pair
continues making the barely there gestures that serve, through reflex
or ruse, as signs of life: Each blinks at regular intervals; each tilts her
head from side to side. One is processing, in the raw, sensory-overload
manner of a human child; the other is performing a series of simple
movements made possible by the servomotors installed inside the sili-
cone casing that is its skin. Is it difficult to play with her? the father
asks.His daughter looks to him, then back at the android. Its mouth
begins to open and close slightly, like a dying fish. He laughs. Is she
eating something? The girl does not respond. She is patient and obedi-
ent and listens closely. But something inside is telling her to resist.Do
you feel strange? her father asks. Even he must admit that the robot
is not entirely believable. Eventually, after a few long minutes, the
girls breathing grows heavier, and she announces, I am so tired. Then
she bursts into tears. That night, in a house in the suburbs, her father
uploads the footage to his laptop for posterity. His name is Hiroshi Ishi-
guro, and he believes this is the first record of a modern-day android.

ALEX MAR (@_alex_mar) is the

author of Witches of America.
This is her first article for wired.

In the 15 years since, Ishiguro has produced some
30 androids, most of them female. They have
included replicas of a newscaster, an actress,
and a fashion model. These androids have made
numerous public appearancesin cafs and
department stores, singing in malls, perform-
ing in a play. Mostly, though, Ishiguros brood of
pretty women is used for his academic exper-
iments, many of which are conducted at two
locations in Japan: the Advanced Telecommu-
nications Research Institute International in
Nara and the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory
on the campus of Osaka University.
The lab, known as IRL, is embedded within
a maze of austere, gray university buildings.
In one of these industrial boxes, about 30 stu-
dents and assistant professors work in a series
of near-silent computer pods and observation
rooms. Teams of young men shuffle down the
long, linoleum-lined hallways in sweatshirts,
pace the research rooms in their socks, or hover
over laptops in rows, heads down, subsisting
mostly on Red Bull, crackers, and Pocky Sticks.
(Women do not seem like a natural fit here. As
if to underline this fact, a sign by the restrooms
reads, watch out for male strangers in
the ladies toilet.)
Presiding over this disheveled scene is
Ishiguro-sensei. He is immediately recogniz-
able, looking just as he does in promotional
photos from recent years: perfectly mod in
slim-fitting black with matching leather back-
pack and fanny pack. He wears tinted hexagonal
glasses and styles his jet-black hair into a mop
top that swoops across his forehead. This is his
department: Ishiguro, 54, is a distinguished
professor at one of the countrys top universi-
ties, with two labs, partnerships with a dozen
private companies throughout Japan, a recent
$16 million grant from the government (one of
its most generous in science and engineering,
he says), and seven secretaries to manage it all.
Today, the technical ability to produce a robot
that truly looks and moves and speaks like a
human remains well beyond our reach. Even fur-
ther beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue
such a machine with humannessthat ineffable
presence the Japanese call sonzai-kan. Because
to re-create human presence we need to know
more about ourselves than we doabout the
accumulation of cues and micromovements that
trigger our empathy, put us at ease, and earn
our trust. Someday we may crack the problem
of creating artificial general intelligencea
machine brain that can intuitively perform
any human intellectual taskbut why would
we choose to interact with it?
Ishi guro believes that since were hard-
wired to interact with and place our faith in
humans, the more humanlike we can make a
robot appear, the more open well be to shar-
ing our lives with it. Toward this end, his teams
are pioneering a young field of research called
human-robot interaction.
HRI is a hybrid discipline: part engineering,
part AI, part social psychology and cognitive
science. The aim is to analyze and cultivate our
evolving relationship with robots. HRI seeks
to understand why and when were willing to
interact with, and maybe even feel affection
for, a machine. And with each android he pro-
duces, Ishiguro believes he is moving closer to
building that trust.
In a secluded room at IRL, a collection of
androids is stored and maintained: his hardest
workers. Arranged in this space today, with its
blackout curtains, thin corporate carpeting,
and shelves cluttered with cables and monitors
and an array of wigs, is a pair of his replicas of
grown women. They are models of the Geminoid
F series. The name is a play off geminus (Latin
for twin), a reminder that their human coun-
terparts exist somewhere in the world.
At any given time, students and staff may
be testing, measuring, and recording the
responses of dozens of volunteers to the
androids at their disposal. What about its
behavior or appearance, its specific facial
expressions and minute body movements, do
they find alienating? What draws them closer?
These androids are used to find answers to
an ever-growing list of research questions:
How important is nonverbal communication
to establishing trust between humans (and,
therefore, between human and android)? Under
what circumstances might we treat an android
like a human? In this way, Ishi guros collec-
tive of labs is dedicated to the engineering of
human intimacy.
Over the several months we are in contact, Ishi-
guro will share information that strikes me as
deeply personal: He has contemplated suicide
twice in his life; though he has a family, he con-
siders himself a lonely man. I will hear him use
that word to describe himselflonelyabout
half a dozen times.
As for me, when I first visit Ishiguro, my sit-
uation is this:
I am 23 months away from what had seemed
like the start of a serious relationship but was
not. I am 15 months away from a rebound rela-
tionship that lingered too long. I am 13 months
into a period of spending long stints in a small
town in upstate New York for the sake of pro-
ductive quiet. Im readying a book to go to the
printerswork that, for me, is all-consuming
and necessary. And lately, when I step back from
the manuscript for an afternoon or at night, I
feel it: isolation. This isolation is not completeI
have my close friends, a wider circle of less-
close friends, my familybut it is the absence
of intimacy. Nothing romantic, no sexual life.
This absence has been, in part, a choice; cer-
tain men have always been curious about me.
But what I miss more than sex is the feeling
of closeness with another person, something
Ive never believed could be conjured up. And
though the sensory deprivation has become a
little extreme, most of the timecan I put a per-
centage on it? Is it as high as 80 percent?I do
not think about it. I am semi-radically indepen-
dent and some kind of artist and in many ways
an unconventional liberal type. However alien-
ating, for me this is a time of deep creativity. Its
that additional 20 percent of the timethats
when I feel dizzy.
This is where Im at when I fly 17 hours to
meet Ishiguro. And as a result, if I am honest
with myself, my time abroad feels particularly
fraught. The very concept of human connec-
tion has never felt so enigmatic to me. It makes
sense that someone would be trying to measure
it, to weigh it, to calculate its dimensions. To be
able to replicate the sensation of human inti-
macy would be to control the very thing that
confuses us most and eludes so many.
This is how Ishiguro remembers his childhood:
His family lives in the town of Adogawa, on
the western shore of Lake Biwa, from which a
river flows through Kyoto into Osaka Bay. At
school, in a classroom of disciplined children,
Hiroshi doesnt listen to the instructor. Its as
if he doesnt notice she is speaking at all. He
spends the day making drawings that have noth-
ing to do with the lesson. His mother worries
 SEAT.
AT ONE

HIS OWN
TO LOSE

OCCUPY-
ALREADY
PERHAPS

ING THAT
BEING IS
TRACK OF
POINT, MY

BECAUSE A
DAD SEEMS

SYNTHETIC
IDENTITY

A CONVERSATION IS A KIND OF ILLUSION, ISHIGURO SAYS. I DONT KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON IN YOUR BRAIN. ALL I CAN KNOW IS WHAT IM THINKING.
that there may be something wrong with him.
Hiroshi rarely sees his mother or father as
schoolteachers they are as consumed by their
work as their son will one day become. Instead,
his grandparents are raising him. His mothers
father is a farmer, a devout Buddhist with fixed,
traditional ideas about how to behave like a
Japanese man. He shows the boy the proper way
to use chopsticks, to pray, to prepare the house
for the New Years celebration. Unlike at school,
Hiroshi has the patience for these lessons: His
grandfather is not telling him how he should
think; he is teaching him to aspire to perfection.
They live at the foot of the Hira Mountains,
and Hiroshi likes to comb the mountainside for
snakes and insects. Maybe a stag beetle, glossy
black and segmented, nearly 3 inches long, with
a pair of antler-shaped mandibles emerging
straight from its head. He fixes new parts to its
body: razor blades, found pieces of metal. It is
an improvement. The insect may continue liv-
ing like this, if the glue doesnt kill it. These are
his earliest cyborgs.
One of Hiroshis close friends is a boy who
lives in a poorer community, down by the water,
and his parents collect and prepare the bodies
of the recently dead for burial. Hiroshi does not
yet understand that these people are consid-
ered to be lesser than his family, because they
have a job that, according to local prejudice, is
tainted. For this reason, when Hiroshis mother
discovers the friendship, she asks that her son
break it off. He will remember this moment for
the next 40 years.
Hiroshi is a delicate child. He has suffered
from extreme skin allergies from the time he was
born; his back and chest and arms are covered in
itchy, ugly rashes. His only comfort comes from
constant touch: Every night, his grandparents
take turns sitting beside him and scratching his
back until he is able to nod off. Every week his
doctor gives him three painful injections to try
to cure the conditionto no effect. (When he is
about 12, steroids will finally help, requiring him
to keep the drug on hand to this day.) His own
body will always be alien to him.
When it comes time for Ishiguro to go to college,
he chooses a school using three criteria: It will
accept an eccentric, sometimes indifferent stu-
dent like himself; its somewhere he can pursue
his drawing and painting; and its not very close
to home. In the fall of 1981, he lands at the Uni-
versity of Yamanashi, near Mount Fuji.
Once there, Ishiguro continues his careless
approach to his studies, finding more pleasure
in the string of odd jobs he takes to pay the
billshe works as a cook, the supervisor of a
childrens after-school program, a door-to-door
textbook salesman (that one lasts a week), and,
most lucrative of all, a professional pachinko
player. He finds himself on the fringes of student
life, rejecting any semblance of mainstream
Japanese ambition.
At the same time, he is fashioning himself
into that most romantic of outsiders: an art-
ist. Always in a black leather jacket, he skips
classes, packs his pads and pencils, and rides
his Yamaha chopper into the nearby country-
side to sketch the landscape. This is his focus:
the strange, organic shapes of the trees, the
peach blossoms that appear in the springtime.
He produces drawings and oil paintings, and
manages to sell a few.
But in his third year, Ishiguro abruptly gives
up painting. Unless he can become a great art-
ist and a tremendous public success, he sees no
point in it. (He blames, in part, his color blind-
ness: He is drawn to landscapes, but the entire
spectrum of green eludes him.) He has lost what
little direction he had. On his darker days, when
he takes his motorcycle on a steep and winding
road, Ishiguro imagines giving in to the impulse
to not make the turn. To drive straight ahead, fly
right off the edgewhat would that feel like?
Then a path presents itself. Yamanashi offers
courses in the new field of computer science,
and Ishiguro begins to wonder what relation-
ship computer graphics and computer vision
might have to the visual arts. These are the
early days of the PC, and programming seems
wildly creative. Feeling he has little to lose, he
switches majors.
Almost immediately, certain elements in his
brain click into place: Ishiguro realizes he can
continue to think like a painter in this unpo-
liced field, but with different tools. He falls in
love with the new vocabulary: Assembler, Pas-
cal. The students are relegated to working in a
single room kept bitterly cold, loud with the hum
of the huge computersconditions designed
for the comfort of machines, not humans. He
works alone, on software development, but he
is learning to communicate with a systema
system that responds to his commands. They
have entered into a dialog.
Ishiguro soon gives up his rides through the
country for entire days spent in the lab. And as
he becomes more fluent in this new language,
more immersed in a conversation with the large
machines, a fantasy takes shape: Could there be
a way to make this language more humanlike,
so that someday computers might understand
us intuitively, on our own terms? So that this
dialog might become a relationship?
This relationship becomes his singular pur-
suit, his dream.
In 2000, Ishiguro, as an associate professor at
Kyoto University, produces his first humanoid
robot: a mechanical-looking contraption that
moves on a wheeled platform, waving its jointed
steel arms. But he has started to think that a relat-
able, humanlike appearance is essential if peo-
ple are going to form real attachments to robots.
Its about a decade into his marriage (to a pia-
nist he met through a university friend), and he
asks his wife if he can make videotapes of her
sitting, breathing, responding to random stimuli.
He is trying to determine the nuances of human
behavior, to isolate the physical signals that read
to us, consciously or unconsciously, as human.
One minor revelation: Humans never truly sit still.
Ishiguro is aware of resistance to the concept
of an androidat least in the West, from which
many Japanese researchers take their cue. Some
are worried that consumer revulsion to a human-
like robot (the so-called uncanny valley effect)
would be too great to overcome and that a failed
android project could undercut public support of
robotics. Ishiguro, too, is worried that pushing
ahead with an untraditional approach might cost
him his academic career. But he cant resist. And
so when the company he has partnered with on a
new robot insists on hiring a respected designer
that makes it look, in Ishiguros opinion, like
an insect, he loses his patience. With his next
project, he decides to go rogue. He will create an
android to convince them.
Ishiguro believes that his first android should
be the same height as the insect (about 3 feet
tall), for purposes of comparison. In other words,
it will have to be modeled after a human child.
And given the painstaking production pro-
cessa model must spend hours encased in
plaster to cast an accurate replicathere is
only one child he can possibly get permission
to use: his own.
A few years earlier, Ishiguro became a father
to a daughter, named Risa, and he now turns to
his wife to explain his plan. She agreesshe is
in charge of raising the girl, and the experiment
would be difficult without her help. And so, in
early 2002, the entire family, along with makeup
and special effects artists, gathers in his lab on
campus and begins the two-day process of cre-
ating a replica of Risa.

