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Original investigations, profile features, and longer essays from the Silicon Canals editorial team. Pieces published here go through additional research and review.
The DOJ and 40 state attorneys general have opened a landmark antitrust trial against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, alleging the company's 86% market share in primary ticketing constitutes an illegal monopoly — while Live Nation argues its actual share is 40% and its business simply brings people joy.
A sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit called Coruna — likely developed by US government contractors — has proliferated from American intelligence through Russian espionage operations to cybercriminals, infecting an estimated 42,000 devices and exposing the structural contradictions of government-funded offensive cyber capabilities.
Internet shutdowns are framed as acts of authoritarian overreach, but the profit chains behind them implicate surveillance tech vendors, VPN companies, consulting firms, and financial analysts across the globe. I mapped who benefits when a country goes dark.
I traced the ownership of the undersea cables carrying 95% of global internet traffic and found a map that mirrors colonial geography with unsettling precision — the same ports, the same routes, the same directional logic of extraction, now controlled by a handful of tech giants.
Silicon Valley perfected the aesthetics of revolution while systematically preventing anything revolutionary from taking root. The disruption flows downward; the consolidation flows upward.
Biometric IDs, cashless payment rails, and AI credit scoring are being deployed across the Global South under the banner of development. But when the data flows to Silicon Valley and the populations can't opt out, we need to call this what it is: surveillance infrastructure dressed as inclusion.
The feeling that upward mobility is impossible isn't a personal failing — it's a signal produced by layered systems of credentialing, housing, networks, and tax architecture designed to compound advantage for those who already have it.
Last Tuesday, sitting in a café in Tiong Bahru, I tapped "I agree" on a cookie consent banner without reading it.
I traced a single credit-scoring algorithm from a Singapore startup to loan denials in Lagos and job rejections in São Paulo, revealing how exported algorithmic frameworks encode one society's norms as universal truth — the quiet machinery of digital colonialism.
