Wired Marzo 2019 [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

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27.03

LAUNCH

“IS TA K I N G

DANGEROUS DRUGS FOR THE REST OF ONE’S LIFE WORTH

THE

SATISFACTION OF MOVING A STRAND OF HAIR FROM A CHILD’S FA C E ? ”

MAR 2019

PAGE 44

DAN WINTERS

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FAST AS THE LEXUS HYBRID LINE Climb behind the wheel. Strap yourself in. Bury the pedal. Feel the roar. Then tighten your grip as the LC 500h’s lightning-fast Multistage Hybrid Drive system propels you from zero to 60 in a mere 4.7 seconds.1,2 Lexus Hybrids. There’s more to h than just hybrid. INSTANT ACCELERATION3 BOLD STYLING

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LC 500h

Options shown. 1. Ratings achieved using the required premium unleaded gasoline with an octane rating of 91 or higher. If premium fuel is not used, performance will decrease. 2. Performance figures are for comparison only and were obtained with prototype vehicles by professional drivers using special safety equipment and procedures. Do not attempt. 3. Comparing 2018 Lexus Gas models and 2018 Lexus Hybrid models. Excluding special orders on the 2018 GS Hybrid. ©2018 Lexus

27.03

FEATURES

44 The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles An intricate transplant technique promised to make patients whole again after they lost hands to illness or injury. It did. Then came the side effects. BY DAVID DOBBS

58

68

80

Alexa, I Want Answers

Welcome to Mirrorworld

How voice computing will fundamentally transform our relationship with information.

The next all-powerful tech platform will be as big as the planet—merging our physical reality with the digital universe.

Careful What You Wish For

BY JAMES VLAHOS

Inside Italy’s techno-utopian Five Star Movement. BY DARREN LOUCAIDES

BY KEVIN KELLY

MAR 2019

DAN

WINTERS

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CONTENTS

15 Angry Nerd It’s not summer, Captain Marvel!

GADGET LAB

18

31

ALPHA Fetish: Surface Studio 2

11

Microsoft’s new desktop PC bends over backwards to help you work

Don’t Trust, Verify Finding facts in a world of fakes BY ZEYNEP TUFEKCI

Tools for managing your tasks

19 Jargon Watch What “roadmanship” means to a self-driving car

20 Infoporn 100 years of science fiction, explored

33 Benchmark: Aeron A radical chair design eschewed tradition to become the most coveted seat in the office

34 Gearhead: E-Scooter Commuter

22 Encyclopedia Automata

Brain Nonbinary

32 App Pack: Desk Mates

Outfit yourself before you hop on and zip off

Where Alexa gets its information

Identity politics force the stubborn mind to adapt

36 Gearhead: Time Out

22 3 Smart Things About Attention

BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Turn your corner of the office into a blissful escape pod

13 What’s the Deal VCs are hungry for “food platforms”

24 The WIRED Guide to Aliens Don’t stop believing—or searching

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26

38 A.I. Is My Coworker Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies are injecting more and more smarts into our workflow BY LAUREN GOODE

40 Dispatch: The Best of CES The most delightful products we saw at the world’s glitziest consumer-tech trade show

POSTSCRIPT 96 Stories by WIRED readers Life online, without all the metrics

Obsessed How a DIY Tesla mechanic resurrects damaged electric cars

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28 You Hear That? It’s the Sonification Age

O N T H E COV E R

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

Artwork for WIRED by Carl De Torres

MAR 2019

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RELEASE

NOTES

Will we ever find aliens? “The scientific community seems more hopeful than ever,” says Sarah Scoles, a frequent contributor to WIRED ’s Science channel and the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Since scientists have discovered habitable planets in our galaxy and weird organisms in places we thought were inhospitable, she says, “it’s become a lot more scientifically acceptable and a bit more socially acceptable to study aliens.” See her guide to the search for alien technology on page 24. Cover designer Carl De Torres

CRASH TEST

he beauty of working for WIRED is that you get to do something you’ve probably never done before, and you get to take some risks,” says Carl De Torres, the designer behind this issue’s cover and the illustrations for the cover story. We asked De Torres, who co-owns the studio StoryTK, to create imagery that would reflect Kevin Kelly’s story about the emerging “mirrorworld”—the convergence of the virtual and the physical. The results were … complex. “I know I’m onto something good when my graphics program is crashing and can’t understand what I’m trying to do,” De Torres says. “To me, that means you’re creating something new.”