Ishiguro will alter his human form to match his
doppelgnger. He opts for laser treatments and
the injection of his own blood cells into his
face.
-
In the lab, Risas mother helps her to undress. She takes
off the girls clothes and stands her up on a small wooden
platform. Together her father and an artist smooth a layer
of pale-green paste over her torso and upper thighs; over
that, they apply wide swatches of fabric dipped in plaster,
asking her to hold very still as it dries. Then the 5-year-old
girl, wrapped in a pink towel, her scalp covered in a rubber
cap and her ears plugged with cotton, is laid down on a table-
top, her head fenced in with Styrofoam and packing tape. An
artist lifts a plastic bucket and pours the paste in until it rises
to cover her ears, as father and mother try to reassure her:
Dont worry! and Youre fine! At last they position the girl
to sit up against the wall for the final part of the mold: her face.
Through a video cameras viewfinder, Ishiguro watches
the rigid expression on his small daughters face as her
mother and an artist slowly cover it in thick paste. Once
were done, her father says, you can eat anything you like!
They slather it across her forehead, around her chin, and
down the front of her neck; they apply it thickly on her cheeks
and across her nose, then subsume her entire mouth, her
mother laughing, keeping the mood light. Keep your eyes
closed. Like youre going to bed Good night! The whole
time, remarkable for a child her age, she does not move or
make a sound. And then the paste closes in on her as they
smooth it over her eyelids, and within moments her face
is layered in the creamy stuff, which has already begun to
harden. Her entire face is undersave her nostrils: a single
hole left clear for breathing.
Youre OK, the artist says. Just a little bit longer
Then Ishiguro, from behind the camera: Risa, youre totally
fine If youre feeling sleepy, if your head feels heavy, you
can just lean back. Just like sleeping
They press a square of plaster-soaked fabric over her face
(again, a hole for breathing) and it begins to stiffen. And per-
haps the professor is now concerned, because he loses the
shot, tilting the camera up to point at the wall. Risa, if you
can breathe properly through your nose, please squeeze
my hand
Risa, her mother says, make sure you dont cry, because
itll block your nose. Anyway, theres no need to cry! Be patient
Its OK to sleep. Go to sleep
When, months later, the package arrives at the lab, Ishi-
guro and his team open the crate to reveal the full-body
silicone-skin casing of his daughter: Risa, bald, naked, made
of rubber. They stretch the skin around foam-padded machin-
ery and prop it up in the lab. His wife has donated one of their
daughters sundresses so it has something to wear. Ishiguro
names it Repliee R1R for Risa.
The results of the experiment are mixed. Ishiguro has to
admit that the low-budget android, with its limited, stutter-
ing movements, is more zombie than human. And though
he shows the project only to a trusted inner circle, word of
the daughter android spreads, becoming a weird legend.
(In describing it, one roboticist I speak with uses the word
crazy, another strange and a little bit scary.) But Repliee
R1 gives Ishiguro the confidence to move forward.
As for his daughter, Ishiguro rewards her with several
Hello Kitty dolls. But still, he says, she cried. To this day,
theyve never spoken about the incident.
Three years later, in 2005, Ishiguro unveils
Repliee Q1 Expo to the public. Modeled on a grown
woman (a popular Tokyo newscaster) and pro-
duced with better funding, this version can move
its upper body fluidly and lip-synch to recorded
speech. Ishiguros lab conducts several studies
with it; the results are featured in a major Japa-
nese robotics journal; the lab is filmed for televi-
sion; he hears about a copycat android in South
Korea. As a growing audience is drawn to Ishig-
uros simulated human, his instincts are validated.
But he now wants something more. Twice
he has witnessed others have the opportunity,
however confusing, to encounter their robot
self, and he covets that experience. Besides, his
daughter was too young, and the newscaster,
though an adult, was, in his words, merely an
ordinary person: Neither was able to analyze
their android encounter like a trained scientist.
A true researcher should have his own double.
Flashing back to his previous life as a painter,
Ishiguro thinks: This will be another form of
self-portrait. He gives the project his initials:
Geminoid HI. His mechanical twin.
Ishiguro has hundreds of photos of the Gem-
inoids assembly. Here is his assistant wrap-
ping the facsimile of his then-43-year-old face
around the machine head and zipping it up the
back, its bald scalp studded with sensors. Here
is the Geminoid seated upright, a padded vest
in place of its torso, its mechanical biceps vis-
ible, its arms only flesh below the elbows, as
if it were wearing elegant gloves. The hands
have veins and sunspots and the faint wrinkles
that gather around the wrists; the nails have
cuticles, pale and precise. Here it is dressed, in
a fitted black shirt identical to Ishiguros. His
assistant raises its arms, one by one, to tug down
the sleeves, as if dressing a complicated child.
It also wears fitted black slacks, like Ishiguros,
and black sneakers stuffed with prosthetic feet in
matching socks; a black wig, styled like the hair
of its maker, is fastened onto the androids scalp
with snaps. Here is the machine that pumps air
into its chesta series of cables runs from its
tailbone into a metal boxas the professors dou-
ble sits at attention and speaks for the first time.
This android is a step forward, but it still falls
well short of verisimilitude. Its hands, at rest on
its lap, are rubbery to the touch; its eyes have a
surprising intensity, not unlike Ishiguros, but
they are clearly made of a hard, bright plastic.
Lean in close and you can hear the soft hum of a
hidden motor; a gentle click is audible each time
it blinks. At times, its overall effect, and that of
its sisters, is of a human-sized puppetlike the
animatronics in a Disney World display. But the
Geminoid is also unsettling. Because, somehow,
all these elements work in concert to simulate
a sympathetic interaction with a human. The
viewer cannot help but assign an entire range
of emotions to its face: melancholic (mouth
downturned), upset (eyes squinted shut), skep-
tical (a sideways glance), pensive (the tilt of
its head to the left). When its eyes meet yours,
motion sensors detecting your position, just
for a moment you feel that itthis he, this
Ishigurois aware of you.
This replica, Geminoid HI, brings Ishiguro the
recognition he has longed for. Using his double,
he and his team publish dozens of studies, ana-
lyzing the participants range of reactions to
him and his doppelgnger. (The studies involve
operating the android remotely and wirelessly:
teleoperation.) Side by side, he and his Gemi-
noid make appearances on TV shows across
Asia and Europe. Ishiguro also begins giving lec-
tures around the world without leaving his lab in
Osaka, teleoperating and speaking through the
android, which is carefully transported abroad
by an assistant. (Its legs and torso are checked
with the luggage; its head is carry-on.) Ishi-
guro-sensei becomes a source of fascination;
he is transformed from a researcher to the man
who made his copy. Invitations for conferences
and festivals stream in.
The success of this particular android is due,
in part, to how it seems to operate on several
levels. It is, like its predecessors, a circus trick:
Look at the human, look at his copy! Try to tell
them apart! It is also Ishiguros bid at solving
an existential dilemmaa striking attempt by
the maker to master himself, to make of himself
something more enduring. At the same time, it
has created a new predicament.
Ishiguro has discovered unexpected conse-
quences of living alongside his own replica. Hes
been dressing in black since his grad-school
years, and now this has become both his and
the HIs official uniform; he was thrilled to real-
ize this clearer vision of himself. But now he
must keep his (naturally shifting, aging) human
body corralled within the androids static limits.
He finds himself accommodating his android,
measuring himself against it, being defined by
it, his worth determined by it. In this way, his
android makes him both painfully conscious of
his aging body and more physically confident
than hes ever been.
Ishiguro is multiple myths simultaneously.
With his female androids, he is Pygmalion, bring-
ing his Galatea to life. But with his own replica,
he is Narcissus, staring into his reflection for
hours. Unlike Narcissus, of course, Ishiguro is
conscious of the situation he has created, but
hes set an unexpected trap for himself through
his image. He poses beside his android, in press
photos and TV appearances, in ways that accom-
modate the Geminoid, setting his face to mir-
ror its expression. (At one point at the research
institute, Ishiguro notices me photographing
him in front of his android and reflexively drops
his smile to match the robot at rest.)
Soon his students begin comparing him to the
GeminoidOh, professor, you are getting old,
they teaseand Ishiguro finds little humor in it.
A few years later, at 46, he has another cast of
his face made, to reflect his aging, producing a
second version of HI. But to repeat this process
every few years would be costly and hard on his
vanity. Instead, Ishiguro embraces the logical
alternative: to alter his human form to match
that of his copy. He opts for a range of cosmetic
procedureslaser treatments and the injec-
tion of his own blood cells into his face. He also
begins watching his diet and lifting weights;
he loses about 20 pounds. I decided not to get
old anymore, says Ishiguro, whose English is
excellent but syntactically imperfect. Always
I am getting younger.
Remaining twinned with his creation has
become a compulsion. Android has my iden-
tity, he says. I need to be identical with my
android, otherwise Im going to lose my iden-
tity. I think back to another photo of his first
doubles construction: Its robot skull, exposed,
is a sickly yellow plastic shell with openings for
glassy teeth and eyeballs. When I ask what he
was thinking as he watched this replica of his
own head being assembled, Ishiguro says, per-
haps only half-joking, I thought I might have
this kind of skull if I removed my face.
Now he points at me. Why are you coming
here? Because I have created my copy. The work
is important; android is important. But you are
not interested in myself.
On a winter day in 2012, a crowd clusters
around a large glass case in Tokyos Takashi-
maya department store. Perched inside is a
Geminoid F in an elegant silk day dress, long
brown bangs parted like curtains around its
face. Valentines Day is coming soon, and she the brain, sparking the uncanny valley effect.
sits, as if waiting for someone, before a back-
drop of gift boxes wrapped in rose-patterned
paper and large red bows.
She spends her days staring at her smart-
phone and mostly ignoring the thousands of vis-
itors who press close to the glass. All the while,
she goes through a range of facial expressions,
a spectrum of subtle emotions, as if reacting
to some text she has just received. Its a clever
ploy: By not interacting much with her onlook-
ers, the simulation maintains the appearance of
a human likenessafter all, real people spend
a lot of time willfully ignoring their surround-
ings. But occasionally, when you approach, she
looks up at you and smiles, and for a moment this
feels like an encounter with a pretty stranger.
Some days, Ishiguro stands across the aisle, by
the main entrance, and watches the people who
stop in front of her. He likes to imagine what they
believe she is thinking.
As complex as we assume ourselves to be, our
bonds with one another are often built on very
little. Given all the time we now spend living
through technology, not many of us would notice,
at least at first, if the friend we were messag-
ing were replaced by a bot. And humans do not
require much to stir up feelings of empathy with
another person or creatureeven an object. In
2011 a University of Calgary test found that sub-
jects were quick to assign emotions and inten-
tions to a piece of balsa wood operated with a
joystick. In other words, we are so hardwired for
empathy that our brains are willing to make the
leap to humanizing a piece of wood. Its a level
of animal instinct thats slapstick-hilarious and
a degree of vulnerability thats terrifying.
But as the object of our attention moves closer
in appearance to human, our expectations of
them grow far more complex. The uncanny val-
ley effect kicks ina huge drop-off in the graph
of our empathy as we sense were encountering
something both familiar and not quite right. The
same year as the Calgary test, having recently
developed his first-generation Geminoid F, Ishi-
guro and the University of California at San
Diego published a study of neurons associated
with empathy. The team used an fMRI machine
to scan the brains of 20 people in their twenties
and thirties as they watched separate videos
of one of Ishiguros female androids, the same
android with its machinery revealed, and the liv-
ing human that the android was modeled after.
The subjects saw each in turn wave its hand,
nod, pick up a piece of paper, wipe a table with a
cloth. Of the three videos, it was while watching
the humanlike androids motions that the pari-
etal cortex of the subjects brains would light
up mostin particular, the areas that connect
our detection of bodily movement with our
so-called empathy neurons. The researchers
believe this revealed that the smallest ges-
tures can create perceptual contradictions in
Ishiguro returned to the lab and redoubled his
focus on the androids most minute movements:
the precise tilt of the chin, the rotation of the
head, the restraint of the smile.
Around the same time as the department
store display, Ishiguro managed to use the Gem-

Our longing to connect, to bridge this divide, is
believes will someday be satisfied through
a driving human desireone that Ishiguro
humanlike machines.
-
inoid F to generate a bond between two humans. Tettchan,
then a game designer based in Tokyo, was recently divorced
when he met Ishiguro in 2012, and he mentioned that he
was curious about the possibility of a romance with a long-
time friend named Miki. Ishiguro invited them both to his
research institute in Nara, where hed asked his students to
have a female android ready for teleoperation. He placed
Tettchan at the teleoperation desk and closed the door; he
took Miki into the other room to meet the Geminoid F. Then he
invited Tettchan (who was listening in) to talk to him and Miki
through the robot. As Tettchan spoke, his voice computer-
altered to sound female, the androids lips moved in sync
with his words, the tilt of her head and her long human hair
in rhythm with his own movements. Its like a real female,
Ishiguro told Miki, enjoying himself. This is not Tettchan,
this is a new woman, really cute and beautiful.
And so they played, making small talk, Tettchan trying
out his new female incarnation. He made Miki and Ishiguro
laugh, and watching Mikis face through the monitor, he could
see a change. That was when Ishiguro, knowing Tettchans
complicated feelings for Miki, said to her, OK, you should
kiss her. And Miki, looking hesitant, leaned in toward the
androidthe android inhabited by Tettchanand kissed it
on the cheek. The feeling, Tettchan said, was like thunder.
Any boundary between them suddenly vanished.
Not long afterward, Tettchan and Miki decided to live
together. Tettchan is still not exactly sure how Ishiguros
machine worked on them, but he remains convinced that it
made them into a couple.
Over dinner with Hiroshi:
He has spent a lot of time talking to himself through his
androids, testing them, imagining their effect on other people.
Hiroshi (who by now has asked me to call him by his first
name) tells me hed like to record himself saying I love you
and then program an android to repeat it back to him in a
female voice. He is kidding when he says thisbut maybe
its another of his half-jokes. At the very least, he believes
the need for such an exchange exists. It would be, he says, a
real conversation. A conversation with himself.
A conversation is a kind of illusion, he says. I dont
know what is going on in your brain. All I can know is what
Im thinking. Always I am asking questions to myself, but
through conversations. Over the years of operating his
androids, communicating through them or with them, he
has found that he isnt really concerned about the other
persons thoughts. Always I am thinking of myself. I need
to understand your intention, but it is not priority. Before
that, I want to make clear something in my brain. Otherwise,
what is the motivation to talk?
In other words, he can only imagine using
conversation with others as a means to better
understand himselfand nothing is more press-
ing than that. He turns to the conversation the
two of us are having. We dont know how much
information we are sharing, he tells me. I am
always guessing, and you are always guessing,
and through our conversation patterns we can
believe that we exchange information. But I
cannot access your brain directly.
What is connection? he asks. Other per-
son is just a mirror.
On some fundamental level, we understand
each others immediate intentions and desires
of course, we do; how else would we function? But
Hiroshis view, though stark, seems sadly right:
There are entire planets of intimate information,
our most interior level of consciousness, that we
will never fully be able to share. Our longing to
connect, to bridge this divide, is a driving human
desireone that Hiroshi believes will someday be
satisfied through humanlike machines. He is con-
vinced that human emotions, whether empathy or
romantic love, are nothing more than responses
to stimuli, subject to manipulation. Through the
fluid interplay of its pneumatic joints, the arch of
its mechanical brow, the tilt of its plastic skull,
the many subtle movements achieved through
years of research studying the human template,
the android becomes more able to span that gap,
to form a perfectly engineered bond with us. An
elaborate metaphysical trick, perhapsbut what
does that matter, if it fills a need? If it feels real?
I think of the gentle look on the face of Gem-
inoid F as she glances down at a smartphone
that she cannot read. He wants us to imagine her
reading notes we have sent her, to imagine her
loneliness, to love her. Every time we project our
own feelings onto herimagine a shared expe-
rience, a connectionhis work inches forward.
Hiroshi says little about his personal life,
but, with his constant travel and self-imposed
16-hour workdays, I understand that he and his
wife lead fairly independent lives. We have
some simple rules. She never asks about my
job, I never ask about her hobbies.
Quickly, he brightens uphe has found a way
to return, in his mind, to the work. I want to
know the meaning of love. Do you know the
real meaning? What is love?
I think for a moment. It changes all the time
in my mind.
Thats good! he says, surprised. You are
like a scientist. I am always changing too. I am
having different hypotheses every year. Before
I pass away, I want to have a better understand-
ing about love.
Hiroshi now tells me of the two times he has
seriously considered suicide: first at 36, when
one of his top students bested him at a computer-
programming challenge (his focus at the time),
and again 10 years later, when another student
proved to be a sharper, more prolific writer of
 GEMINOID F TRAVELED THE WORLD PERFORMING IN A STAGE PLAY CONCEIVED WITH IT IN MIND. IT ALSO PLAYED A COMPANION ROBOT IN THE 2015 FILM SAYONARA.

