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

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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. 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.
  2. Every card payment appears instant, but the money can travel through several companies and decades-old settlement systems before it actually reaches the merchant
  3. 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
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Politics

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

  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. 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
  3. Antonio Damasio's 'somatic marker' theory argued that bodily signals help guide decisions before conscious reasoning, and patients with damaged emotional circuits showed why intellect alone may not be enough
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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. In 1973, a sociologist named Robert Weiss proposed that loneliness is really two separate feelings, one from lacking a wider social network and one from lacking a single close attachment, and introversion mostly protects against only one of them
  2. Psychology says downplaying your birthday is a sign of quiet confidence because it means your sense of worth doesn't need an annual vote of confidence from everyone you know
  3. In 1997, researchers identified a hormone surge that happens to nearly everyone in the first 30 to 45 minutes after waking, whatever time that happens to be, and later work found its size predicts how well the brain handles demanding tasks that same afternoon
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

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?
  1. 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
  2. How does a bundle of glass fibres thinner than a garden hose, lying on the ocean floor under four kilometres of water, carry more than 95 percent of all intercontinental internet traffic?

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. 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
  2. In 1991, two researchers at Cambridge pointed a grainy camera at the Trojan Room coffee pot and wired it into the building's network, because they were tired of climbing the stairs to find the jug empty — and without meaning to, they built the first webcam

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

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Editorial columns

Our columns

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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
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Politics

Cabinet

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

The transparency obligations are the cheap ones to meet. The expensive, rights-protective rules are the ones that just got more time.
  1. The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default
  2. Agility Robotics is going public at $2.5B while Figure AI sits at $39B on less proven ground — and the gap between those two numbers is the entire humanoid robotics thesis in one line
  3. Ford rehired the engineers it replaced with AI — and reclaimed its first JD Power top ranking since 2010
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

In a long-running Berkeley study, researchers found that women who smiled genuinely in their college yearbook photos went on to have more stable marriages and higher wellbeing thirty years later than those whose smiles were posed

A 2001 study of 141 women photographed for the 1960 Mills College yearbook found that those with genuine, eye-crinkling smiles reported better marital and personal outcomes thirty years later. A careful reading of what the finding does and does not support.
  1. Psychology says the people who apologise for the state of their house before anyone has even walked in aren't self-conscious about cleanliness, they were raised to believe hospitality had to be earned before it could be offered
  2. Is all that scrolling really dulling your attention? Researchers combed 71 studies — the link is real, but how compulsively you scroll matters more than how long
  3. Most of what you do all day runs on habit, not choice — but a new study found the habits are usually working for you, not against you
All in Field Notes →

Funding

The Term Sheet

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?

The company is ASML , headquartered in Veldhoven , a Dutch town of roughly 45,000 people about ten minutes' drive from Eindhoven.
  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
All in The Term Sheet →

AI & Deep Tech

Machine Room

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.

Merchants have been quietly passing along billions in hidden credit card fees to you every time you swipe, and nobody's talking about it.
  1. Ozempic has no owner. Not a person, not a family, not a parent company, and the reason why is stranger than the drug itself
  2. Many people assume those who build powerful AI must grasp how it thinks, but in an important sense they cannot: even a model's own creators often cannot fully explain why it gave one answer rather than another
  3. Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement wins final approval, leaving AI fair-use ruling intact
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.

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