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. 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
  2. Ozempic has no owner. Not a person, not a family, not a parent company, and the reason why is stranger than the drug itself
  3. Many people assume those who build powerful AI must grasp how it thinks, but in an important sense they cannot: even a model's own creators often cannot fully explain why it gave one answer rather than another
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Politics

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

  1. 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
  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
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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. Children who grew up in the 1970s with empty afternoons and no structured playdates were not being neglected — they were practising self-directed play, the vanishing skill of inventing a world without adults running it
  2. Psychology says people who stay fit as they age aren't unusually disciplined or genetically fortunate — they're often the ones who found a reason that had nothing to do with their body and everything to do with the life they were still building
  3. In 2025 the World Health Organization put a number on loneliness, and it was grim: it now touches about one in six people on Earth
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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

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Technology

Canal Letter

Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement wins final approval, leaving AI fair-use ruling intact

The settlement freezes a pivotal moment in AI law: Anthropic avoids a jury trial while a controversial fair-use precedent survives unchallenged.
  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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”
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
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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