0
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HUMAN EMOTIONS, FOR ISHIGURO, ARE NOTHING MORE THAN RESPONSES TO STIMULI AND ARE THUS SUBJECT TO MANIPULATION.
0 0 0
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THE TELENOIDS DELICATE FEATURES SOMETIMES APPEAR FEMININE, SOMETIMES LIKE THOSE OF A SMALL BOYBUT ALTOGETHER TOO KNOWING FOR SOMEONE SO YOUNG.
technical papers (something Hiroshi took great
pride in). Both times, he swerved out of the
depression by finding a new angle on his work.
But those instances heightened his dread that
he might not be able to prevent the slow, natural
deterioration of his mind. He is already certain
that his concentration is not what it once was.
Developing dementia as he ages is his worst
fear. Without being able to generate new ideas,
probably I cannot find any reason to survive in
this world. I dont like to imagine that.
We are quiet for a momentthen he leans
in again.
Do you know what is the soul? he asks. Soul
is not so personal. In Japan, when we pass away,
our soul goes back to the same place, back to the
mountain. So now we are living individually, like
thishe motions to the two of us sitting on mats.
We have our own souls. But when we pass away,
were going to share something. Soul is going back
to the place where souls are coming together.
Soul is not lonely, he says. Soul is not alone.
On a Saturday night, I meet up with Hiroshi and
Rosario Sorbello, a robotics professor from
the University of Palermo who makes a couple
of pilgrimages to Hiroshis lab each year. He
often sends his students to study there, and he
arranged for Hiroshis android play to be per-
formed in Sicily. For a tall man in a well-tailored
suit and fine leather shoes, Sorbello is boyish,
and he clearly relishes his access to Hiroshi
he reminds me, twice, that Hiroshi is a very
important person.
We meet in Minami, one of Osakas hectic
shopping districts, and have an evening of street
food: huge bowls of ramen and batter-fried balls
of octopus. (Hiroshi used to come here a lot in
his days as a poor grad student.) After red-bean
dessert soup, served by a woman in a ruffled
apron, Hiroshi makes a decision: Rather than
head to a bar, he says we should go to the bar in
my office. En route, we stop at a fluorescent-lit,
24-hour convenience store to pick up drinking
foodwasabi peas, octopus jerky, chocolate
Pocky Sticksbefore boarding the train back
to the university.
As Hiroshi scrolls through his phone, Sor-
bello talks about the desire for intimacy with
androidssomething hes clearly thought a lot
about. Can you imagine what it would be like,
he asks, to want to kiss a robot? To want to kiss
that rubber, not-human flesh? There are people
who have those kinds of desires. Imagine if you
could run heat through its skin so that it feels not
like cold rubber but warm to the touch? There
are people who want to try things with that.
Human sexual and romantic relationships are
unavoidably messy, he says, and many people
would like to keep their lives simplein which
case a relationship with an android might be
a solution. I think this is the future, he says.
Sex is arguably the ultimate physical act of
human connectionbut it can also be merely
that: an act, a simulation of intimacy. Sex can
be thought of as something that transcends the
purely physical, but in reality it is often an expe-
rience thats mostly physical, not as intimate as
we pretend it can or should be. Looked at in this
light, a whole range of sexual experience, at least
in theory, could be replicated with an android.
On Sorbellos recommendation, I later read
Love and Sex With Robots, a 2007 book by AI
expert David Levy. In it he proposes that we are
not far from a time (he suggests roughly the year
2050) when humans will desire robots as friends,
sexual partners, even spousesa premise he
seems unnervingly OK with. It all comes down
to our willingness to believe in the robots emo-
tional life and desires. Designed with the phys-
ical proportions that its human owner prefers,
the preferred voice timbre and eye color and
personality type, and the ability to recall and riff
on its owners personal stories and little jokes,
android will captivate human.
Levy takes Alan Turings famous claim that
the convincing appearance of intelligence (in
AI) is proof of intelligence, and he expands that
into the emotional realm: If a robot behaves as
though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue
that it does not? If a robots artificial emotions
prompt it to say things such as I love you, surely
we should be willing to accept these statements
at face value Why, if a robot that we know to
be emotionally intelligent, says, I love you or I
want to make love to you, should we doubt it?
Human emotions, he argues, are no less pro-
grammed than those of an intelligent machine:
We have hormones, we have neurons, and we
are wired in a way that creates our emotions.
In other words, Levy argues, our inner lives
are essentially algorithmic, much like an AIs.
A few decades from now, he writes, the differ-
ences between human and android may be no
greater than the cultural differences between
peoples from different countries or even from
different parts of the same country. As for the
actual sex, Levy believes that it will become not
only a recourse for the socially isolated but also
an accepted outlet for the sexually adventurous
or for someone whose partner is sick or traveling.
These are pretty radical ideas about human
nature and intimacy, and yet I recognize the desire
some might have to turn to an android for close-
ness, for companionshipfor comfort when
youre far from home, maybe on the other side
of the planet, on assignment for weeks at a time.
And if someone provides you with a salve, why
not take it? Most of us already allow technology
to mediate what was once simple, direct human
interactionwhat really is the difference? And
is that difference so essential to the experience
of being human that it must be preserved?
Back on campus, we pass the few students who
are still sequestered in the lab, working late, and
hide out in Hiroshis office. There he slides back
his whiteboard to reveal a hidden liquor cabinet.
He pours us some excellent local whiskey, and
we sit back and listen to his collection of music,
everything from Japanese pop ballads to Simon
& Garfunkel. Weve all had a few. Hiroshi tells us
about how, from the moment he started expos-
ing people to his androids, a shift took place: The
androids, he says, seemed to unmask the humans
around them, to reveal a desire theyd carefully
been hidingfor connection, for touch. There
was the expected: Men who leered at the female
androids during industry showcases, men who
had to be watched closely, for fear theyd try to
kiss and grope the robots. But something more
complicated was also taking place.
Shortly after the android of his daughter was
completed in 2002, Hiroshi had his students at
Kyoto University use it to test the differences in
human response to a mechanical-looking robot
and one that was humanlike. When not in use,
the android was left in the middle of the lab, and
soon a few students complained that they were
having trouble working in front of it. They felt
it looking at them. (From then on, they made
a habit of placing it with its face to the wall.)
Things were further complicated when Hiro-
shi was informed that one of the students had
become attached to his daughters replica.
During the day, this student would run the
experiments, but late at night, when he thought
he was alone in the lab, he would serenade the
android with his flute and then chat with it,
asking what it thought of his playing. It was as
if he felt he could only reach out for compan-
ionship this way, in secret.
This incident made Hiroshi realize that these
androids could have unexpected emotional
impact. That was the first android, Hiroshi
says. We did not know what would happen.
He moved the android to Osaka University and
assigned another student to oversee the work.
He also laid some ground rules for how it could
be used: not late at night and not alone.
When he then created the first replica of a
grown woman, he was a little wary of what his
students might do with it in the lab. Would they
want to sleep holding her in their arms? Hiroshi
witnessed how one staff member, whod been
closely involved in the Geminoids production,
became visibly flustered in front of her. Hiro-
shis theory is that a friendly human woman will

