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

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.

Visit the channel →

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. A 2025 survey of over 1,000 US teens found 72% had tried AI companions and 52% used them regularly, but the detail that unsettled researchers was this: a third had turned to a bot, not a person, for a serious conversation
  2. The UK just became the second country to ban under-16s from social media, and the part nobody is debating is whether the age-verification tech actually works
  3. 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
More in Technology →

Politics

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

  1. Elon Musk's $288M political spend in 2024 was the largest individual donation in American electoral history
  2. Cambodia stripped Chen Zhi of citizenship in January 2026 and handed the 'Neak Oknha' royal advisor to Beijing — not Brooklyn
  3. Jan Marsalek: the Wirecard COO who vanished to Moscow and was accused of running a Russian spy ring
More in Politics →

Mind

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

  1. People who bypassed classrooms and educated themselves through curiosity often share 8 measurable traits — and psychology says their problem-solving edge isn’t about knowing more, it’s about learning differently
  2. Adults who feel loneliest in a full room aren't ungrateful or cold, they may simply have learned long ago that being understood and being surrounded are two completely different things
  3. People who reach for a text instead of making a call aren’t always avoiding connection — sometimes they’re protecting something calls don’t give them: the space to think before they speak
More in Mind →

What’s building in

Cities

All cities →

Europe

London

Fujitsu engineers could remotely alter subpostmaster accounts without their knowledge — and the Post Office told courts for years that they couldn't
  1. Booking.com runs well over a thousand simultaneous A/B tests at any moment from its Amsterdam headquarters, on an experimentation platform engineers built in the mid-2000s and have patched continuously without ever fully replacing, and a single button colour test passed into company folklore as the change that reportedly earned more than its first three years of trading combined
  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

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. 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
  2. The Wollemi pine was known only from ancient fossils until a park ranger rappelled into a canyon outside Sydney in 1994 and found a grove still alive, and the exact location is now a state secret guarded by Australian rangers

Asia

Singapore

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
  1. 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
  2. Australia's youngest billionaire owed $540M in 2016 — then a rare legal manoeuvre erased the bankruptcy entirely

Deep dive on

AI

All AI →

Editorial columns

Our three columns

About the columns →

Technology

Canal Letter

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

Fusion startup Xcimer Energy has activated Phoenix, a krypton-fluoride excimer laser system the company describes as the largest privately owned laser in the world.
  1. Oxford Quantum Circuits just raised Europe's largest-ever quantum round at £260M — and the customer list reveals who is really underwriting the entire sector
  2. Nobody talks about why supply-chain attackers started hiding command servers inside Google Calendar events and Solana memo fields — and the Glassworm takedown finally explains it
  3. A Google engineer allegedly turned the company's confidential search data into $1.2M on Polymarket — and the case quietly exposes the attack surface every prediction market is pretending not to see
All in Canal Letter →

Politics

Cabinet

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

The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom theoretical penalty powers larger than the GDP of small countries. The team that actually issues those fines has fewer than 50 staff — and Meta is now in the High Court trying to shrink the formula.
  1. A one-person startup just raised $30M at a $250M valuation, and it explains ClickUp's 22% layoff
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

We tend to think quiet people are holding back — but research suggests introverts often use language differently, sticking more closely to concrete facts while extroverts tend to speak in broader, more abstract terms.

A study by Beukeboom, Tanis and Vermeulen found that extraverts describe the world more abstractly while introverts stay concrete and specific — and that the two styles are read very differently by listeners. What the finding shows, and what it does not.
  1. Beneath the streets of Paris lie roughly 200 kilometres of tunnels holding the bones of around six million people, moved underground starting in 1786 to relieve overflowing cemeteries, and only a small lit fraction is open to visitors who descend 20 metres below the city.
  2. Researchers investigating how people recover after work identified four off-hours experiences that were linked to lower strain — detachment, relaxation, mastery and control
  3. A single standout trait — good looks, an impressive job title, the voice of authority — tends to bleed into how we judge everything else about someone. This 'halo effect', first measured by Thorndike in 1920, still shapes hiring decisions, courtrooms and first impressions
All in Field Notes →

The Silicon Canals weekly

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.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We never share your address.