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. Nintendo began in Kyoto in 1889 making hanafuda playing cards, then experimented with businesses ranging from taxis to novelty products before maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi’s homemade toys helped steer it toward electronic entertainment — and 96 years after its founding, the former card company launched the NES in America and helped revive a home-console market devastated by the 1983 crash.
  2. In 1975, young Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first self-contained digital camera, a 3.6-kilogram device that took 23 seconds to record a 0.01-megapixel black-and-white image onto cassette tape—and Sasson later summed up management’s initial reaction at the film giant as: “That’s cute—but don’t tell anyone about it.”
  3. Twelve microphone-equipped cameras on New York streets logged 15,994 loud-vehicle events in 2025 and produced 1,691 summonses carrying $1,472,265 in penalties, of which $308,229 was actually paid, and thirteen of the twenty-five cameras the city's own law requires were never bought.
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Politics

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

  1. A Columbia team counted about 240,000 plastic particles in a litre of bottled water and put their mass at roughly 10 nanograms: four and a half years into treaty talks there is no agreed text, and the only microplastics banned EU-wide are microbeads and glitter
  2. Can the planet only be saved by moving beyond capitalism? We map the strongest case its supporters make, from degrowth to the doughnut, against the decoupling evidence that complicates it
  3. Across 37,073 European Research Council applications, the same proposal scored higher with reviewers who shared the applicant's citizenship and country of work — and that match moved the score about seven times as much as a shared gender did
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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. Psychology says people who become strangely quiet around certain family members aren't necessarily shy — part of them may still remember how small they once had to become to keep the peace
  2. Psychology says people who become more selective about who they spend time with as they age aren't necessarily becoming antisocial — they may be realizing that time is too valuable to keep giving it to relationships that no longer add anything to their life
  3. Psychology says people who reach midlife and wonder “Is this it?” aren't necessarily having a crisis — they may be realizing that the life they keep meaning to live someday has quietly become the life they're living now
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What’s building in

Cities

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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

Artificial Intelligence

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Mind

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

The older generation didn't have superior memories. They had daily reps, thousands of them, in an environment that demanded phone numbers, routes, and small facts be held in the head. The environment changed. The reps stopped. What replaced them isn't quite equivalent.

Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

SoftBank is putting $200 million into the excavator-automation startup Gravis Robotics, whose headline productivity figure was stated two different ways on announcement day, with no published method behind either version

Gravis says its retrofit kits deliver "up to a 30% boost" against peak manual operation. It also told Inc. the machines have delivered "about 30 percent on multiple projects" against human-operated equipment. The specialist Inc. asked wants to know what was measured.
  1. Cambridge Aerospace was just valued at $3.4 billion, less than two years after it was founded — and the two numbers that would let anyone test that valuation, the price of one Skyhammer and the size of its UK contract, have never been published as figures
  2. A federal judge is about to decide whether Washington can punish AI vendors for saying no
  3. Nadella pitches swappable AI models as Microsoft scales MAI models and Maia chips
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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

In a month-long study of 136 couples, how well partners talked about money predicted how satisfied they were a month later, while how often they talked did not — and among the people who reported the least financial stress, talking about it more often tracked with their own satisfaction slipping

Two relationship researchers followed 136 couples through a single November, asking both partners every Sunday how often they had discussed money and how well it had gone. Conversation quality showed a link to how satisfied each partner felt at the end of the month. Frequency showed no such link. The study was not preregistered, and its authors call the analyses exploratory.
  1. In a 14-day diary study, the single adults who saw singlehood as room to grow were still more satisfied with being single the next day, while the activities they had done no longer showed up in those numbers — and in a separate weekly diary, half of those activities were done with friends
  2. Thinking it over tends to improve how people judge your character, mainly if they disagree
  3. A new study suggests the person who left your message unanswered tends to feel worse about it than you imagine, and worse still when the silence was accidental — in a scenario version of the situation, a one-line "Sorry, but I can't talk right now" narrowed the gap without closing it
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Funding

The Term Sheet

The archetypal high-growth founder isn’t a 20-year-old prodigy in a garage. A US Census study of 2.7 million founders found that those behind the fastest-growing 0.1% of new ventures were 45 on average—and a 50-year-old was roughly 1.8 times as likely as a 30-year-old to produce an exceptional-growth company.

A Census-linked study of 2.7 million US founders found that exceptional employment growth was associated with middle age, with relevant industry experience offering the clearest clue as to why.
  1. The company behind Ozempic cannot be taken over, because Novo Nordisk has been controlled since the 1920s by a Danish foundation whose charter obliges it to keep control, and the weight-loss boom has quietly made that foundation the largest charitable fund on Earth, ahead of the Gates Foundation
  2. AI’s first visible employment shock may be hitting the bottom rung of the career ladder: by June 2026, employment among 22–25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations was running 19% behind their less-exposed peers, largely because companies were hiring fewer juniors—not firing experienced workers—raising an uncomfortable question about who becomes tomorrow’s senior analyst, lawyer or coder.
  3. Between May and December 2025, the share of American students from middle school through college using AI for homework rose from 48% to 62%. Yet 67% believed heavier AI use harms students’ critical thinking—and only about one-third said their school had established a schoolwide AI policy.
All in The Term Sheet →

AI & Deep Tech

Machine Room

During the Second World War, when sugar, butter and cream were rationed and rival firms quietly swapped in cheaper ingredients to keep selling, a California sweet-maker refused to lower its quality, kept its recipes exactly as they were, and made peace with producing less candy and closing each shop the moment the day's stock ran out.

A California candy maker's wartime refusal to cheat—sticking with premium ingredients while competitors cut corners—became a lesson in how principle can outlast expedience.
  1. Cursor went from $100 million in annualized revenue to $2 billion in just 13 months—a twentyfold surge that outpaced the early growth of Slack and Zoom and ranks among the fastest revenue expansions ever reported by a software company.
  2. While most food publishers spent 2025 panicking about Google's AI Overviews eating their traffic, one blog quietly stopped treating Google as the plan, posting to Facebook three times a day, adding half a million followers in about six months, and rebuilding on a platform most of the industry had already written off
  3. In January 2026, the largest human–AI creativity comparison yet tested language models against 100,000 people. GPT‑4 beat the average person at generating unexpected associations — but even the most creative half of humanity outperformed every model tested, with the top 10% far ahead.
All in Machine Room →

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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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