( Evolution
Android
) a partner who is, literally, an extension of yourself.
We traced Ishiguros android
milestones on the road from
Uncanny Valley to (near) Total
Turing. CaitlinHarrington
2002
REPLIEE R-1: Ishiguros first
android was produced in 2002 and
modeled on his 4-year-old daughter.
It looked human enough, but its
movements were all machine: jerky
and creaky-gear-sounding.
PHOTO: OSAKA UNIVERSITY
2005
REPLIEE Q-1: The lab installed
pneumatic actuators in this model,
allowing for humanlike gestures.
To boost authenticity, they
added autonomic elements like
breathingand posture shifting.
The android debuted at Japans
2005 World Expo.
OSAKA UNIVERSITY AND KOKORO CO., LTD
2006
GEMINOID HI-1: The first replica
of its creator, HI-1 was also the
labs first android to work via tele-
operation: Ishiguro controlled his
doppelbot via mics and webcams.
ATR HIROSHI ISHIGURO LABORATORIES
2010
GEMINOID F: The team simplified
its new model, Geminoid F, for
experimental use outside the lab,
limiting the mobility of its limbs.
It went on to appear in numerous
international productions of a play
written with the android in mind.
OSAKA UNIVERSITY / ATR HIROSHI
ISHIGURO LABORATORIES
always be merely a real person, never as elegant as her
android counterpart. We want to have some ideal partner,
and the android can be a very strong mirror to reflect your own
idea. In this way, a relationship with an android is like having
The response of so many men to Hiroshis female androids
unsettles him. But its also one hes been cultivating. In 2014
he embarked on a new project that marries his personal per-
fectionism with his ideas about female beauty: During my
visit, he and his robotics team are at work on what he refers
to as the most beautiful woman. His not-entirely-empirical
approach to its appearance has included speaking with a pop-
ular cosmetic surgeon in Osaka (his own), analyzing images
of Miss Universe pageant finalists, and, in the end, trusting
his gut. (He has reminded me a few times that he thinks more
like an artist than other roboticists.) Hiroshi worked for
two 12-hour sessions with a technician to create the androids
3-D rendering. He was thrilled to discover that the slightest
change to its eyes or nose transformed the rendering into a
completely different person. It feels likehow can I say?
not my daughter, but a special person for me, he says.
Now, when I ask Hiroshi why he puts such emphasis on
good-looking mechanical women, he reminds me that the
larger goal of his field is to have people accept robots into
their lives. And which is more acceptable to many people,
he asks, beautiful woman or ugly woman? In a corporate
lecture I later hear him give, he sums it up like this: A beau-
tiful woman you dont picture going to the restroom or get-
ting tired. So I think beauty is better represented by android.
At this point, Hiroshi stands up from his ergonomic chair,
as if inspiration has struck. He turns around, rummages
through his drawers, and produces a black zipper bag. From
inside, he pulls out two hand-size foam mock-ups of a human-
oid figure and offers me one as a gift. He picks up the other
and holds it out to me.
Lets make an experiment, he says. We bring them
together and we make them kiss.
Im unsure of where this is going. OK.
I bring the face of my tiny figure to meet the face of his, and
their motionless mouths touch.
It feels funny, right? he asks. And it does. It feels just a
little like crossing a line.
I return to Tokyo for a few days to meet more of Hiroshis col-
leagues. And in the midst of this back-and-forth from Osaka,
something is starting to happen: I am falling for someone I
met on the second night of my trip.
I was introduced to Ethan over email by my literary agent,
who knew Id been searching for helpful contacts in Japan.
Hes an American (also in his thirties) who moved to Tokyo
for graphic-design work a decade ago and is fluent in Japa-
nese. Ethan (a pseudonym) emailed me the names of fixers
and translators and boutique hotels and agreed to join me for
dinner before I took the Shinkansen bullet train west to Osaka.
When I found him that evening, at our meeting
spot in front of a Shibuya-ku Metro station, his
eyes reflected back to me the thought just then
crossing my mind: This will be a very good night.
Ive never been particularly drawn to men
who are handsome in a conventional way. But
Ethans looks are so classically handsome, it
seems impossible that he walks around with
such a face and such a strong jawline and such a
finely shaped head. (Have I ever before thought
about the shape of a mans head?) There is also
the small hollow at the back of his neck and the
width of his shoulders (something about their
proportion gives me a startled feeling in my
chest) and the smell of his skin and the timbre
of his voice (deep and musical).
He becomes my guide in an unfamiliar city. I
am led around and am much happier for it. We
drink in a white bar with sliding paper screens;
a jazz bar in which no one is allowed to laugh
out loud; a space with eight seats, covered in
Wim Wenders film posters; a hotel lounge with
a piano singer and 52nd-floor views of the city.
We talk about books; we talk about our fam-
ilies; we talk about the people weve thought
we loved. We walk down the streets at night
with our arms lightly touching; we sit with our
knees lightly touching; I lay my palm on that hol-
low at the back of his neck. And in private, we
lie down in his bedroom, on a thin mattress on
the floor, and remove all our clothes. It has been
ages since either of us was drawn to someone
in this way, an attraction that feels like a plane-
tary pull, seemingly outside the realm of reason
and predictabilitythe very thing we spend so
much time trying to conjure up but over which
we have no control.
It is thrilling. And for me right now, immersed
in the world of android designa heavily medi-
ated world in which soft silicone shells stand in
for human skin, in which we search for signs of
human kindness or sadness or pity in a mechan-
ical faceit is also a relief that something so
simple can still happen. It is a relief because it
means that we are animals, not ideas; that our
chemistry is not as cool as a set of programmed
responsestheres an immediate magic to it.
2010
TELENOID: Hiroshi and his team
stripped away differentiators like
age and gender to make this droid
universal, then dispatched several
of them to nursing homes as
companions.
ATR HIROSHI ISHIGURO LABORATORIES
To know that that instinct is not broken in me,
and to be able to answer it, makes me feel like
a person again.
When Hiroshi first considered building an
android, he began a search for the right sili-
cone. He turned to Orient Industry, a company
that specializes in high-end love dolls, sex
dolls that can cost thousands of dollars. They
collaborated on a trial modelbut Hiroshi soon
severed the relationship. As his reputation grew,
he worried about how such a collaboration might
look. The government does not want its money
associated with love dolls.
The sex industry, however, does not need
government approval to thrive. Back when
they briefly worked together, Orient Industry
operated out of a single room; now, almost two
decades later, it occupies an entire building
and it sells nothing more advanced than pose-
able dolls. Human-robot sex, Hiroshi believes,
will definitely be part of our future, its merely
a question of when. He knows that his research
would be very helpful in that arena, but as a
respected academic he would require a non-
commercial, for-the-betterment-of-society
reason to pursue that line of inquiry. Perhaps
for people with disabilities, he suggests. Once
we create a pretty good sex doll, you know, defi-
nitely other people want to use it, he says. Its
a basic desire.
Were heading back to Osaka from Nara as
he says this, speeding down the highway in his
slim black MazdaHiroshi drives the way he
walks: irrationally fastand eventually our talk
turns to the 1982 film Blade Runner. Hes stuck
on the lead female replicant, whose name he
cant remember. She looks like you!
2011
ELFOID: The team miniaturized the
Telenoid and turned it into a cell
phone. Elfoid creates what Ishiguro
calls telepresence: the sensation
that the person youre speaking to
is physically embodied in the 8-inch-
long device.
ATR HIROSHI ISHIGURO LABORATORIES
Hiroshi pauses for a moment, and when he
speaks again, its in a thoughtful voice. Some-
day I want to have my own replicant, he says.
Probably everybody want to have one, right?
Dont you think?
Their own attractive robot?
Yeah. I think so. In what must be another
of his one-sided conversations, hes agreeing
with himself. It is not just robotits almost
human. Its ideal.
An ideal woman?
Probably. No idea. He laughs. That is one
of the projectsthe most beautiful android.
We drive on in silence, then he asks a sur-
prising question: What would people think if
he made my copy?
For whatever reason, the possibilityeven
in the abstracthas never occurred to me, and
the idea is unexpectedly intimate.
I try to imagine how this would play out.
They would encase my body in plaster, and
then my various parts would be molded and
manufactured and bolted together. And a sili-
cone replica of my face, a bald and half-smiling
not-me, would be stretched around its mechan-
ical skull. And then my parts would be deliv-
ered to one of Hiroshis labs and unpacked and
assembled and dressed in a skirt and blouse and
a long black wig; maybe a student would take
a pair of heels (patent leather, slipped off an
older model) and place them on my feet. Eyes
that are not my own, but of a convincing shine
and color, would appear to stare back at the
gathering of researchers.
Lets say Im not used in the lab at first but
put out into the world, on display: destined
for a new stage play or an android opera. An
assistant professor and I will travel together
from venue to venue; at the end of each inter-
national stop, back at the hotel, maybe he will
crack open the valise that holds my head and
talk to me about his frustrations. And eventually,
when this android theater comes to the end of
its run, I will be retired to an observation room,
stacked against the wall with my clothes and hair
stripped off and my head bowed. And the stu-
dents will sometimes entertain themselves late
2015
ERICA: The labs first fully
autonomous android, Erica can
hold 10-minute conversations.
Voice recognition, infrared human
tracking, speech synthesis, and
natural motion generation all
bolster her humanness.
ERATO ISHIGURO SYMBIOTIC HUMAN-ROBOT
INTERACTION PROJECT
at night by making my replica sing karaoke while
they drink beer. And for the rest of timeor
until my silicone is no longer considered worth
replacingthis facsimile of myself will be made
to do things, to say things, that are beyond my
control, always borrowing my appearance, my
face, my expressions, the memory of the living
woman who was her model.
Im not prepared to give away my likeness.
I compared Hiroshi to Pygmalion, but that com-
parison is only partly right. His desire to cre-
ate, that personal obsession, is driven less by
romance and more by ego. In all my time with
him, I never get the sense that Hiroshiunlike
some of his robots fans and perhaps some of
his colleaguesfetishizes his female androids.
What excites him is the power of his role as Cre-
ator, the notion that he may one day crack the
code of our emotional bonds. And he doesnt
care what shape that solution takes. If he could
reduce the human form to its barest, most mini-
mal structure, he would. What if so many of these
physical detailsthe precise silicone mold, the
perfect eyelashes and cuticleswere a distrac-
tion from the true nature of sonzai-kan? One way
to know would be to strip the android down to
something more essential.
He has done just that. The shape came to him
in a dream. When he awoke, he sculpted a model
out of clay. The Telenoid is about 1 feet tall and
ghost-white, a toddler with an alien-smooth
face. It has stunted arms and, instead of legs,
a bulbous stumpas if, in place of genitalia,
the halves of the ass had continued all the way
around to form two spheres. A stretch of silky
white spandex serves as the lower neck, bridg-
ing the head and the body, but it is otherwise a
continuous, jointless piece of supple plastic, as
smooth as a naked child.
In repose, the expression on its face is serene
enough to be unsettlingperhaps because of its
deep-set black eyes; its thin, pursed lips, ever so
slightly upturned at the corners; and its gentle,
barely perceptible brow. Its delicate, thin fea-
tures sometimes appear feminine, sometimes
like those of a small boybut altogether too
knowing, too serene, for someone so young.
In a research room at Hiroshis institute, his
team shows a group of Danish visitors the latest
model. Propped up on a tripod, low to the floor,
the Telenoid squirms to life once activated. It
looks up at us and begins to make a play for our
attention, glancing around, wiggling its short
 arms. Its little movements are completely fluid and easy, giv-
ing it a sweet demeanor. It starts speaking to us in Japanese
in a feminine voice, drawing a grad student named Miriam
into an animated conversation. For now the Telenoid is tele-
operated, but Hiroshi hopes to make it autonomous within
child by cradling a robot with stunted limbs.
inthat someone would be left alone in their
the next few years. Its face conveys a calm authority that a
human toddler would not possess, but its body and small
gestures transmit the vulnerability and neediness of a child.
advanced age to relive the joy of having a
Miriam lifts the toddler-thing to cradle its stump in the
crooks of her arms, and the two continue chatting in cooing,
affectionate tones. And at this point, after a few minutes of
It takes a moment for the horror to sink
observation, the words that come to mind are no longer repul-
sive and nightmare, but small and dear and friend. It becomes
easy to feel protective of the little alien.
As it turns out, the visitors at the lab when I visited were
there because Hiroshi was hoping to partner with a ven-
ture capital firm to install Telenoids in senior care facilities
throughout Denmark. For a couple of years, he had been trav-
eling there every few months. Hiroshis team and their Dan-
ish partners were in the final stage of their field tests; they
hoped to have a viable business plan in place soon. Everyone
was optimistic: Test subjects have been quick to connect with
the strange humanoid. Media events for the Telenoid in Den-
mark were attended by Japanese ambassadors and the Danish
crown prince, who embraced the humanoid on-camera. He
said the experience reminded him of holding his own child.
And the video footageof elderly people in nursing homes,
each supposedly with some degree of dementiais compel-
ling. In one, an older woman in a colorful turtleneck sits on a
sofa in a facility in Kyoto with a Telenoid on her lap. Though
her caretakers have explained that she rarely speaks with
them, she is shown here in excited conversation with the
humanoid (which she may or may not understand is being
teleoperated by a volunteer in Osaka). In another clip, a far
frailer-looking woman, more than 100 years old, sits slumped
at a desk, her arms wrapped around herself. Shes depressed
and does not talk with others, one of Hiroshis researchers
says. When a caretaker sits beside her and hands her a Tele-
noid, however, she lights up, grinning and laughing. Out of
sheer pleasure, she begins making short, clipped babylike
sounds: Ah-ah-ah-ah! She grips the mechanical toddler to
her chest, a blissful expression on her face, and starts to rock
it slowly back and forth.
This clip is powerful evidence that a machine can conjure
up an emotional connectionbut a connection to what? Is
it a look of recognition that flashes in this century-old wom-
ans face, the resurrecting of some long-ago happiness? We
dont know yet, exactly, the researcher says. But those who
love Telenoid tend to be someone who used to have a baby.
It takes a moment for the horror of this statement to sink
inthat someone would be left alone in their advanced age
to relive the joy of having a child through the cradling of a
robot with stunted limbs.
More than a dozen years of progress have brought Hiroshi
full circle: from his young daughters android to another child
robotone that is blank, one that can be anyones small child.
A humanlike robot that is both terrifying in appearance on the
most primal, gut level and undeniably effective: Once its in
operation, you are drawn to it, in sync with it, cannot help but
-
feel empathy with it. The countless ways in which we judge
someone based on their appearance all evaporate in the face
of this neutral appearance, as Hiroshi calls the Telenoids
blank, abstract body. And what is left in its place is that inef-
fable thing he has been trying to define: a dis-
tinctly human presence, free of the uncanny. It
is an outsider, like its makerbut one who man-
ages to trigger our affection. While holding the
android, it hardly matters that this humanness
is emitting from something that barely resem-
bles a human at all.
Today, Hiroshis daughter-android stands on a
white platform, sealed inside a glass display in
one of his labs. Even draped in a pale-yellow sun-
dress, it is an unnerving sight. Its arms are too
long, almost simian, its hands dangling far too
low, one posed awkwardly over the crotch, as if
to shield it. The face, with its grimly downturned
mouth, is imprinted with tension. It appears to
wear the look of its inception 15 years agothe
very human discomfort of the little girl who was
its prototype.
Risa is now studying in her fathers depart-
ment at the university, one of only a handful of
women. The family is pleasedthough Hiroshi
is a little confounded: They had never discussed
his work. But this is positive, right? he asks me
with a note of vindication. Im not sure if mak-
ing her android was positive or negative effect
for her. And finally, she come to my lab, he says.
I can have some excuse for people now. This
makes him laugh.
For Hiroshi, Risa seems to exist in opposition to
his most beautiful female archetype: smart and
impatient, not girlish, a free thinker. She seems
to surprise him. He sees her as a mix of typical
female characteristics and some strong charac-
ter like me. Shes talented at math and physics,
and he has the impression that shes compet-
itiveparticularly with the boys. She is very
tough sometimes, he says.
Meeting her for the first time in a small con-
ference room down the hall from her fathers
office, I am immediately struck by Risas calm
intelligence. With the same round face and high-
set eyes, Risa is undeniably the girl from the
video clips, now in a fitted blouse, eyeglasses,
and wearing a crystal pendant, her hair pulled
back in a low-hanging ponytail. This is the girl
who as a toddler was already playing with her
fathers early robots, blissed out, trying to make
them chase her around the lab. (He still uses this
footage in his PowerPoint presentations.) She
has never seen him lecture and only recently
read his books for the first time. On the subject
of her replica, Risa is as pragmatic as her father.
I was the closest example that he was able to
find on which to model an androidI havent
really thought about it more deeply than that.
(Risa and I spoke through a translator.)
Students sometimes ask Risa about her
last name. Because, I guess, my father is
famous, she says. But just as there remains
a clear distinction between Hiroshi and his
rubber-and-steel look-alike, Risa sees Pro-
fessor Ishiguro and her father as two very
different (if look-alike) entities. At the univer-
sity, surrounded by students and faculty, hes
charismatic, a role model, drawing others
into his work; at home he becomes himself
again, a researcher focused on satisfying his
own curiosities. A true researcher, Risa says,
is someone who is trying to find out whats
interesting for himself.
Though Risa has not yet declared a major,
she knows shes not interested in android sci-
ence. Her level of ambition, however, is famil-
ial: Whatever comes after the internet, she
says, the next major innovationwhatever
that is, thats what Id like to be a part of. She
believes that being roped into her fathers work
at such a young agean experience she wont
call positive or negativehas made her bolder
than she might otherwise have been. I was sort
of forced to become part of my fathers project.
And because I had this experience that others
had never had before, I had a sense that anything
could be done. And since then, when other peo-
ple say No, thats not possible, we cant do that,
I think maybe I can do it. My father can do what
other people cant do, and I am his daughter.
As far as I can tell, Hiroshi has no idea that
she talks this way.
Risa was 9 when he created his own replica,
and she made a visit to the university then, to
interact with the Geminoid, while Hiroshi teleop-
erated it. I didnt focus as much on the android
as I did on my fathers voice, she says. What she
remembers best from that day was the presence
of her fathernot at her side, but in another
room, beyond the wall, just out of sight.
up ballad after ballad in Japanese. Seated on the
banquette, I watch as he takes up the mic and
sings, each song more saccharine than the one
before. With the same look on his face that Ive
seen in the lab, Hiroshi takes his performanceto
me, to the empty roomvery seriously.
Another number begins, and this time he
extends his hand to me; I stand to take it. With
the microphone in one hand as he croons (in a
small, artless voice) and the other hand on my
waist, Hiroshi leads me through a slow dance. We
dance awkwardly, like two kids in junior high
barely touching, glancing away, focusing on our
steps. The time Ive spent with Hiroshimonths
of correspondence and Skype calls, weeks of
unbroken hours with him, poring over what he
values most (his work)has been yet another
strain of choreographed intimacy: journalist and
subject. The version of me that Hiroshi knows
is a woman completely fascinated with him, a
mirror that reflects his image, an echo chamber
for his ideas, a conversation with himself; the
version of Hiroshi that I know is an eccentric
in black, the man who made his double, a valu-
able subject for my work. These models of our-
selves are the ones now dancing together in a
small black room. What connects them is a nar-
row fascination that serves a narrow purpose.
What sort of connection do we need most?
How much is enoughenough to sustain us,
to alleviate the feeling of being alone? Would
you trade four months in a bad relationship
for an hour of karaoke and a slow dance with
a roboticist in Osaka, Japan? Would you trade
a few weeks of meaningless sex for the physi-
cal comfort of a Telenoid? Would you trade a
couple of unsatisfying dates for an affection-
ate phone conversation with a woman you may
never realize is a chatbot? Is the feeling of your
hands on someones waist while dancing equal
to the touch of your fingertips on the most per-
fect silicone skin of the future? Does a dance
with me have the same value as a dance with a
Geminoid?
When the track finishes, its time to leave.
Outside, the shopping plaza is dark and dead-
quiet. Hiroshi and I part ways.
voices. We insist on the link between us through
language: carefully scheduled phone calls, bursts
of text messages. I listen closely to his voice
(deep and musical); I picture him seated in that
corner room surrounded by tall windows. I tell
him the stories that I save for the people I like
best; he tells me his. We send each other music
and movie titles; we trade photographs, so we
can imagine each other better. I picture him
tilting his head into his phone, and that small
hollow at the back of his neck.
We barely know each other, but something
between us has been synchronized. Each of us
carries a piece of the others presence, built up
through touch and then the remembrance of
touch. A small collection of sensory memories.
In the week since I left, he tells me, hes twice
gotten up in the middle of the night, half-asleep,
to make me more comfortableturned up the
heater, pulled an extra pillow from the closet
some part of him convinced I was still in his bed.
I am echoing through his home, even though I
am no longer there.
For a brief period of time, this feels just like
falling in love.
After this story was reported, Hiroshi Ishiguro
unveiled his most beautiful woman android,
named Erica, at Tokyos Miraikan science
museum. It operates autonomously, parsing
human speech and using neural network tech-
nology to fashion replies. Erica models are cur-
rently being used for human-robot interaction
research in three universities in Japan.

One night after a long dinner at a traditional

restaurant in Osaka, Hiroshi takes me to a kara-
oke bar. Maybe its the particular weekday or the
late hour, but the place appears empty when we
arrive. Hiroshi pays the bored young attendant,
who leads us to the last in a long chain of rooms
and shuts the door.
The surfaces are black formica and fake leather.
In the blue light of the flatscreen, Hiroshi queues
My time with Hiroshi is over. I leave Japan.
My time with Ethan may also be over. Neither
of us knows whats to come. What we do know
is that there are now 7,000 miles between us.
And so we do what comes instinctively. As a
substitute for physical closeness, we use our
 For years, timber barons in the Amazon have sent lumber to
the US by the shipload.
But many of the
groves they harvested BY RICHARD CONNIFF

were pure fiction.