T

MAR 2019

Fun fact: We ran our backwards-text cover by the US Postal Service to make sure it didn’t run afoul of regulations.

BETH

HOLZER

Michael Calore has some rules for surviving 16-hour days at CES, the tech world’s annual trade show in Las Vegas: “Buy two gallons of water for your hotel room so you can stay hydrated, and mix one packet of Emergen-C into your water bottle per day,” says Calore, a senior

editor at WIRED and a nine-year veteran of the event. “Also, don’t touch your face or rub your eyes unless you’ve thoroughly washed your hands. And do not party on the first night.” On page 40, Calore, who oversees gear coverage for WIRED , rounds up the best of this year’s CES extravaganza. “Lots of stuff will never see the light of day,” he says. “For the magazine, I picked things that give us a glimpse of the future.”

When science writer David Dobbs set out to write about hand transplants, he wanted to explore the psychology underlying such a procedure: How do patients adapt to using a stranger’s arm to hold their loved ones? But as he met patients, a different question emerged: How do people cope when a transplant comes with health complications? “With a kidney or a liver transplant, the benefit is you get to live longer than you would,” Dobbs says. “A hand transplant is not life-extending, it’s life-enhancing.” On page 44, he explores what happens when medicine’s promises are clear and its risks are murky.

COMMENTS

@WIRED / [email protected]

ON THE BRINK

Re: “Space Invaders”: After a chunk of rock plummeted from the heavens in remote Peru, meteorite hunters rushed to get a piece of the action. Then things got weird.

“I once missed the last coach from Tarifa to Algeciras, Spain. During the long walk at night, I saw a huge red meteorite fall not too far away. I hoped that at

got so fed up with people telling me how great Elon is, I just stopped talking about it. The standard Tesla line is to denigrate anyone who Elon feels the need to fire (or who, shock, leaves). I was always baffled by why such smart and amazing people would put up with it. But they did, and they do, and they will. I now have a great job working with an amazing team. I survived Elon Musk.” Anonymous via mail@WIRED .com

3 am I was not alone in seeing it. Your article has unearthed almost lost memories.” David Steele via mail@WIRED .com Re: “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk”: Here’s what it was like to work at Tesla as Model 3 production ramped up and the company’s leader melted down. “Working at Tesla wasn’t my first rodeo, but it was my weirdest. Whenever people would

ask about Tesla, I painted a picture much like Duhigg’s article. It was invariably received with either disbelief or else some variation on ‘the ends justify the means.’ I

“I’ve finally had it with WIRED. Can’t deal with your Elon Musk and Teslabashing anymore. I turned off Facebook notifications and that reduced the daily ‘Elon sucks!’ barrage, but this latest article is the final straw. I’m done with you. Climate change is the story of this century. As Eric Larkin told

Duhigg: ‘Tesla is the only company positioned to make this world a better place, to really improve the world right now. And Tesla is Elon. How can you be bitter about humanity’s best hope?’ ” Lori Nelson via mail@WIRED .com “Silicon Valley has demonstrated a unique ability to identify and support extraordinary entrepreneurs. What remains elusive is the formula for transitioning management cultures from the creative intensity of the startup mode to the more balanced, mature environment required for success at scale. Tesla is the latest example, a brilliant brand struggling to implement manufacturing disciplines that are second nature to its competitors.” Roger McNamee via Facebook

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ARGUMENT

BRAIN NONBINARY THE PROBLEM OF DEEP GROOVES

ALPHA

BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

I

I HAVE A new friend, Melissa, who goes by “they.” Singular “they” has existed since Chaucer’s day, but for the past five years it’s been pressed into service as an epicene, addling reactionaries. I know others who use “they,” but with Melissa, rather than merely play the deferential ally, I’m determined to give my pal’s pronoun my all, to use the “they” with gusto, and to put my linguistic skills where my convictions about identity are. Narrator: It didn’t go as planned. Melissa told me that coming out as they at 35 was much harder than coming out as gay at 19. Friends and family seemed to want credit for their forbearance with Melissa’s first coming out, and now some acted inconvenienced: It’s always something with you. But

