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. Wall Street is treating Nvidia GPUs like aircraft collateral — and a $35B syndication is quietly testing whether the credit markets agree
  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?
  3. 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.
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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. The 10,000-hour rule was never what Anders Ericsson actually found — his own research showed hours matter far less than the specific kind of feedback you get inside them
  2. The most accurate early predictor of adult achievement isn’t IQ, socioeconomic status, or parental education — it’s whether a child believes, by age ten, that their abilities can grow.
  3. A study asked people to spend fifteen minutes a week walking outdoors while deliberately looking for things that amazed them, and by the eighth week their selfies showed them smaller in the frame and smiling more.
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

In 1887, a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop watched his son bounce painfully along a cobbled path on a tricycle and glued strips of rubber into a tube of air around the wheels that night, because the boy had complained of headaches from the ride — and the pneumatic tyre he improvised in his garden was working on Belfast streets within a year
  1. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone’s nodules are estimated to contain more nickel and cobalt than all terrestrial reserves — but commercial mining is still waiting on permits and an unfinished global rulebook
  2. Before it was named Ceratothoa famosa, Nico Smit’s photograph of the parasite staring from a fish’s mouth had already gone viral

North America

New York

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
  1. 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
  2. OpenAI spent two years telling courts it couldn’t search its own training data — then a deposition suggested it had already built the tools to do exactly that

Asia

Singapore

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
  1. 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
  2. Wirecard's Singapore whistleblower was its Head of Legal for Asia-Pacific, Pav Gill — and his mother's refusal to stay silent saved the evidence

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

Regulation

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Editorial columns

Our three columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

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

ASML in Veldhoven is the only company on Earth that can build extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Inside each one are mirrors so smooth that, scaled to the size of Germany, their tallest bump would sit under a millimetre high — and every leading-edge chip on the planet has passed under their light.
  1. Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement wins final approval, leaving AI fair-use ruling intact
  2. The US fast-charging network quietly stopped being terrible, and the data shows buyer confidence in EVs is collapsing anyway — a gap nobody in the industry knows how to close
  3. Nobody is asking why Apple filed its OpenAI trade secrets suit now, weeks before a rumoured public listing — and the answer sits inside a screenless device shaped by the more than 400 ex-Apple hires OpenAI has quietly made
All in Canal Letter →

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

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

Researchers tracked 105 people six times a day for a week. About two-thirds of what they did was triggered by habit, and nearly nine in ten actions were carried out on autopilot. The surprise wasn't the size of the autopilot — it was how often the automatic thing and the intended thing turned out to be the same.
  1. There’s a reason “I’ll start Monday” keeps working — researchers found people are measurably more likely to hit the gym, start a diet, or set a new goal right after a fresh week, month, or birthday
All in Field Notes →

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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