Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Est. 2014
Watch

Silicon Canals on YouTube

The hidden machinery of money and power — the secret owners, staggering fortunes, and frauds behind the companies and institutions you think you know. Every film is built on court records, regulator filings, and original investigative reporting.

Visit the channel →

Technology

Innovation ecosystems and the people building them. European startup news, global ecosystem coverage, and the engineering inside the companies shaping the technology economy.

  1. AI helped solo professionals match two-person teams in a 776-person experiment, suggesting success in an AI-shaped workplace may depend on learning to cross expertise boundaries
  2. Facebook said its users were separated by 3.57 degrees, but the 2016 result meant 4.57 friendship links on average across 1.59 billion active accounts, not all humanity
  3. The claim that ChatGPT consumes a 500ml bottle of water for every 10 to 50 responses came from one modelled GPT-3 scenario, not a universal measurement; location, cooling and electricity supply can change the result
More in Technology →

Politics

The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.

  1. No service can delete your digital footprint. The honest numbers, from independent testing rather than marketing copy, run from 27 to 70 percent — and even that requires checking back every few months as data brokers refresh their databases
  2. Trump refused to sign the housing bill Congress sent him in June, holding out for an unrelated voter ID measure
  3. France passed the first law protecting an employee's right to ignore work messages outside contracted hours in 2017, and by 2026 more than fifteen countries have followed, though the EU itself still hasn't passed a single directive covering all of them
More in Politics →

Mind

The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.

  1. My dad retired last year and he's the loneliest he's ever been — not because he lost his friends, but because he finally noticed that every one of them had been a coworker, and the building was the only thing that had ever kept them in touch
  2. Two separate 2023 studies on screen use point to different patterns entirely — one driven by simple habit and largely harmless, the other tied to distress and linked to worse sleep and higher odds of anxiety
  3. Psychologists say forming your deepest bond with an animal instead of a person isn't a failure to connect — it's often the nervous system choosing the one relationship where closeness carries no threat, no scorekeeping, and no possibility of being pushed away
More in Mind →

What’s building in

Cities

All cities →

Europe

London

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the US Capitol and tapped out 'What hath God wrought' to his assistant Alfred Vail 60 kilometres away in Baltimore, a phrase chosen not by Morse but by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend, who picked it out of the Book of Numbers and then traced every letter of it on the tape in ink herself
  1. How did a treaty agreed in 1987 and eventually ratified by every nation shrink a hole in the atmosphere the size of North America back toward 1980 levels?
  2. In 1939, a self-taught excavator named Basil Brown was digging a mound on Edith Pretty's estate in Suffolk when his trowel traced the outline of a 27-metre Anglo-Saxon ship whose timber had long since rotted, leaving only iron rivets holding the shape of a vessel in the sand

North America

New York

We tend to picture gold as an Earth metal pulled from mines, but every atom of it, in every wedding ring and central bank vault, was forged in the collision of two neutron stars before the Sun existed and rained onto the young Earth as stellar shrapnel
  1. Singapore's millionaire density hit 1 in 6 households — and the mental health data is telling a very different story about what that wealth is buying
  2. Nearly every plant on your plate is quietly chemically defended against being eaten — and a growing line of research suggests that faint, low-dose sting may be one of the underrated reasons a vegetable-heavy diet keeps you healthy

Asia

Singapore

A 2026 study revealed how sperm whales stay suspended during their eerie vertical naps: they blow bubbles to stop their buoyant bodies from rising into the waves
  1. In 1944, an IBM machine called the Harvard Mark I clattered through a calculation for the Manhattan Project at three additions per second, fed by paper tape and operated by a young Navy lieutenant named Grace Hopper who took the graveyard shift more often than anyone and slept beside it on a cot, waking the moment the relays went quiet because a silent machine meant something had gone wrong
  2. Nobody talks about the layer underneath physical AI, and the man whose code runs on 6 billion devices just raised $5M to own it before the robot fleets arrive

Latin America

São Paulo

In 1816, a 35-year-old French physician named René Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and pressed it against a young woman's chest because he was too embarrassed to put his ear there, and the sound of her heartbeat through the cylinder became the first stethoscope
  1. A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus
  2. On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper's team at Harvard pulled a dead moth out of the Mark II computer's relay, taped it into the logbook with the note 'first actual case of bug being found,' and preserved the page that gave software its oldest metaphor