MAR 2019

HANNAH

PERRY

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ALPHA

for Melissa, “they” was the pronoun that made sense, evoking the liquidity, expansiveness, and even plurality they experience. I envy Melissa both for their integrity and fearlessness, especially in a time when some 40 percent of nonbinary youth are subject to violence, according to a 2017 study by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Melissa’s Twitter bio suggests “they/them” but offers no instructions on how to conjugate whatever verbs might arise alongside “they.” I’ve been defaulting to the third-person plural. “They are” and not “they is.” Melissa, who emphasizes that people choose “they” for a wide range of reasons, identifies as multiple, a Whitmanesque body electric, a person—like Cleopatra and maybe like every one of us—of infinite variety. But then good intentions collided, sharply, with reality. I went into my pronoun project with confidence, but quickly hit a wall: The singular “they” brought my synapses up short. At first, in fact, the pronoun was an authentically hard hit—and forced me to find some mental plasticity amid what often feels like sclerosis. The challenge to loosen up conceits around gender, a challenge I long ago accepted, has slid into one I haven’t: to reconsider number, to consider that one person might contain multitudes. At that thought, I moped a little. Melissa is many while I’m just one. Do they get more votes or dessert or say than I do? See how the resentment starts? I’m

MAR 2019

game. At a loss. But game. Quite literally, I am at a loss. When I go to recruit from the recesses of my noggin a plural singular, I find nothing. It’s like doing sit-ups after giving birth; my abdominal muscles were just ... not there. Rummaging around in my brain, sure, I find other junk, long obsolete and in disgrace. There’s “gyp” for “rip off,” “girl” for “woman.” But no “they” for Melissa. I’m gonna have to build this thing from scratch. Before most English speakers even learn the alphabet, “they” conjures two or more: a gathering of friends, possibly an army of Orcs. But to change what the word denotes, I find I’m doing one of those excruciating but small physical exercises to correct, say, a tilt of the foot. To turn an ankle a quarter inch is simple, barely noticeable. What’s painful is how aware it makes you of the intractable habits of the bones, muscles, tissue, and central nervous system. And then, whether with pronouns or pronation, an electric signal between synapses likes to slip back into its rut, like a bowling ball bound inexorably for the gutter. Pronouns, especially, lay down a heavy, heavy groove. From the start, a “he” accumulates an unmistakable vibe. A “she” sits in the thicket of the mind among other, equally dense associations. Neurons that fire together wire together, to paraphrase neurologist Donald Hebb. “They” and “more than one” have been firing together in me for 47 years; they’re every bit as entwined as, oh, the idea of “pink” and “girl” or “blue” and … Oh. I’m sometimes reminded of a line from a miniseries called Goliath in which a Billy Bob

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is a regular contributor to W I R E D .

Thornton character—old, drunk, alone—bellyaches that his moldy come-ons don’t work anymore. This would depress any old man, but the Thornton character bypasses his pain at being rejected in favor of the stock geezer complaint about political correctness. “You can’t say shit to anybody. You can’t even be a fucking human being anymore. You know what I’m saying? How are you supposed to be a human being?” Heard as a lament for the heyday of skirt-chasing, this is not much; heard as the character’s anguish over his brain’s paralysis—he can’t speak, can’t say shit—it’s sadder. He can’t sing his old songs. He can’t master the new ones. Mute, and feeling silenced, he feels as if he has lost his humanity. This is the tragedy of aging: Your body and ideas atrophy, while the world is as multifarious, as changeable, as nonbinary as ever. Cognition is fundamentally conservative. Our better angels may want us to charge into the future like Alexandria OcasioCortez, to flip our circuitry apace with social change, to respond to newness with alacrity. But old brains balk at new tricks. For me, I’d become ashamed by my inability to adapt to new grammar. If I didn’t learn it, my failure would soon exact social costs, registering as unintended disrespect—or worse, bigotry. And that’s why, while trying to shake awake my stubborn left brain, I’ve begun to wonder whether resentment over new populations, new idioms, and new dialects—xenophobia and bigotry—is grounded, in part, in shame over cognitive limitations. Is it possible some would rather be known as racists than as cognitively ossified? They

