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. The gut-sleep axis: how microbial diversity in the colon shapes how rested you feel, according to a 2019 PLOS ONE study of 40 men
  2. Apple just banned home services, crypto ATMs and bail bonds from Maps ads before the product even launched — and the exclusions reveal a bet against Google's entire local search model
  3. In 1936, a British mathematician named Alan Turing published a 36-page paper on a machine that didn't exist — an imaginary tape reader that could compute anything computable — and every processor on Earth today is a physical descendant of the abstract device he sketched to settle a question about mathematical logic
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Politics

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

  1. In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones ran a five-day classroom experiment called 'The Third Wave' — and by day four, 200 students had joined a movement none of them had been invited to
  2. Finland, a country long invaded and overshadowed by its neighbors, built the most trusted education system in the world by doing almost the exact opposite of what everyone else believed worked
  3. 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
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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. The reason a chosen breakup can leave a hollow you did not choose: the good reasons for leaving live in one part of the brain, while the routines built around a person keep sending their signals for weeks with no one there to answer
  2. In a classic experiment, people preferred to repeat 90 seconds of painfully cold water rather than 60 seconds of the same pain because the longer trial ended just one degree warmer, revealing that memory often judges an experience by its worst moment and its ending rather than by how long it lasted
  3. 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
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What’s building in

Cities

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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

Deep dive on

AI

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Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

The federal regulator just told every robotaxi operator to fix emergency-response failures by month's end — and the quieter rule change happening alongside it reveals who actually wins

The U.S. federal auto safety regulator has issued a formal ultimatum to the autonomous vehicle industry, demanding that developers produce fixes for robotaxis that interfere with first responders — a directive that arrives just as the commercial architecture holding the sector together begins to visibly crack.
  1. Nobody talks about what happens when the agency writing federal cybersecurity standards has no director, no playbook, and a third fewer staff — CISA's May 2026 leak just made it visible
  2. SK Hynix just pulled off the biggest foreign share sale in U.S. history — and American investors paid a premium for it
  3. General Intuition just raised $320M on a thesis that sounds absurd — that video game data, not real robot telemetry, will produce the GPT of embodied AI
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. 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
  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
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

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

A 2014 study tracked years of diet searches, hundreds of thousands of gym visits, and tens of thousands of goal commitments and kept finding the same pattern: the urge to chase a goal spikes right after a clean line on the calendar. Here is what that does — and does not — explain.

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Free field brief

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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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