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. In 1901, Greek sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the island of Antikythera stumbled onto a Roman shipwreck and hauled up a corroded lump of bronze that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old geared computer capable of predicting eclipses and tracking the Olympic calendar, a device so sophisticated nothing comparable would appear again for another 1,400 years
  2. In 1911, an Oklahoma auto dealer named Clyde Cessna taught himself to fly by crashing his hand-built monoplane at least thirteen times on the salt flats of northern Oklahoma, because there were no flight schools within reach, no manuals worth trusting, and no one nearby who had flown one and could tell him what he was doing wrong
  3. 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
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Politics

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

  1. 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
  2. The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default
  3. In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones ran a five-day classroom experiment called 'The Third Wave' — and by day four, 200 students had joined a movement none of them had been invited to
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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. Research suggests our most enduring regrets concern the selves we never became, not simply the mistakes we made
  2. We picture loneliness as an old person's burden, yet a global 2023 survey found this may not be the case: across 142 countries, adults aged 19 to 29 reported the most loneliness of any age group, more than a quarter of them
  3. Neuroscience suggests overthinking isn't solved by more thinking — it's interrupted by the body, because the vagus nerve carries roughly 80% of its signals upward from gut to brain, not the other way around
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

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
  1. Before it was named Ceratothoa famosa, Nico Smit’s photograph of the parasite staring from a fish’s mouth had already gone viral
  2. In 1936, a British mathematician named Alan Turing published a 36-page paper on a machine that didn't exist — an imaginary tape reader that could compute anything computable — and every processor on Earth today is a physical descendant of the abstract device he sketched to settle a question about mathematical logic

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

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
  1. 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
  2. OpenAI just hired a Transformer co-author and a former Trump AI official in the same quarter — and the pairing is really an IPO prospectus written in personnel form

Deep dive on

Regulation

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Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

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

Apple has allegedly filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI that could complicate the artificial intelligence company's path to a public listing.
  1. Corgi, a startup that insures other startups, doubled its valuation to $2.6 billion three weeks after its last round — and because the same investors backed both, the jump is drawing quiet scrutiny over “internal markups”
  2. Eye Security, founded by former Dutch intelligence-service employees, raised €60 million to build a “sovereign” European cyber defense — and two of its backers are American
  3. Saudi and UAE sovereign AI plans still rely on Nvidia and US technology
All in Canal Letter →

Politics

Cabinet

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

Agility Robotics is heading to the public markets at a valuation notable less for its size than for its restraint.
  1. Ford rehired the engineers it replaced with AI — and reclaimed its first JD Power top ranking since 2010
  2. Europe’s new tech-sovereignty plan doesn’t ban U.S. cloud giants — it sets four levels of “sovereignty” for sensitive government data, and an American law makes the top levels nearly impossible for them to reach
  3. Stockholm's Fika Jobs just raised $4M to kill the resume with AI video interviews — and the part nobody is pricing in is what happens when employers see your face before your skills
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
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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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