ALPHA

can’t tell the age of people of other races; they can’t distinguish among them any more than they can tell the trees in a forest apart. They can’t remember the letters in LGBTQ; they don’t know what words or gestures to use to express sexual interest in someone in 2019. So they cry out in pain like the character in Goliath, blaming political correctness for their mental decline. I’ve hit against this myself: The shameful temptation to hide my mental lethargy by lampooning identity politics the way Christina Hoff Sommers or Tucker Carlson or Mark Lilla might—rather than do the hard work of getting the recalcitrant mind to adapt already. But, come on, I can’t do what I did with skiing: slag off a whole human endeavor as elitist only because I suck at it. The biggest surprise, though, has been that I alone seem to panic over my verbal klutziness. Melissa doesn’t mind it. Our friends don’t. When I use “she” by accident, I’ve decided not to consider myself immoral or even impolitic, just ... slow. But sincere. And committed to learning this new grammar—and its implied post-structuralist worldview, as well as the many-in-one, something akin to the absorbing paradox of Christianity’s Trinity. The other day, my teenage son asked for “a curmudgeon of cake.” He meant “smidgen.” He laughed as hard as I did. He did not feel stupid. He was experimenting, improvising, seeking rather than fearing correction. That’s it: This challenge of Melissa’s “they” has made me childlike. And in that way, I feel more, not less, like a human being.

WHAT’S

THE

DEAL

GREEN GIANTS THE RISE OF FAST-CASUAL “FOOD PLATFORMS” AFTER RAISING $200 MILLION in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad. ¶ A new batch of foodfocused investment firms like the Kitchen Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments (run by Shake Shack titan Danny Meyer) are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-casual startups—or, as they say, “early-stage scalable restaurant concepts”—powered by AI and data-mining apps. ¶ Why all the fuss over lunch? These food platforms incorporate technology as a base ingredient. Nearly half of Sweetgreen’s customer orders are placed through its app; that data is used to tweak menu offerings and make personalized recommendations. A proposed update would even use 23andMe results to create meals that are “customized” to your microbiome— a seemingly dubious goal, given our current understanding of genetics and gut science. Sweetgreen predicts its daily food needs and minimizes waste with the help of machine learning that crunches information like historical purchases, weather, and local events. IoT sensors at suppliers’ farms monitor growing conditions, and the company says it has started tracking produce from seed to store with logs built atop the blockchain. ¶ “The next five years will be more disruptive to food service operators than the last 50,” says restaurant consultant Aaron Allen, pointing to the boom in online ordering, which is expected to grow nearly four times faster than the rest of the restaurant industry, and in delivery-only “ghost kitchens.” VCs are betting that diners are willing to trade physical restaurants—and personal data—for AI-extracted “content.” That’s Sweetgreen-speak for meals. —Caitlin Harrington

THE

VOORHES

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SIMON

SIMARD

ALPHA

OBSESSED

ELECTRIC COWBOY A DIY TESLA MECHANIC ANGRY

flooded Tesla, first extract any dead fish. Then strip out the leather—it may be infected with mold spores. And scrape salt from the car’s corroded high-voltage batteries. Finally, Rich Benoit explains, harvest parts from other damaged Teslas. (Don’t expect much support from the manufacturer, who’d likely prefer you just buy a new vehicle.) Benoit, a Bostonbased IT manager, has been stripping apart e-cars for the past three years and chronicling the endeavors for more than 400,000 YouTube subscribers. Now he’s crowdfunding to open his own shop for totaled Teslas. In 2016, Benoit purchased his first fixer-upper, a waterlogged Model S rotting in a New Jersey auction yard, for just $14,000. “It was essentially a science experiment,” he explains over his day job’s lunch break. Tesla wouldn’t sell him replacement parts, so to save Dolores—he named the car for the Westworld protagonist— Benoit went all in, shelling out thousands for another wrecked Tesla he found online. After six months of transplants (and one fish extraction), Dolores was on the road. Benoit gifted it to his wife and promptly sold their minivan. “When I tell someone I’m repairing a flooded car, they run away,” Benoit says. “When TO RESUSCITATE A

