Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Est. 2014
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Silicon Canals on YouTube

Deeply reported business storytelling — the frauds, empires, collapses, and secrets behind the world's biggest companies. Every film is built on court records, regulator filings, and original investigative reporting.

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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. You think you make decisions early because you're decisive. UCL research finds uncertainty is more stressful than pain itself
  2. 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
  3. A Nobel laureate just walked out of Google DeepMind for Anthropic, and the part nobody is discussing is what Alphabet had reassigned him to do before he left
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Politics

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

  1. Wirecard's Singapore whistleblower was a junior lawyer named Pav Gill — and his mother's intervention saved the evidence Munich tried to bury
  2. Trump rebukes Netanyahu at G7 and floats Syria role against Hezbollah
  3. Elon Musk's $288M political spend in 2024 was the largest individual donation in American electoral history
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Mind

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

  1. Elon Musk's original 2001 plan for Mars wasn't a colony — it was a tiny greenhouse called Mars Oasis, meant to grow plants and reignite public interest in space
  2. Older adults who start giving away money before they die aren't being reckless, they're choosing to witness the help they'd otherwise never see
  3. We give people a few days and expect them back as themselves, when the science of loss says grief takes no days off at all, and the shame around admitting that is its own quiet cruelty
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the Greek island of Antikythera surfaced with a corroded bronze lump that sat in an Athens museum for decades before anyone realised it was a 2,000-year-old geared computer that could predict eclipses and track the Olympic Games
  1. In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out 'What hath God wrought' from the US Capitol to a Baltimore railroad depot, and the four-word message took 38 miles of copper wire and a verse his friend's daughter had chosen from the Book of Numbers
  2. Goldman Sachs paid $3.9 billion to settle with Malaysia over 1MDB — the bond fees that triggered it were just $600 million

North America

New York

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
  1. Cambodia stripped Chen Zhi of citizenship in January 2026 and handed the 'Neak Oknha' royal advisor to Beijing — not Brooklyn
  2. The US Justice Department seized 127,271 bitcoin worth $15B — the largest forfeiture in American history traces back to a 2020 mining hack nobody reported

Asia

Singapore

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
  1. Adyen processes payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay, and Microsoft from an Amsterdam canal house where the engineering team still eats lunch at a single long table, and the company went public worth €7 billion with fewer staff than a midsize hotel
  2. In 1991, researchers at Cambridge's Computer Lab pointed a grey-scale camera at the department coffee pot and streamed the image to their desktops, because they were tired of walking three floors only to find the jug empty — and accidentally invented the webcam

Deep dive on

Regulation

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Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

One of the five brothers who kept Ubisoft independent for 40 years just died in a plane crash, and the real question is whether the family voting bloc can survive its first generational test

Claude Guillemot, a co-founder of French video game publisher Ubisoft, reportedly died in a plane crash.
  1. BlackRock and Wellington just backed a 1977 Japanese taxi operator's robotaxi pivot — and the demographic math behind the deal explains why Waymo needs Go more than Go needs Waymo
  2. Bezos, Altman and Milner have poured billions into cell reprogramming as the new anti-aging frontier — and Life Biosciences just dosed the first human, but the field’s older bets left few clinical wins and brutal trial misses
  3. Xcimer just turned on the largest privately owned laser in the world — and the real story isn't the kilojoules, it's who gets to own the supply curve for fusion energy
All in Canal Letter →

Politics

Cabinet

Tech layoffs are running 44% ahead of last year while the same companies post record profits and mint new billionaires — and the structural setup is stranger than 2008 because there's no crash to blame

Tech companies are firing workers at the fastest pace in two years, blaming artificial intelligence — and simultaneously posting record profits while a small cohort of AI insiders accumulates generational wealth.
  1. The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom the power to fine platforms 10% of their global revenue, which for Meta alone would be over $16 billion, and the enforcement unit responsible for issuing those fines has fewer than 50 staff
  2. Norway's sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team deciding how it votes at 9,000 annual shareholder meetings is smaller than the compliance department of a single mid-sized European bank
  3. A one-person startup just raised $30M at a $250M valuation, and it explains ClickUp's 22% layoff
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

Psychology suggests that people who fear AI are often not only afraid of the technology itself — they’re afraid of what it threatens to erase: the status, competence, identity, and sense of usefulness they spent years building.

In late 2024, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 5,000 employed Americans and found that 52 per cent were worried about how AI might be used in their workplace.
  1. People who scroll through social media for hours but never post aren’t necessarily antisocial or disengaged — many are quietly studying the room, learning its norms, or deciding whether to speak
  2. Psychology suggests that people who build success quietly may not be secretive or antisocial — they may simply understand that announcing a goal can create a premature sense of progress, making the work itself feel less urgent.
  3. We tend to assume that classy people come from money or privilege, but psychology points to something quieter: households where manners were taught not as performance, but as genuine regard for other people.
All in Field Notes →

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Undercurrent

Where three streams meet. Each Sunday, one synthesis of the week’s technology, politics, and mind coverage — plus the wider innovation reading we found worth your time.

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