0 9 8

I
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V
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S
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY IAN ALLEN
F
O
R
E
S
T
The
cargo ship
Yacu
Kallpa
rode
impatiently
at anchor off
Iquitos, Peru,
a ramshackle city on a bend in the broad,
turbulent waters of the Amazon River. She
was a midsize ship, a tenth of a mile long,
low-slung, with a seven-story superstruc-
ture in the stern and plumes of rust fanning
down the hull from her main deck scup-
pers. She was like any other cargo ship in
the world, but with a dark history. At that
moment, in November 2015, she needed to
get out of town fast.
The captain and crew had a long run ahead,
nearly 2,300 miles down the Amazon, then
another 4,000 miles north to Tampico, Mex-
ico, and finally to Houston, with lumber har-
vested from the Amazon rain forest. It was a
route the ship and its predecessors had run
hundreds of times for more than 40 years,
hauling millions of pounds of timber at a
time, to supply lumberyards and big-box
stores across the United States with the
ingredients for the floors, decks, and doors
of the typical American home.
1 0 0
In Iquitos, the waters were too shallow for the Yacu
Kallpa to dock amid the tin-roofed stilt houses and the
brightly painted tourist boats that lined the riverfront.
So small workboats were ferrying stacks of lumber from
shore, to be lifted into the hold by two onboard cranes.
This was a job that could take two weeks under the best
of circumstances. The longer it took, the more time cus-
toms officials had to prove that the lumber being heaved
aboard the Yacu Kallpa had no business being there at all.
As the loading crews worked, 35 inspectors from a gov-
ernment agency called Organismo de Supervisin de los
Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre (Osinfor) were
slogging through forests all around Loreto Province. The
inspectors were armed with handheld GPS navigators
and a few batches of documents that listed the supposed
harvest sites and the species of trees on the ship. More
often than not, as they visited the sites listed on the paper-
work, they found no evidence that any trees had been cut
down thereno stumps, no debris, no disturbancemuch
less the trees listed on the documents. Sometimes there
was no suggestion that trees ever grew there in the first
place. Theyd leave a mark in spray paint and jot a note on
a report: No existe en un radio 50m, shorthand for no
trees logged here, nor within 50 meters in any direction.
The vast scale of illegal logging in the Peruvian Ama-
zon has long been an open secret. Government officials
didnt care, and until recently there was little anyone
else could do to stop it. Local activists often died try-
ing. But for a few defiant government agents, this time
there was hope. The urgent question: Could they finally
prove that enough trees came from illegal logging sites for prosecutors to stop
the ship from sending its cargo into the US market?
As the Osinfor inspectors pushed deeper into the Amazonian forests and
dockworkers hurried to load the ship, 30 or so staffers at the Environmental
Investigation Agency, a nonprofit organization, waited nervously in an office
just off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. They had been developing methods
to tie the ship to illegal logging for four years. But at this moment, they just
had to wait and see what would happen next. It was up to government agents
in Peru and Washington to make stick all the work the EIA staffers and forest
inspectors in Peru had done. If everything went right, this would be the last
voyage of the Yacu Kallpa.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL INVESTIGATION AGENCY GOT
its start in the mid-1980s when a trio of Greenpeace investiga-
tors became disenchanted with that organizations increasing
scale and incendiary tactics. The idea was that the new organization should
stay smalland focused on environmental crimes. Over the years, the EIAs
investigators have made a reputation for meticulously assembling detailed
RICHARD CONNIFF (@richardconniff) writes about wildlife and environmental issues. He
has written nine books; his most recent is House of Lost Worlds.
Opening spread, left: Dock workers in Peru stack lumber cut from Amazon forests. IN 2009, WITH THE LACEY ACT
amendment in place, von Bis-
marck began trying to figure
out how to make a case with the new law.
A trade deal between the United States
and Peru was just going into effect, and it
evidence of criminal behavior, via undercover work, in some of the most dan- included new penalties for illegal logging
gerous corners of the world. and made Osinfor an independent agency.
One such investigator is a mild, studious figure named Alexander von Bis- Von Bismarck saw an opportunity. He and
marck, now 45 years old, tall and thin with close-cropped red hair retreating at Andrea Johnson, then director of the EIAs
the temples to form a widows peak. Von Bismarck grew up spending part of each forest campaign, hired a Peruvian journal-
year with his American mother in the United States and part with his father in ist named Julia Urrunaga, who had spent
Germany. He graduated from Harvard on what he calls the 12-year plan, after 15 years investigating corruption for Perus
a diversion to try his hand as a professional equestrian show jumper, another leading newspapers.
to study the demise of cichlids in Ugandas Lake Victoria, and finally a tour in Urrunaga is a happy warrior sort, 47 years
the Marines, where he trained as a scout swimmer for an amphibious landing old, just over 5 feet tall, with a great mane
unit. If his name brings to mind Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century German of curly light-brown hair. Im a journalist.
statesman and grand European strategist, thats because he is descended from I didnt know much about forestry, she
the Iron Chancellors brother (a potato farmer, he notes). A penchant for stra- admits. She and Johnson, blue-eyed, freckle-
tegic thinking nonetheless persists. faced, and also 5 feet tall, with a degree from
In 2005, von Bismarck set out to persuade Congress to amend the Lacey Act, Yales forestry school, set off to find out
the nations chief law against trafficking in stolen wildlife. The ambition was exactly how the lumber business worked.
to include stolen forests too, making it a federal crime to import illegally har- They visited river ports, attended endless
vested plants. Von Bismarck was able to help forge what was later termed a meetings, and interviewed people about life
Baptist-bootlegger alliance with US timber producers, who were ready to push in the logging camps. Then, one day out of
for the amendment because, by their own estimate, competition from illegally the blue, an email arrived at the EIA office
imported timber was costing them $1billion a year. in Peru. It came from an Italian immigrant
As the amendment was under debate, one of von Bismarcks undercover in Iquitos named Francesco Mantuano, who
investigations revealed that new terrorism-resistant doors ordered for the said he had been duped into buying a logging
US Capitol building may have been supplied by an illegal timber-trafficking concession for what he imagined would be
network in Honduras, and the wood may have been harvested illegally from a a lazy jungle retirement. Instead, he found
Unesco World Heritage Site. The contract for the doors was quietly canceled. himself entangled with the wood mafia,
(Other doors from the same source allegedly ended up at Mar-a-Lago, accord- as he called it, in a deeply dishonest busi-
ing to von Bismarck.) The Lacey Act amendment sailed through Congress and ness that was sweeping away the rain forest
became law in May 2008. in a maelstrom of semi-slave exploitation,
Von Bismarck, who became executive director of the Environmental Inves- social and environmental changes and
tigation Agency in 2007, credits his tour in the Marines with giving him the looting of biodiversity.
operational awareness for undercover
work. He once tracked wood from a pro-
tected tree species stolen from a habitat Swaths of the Amazon forest in Peru are protectedin theory.
for endangered orangutans in Indonesia
to baby cribs being sold by Walmart in the
United States. He and other EIA agents also
went undercover in the Russian Far East
and helped prove that Lumber Liquidators
was knowingly buying hardwood floor-
ing made from illegal timber taken from
the last remaining home of the critically
endangered Siberian tiger. (Lumber Liqui-
dators pleaded guilty to violations under
the Lacey Act and agreed in 2015 to pay a
$13.2 million penalty.)
Of the logging industry, von Bismarck says:
So many of them would love to have a sys-
tem based on legal woodso many of them
feel trapped in a system that is a race to the
bottom. He pauses. Then he adds, But some
guys just need to go to jail.
 0 0 0

Julia Urrunaga had been a journalist before tracking down illegal lumber; mahogany, cedar, chestnut, and rosewood are all logged in Peru. 1 0

Urrunaga was suspicious at first. Maybe someone was sending us the perfect indigenous community lands, and other
case to lead us to a horrible mistake, she says. But she was also curious, so she protected areas.
and Johnson headed to Iquitos. They found Mantuanoa rail-thin, wildly ges- Mantuano launched an indignant letter-
ticulating Italian, Johnson sayswith a friend, an Iquitos native. The two men writing campaign to explain all this to offi-
spent their afternoons sipping coffee and smoking in sidewalk cafs, as though cials in Lima and Washington. But his efforts
Iquitos were Milan and not this chaotic frontier river city where the mufflerless produced no investigation until Johnson
moped taxis drown out anything you say whenever the light turns green, she adds. and Urrunaga showed up. Mantuanos story
Urrunaga and Johnson joined the two at their habitual caf to hear out their tales. backed up what the EIA was already begin-
According to Urrunaga, Mantuano said he had bought into a concession with ning to suspect: The logging industrys basic
large stands of trees approved for harvest by the national forest authority. But operating method was to cut down trees
when timber crews showed up, they left far too quickly to
actually have cut the trees they had supposedly purchased.
Then the timber merchants expected him to hand over tran-

The remoteness of the

sit documents for large amounts of lumber. The intent, he
gradually realized, was to launder timber that had already
been illegally cut elsewhereplaces like national parks,
 on protected lands and then produce fal-
sified permits, either purchased on the
black market or via corrupt government
officials. The permits typically listed legal
sitesbut ones that often were remote, or
sparsely forested, and thus wouldnt yield
big profits. Meanwhile, Perus Amazonian
rain forests were being destroyed at a rate
of 400,000 acres every yearan area larger
than the city of Los Angeles. The women
could piece together the pattern. But there
was a hitch. After a tree was cut down and
loaded onto a ship for export, there was
no way to prove where it came from. As
they compared Mantuanos documents and
data with their own, Johnson and Urrun-
aga started thinking: Why not prove where
the trees didnt come from? The key was to
compare export documents detailing where
protected species, like mahogany and cedar,
were supposedly harvested with Osinfor
inspections of those areas.
It took nine months of pestering govern-
ment officials in Lima, but finally the EIA
received thousands of pages of crappy pho-
tocopies, Urrunaga says. As they waded
through them, Johnson and Urrunaga could
see, for the first time, where the trees had
supposedly been harvested, right next to
data on the ships that had sailed away with
that wood. Some of those areaslike the
most remote parts of Mantuanos conces-
sionhadnt yet been inspected by Osin-
for. Now they would just have to follow the
paper trail back to the forest themselves.
With data from one of the ships many
voyages in hand, Johnson set off on a field
3 trip. It took her three days by boat upriver
from Iquitos, then a day of hiking into land
owned by an indigenous community, and
another two days slogging deeper into the forest, trying to find a way around
and then acrossa dense, almost impassable palm swamp. Exhausted, drenched
in sweat, and wiping swarms of insects from her forehead, she finally reached
the harvest location. Cedar trees from the site had supposedly been exported
to a company named Global Plywood & Lumber, incorporated in Las Vegas,
but no one had ever cut trees from anywhere around her. The remoteness of
the place made cutting timber there about as practical as harvesting trees on
the moon. There was no way the export companies were getting their wood
from sites like this one. We had set out looking for one shipment to prove the
wood being exported from Peru was illegal, Urrunaga says. We found 100.
place made cutting timber there about
as practical as harvesting trees on the moon.
Until then, most of the government officials
the two women had tried to work with had
been very hostile, very aggressive when
the EIA team approached them about illegal
logging, Urrunaga says. But at a meeting with
Rolando Navarro, the newly appointed head
of Osinfor, she and Johnson laid out evidence
that the entire system is corrupt, Johnson
recalls. He said, Youre right. Navarro had
grown up in a river town, and he knew how
loggers operated. He had worked with the
World Wildlife Fund in Peru helping local
communities find alternatives to illegal log-
ging. He also knew, from Osinfor field inspec-
tions, that the documents listing the supposed
harvest sites didnt make sense. The women,
Navarro, and the Peruvian customs officials
they were working with realized that by hom-
ing in on suspicious exporters, theyd have a
better shot at making a bust.
Eventually, customs officials asked Inter-
pol for help, which allowed Navarros agents
to expand their investigations. That meant
they could get more documents and slog
through more forests. Finally, in 2015, a
multi agency team released its report: It
found that about 90 percent of the wood com-
ing out of the Peruvian Amazon was illegal.
But stopping the shipments and putting
people in prison, that wasnt happening,
Urrunaga says. The Yacu Kallpa kept sail-
ing with what seemed like its old impunity,
making four trips in 2014 and three more in
the first half of 2015, carrying timber on its
regular route to Tampico and then Houston.
TO STOP THE SHIPMENTS
to stop the Yacu KallpaNavarro
pressed for his field agents to get
transport documents earlier, while the tim-
ber was still being loaded, so they could
demonstrate there was enough of a mis-
match, enough deceit, to stop it before it set
sailor at least before the timber landed
on the docks in Houston. So throughout
early 2015, customs agents got better at
extracting documents from the exporters,
while Osinfor agents got more efficient in
their field checks.

Stacks of forestry documents in Iquitos; EIA chief
Alexander von Bismarck.
Soon after the ship left Iquitos for its
August 2015 voyage toward Houston, Peru-
vian officials sent word to US investigators:
A significant percentage of the timber aboard
was of illegal origin.
Back in the States, the Department of
Justice was just settling its illegal logging
case against Lumber Liquidators and was
eager to build on that success. But everyone
wanted to tread carefully, as the investiga-
tion into the Yacu Kallpa could affect trade
agreements between the two countries. To
complicate matters, Urrunaga had been
working with an Al Jazeera reporter and
television crew on a story about the use of
fake export documents in Perus logging
trade, and in August the network aired its
story. Prosecutors and investigators wor-
ried that it could blow the case.
In the Al Jazeera broadcast, a reporter
doorsteps Kenneth Peabody, the general
manager of Global Plywood, at his home
near San Diego. The company had been sell-
ing Amazon rain forest timber into the US
market for at least eight years, in steadily
increasing quantities. Its business with a
Peruvian exporter named Inversiones La
Oroza had surged from $250,000 in 2012 to
$2 million by 2015. Standing in his driveway,
a Honda minivan on one side and a Mercedes
Benz SUV on the other, Peabody looks like a
soccer dadmiddle-aged, in black shorts, a
gray cathedral catholic dons T-shirt,
sunglasses, and a two-tone Nike golf cap.
Id like to talk with you about shipments
of illegal wood your company is importing
from Peru, the reporter begins. Hes lean,
hunched, and dressed in the shabby manner
of journalists everywhere.
Ah, I dont have anything to say about
that, Peabody says, glancing down and then
turning away to the SUV.
According to Peruvian authorities, the
reporter continues, your main supplier, this
company called La Oroza, has been shipping
many shipments of illegal wood to your com-
vested trees, Peabody swallows and shifts
his keys in his hand, ready for his exit.
Do you know about the Lacey Act? the
reporter persists.
Of course. We comply with all the require-
ments, Peabody says with a dismissive
sweep of one hand. The two of them go back
and forth for a moment longer. Then Peabody
gets into the SUV, the corners of his mouth
compressed in disgust, and drives off. (Pea-
body declined to speak to wired. La Oroza,
reached in Iquitos, denied any wrongdoing.)
Remarkably, the Al Jazeera broadcast did
not stop the Yacu Kallpa from sailing on. As
it neared Houston in September, agents from
Homeland Security gathered. When the ship
finally settled in port, they boarded and set
about inspecting the cargo. Then they issued
a temporary order detaining the timber
denying, at least temporarily, its import into
the US marketand put the wood in a stor-
age facility at the port in Houston.
A few days later, in early October, according
to an affidavit from a Homeland Security inves-
tigator, a man in the dock area was directing
forklift operators to move bundles of timber.
It was Peabody. Hed flown in from California.
Confronted by federal agents, he told them
that Global Plywood owned 85 percent of the
wood the Yacu Kallpa had just delivered, and
it was the largest shipment in the companys
history, worth $1 million. An official of the port
told Peabody that customs agents would be
taking samples of the shipment to verify that
the timber species on board matched the tim-
ber species listed in the paperwork required
under the Lacey Act. A week later, Peabody
sent in revised paperwork that added another
40 tree species for this shipment.
It seemed like the end of the run for the
Yacu Kallpa. But then, as if out of irresistible
habit, the ship turned around and headed
back to Iquitos to pick up another load.
BY 2015, IT HAD BEEN SIX

pany. Ive got three of them here, he adds,
holding out some paperwork. You dont
know about this?
I dont know what youre showing me,
Peabody says, turning back now.
These are the documents of shipments
sent to your company by this company in
Peru, the reporter explains.
After the reporter reveals that he has been
to the tree harvest sites and seen no har-
years since the Peru free trade
agreement, with all its environ-
mental commitments, had gone into effect,
and trade between the United States and the
South American nation had almost doubled,
to $20 billion. It promised to get even big-
ger under the upcoming Trans-Pacific Part-
nership. But the Yacu Kallpa was quickly
turning into a test case of whether the envi-
ronmental commitments in free trade trea-
 SOURCE OF IMPORTS TO CHINA

SOURCE OF IMPORTS TO U.S.