Amateur repairman Rich Benoit inside one of his salvaged Teslas

I tell someone I’m repairing a flooded electric car, they run even faster. But I’m following Tesla’s overall mission: sustainability and recycling.” On his YouTube channel, “Rich Rebuilds,” Benoit stumps for the right-to-repair movement, pushing uncooperative manufacturers to make it easier for owners to fix stuff themselves. (Last fall, Tesla released detailed diagrams of all its car models.) But it’s not all shop talk—Benoit also discusses mundane family life and his favorite fails. Once, he installed used Tesla batteries into a 1970s Disney electric princess cart. It managed a few jaunts to a nearby office parking lot and an appearance at an electric vehicles show, but the buggy eventually exploded in a friend’s garage. Benoit wasn’t distraught; the project, he told his viewers, was “just for the lulz.” Corporate stinginess aside, Benoit admires Tesla’s vision. (Then again, he named one of his cars Angela, for the Westworld robo-seductress played by Elon Musk’s ex-wife, actor Talulah Riley.) He even hopes to convince some Tesla engineers to come run his future shop; three, he reports, seem willing. In the meantime, Dolores is due for some touch-ups. Her machinery occasionally belches out odd clicks and clunks, and her door handles don’t always cooperate. Just signs, Benoit says, of natural aging. —REBECCA HEILWEIL

NERD

COMING TOO SOON! Hello, Hollywood? I know I said I wouldn’t call again, but I can’t sleep, and it’s all your fault. For ages, summer—the season during which I flee the heat by watching superheroes punch superbaddies in AC-blessed theaters—has marked a very specific period in my equinoctial year. You began unraveling the cycle back in 2008, when Iron Man decided he owned the first weekend of May. The fifth month of the year is never summer. Period. Neither is the fourth month, but that didn’t stop you—greedy corporate time bandits!—from releasing Infinity War in April. Now, in a perversion of the Time Stone worthy of Thanos, Captain Marvel is coming out the first week of March. March! Great Gregorian gods, why? You’re messing with ancient circadian oscillations here. I’m so used to the temporal rhythms that seeing Deadpool in the nonheat of Valentine’s Day 2016 even threw my menstrual cycle out of whack— and that’s just an n-of-1 example. They tell me glaciers are melting due to climate change, but what if it’s because movie publicists are being asked to blow hot air year-round? When I gotta disrupt my hormones by eating fakecheese nachos at the megaplex in coldest climes, seasons cease to matter and all entertainment mushes together. Seriously, I’m one more spandex-in-springtime experience away from dropping the “seasonal” from seasonal affective disorder and never leaving my couch again. Captain Marvel could’ve been my ray of sunshine—if only she’d been allowed to glow in June. —A N G E L A WAT E R C U T T E R

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M I R R O R L E S S R E I N V E N T E D R E A D Y

F O R

A N Y T H I N G

ALPHA

ZEYNEP

TUFEKCI

DON’T TRUST, VERIFY FINDING THE FACTS IN A WORLD OF FAKES. IN THE SUMMER of 2006, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced that he was temporarily handing over power to his brother. Turns out he needed to undergo intestinal surgery. Afterward, an anchor on state-run television read a statement, said to have been written by Castro, attesting that all was well. But there were no photographs of Fidel in recovery, no nine-hour radio address from his hospital bed. Rumors flew that the longtime Cuban leader had died. Then, about two weeks after the operation, the Cuban regime released a picture of the bearded leader wearing an Adidas jacket and holding the August 12, 2006, edition of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, Granma. He was alive, at least as of that date. Fidel Castro had been verified.

MAR 2019

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a W I R E D contributor and a professor at UNC Chapel Hill.

BLAKE KATHRYN

The Cuban regime was onto something. The people hadn’t believed statements that Castro was alive and well—so it found a way to offer hard-to-deny proof. Today we are like the Cubans, circa 2006. In our case, fakery is gushing in from everywhere and we’re drowning in it. “Deepfake” videos mash up one person’s body with someone else’s face. Easy-to-use software can generate audio or video of a person saying things they never actually uttered. Even easier? Fake clicks, fake social media followers, fake statistics, fake reviews. A gaggle of bots can create the impression that there’s a lot of interest in a topic, to sway public opinion or to drive purchases. It is even a breeze to create a fake newspaper online. On November 5, 2016, Jestin Coler, founder of the fake newspaper Denver Guardian, posted a “news story” saying an FBI agent involved in leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails was found dead in an “apparent murder-suicide.” “Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy,” Coler told NPR. “Our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums, and boy, it spread like wildfire.” The made-up tale went viral on Facebook before the 2016 election—and was probably seen by tens of millions. “It was so easy,” Coler told me once. We’ve lost signals of credibility. Before the online era, you would need to shell out a lot of money to print a fake newspaper, or it would look like an obvious counterfeit. (In fact, in January a group called the Yes Men printed 25,000 copies of a parody Washington Post with antiTrump fare; that stunt cost more than $30,000, according to one of the organizers, who was interviewed in the real Washington Post.) Scrolling through Facebook, however, there’s little distinguishing an article from The Wall Street Journal from the sham Denver Guardian. It’s easier than ever to be fooled. Which brings me back to the picture of Castro with the newspaper. It was a crude but effective verification mechanism. We need to find digital equivalents, especially to verify the time and place of documents,