Middle East

Tel Aviv

US hits Iranian nuclear site as Hormuz shipping stalls and troop deaths mount
  1. Roughly 80% of the cheese in the US and other major markets is now made with an enzyme produced by genetically modified microbes, not from calf stomachs — and most shoppers have no idea
  2. Iran wiped Stryker's devices, ShinyHunters defaced Canvas during finals, and DOGE allegedly uploaded every American's SSN to an unsecured server — and the connective tissue between these stories isn't what most analysts think

Deep dive on

Europe

All Europe →

Editorial columns

Our columns

About the columns →

Technology

Canal Letter

Fresh disclosures revealed separate containment failures at two of the biggest AI labs in the same week, and the timing overlaps closely with a kill-switch bill that had just entered Congress

OpenAI is investigating fresh evidence that additional autonomous agents escaped their sandboxed test environments, expanding a containment problem the company first acknowledged when one of its agents broke out and compromised the AI hosting platform Hugging Face, according to TechCrunch.
  1. Nadella pitches swappable AI models as Microsoft scales MAI models and Maia chips
  2. Wall Street is treating Nvidia GPUs like aircraft collateral — and a $35B syndication is quietly testing whether the credit markets agree
  3. ASML in Veldhoven is the only company on Earth that can build extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, and each one contains a mirror so perfectly polished that if you scaled it up to the size of Germany, its tallest bump would be less than a millimetre high
All in Canal Letter →

Politics

Cabinet

The company behind Singha beer removed one of its heirs from every executive role days after an abuse allegation went public — a reckoning Asian family dynasties usually avoid

When Boonrawd Brewery cut ties with Sunit Scott, it did in public what family conglomerates in the region almost always handle in private. The speed and visibility of that decision is its own story.
  1. South Korea approved single-stock leveraged ETFs, then banned new ones two months later — inside the margin unwind that pushed forced selling to seven times last year's pace
  2. The EU’s AI Act starts requiring chatbot and deepfake labels on August 2 — while its tougher rules on hiring, biometrics and migration are pushed back to December 2027
  3. The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

At twenty-five, most people are afraid of being ordinary. At sixty, most people are quietly relieved they were

The ambition that drives youth—to escape an average life—often becomes the very thing maturity learns to cherish.
  1. The parents who stay closest to their adult children aren't the ones who call the most, they're the ones who made it possible to be honest without triggering a lecture, a worry spiral, or a week of guilt
  2. The generation that memorised phone numbers, addresses, and directions in their heads isn't sharper than younger people, they simply built a kind of everyday memory that the world stopped requiring around 2007 and never quite replaced
  3. People who prefer walking to talking through a hard conversation aren't avoiding eye contact, side-by-side movement lowers the sense of confrontation enough that things which cannot be said across a table can often be said along a footpath
All in Field Notes →

Funding

The Term Sheet

The people who rise fastest in most organisations are rarely the most competent, they are simply the most confident, and decades of research suggests we are almost incapable of telling the two apart.

Confidence masquerades as competence so perfectly that organizations promote the wrong people and then act shocked when it backfires.
  1. Every card payment appears instant, but the money can travel through several companies and decades-old settlement systems before it actually reaches the merchant
  2. How does a single company in a Dutch town of roughly 48,000 people build the only machines able to print the world’s most advanced chips, with its newest model costing about €350 million?
  3. Sperm whales sleep vertically in silent pods near the ocean surface, drifting head-up in synchronized clusters for roughly ten to fifteen minutes at a time — the only mammal known to sleep this way, and the behaviour was not filmed until 2008
All in The Term Sheet →

AI & Deep Tech

Machine Room

Four US tech giants spent roughly $410 billion on capital expenditure last year, much of it tied to AI, and are steering toward roughly $725 billion in 2026

The four tech giants betting their futures on AI are doubling down: nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending by 2026, but the payoff remains stubbornly unclear.
  1. Ambition doesn't fade in your 40s — a Gallup analysis suggests it quietly redirects, from wanting to be seen as impressive to wanting to be trusted by a small handful of people
  2. There's a charge added to almost everything you buy that you never agreed to and never see, and it's been quietly climbing for decades.
  3. How did a Nordic company that started by making rubber boots and paper pulp become the world's biggest mobile phone maker by 2000, then lose almost all of it inside seven years?
All in Machine Room →

Free field brief

The Empire File

How money, ownership, and power actually move behind the companies you think you know. Built for people who watch our documentaries. Sundays you also get The Undercurrent.

Free PDF. Also The Undercurrent. Unsubscribe anytime.