RUSSIA ties amounted to anything more than words on paper. For critics, the ship was a big ugly
billboard advertising the utter failure to stop the illegal timber trade. Potentially at stake:

ILLEGAL TIMBER
free trade between the two countries, and Perus already precarious economy.
At the same time, Urrunaga was hearing from her government sources that the lumber
bosses were putting pressure on cabinet ministers to rein in Osinfor. Angry workers were
taking to the street. Logging, after all, made the livelihoods of thousands of Peruvians. The
economy in Loreto moves because of logging, Navarro says. Demonstrators staged noisy,
sometimes violent protests, driving logging company trucks and tractors to the agencys
offices and carrying banners: osinfor works for the gringos. One inspector received
a photograph over WhatsApp of his 1-year-old daughter in her stroller at a local park. The
ECUADOR note said simply, I am from Ayacucho, birthplace of the brutal 1980s militant group Shin-
ing Path. That same week, demonstrators showed up at Navarros office in Iquitos carrying
coffins, one of them bearing his name. Even
after changing his phone number, the threat-
INDONESIA ening calls rang through: We know where 1 0 5

your family lives. At 3 am on November

30, two men in hoods tossed Molotov cock-
SOLOMON ISLANDS
tails into the front of the agencys office in
Pucallpa, another logging town. To get rid
of people who are in the way is the normal
thing to do, Navarro says.
In late November, the Yacu Kallpa was load-
CHINA
ing up in Iquitos, and Osinfor agents were
once again scrambling in the field. By the
day before the ship was scheduled to depart,
the agents had found that 15 percent of the
timber coordinates were faked. A customs
agent in Iquitos rushed a summary of the
investigation to the local prosecutorwho
hesitated. You want me to prosecute them
BRAZIL
ALL OTHER COUNTRIES based on where the timber in the shipment
didnt come from? he asked, incredulous.
The details about what happened next are
murky, but according to news reports and
Navarro, the prosecutor wasnt even sure he
ALL OTHER COUNTRIES had the authority to stop the ship from leav-
ing. The agent cajoled and bantered with him
until 11:30 that night, reminding him that just
weeks earlier, the nation had adopted a decree
authorizing a prosecutor to seize a timber
shipment on suspicion of illegality. Finally, the
prosecutor agreed to meet the agent, before
Global dawn, at the Iquitos dockif Osinfor could
Wood provide all the documents from the investi-
Laundering gation. Osinfors agents spent the next four
PAPUA NEW GUINEA Not much has hours printing out documents, downloaded
been done to via the creaky Iquitos internet.
stanch the flow of
illegal wood to The reluctant prosecutor and agents
developing coun- from Osinfor and customs arrived at the
triesparticularly port before the sun had risen. Iquitos is a
China, the worlds
largest importer. small city, and word had gotten out. A pla-
The products toon of timber company lawyers and man-
represented here, agers followed on their heels. Word also
MYANMAR like logs and ply-
wood, are more reached Urrunaga, who soon had some-
likely to be illegal one recording the scene. The discussion
than other wood rageda representative of the regional
imports and can
be reexported to
the US as chairs
or picture frames.
forest department wanted the ship to get
under waybut the prosecutor pointed
out that he was in charge. Arguments went
around for hours until finally the captain
said, OK, take your 15 percentmeaning
the illegal wood. Reports say the prosecu-
tor was told that the cost of offloading the
timber would be $20,000. It then took him
days to obtain the necessary permissions,
but when he returned to the ship, the price
was suddenly more than $200,000. The
Iquitos prosecutor finally agreed to accept
a declaration from the captain that the ship
would bring the allegedly illegal 15 percent
of its cargo back after dropping off the rest.
So on December 2, the Yacu Kallpa weighed
anchor and turned downriver at full speed.
In the EIA offices in Washington, Alexan-
der von Bismarck and other staff immediately
went on alert. They could track the ships
movements minute by minute, as the Auto-
matic Identification System that all cargo
ships must use pinged its location, bearing,
and speed. Government agents in Peru, the
United States, and at Interpol were watching
too. When the ship crossed into Brazil, police
there, responding to a call from a prosecutor
in Lima, boarded it briefly. But they had no
Lacey Act nor any other means of real enforce-
ment. The ship pushed on, with captain and
crew now aware that everyone was watching.
Osinfor investigators were also pushing,
heading deeper into the forests, working
their way down the long list of GPS coordi-
nates for the cargo. By mid-December, as the
ship made its way north along the Atlantic
coast, the investigators sent word to law
enforcement agencies in Lima and the US:
More than 60 percent of the cargo was illegal.
 On December 20, the Yacu Kallpa paused
unexpectedly in Trinidad and emerged again
in the new yearsuddenly under a new
flag of convenience. I thought I was going
crazy, says an EIA technician who was
tracking the ship when the flag of Panama
popped up on his cell phone.
On January 3, the Yacu Kallpa made a bee-
line for the Dominican Republic and began to
unload its tainted cargo. Meaning we lose,
von Bismarck says. An EIA staffer called a
photographer friend in Santo Domingo and
persuaded him to get to the scene and start
recording. But then international pressure
came down on the Dominican government,
and the Yacu Kallpa sailed onMeaning
we won, von Bismarck says. The ship stag-
gered onward, jinked briefly toward Jamaica,
then reluctantly turned back on its familiar
course, heading toward Tampico.
On January 8, agents sent out a new field
report: 72 percent of the cargo was illegal.
ONE DAY IN MID-JANUARY,
as the ship was still en route,
Navarro had a meeting in his
office with two lumber trade association
representatives, one of whom he later found
out was also the CEO of Global Plywood.
The men lamented that they had never had
such trouble in 30 years of buying timber
in Peru. Yes, thats probably the case,
Navarro said, and we have nothing against
private investment. But, he told them, the
evidence was showing that even shipments
with apparently legal documents were com-
ing from illegal sources.
As they talked, the businessmen peri-
odically checked their cell phones. Then,
abruptly, they announced that they had to
leave. A few minutes later, Navarro found
out he had just been fired by the president
of the country. Four days later, feeling vul-
nerable without the protection of public
office, he fled to the United States. (The
Global Plywood executive did not respond
to requests for comment.)
On January 26, 2016, at 8 pm, the Yacu
Kallpa limped into Tampico. At the request
The ship paused unexpectedly in Tri
in the new yearsuddenly under a new flag.
of Peru, the US, and Interpol, Mexican officials seized
roughly 8 million pounds of rain forest timber. When its
holds were finally empty, the ship anchored in the har-
borand waited. A month later, the hapless crew was
still onboard, abandoned 2,500 miles from home, unpaid,
and requesting help and food. Finally, at the end of Feb-
ruary, the Peruvian embassy intervened and brought the
men home. The owners of the ship, based in Lima, liq-
uidated their assets and abandoned the Yacu Kallpa in
Tampico, according to a former employee. The Mexican
government assumed ownership and reportedly plans
to use it as some kind of training ship.
That May, a potential timber buyer from Shanghai
phoned Peabody, the Global Plywood manager, and said
hed read about the case in the newspaper and wanted
to sell the wood still stuck in Houston into the Chinese
market. Peabody flew to meet the buyer at a Chinese
restaurant in Vancouver. Even though the wood couldnt
be imported to the US, Peabody could theoretically still
sell it elsewhere. He warned the prospective buyer that
any sale might be complicated by the US government.
The buyer sought reassurance that Global Plywoods
suppliers in Peru could be trusted. Peabody smiled.
We trust them to do what they need to do to get by in
Peru, he said. The customer, operating under a false
identity and with a video camera recording, was of
course an undercover agent with the EIA.
Many months later, final reports on the ships last
voyages were complete. For the August shipmentthe
one impounded in Houstonit would show that at least
92 percent of the 3.9 millionpound haul was illegal.
As for the vessels final voyage, it took nine months for
agents to complete their field checks of all the GPS sites
listed on the harvest documents. They found that more
than 96 percent of the ships cargo had been illegally
harvested from the Amazon rain forest and sent north.
In June of last year, federal agents showed up at the
one-room office of Global Plywood, next to a volleyball
court in a San Diego suburb, with a warrant to haul
away paperwork, Peabodys cell phone, and copies of
computer hard drives. Peabody later emailed the potential buyerthe EIAs
undercover agentto say that any possible deal was off the table. In the end,
all the illegal lumber in Houston was destroyed earlier this year in a no-fault
settlement with US Customs. A criminal investigation is ongoing, but so far
no charges have been filed.
After more than four years and the work of hundreds of people, one offending
ship responsible for carrying millions of pounds of illegally harvested wood into
the US market had been stopped. It was a tremendous victory. But it was limited.
Additional reporting by GREGORY BARBER and BLANCA MYERS.
 1 0 7 Perus rain forests are being cut down at a rate of 400,000 acres each year.
This past January, within days of taking
ofce, President Trump pulled the US out
of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was
no longer clear just how much it mattered
whether trade partners stood by their envi-
ronmental commitments. Von Bismarcks
biggest concern was that timber importers
in the United States would now persuade
the administration to roll back the Lacey
Act ban on importing illegally harvested
nidad and emerged again
lumber. That may not matter for the rain forests of Peru; China has now become
the leading export destination for Peruvian timber, and it puts far fewer envi-
ronmental conditions on its massive market for timber.
Von Bismarck says the EIA will also adapt. In fact, the agency is already
developing a system to monitor forests worldwide by satellite, with updates
every few days. Meanwhile, Osinfor agents continue their field inspections.
One day a few months back, in his ofce, von Bismarck rolled a video taken from
a DJI Phantom 3 quadrotor drone. It showed two Osinfor agents in hard hats, trav-
eling in a local mans dugout, to check one of the GPS coordinates listed for lum-
ber on the Yacu Kallpas final shipment. There was no sign that a tree could have
been felled in the area, and one of the agents sprayed
no e, for no existe, in blue paint on a grassy hummock.
The men paddled slowly onward to the next GPS point.
Then the drone pulled back to reveal that the site was in
fact a vast, grass-fringed lake, glittering in the sun, with
not a forest in sight and where none had ever grown.
 Tony Fadell is at the Grove, a spectacularly
beautiful country estate outside of London.
The event is Founders Forum: the ultra
exclusive inviteonly tech conference. Prince
William is in the house. The guest list is lousy
with knights and lesser officers of the Most
Excellent Order of the British Empire. Marissa
Mayer, the now exCEO of Yahoo, and Biz
Stone, recently returned to Twitter, are min
gling with the other hundred or so invitees.
But this is really Fadells moment.
Its almost exactly 10 years since the
iPhone was released, and the media buzz
is inescapable. The press is having trouble
coming up with superlatives to describe the
1
impact of a device that has sold more than a 0
8
billion units. A new book, The One Device, is
lighting up the intertubes with fresh gossip
about the secret history of the iPhone.
And Fadellboth the source and the subject
of that gossipis getting his due as one of
the guys most responsible for turning Steve
Jobs onedevicetorulethemall vision
into reality.
The title of the afternoon session is What
to Build Next? and Fadell is onstage with
two other bona fide tech zillionairesNiklas
Zennstrm, the Skype guy; and Kevin Ryan,
one of New York Citys most successful inter
net entrepreneursas well as a couple of
other founder investor types. Of the five
people onstage, Fadell is the only one who helped build
an object that every person in the audience has most
likely used at one time or another. First Fadell helped
build the iPod for Apple, then the iPhone, and then he
ventured out on his own to build the Nest thermostat.
Payback Fadell is the star of the show, and he knows it. His
Time
selfconfidence is well earned but can come across as
overweeningespecially to those who suddenly find
themselves in his shadow. Any VC who tells you that
Tony Fadell
you have to move to Silicon Valley, Fadell says at one
created the point, gesticulating wildly, is being very lazy. Two
iPod and
of the other people onstage are, in fact, from Silicon
Nest, then
lost control Valley venture capital firms, and their collars seem to
of them. His squeeze a bit tighter. Fadell, in comparison, is supremely
next project
could be comfortable: relaxed and expansive in a pair of bright
his most red sneakersno socksand a polo shirt. The moder
ambitious
yet: taking
ator, wrapping things up, calls for a lightning round:
on Silicon a rapidfire series of questionswith only oneword
Valley itself.
answers allowed.
Whats the biggest problem facing the world right now?
Climate, Fadell says. Then he adds, Weregoingto
havetogonuclear before being hushed by the moder
ator for busting the oneword rule.
By
Whats the next big thing in tech?
Adam Computational synthetic biology, Fadell says, bend
Fisher
ing the rules a second time.
What is the one word that people who know you would
use to describe you?
Nadav
Kander Troublemaker!
With that, the panel is over, and Fadell is mobbed as he
tries to leave the Groves 18thcentury manor. People want
 autographs, selfies, a word or twobut the
most persistent want money and advice.
Like many of his contemporaries, Fadell
makes personal investments as an angel,
through a firm called Future Shape, with
one important difference: He says he has a
venturesize pool of moneya portfolio of
Future Shape investments worth more than
half a billion dollars. Looking to make his
escape, Fadell slips into the mens room. One persistent
supplicant follows and, while Fadell is standing at the
urinal, penis in hand, proceeds to make his pitch. Its
a startup with a new design for a robotic arm. Fadell
listens for less than a minute and, shaking off, says: A
new robot arm? China is going to copy that in a second!
What then? Whats your value proposition?
Faster, better, cheaper blah blah blah.
Not good enough! Fadell thinks, before offering
some bland words of encouragement and dashing off
to slip into the back seat of a black MercedesBenz
Sclass emblazoned with the AMG performance badge.
As we start to speed toward central London to catch
the afternoon Eurostar to Paris, he entertains the
chauffeur (and me) with the penispitch story. I did like
his persistence, though, Fadell says, I respect that.
Turning philosophical, Fadell puts on his shades
against the bright sun streaming through the backseat
sunroof. Its kind of like being a film producer, he says,
reflecting on his new role, postNest, as an investor.
People pitch him, and if he likes their idea, its go time.
As if on cue, Fadell is forced to cut his reverie short
to take a call from a young journalist doing a story on
the new culture of celebrity in tech.
Did you ever think that tech would make you into
a celebrity?
Absolutely not! Fadell says. The tech business
in the 80s was Revenge of the Nerds. It was geeks.
We were looked down upon, trodden upon Fadell
is working himself into his trademark lather. Who
are these crazy guys with pocket protectors and bro
ken glasses? he asks rhetorically. So you never
thought that you were going to become a rock star,
Fadell says, winding down, before quickly amending
the thought. Not that I am, he says, but thats what
some people think.
I dont think Fadell is a rock star, but Im
quickly realizing that he is not your runof
themill Silicon Valley billionaire making
an early retirement out of an investing
hobby either. For starters, he doesnt even
live in the Valley anymore. He has moved
to Paris. Permanently. And the more I learn
about him, the more I begin to suspect
that Silicon Valleys favorite son secretly
hates the Valley. To hear Fadell tell it, he
certainly has reason to.
Rewind to the early 90s. Fadell, a computer engineering major
at the University of Michigan, has already tasted entrepreneurial
success with a little educationsoftware company called Constructive
Instruments that he founded in his dorm room, but he wants more.
I was getting very frustrated being a big fish in a little pond in Ann