ALPHA

photographs, and videos, as well as to authenticate individual identities. This is a daunting task that will mean developing hardware, software, and protocols, not to mention institutions to oversee the process. How would this work? It’s harder than just showing the people an image of a print newspaper (if you can find one), because digital bits can easily be altered. But it is possible to develop schemes to approximate this. For example, the digital front page of The New York Times on the date and time a photograph was taken could be used to generate keys to “digitally sign” any photograph and its metadata. That’s a bit like making the photograph hold a copy of that moment’s New York Times, so to speak, except the “holding the paper” part is done by cryptographic digital signing. This is a simplification, and there would be many details to work out: a camera with specialized hardware, a spoof-resistant method of geolocation, a means to add a “taken before” verification (using existing methods such as trusted time stamps), and such. Blockchain databases—hyped for so much else—could actually be useful for verification. We’ve already seen some efforts to vouch for human identity, like the blue check on Facebook and Twitter telling users they can trust that an account belongs to the person who claims to own it. But these programs were imperfect and limited, and as of this writing, both companies have paused verification and mostly quit issuing the blue checks (though existing ones are still in use). An effective identification system, however, carries with it a worrisome truth: Every verification method carries the threat of surveillance. There are ways to mitigate this concern. We can develop schemes that protect identities or reveal as much as necessary in a given context—and then secure the evidence proving the authenticity after a person has been verified.

Also, we need to make sure verification is a choice, not an obligation. When people argue against verification efforts, they often raise the issue of authoritarian regimes surveilling dissidents. There’s good reason for that concern, but dissidents probably need verification more than anyone else. Indeed, when I talk to dissidents around the world, they rarely ask me how they can post information anonymously, but do often ask me how to authenticate the information they post—“yes, the picture was taken at this place and on this date by me.” When it’s impossible to distinguish facts from fraud, actual facts lose their power. Dissidents can end up putting their lives on the line to post a picture documenting wrongdoing only to be faced with an endless stream of deliberately misleading claims: that the picture was taken 10 years ago, that it’s from somewhere else, that it’s been doctored. As we shift from an era when realistic fakes were expensive and hard to create to one where they’re cheap and easy, we will inevitably adjust our norms. In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified. If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow’s famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without “privilege or prejudice”—it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth. If we can’t even come together around the nature of basic facts, we can’t hope to have the debates that really matter.

JARGON WATCH

ROADMANSHIP n. A proposed safety standard for self-driving cars, based on the road etiquette of humans. In 1909, when horseless carriages were all the rage, a magazine called Country Life in America advised new drivers on “the ethics of good roadmanship.” Motorists, it urged, should go slow to avoid spooking the animals pulling other vehicles. ¶ Today we face a similar anxious transition with the advent of driverless carriages, and that quaint term, roadmanship, is back in circulation. A new Rand Corporation report, commissioned by Uber, revives the notion as a basis for long-overdue safety standards in autonomous vehicles. ¶ Humans have to pass tests before they’re allowed behind the wheel, but there are still no comparable evaluations for computers. As a result, the report says, public streets have become a “living laboratory,” a dangerous experiment we didn’t consent to and can’t opt out of. ¶ So what does roadmanship mean today? According to Rand, it’s the ability to “play well with others”—things like reading the subtle cues that human drivers give one another, or noticing that a child on the sidewalk is bouncing a ball. The challenge will be quantifying such behavior, which people just do naturally, and teaching a machine to replicate it. ¶ It’s significant that the authors define safety with a term having man at its root—a reminder that autonomous vehicles will, for years to come, share the road with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. We’re the horses now. If the industry wants us to buy the future it’s selling, it better make sure we don’t get spooked. — J O N AT H O N K E ATS

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The Science Fiction Concept Corpus is built on plot descriptions, reviews, and user-generated tags scraped from Goodreads, sci-fi forums, and other sources. “It was interesting to see how sci-fi authors foreshadowed developments in history, like AI winters,” says data scientist Eric Berlow, who helped create the Corpus.

