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

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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. 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
  2. AI just beat the average human on a creativity test involving 100,000 people, and the researchers say the real question is whether the gap between average and exceptional will hold
  3. In 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 Venus probe veered off course 293 seconds after launch and had to be destroyed mid-flight, because a single missing overbar in the guidance equations turned a smoothing instruction into a command to chase a phantom signal
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Politics

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

  1. Cambodia stripped Chen Zhi of citizenship in January 2026 and handed the 'Neak Oknha' royal advisor to Beijing — not Brooklyn
  2. Jan Marsalek: the Wirecard COO who vanished to Moscow and was accused of running a Russian spy ring
  3. The first-speaker advantage: how anchoring bias quietly shapes every meeting decision
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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. Nobody prepares you for the loneliness that comes not from being abandoned but from slowly outgrowing the conversations the people around you are still willing to have
  2. Thought of the day by Jane Fonda: “You can be really old at 60 and really young at 85.”
  3. People who are genuinely kind but have no close friends often keep everyone at a kind, gentle distance without realizing it — warm to all, available to many, and quietly letting no one all the way in, because the people who could hurt them most are the ones allowed close
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What’s building in

Cities

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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

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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
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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
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Mind

Field Notes

Harvard psychologists tracked 2,250 people through their days and found that nearly half their waking hours were spent thinking about something other than what they were doing — and that wandering away from the present moment was a stronger predictor of unhappiness than any activity they were engaged in

A 2010 Harvard study used an iPhone app to sample 2,250 people in the moment. Minds wandered 46.9 per cent of the time, and where attention went predicted momentary happiness better than the activity itself. A careful read of what the study shows, and what it does not.
  1. A Roman shipwreck found off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 held a corroded bronze device with dozens of interlocking gears, and X-ray scans later revealed it was an analogue computer built around 100 BC to predict eclipses and the positions of planets.
  2. We imagine that hitting the big goal — the promotion, the house — will bring lasting joy, but feel strangely flat once we arrive. Psychology has a name for this: the arrival fallacy
  3. How old you feel may matter more for your future than how old you actually are: in long-running studies, people whose 'subjective age' runs younger than their birth certificate tend to stay healthier, keep sharper memories and even live longer
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.

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