Arbor, Fadell says, and my eyes were looking at the West going,
Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. For a technologist like
Fadell, there was no other place. Then, when news broke that a handful
of Apple alumniincluding the heroprogrammer behind the Mac,
Andy Hertzfeldhad escaped the mothership and
banded together to form a new company, General
Magic, Fadell saw his future.
Not long after graduating in 1991, he showed up at
General Magics offices in Mountain View, California,
early one midweek morning, unannounced. And
because he was there before the receptionist, he just
started wandering the halls, uncomfortable in his
jacket and tie, rsum in hand. He eventually found
some people to pesterpeople who had clearly
been there all night, hacking away. Leave us alone,
kid. I was humbled in the first 10 minutes of being
there, he says. I was like, Oh my God, this is not
like Michigan, I have got to be here, these are the
smartest people ever, I have got to be working here.
I have to be working here.
The young Fadell had persistence, and it paid off:
By the end of 1991 he had a job offer from General
Magic. I wouldnt have said, back then, This guys
going to change the world, particularly, Hertzfeld
says. He was incredibly talented, very opinionated,
obviously very bright, and physically very strong.
At General Magic, Fadell joined a small team that
was trying to build something the company had
labeled a personal communicator. It had email.
It had downloadable apps. It had shopping. It had
animations and graphics and games. It had telecom
municationsa phone, a builtin modem, Fadell
says. It was the iPhone 14 years too soon. It never
got off the ground, and Magic ran out of tricks and
cash by the early 2000s, but the experience was
formative. Hardware, software, services. That was
the first link that I ever saw like that, Fadell says.
That has influenced everything Ive done since.
A few years after leaving General Magic, Fadell
had his own startup, Fuse Systems. It was a hard
ware company that was attempting to capitalize on the Napster
fueled rise of the MP3 music format. Yves Bhar, the noted product
designer, remembers working with the nascent company: The idea
was to make a full line of MP3optimized music playerseverything
from a component stereo system to a small portable Walkmantype
GROOMING BY KARINE BELLY
device. Tony was talking about a world where media, especially
music, was going to be all digital, Bhar says. And he got so excited
and animated and passionate that he broke a chairhe was just very
physical, getting up and sitting down againand that became a joke:
Tonys a kind of excitable guy who breaks the furniture.
To get the idea off the ground, Fadell rented an office in San
Franciscos Telegraph Hill neighborhood and hired So he put his own dreams in a box and went to work
about a dozen people. Then Apple called. This was just for Apple as the head of the iPod project. The first
after Jobs had returned to the company he founded iPod was not perfect, but it was still way better than
and was struggling to save it from oblivion. Jobs was the competitionand as it was refined, it grew into a
looking for a way out of a nowin battle with Microsoft monster hit. Steve Wozniak, who watched it all happen
and, like Fadell, had hit upon the idea of a portable MP3 from the inside, credits the iPod with turning the entire
player. Toshiba had just announced the launch of a small company around. It made our revenues double, our
format disk drive that would give the Apple MP3 player profits double, and our stock double, he says. The
a crucial advantage over the competition. But Apple iPod was a hit, and Fadell was a hero inside Apple.
needed someone who knew the When Jobs announced that he had cancer in 2004, Fadell was
tech forward and backward to on every list of potential successors. He even reminded people of
build out a prototype. Execu the mercurial Apple founder, both in his ability to get things done
tives asked him to come in to and in the way he operated. Tony is a little bit like Steve Jobs in
discuss somethingthey were the way he shaded the truth, says Hertzfeld, who was close to
cagey about exactly what. both men. Its not exactly lying, but its expressing things in an
Fadell assumed Apple needed advantageous way.
some help designing a nextgen The iPhone, which came out in 2007, was Fadells last chapter
Newton and took the meeting. at Apple. As the guy who built the iPod, he had earned the right
It was only after he signed the to shape the companys next flagship product. The phone project
nondisclosure agreements that started in earnest at the end of 2004. By that time, Fadell and
he discovered that the company Tony his team had prototyped iPods that could also make phone calls.
started
wanted him to design a portable to adopt Fadells design used the iPods circular controller like a rotary dial.
MP3 playerthe future iPod. In Steve Jobs But there was another team inside Apple with a bigger ideathe
mannerisms
effect, Apple was asking Fadell and
alltouch screen. And the competition between the two teams at
for help in competing with him persona times escalated into fullon corporate warfare.
self. Yet if Fuse were to have any because Fadell lost the battle over the iPhones final designbut, because
it was a
chance of survival, Fadell had to pressure of his previous success, he was still expected to build the hardware,
take the consulting gig at Apple, cooker a powersharing situation that created all kinds of drama with Scott
but also
because Fuse needed another you emulate Forstall, Apples legendary software guru. This is when Steves
infusion of cash. The tradi what works, leadership and management style started to permeate the company,
right? And
tional sources of funding had so everyone
remembers Andy Grignon, the manager responsible for the phone
shut down because the dotcom started part of the iPhone. Tony started to adopt Steves mannerisms and
crash was already under way. screaming persona because it was a pressure cookerbut also you emulate
at each
Fadell put Fuse on autopilot other. what works, right? And so everyone started screaming at each other.
and designed the iPod pro It became just like the thing to do: Fly off the fucking handle. And
totype for Apple in six short by the time the iPhone was ready to launch, it seemed Fadell was
weeks. After he demonstrated no longer the golden boy.
how the iPod could be built Jobs appeared to confirm this fact in an exceptionally cruel way:
which components, which inter The message was signaled from the stage at the very event where
faces, and at what priceJobs the iPhone was unveiled, on January 9, 2007. When Jobs was demon
put Fadell into a double bind. strating the iPhones contact list, he showed that he could delete a
He asked him to abandon the contact with one tapand the contact he deleted was Tony Fadell.
Fuse MP3 player designs and The public may not have thought twice about the gesture, but the
develop his idea inside Apple, Apple engineers in the audience understood exactly what was
which would mean killing his going on. People laughed about it, but everybody knew, Grignon
own company. It was agonizing for the young entre says. Steve was in many ways diabolical, and Tony and
preneur. I was just like, whoa! says Fadell, who even Steves relationship had grown increasingly rocky.
now gets worked up at the thought. I am like, Wait a Fadell insists that his relationship with Jobs remained
second, I have a company, and there are people over there solid, but he seems to have been pretty decisively out
working on this other thing. How am I going to do this? maneuvered. That demo script, Fadell says, was 1
1
So I just got in my car, and I started driving through the created by Scott Forstall. (A source closely involved 1
hills of Saratoga and Los Gatos. I go up to Skyline, I wind with the presentation says Jobs was adlibbing.) Fadell
up those roads, and Im just sitting there going, What and his wife, Danielle Lambert, also an Apple employee,
am I going to do? What am I doing? eventually decided theyd had enough and were gone by
In the end, Fadell didnt have much of a choice. The November 2008. Fadell says they left to spend more time
odds of Fuse succeeding on its own were not good. with their kids. Steve was wondering why we didnt do
it sooner, Fadell says. And then for a year, year and a
half, we kind of went around the world. The city they
liked best was Paris, so there they settled. They bought a
big, beautiful apartment in the seventh arrondissement,
started filling it with contemporary art, and enrolled
their eldest son in the local school.
Fuck Apple!
Fadell is in full manic panic, and
those are the first words out of
his mouth as I step into his garden
courtyard in the seventh. Its early
in the morning, the day after Found
ers Forum in London, and Im being
escorted onto the premises by Fadells
PR person. Today she has scheduled
Fadell for a long sitdown interview
with me. But all of that has been for
gotten, as Fadell has just been hit
with some disturbing news. Fucking
Apple, he says. Fadell clams up after
this outburst, but I later hear there is
a dispute brewing between one of the
Future Shape companies and Apple.
Fadell has invested in hundreds of
startup companies, and I have no idea
which of them is butting heads with
Apple. However, I do glean enough
to understand that there is nothing
unusual about the mornings drama.
Fadell is a drama king: The more
drama, the better. In fact, Fadells
PR person is a specialist in what has
come to be called crisis PR, and she
tells me that with Fadell, every day
is a new adventure.
Indeed, the next thing I hear from
Fadell is that weve got to go now. He has decided that,
instead of sitting down for the interview this morning,
he has to make an appearance at VivaTechthe Tech
Crunch of Europe. He points to a pair of bikes waiting in
the courtyard, outfitted with a device that gives them
an electric boost. The devices are from a startup called
Superpedestrian, and Fadell is an investor. The bet
on ebikes is emblematic of the types of investments
hes looking for. He tends to like hardware startups.
He looks for industries that are very stable, where the
basic designs, tools, or materials have barely changed
for a long time. Consider Modern Meadow, a Future
Shape portfolio company, which is trying to replace
cow leather with a labgrown substitute. Then theres
a heating and cooling company aiming to replace every
compressor in every industrial refrigerator in the
Fadell has prime office space at Station F, a startup incubator in Paris.
world with a solidstate thermoelectric
coolera chip, in essence. In Fadells mind,
the ultimate triumph would be a break
through battery: If we have energy storage
technologies that are very cheap and very
efficient, then were going to see wars stop,
because no one is going to be fighting over
oil reserves anymore.
We each take a bike and head into traffic,
riding south on Boulevard SaintGermain
If youre and then merging into traffic to veer onto
launching Boulevard Raspail. Fadell has our destina
a startup
today, tionthe Paris Expo centerdialed into
dont go his iPhone. Its only 4 miles away, but we
to Silicon
are going to have to sprint to get there in
Valley if
youre not time. Theres only one problem: My boost
from there, doesnt work! Fadell says.
Fadell
tells a No matter, he just stands up on his pedals
group of and grinds like a bike messenger who has
students.
Dont do it! just guzzled a gallon of espresso. Keeping
up is not easy, even with my Superpedes
trianassisted superlegs, because Fadell is
blowing through red lights, splitting lanes,
squeezing through wormholes in moving
traffic. And doing it all onehanded so he
can keep an eye on the map.
Watch out for cops, OK? he says as we
blast through another busy intersection.
If they see me riding with my phone out,
its an automatic ticket.
Were cranking, running with traffic on
the Rue de Rennes, and then the second
technical fail strikes.
What the hell?! Fadell grunts, glaring
at his screen while spinning his crankset
madly. My phone is only at 50 percent charge. It was
full when we left this morning.
You need to be able to jack it into that battery in
the bike, I say, offering an unsolicited design critique.
Youre right! he says, leaning into a chicane designed
to slow traffic.
A left, a right. The streets are getting wider: four
1
lanes, then six. Traffic is moving faster and faster. Fadell 1
2
is starting to sweat.
I need to reboot. Theres a bug in the phone. Its
sucking power, he says. We glide to a stop at the edge
of a deserted plaza near a train station so Fadell can
reboot his iPhone. The reboot doesnt fix the bug. Such
is the life of a digital citizen, he sighs.
I have an idea: I hand him my Android so he can con
tinue to navigate, and we are off again. Its all downhill
from here, and soon we are on a paved bike path. Fadell
narrowly escapes a headon collision with a helmeted
mountain biker while trying to get his bearings from
the unfamiliar phone.
Weve got gravity at our back, trees to our left, and
pedestrians to our right. Were laying down a groove in
a dedicated bike lane carved out of an impossibly wide
Parisian sidewalk.
It says were here! Do you see it? Its just to our left
somewhere, Fadell says, craning his neck, looking for
the Expo center.
Then, crash!
Fadells front wheel goes kerflooey against a half
inch granite curb delineating the edge
of the bike lane, and hes thrown to
the ground. The bicyclist behind us
swerves to avoid the crash and curses
at Fadell while hes down, splayed over
his crumpled bike: Merde!
My phone is yards away, having
escaped Fadells grip when he went
flying. The screen is shattered. Fadell
has dirt stains on the knees of his
white jeans.
Youre not going to put this in the
story, are you? Fadell asks.
The one problem with moving
to Paris was that Fadell had no real
network there. Then he met Xavier
Niela man sometimes referred to
as the French Steve Jobs. He made
his money as an internet entrepreneur
and now, like Fadell, invests it. I was
reading blogs and stuff, but I wanted to
talk to other people in the business,
Fadell tells me.
At the time, Paris wasnt a big tech
city, says Niel, who recalls meeting
Fadell early one afternoon in his office in 2009. It was
a blind date bromance, and they talked for almost 10
hours straight. Oh my God, we just bonded instantly,
Fadell says. We had similar backgrounds, just in different
countries. He had an Apple II, I had an Apple II.
We spoke a lot about electronics Niel says.
Fadell had an idea about a company of his own and was
looking for collaborators. Nest was burning inside me to
be created, he says. Niel was an early investor.
The Nest elevator pitch: home thermostat meets the
iPhone. Nest was never simply about making a smarter,
more beautiful thermostat, any more than the iPhone
was about making a smarter, more beautiful phone. The
business pitch was that, someday soon, every device in
the average houseevery lock, appliance, power outlet,
and light switchwould be replaced by a fancy cloud
connected gizmo. And what would connect this socalled
internet of things? Who would provide the operating
system to the houses and apartments we would all be
living in? Well, Nest of course.
Fadell moved back to Silicon Valley to build it with
Matt Rogers, who had been Fadells colleague at Apple.
The company was incorporated in June 2010 and was in
stealth mode for more than a year. Googles Sergey Brin
saw a prototype early in 2011 and immediately moved to
buy the company. Fadell said no. Steve Jobs heard about
the thermostat and wanted to see it too, but by the time
Fadell felt it was perfect enough to show to the perfectionist, Jobs
was on his deathbed. He never saw it.
The Nest thermostat debuted at the end of 2011 and earned Nest a
raft of plaudits and design awards, and all the attention was making
Fadell nervous. I have seen this before, he says, where youre the
biggest fish in the smaller pond, and then all of a sudden the pond
grows immensely because Google or Microsoft or Apple or Amazon
or Samsung gets into it, and now youre a very tiny fish with these
big, big, big whales.
By the summer of 2013, the second product in the Nest family, a
smart smoke detector, was about to come out, and Fadell was looking
to raise more money through an investment round. We had connected
products, but what we wanted to do was connect the whole thing
together. That was the vision of Nest. So how much money was it
going to take? Fadell asks. The answer: a ton of moneyand time
too. Meanwhile, Google was still interested in buying the company
outright. Nest was starting to look like the key that could unlock a
gazilliondollar connected home market, and acquiring Fadell
seemed to be a chance to inject Google with some of the design DNA
that had made Apple the most valuable company in the world.
Fadell was pressed hard against the same dilemma hed faced at
Fuse a decade earlier. He could bet everything on himself and risk
losingor he could try to pursue his vision inside the confines of
a warm corporate cocoon. This time the double bind wasnt so
heartbreaking. Fadell wouldnt have to kill his company, because
Nest would effectively live inside Google. Fadell could keep control
while drawing on all the Google infrastructure he needed to build
Nest into a connectedhome platform. All kinds of promises were
made, Fadell says. Including, according to a source who saw the
contract, a fiveyear runwaya period of time in which
Nest could spend and innovate freely with the goal of
capturing the entire connectedhome ecosystem that
everyone knew was coming.
In January 2014, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion.
Five months later, Google bought Dropcam, a smart
homesecuritycamera company. The plan was to do
some modifications, rebrand the system, and add the
new Nest Cam into Fadells product line. Thats what
happened, but not before the former Dropcam CEO, Greg
Duffy, attempted a coup dtat early in 2015. According
to an article on the news site The Information, Duffy sent
an email to Google CEO Larry Page complaining about
Fadell, his boss at Nest. He also recommended that Fadell
be fired and suggested that he himself should replace ing an entrepreneur in residence deep inside the
Fadell. When Duffys insubordinate power play got no Google death star, Ruth Porat was hired as Googles new
response from Page, he quit Nest and, for good measure, CFO. Porat had deep roots in Silicon Valleyher brother,
says he told Fadell, I think youre running this company Marc, was Fadells boss at General Magicbut Porat
like a tyrant bureaucrat! before walking out. came from Wall Street.
Theres definitely a tyrannical streak in Fadellin a She was hired to bring financial discipline to Goo
heated moment Fadell once asked his cofounder, Rogers, gle. And indeed, within five months, Google announced
to postpone his honeymoon to help the Nest team meet that it was no longer Google anymore. It was Alpha
some deadlines. (Rogers knew the storm would pass bet, a holding company that would contain at least a
and took his honeymoon as scheduled.) But Fadells real dozen divisions. There would be the core searchand
problem wasnt his socalled tyrannyit was the new advertising company called Google as well as what
bureaucracy he suddenly found himself in. Alphabet called its other bets. Nest was one of the
The month after Duffy transferred out of Nest, becom other bets, and as a division Nest would have to meet
certain revenue goals, and its balance sheet would suddenly be sub
ject to large overhead and other indirect charges from Alphabet.
Fadell remembers the moment vividly. He thought he had a promise:
five years in which to build Nest into the dominant connectedhome
Archangel platform. But everything changed when Google morphed into Alpha
Investor bet. They decided there was a new regime in town, and they said,
Were going to have all new metrics, and I was like, This is not what
There are angel investors, and then we agreed to before, because this was not just about fiscal thingsit
theres Tony Fadell. The engineer was about getting married. I had never thought about being bought.
best known for inventing the iPod
has spent the past eight years It was about getting married to build a beautiful child, right?
quietly investing inand consulting Fadell soldiered on under the new regime for four months, until
withstartups through his fund, at the end of 2015 he discovered that the new bottomlineoriented
Future Shape. In size, Future
Shapes billion-dollar portfolio Alphabet was going to sell Nest. At that point I knew it wasnt going to
rivals medium- and large-size VC work out, and thats when I came home to my wife, after a lot of strug
firms. But the investments come gles with the Alphabet thing. It wasnt working, it was, OK, its over.
unencumbered by meddlesome
limited partners or 10-year return Things went south after Fadell told Page that he wanted out in
horizons. So Fadell can, as he puts December of 2015. The tech blogs started circling, and the famously
it, go long. Heres where Future tightlipped Google started leaking. Recode got ahold of a meme,
Shape is placing its bets.
blanca myers created by someone inside the company, that showed a cartoon mob,
torches raised high, behind the words sell nest. The Information
did a damning expos, featuring Duffys version of Nest as a bloated,
ineffectual organization. In a followup blog post, Duffy accused Nests
leadership of fetishizing only the most superfluous and negative traits
of their mentorsin other words, Fadell had emulated Steve Jobs
Keyssa Phononic dark side but not his capacity for getting things done. Fadell, of course,
(Campbell, CA) (Durham, NC)
Develops high- Develops solid- rejected the charges: In his view, Duffy was acting out of line, while
speed wireless state heating and
connectors. cooling systems.
Nest was racking up accomplishments at Googlea regular drumbeat
of significant hardware redesigns and new software services. Fadell
felt blindsided by Duffy and hamstrung by legal agreements restricting
what he could say publicly: I was disappointed Google
did not step up to the line when these personal attacks
were made on me and Nest, he says. Furthermore, Google
Turvo Karius DX Dice
(Sunnyvale, CA) (Redwood City, CA) (London) threatened Fadell with legal action if Fadell went ahead
Offers a cloud-based Diagnoses Suggests live music
logistics platform for infectious diseases performances
and defended himself in the pressthis tidbit according
shippers, brokers, using genomic and offers mobile to the same source who saw the fiveyear runway clause
and carriers. technologies. ticketing on an app. 1
in the original purchase agreement between Google and 1
5
Nest. Alphabet, which politely declined to comment on
what exactly went wrong at Nest, whether Fadell quit or
was fired, or even if there was any runway agreement in
the first place, vehemently denies threatening Fadell with
Impossible Rohinni CashShield
Foods (Coeur dAlene, ID) (Singapore) legal action. Whatever really happened behind closed
(Redwood City, CA) Develops Helps enterprises doors, we do know for certain that by June 2016, Fadell
Makes a meat LED lighting detect and prevent
substitute from plants. products. online fraud. had returned to Paris for good.
 Given that Fadell has tangled
with major Silicon Valley companies
and lost twice, its hardly surprising
that he decided to relocate to Paris.
The surprising thing is that he may
have found something better. At least
thats the case Xavier Niel makes. Sili
con Valley, Niel says, is for suckers. He
ticks off the downsides: the skyhigh
salaries needed to attract engineers, the
atrocious traffic, the relative dearth of
cultural institutions, the isolation from
the great cities of Europe
I am, to say the least, dubious: France
is known for being unfavorable ground
for businesses of all kindsespecially
startups. It has high taxes, rigid labor
laws, and a culture that is averse to the
free market. But I have to concede that
Niel, a billionaire eight times over, is
putting his money where his mouth is.
Hes making the case against Silicon
Valley in the middle of Station F, a mas
sive complex on the outskirts of Paris
devoted exclusively to the care and
feeding of startups. The building that
houses it all is a former railroad terminal almost as long as
the Eiffel Tower is tall and filled with a sea of desksmore
than 3,000 in all. Basically, its a gargantuan coworking
space, one that comes with all the amenities youd find
in a big Silicon Valley company campusfoosball tables,
private conference rooms, fancy food courts, a chill zone,
beanbag chairs. All of it is owned and operated by Niel.
He operates as its landlord. Young entrepreneurs with
an idea have to apply to get in, and if they do, they pay a
nominal fee for a desk and plugandplay access to the
entire French entrepreneurial ecosystem. Looking down
from all sides are offices of the permanent tenants: angel
networks, VC firms, incubator and accelerator programs,
outposts of large firms like Facebook and Microsoft look
ing to hire and acquire. Those tenants pay top dollar for
the advantage of being in the same building with all the
young guns.
One of the nicest of the permanent offices belongs to
Fadell. Future Shape, his fund, is now worth, he estimates,
between $500 million and $1 billion. Thats equivalent
to a medium or even largesize venture fund. But the
difference is that, unlike a VC fund, Fadell doesnt have
a bunch of limited partners
backing him, tracking returns
ADAM FISHER
(@AdamcFisher) over (typically) a 10year mat
is the author of uration period. Future Shape
Valley of Genius,
a history of Silicon
is all Fadells money, so theres
Valley. It will be none of the usual VC pressure to
published
in spring 2018 by
IPO or be acquired. His personal
Hachette. balance sheet is not public, but
financial lightning struck him twice: Both he and his wife got a bundle
of Apple stock options back when AAPL was dirt cheap, and then he
sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion. Its all covered, Fadell says,
referring to his finances. I dont have to worry about it. So the point
of Future Shape, for Fadell, is finding those magic productslike the
iPhone or the Nest thermostatthat need long runways but might
change everything.
All of these incumbents with these big businesses that have been
around for 100 or 200 years can be unseated, Fadell says, because
technology is the unseating element, the levelizer. When Fadell talks
about technology he means something a bit different than the usual
definition. He waves off things like email and spreadsheets as mere
boltons to existing business models. His thesis is that almost every
industry is up for grabs when and if someone like him redesigns the
essential hardware with software and services baked in. Its the formula
Fadell learned at General Magic and then applied at Apple and Nest.
Everywhere he looks, he sees industries ripe for his particular brand
of disruption: logistics and trucking, urban transportation, farming.
Its an exceedingly familiar rap. Every venture fund claims that
disruptive opportunity is everywhereits the very premise of that
type of investingand lots of them claim, for one reason or another,
that they dont push their startups for exits.
Fadell indulges in one heresy, however: an insistence that you no
longer need to throw yourself at the feet of the Silicon Valley masters,
as he did 25 years ago. If youre launching a startup today, dont
go to Silicon Valley if youre not from there, Fadell tells a group of
awestruck students at a coding school that
feeds its graduates into Station F. Dont do
it! Youre at an incredible disadvantage. It
is clear that hes also talking about himself.
In fact, whatever the audience, whether
its coding kids or the founders of Founders
Forum, Fadell never misses a chance to
poohpooh the Valley. Fadell made a for
tune in Silicon Valley and now has left it for
In Paris,
he can
good. Hes putting down roots in Paris. He
pick out studies with a French tutor every day and
younger is getting fluent. His two kids are enrolled
versions
of himself, in the local cole, and the headquarters
give them of Future Shapethe new businessare
money,
and watch inside Station F.
all the You dont need Freud to figure out why.
possible
versions
Look past the big wallet and the big ego and
of his life you see a guy who has been grievously hurt
story by the Silicon Valley systemexploited and
unfold
again and then betrayed, twice. First by Steve Jobs,
again. who squeezed Fadell for all the juice he had
and then publicly tossed him aside. The
second time it was the same shit, different
companyFadell was again suckerpunched
on the way out. The wave of bad publicity
while he was at Nestthe Recode memes,
the Information exposcame after Fadell
told Page he wanted to leave Google.
Sure, he might have failed altogether if
it hadnt been for the support of Apple and
Alphabet. And by one very important mea
sure, Fadell succeeded stupendously, thanks
to Silicon Valley: He walked away from both
companies with huge piles of money. Maybe
for mere mortals, money would be enough.
But it wasnt for Jobs, who famously plot
ted and finally succeeded in winning back
the control that Apples early financiers
took from him. Hardware is tough: Putting
millions of things in the hands of millions
of people requires large amounts of capital.
And when someone gives you large amounts
of capital, it often means you lose control.
Elon Musk, who is two years younger than
Fadell, is the first Silicon Valley hardware
titan in generations to retain control of his
inventions. Fadell seems to yearn to oversee
his own dominion. This idea that he had to
sell his babies is, I sense, what drives him.
Fadell is almost pathologically compelled
to say whats on his mind, and never in the
week I spent shadowing him did he say
anything that smacked of selfpity. But by
the end of the week, it was clear what this
third act of his career is about. Hes trying
to challenge a Silicon Valleycentric sys
tem that separated him from
his creations.
In France, Fadell has a mini
replica of Silicon Valley outside
the Future Shape door. Its a
place where he can pick out
younger versions of himself,
give them money, andin a
sensewatch all the possible
versions of his own life story
unfold again and again. My
job is to come here and bring
Silicon Valley here, he says.
Its that cultural element that
1 NY 10007. For permissions and reprint
1 people are trying to replicate
7
around the world, of taking risks
and believing in yourself and
changing the world, and theres
no reason it can only be done in
Silicon Valley. Fadell is the vec
tor, the human tissue culture in
a grand cloning experimentas
well as the experimenter, tweak
ing the rules.
What I see is a guy trying to
prove to Silicon Valley that
his way was the right way all
alongwith the irony that hes
trying to make that case in a
hightax country that has, so far,
produced very few high tech companies of
note. But who knows? It might just work.
Station F is not some governmenthatched
development plan but rather the private
gamble of a selfmade tech billionaire, and
Niels stated goal is to have it pump out a
thousand additional startups a year into
what is one of Europes biggest startup cit
ies. Its the ambition of all the people here,
including Tony, as well as our new president
Macronthe young French president has
met with both Fadell and Nielto help this
ecosystem become huge.
As for Fadells Future Shape, it already
includes chunks of some of the more
promising nonSilicon Valley companies
goingSuperpedestrian in Cambridge,
Massachusetts; Modern Meadow in Nut
ley, New Jersey; Convargo in Paris; DICE in
London; CashShield in Singaporeand to a
person their CEOs have described Fadells
behindthescenes help as invaluable. Judg
ing by the idolization that Fadell gets from
young French coders, Future Shape will
undoubtedly get early access to the start
ups that will emerge from Station F and
elsewhere. His rockstar status
is probably his main advantage
as an investor. Will it be enough
to beat Valley VCs at their own
game? Well see.
But in another sense, Fadells
big bet on Paris has already paid
off. Spiritually, hes back home
to that Midwestern place where
he was before he was sucked
into Silicon Valleys vortex.
He calls his own shots. Hes a
big fish in a small pond. Hes in
control. And this time around,
Silicon Valley comes to him.
Tony meets more American
tech people in Paris than in the
US, Niel says. Because if you
are a big US tech manager, you
come to Paris at least one or two
times a yearand when they do,
they all call Tony!
By all means, when you come
to Paris, you should definitely
look Fadell up. Hes a wild man, a
maverick, a bull in a china shop,
and a lot of fun. But take one bit
of advice from me: Whatever
you do, dont let him borrow
your phone.
COLOPHON
DOPPELGNGERS THAT
HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
Twin shadowcats Walnut and Willow; all
those passingly familiar faces on BART;
Netflixs Ozark (its basically Breaking Bad);
Marjorie (the 70-year-old woman who lives
inside me) and Monique (the 15-year-old
girl who lives inside me); my great-grand-
father, who had the same haircut as me;
Dougie Jones, he born of the gold seed,
who made it home to Sonny Jim; my belief
that Brendan Fraser and Billy Zane are the
same person masquerading as two differ-
ent actors; eating two of the same cup-
cakes at a wired farewell; Meeko, the dog
that stares at his reflection all day; when
Ilana Glazers Broad City character fell in
love with her lookalike; those pictures of
me that my mom just came across at the
start of my career.
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A TALE OF LOVE IN THE DIGITAL AGE:

UPON
MEETING,
NEITHER
ONE
LOOKED
UP.
BY @NOLANDLIKEOCEAN, VIA TWITTER

HONORABLE MENTIONS: SHE STOLE MY HEART AND PASSWORDS. (@VAZQUEZ_AND1, VIA INSTAGRAM) // HE CALLED. APPALLED, SHE TEXTED BACK. (@DIGIUNDERDOG,
VIA TWITTER) // I ALREADY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. (@ANDOCALRISSIANO, VIA INSTAGRAM) // ROMEO, ROMEO, WHEREFORE *OPENS SNAP MAP* (@NATTAHTAT, VIA
INSTAGRAM) // LOST A PHONE, FOUND A LOVER. (HUNAIS HYDER KHAWAJA, VIA FACEBOOK) // SWIPE, TEXT, RECEIPT, UBER, NETFLIX, DELETE. (@SEVRLES, VIA INSTAGRAM)

1 1 8 ANUJ SHRESTHA NOV 2017