INFOPORN

100 YEARS OF SCI-FI, EXPLORED AI RESEARCHER Bethanie Maples has been reading science fiction since she was given a copy of Dune at 10 years old. Still, two decades and nearly 1,000 books later, the self-described sci-fi fanatic struggles to find books that delve into her most niche interests, like the link between AI and transhumanism. So last year, while working at Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction lab, she teamed up with data scientists Eric Berlow and Srini Kadamati to create a book recommendation tool based on more than 100 salient sci-fi themes, from hyperspace to magical feminism. Using data scraping, network analysis, and machine learning, the resulting Science Fiction Concept Corpus includes more than 2,600 books written since 1900. We made our own voyage into Maples’ sci-fi universe. —Lauren Murrow

Popular topics featured in sci-fi books, by decade

Alternate Histories

FEMINISM

GENETIC ENHANCEMENT

SOCIAL ISSUES

SPACE TRAVEL

TIME TRAVEL

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PERCENTAGE OF BOOKS

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Expand Your Horizons

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The Sci-Fi Corpus reveals “first-degree neighbors,” books that share some—but not all—common themes. The tool helps readers discover a broader range of relevant books from the past and present.

Book Recommendation Generator The Corpus suggests titles based on 108 topics of interest, enabling intelligent browsing rather than algorithmdriven results, Maples says.

First-degree neighbors, according to shared keywords Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer (2016)

If you’re interested in …

The Sci-Fi Concept Corpus recommends …

Virtual reality

Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984) Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)

FEMINISM SOCIAL ISSUES NUCLEAR WAR

POST-SCARCITY

HUMAN NATURE

HUMAN ENHANCEMENT

GENETIC ENGINEERING

Genetic enhancement

Sundiver (Uplift saga), David Brin (1980) Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)

Immortality

Endymion, Dan Simmons (1996) The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice (1985)

Beggars and Choosers, Nancy Kress (1994)

The Fermi paradox (the quest to find alien life)

Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey (2011)

5 AI

SPACE TRAVEL

WARP DRIVE

SPACE COLONIZATION

CLIMATE FICTION ALIENS

The Legacy of Heorot, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes (1987)

MAR 2019

1930

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Senior editor Lauren Murrow (@laurenmurrow) wrote about the tech gender gap in issue 26.10. View the complete Sci-Fi Corpus at app.openmappr.org/play/100YrsOfSciFi

1920

The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin (2006) Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

38 N U M B E R O F T I T L E S BY R O B E RT A . H E I N L E I N , THE MOST PROLIFIC SCI-FI W R I T E R R E P R E S E N T E D I N T H E CO R P U S

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Sci-Fi Concepts Over Time The researchers analyzed the prevalence of more than a dozen high-level concepts in science fiction, from human control to augmentation. “Powerful books can fuel our imagination or instill fear,” Maples says. “You can often draw a slender thread between technology trends and social movements.”

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Number of books published on each concept, by year ALIENS EXPLORATION AI WAR

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Genre Benders By linking books that share relevant keywords, the Corpus exposes hidden correlations between various sci-fi themes.

43% of “sci-horror” books are set in outer space

32% of books about virtual reality also feature artificial intelligence

19% of books about magical feminism also feature time travel

The most popular sci-fi books, by decade: 1900–09: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz #1), L. Frank Baum 1910–19: The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka 1920–29: Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse 1930–39: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley 1940–49: 1984, George Orwell 1950–59: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 1960–69: A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle 1970–79: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 1980–89: The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho 1990–99: The Giver, Lois Lowry 2000–2009: Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins 2010–present: Divergent, Veronica Roth

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3 3 SMART THINGS ABOUT

ATTENTION* BY R E B ECC A H E I LW E I L

1. We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them. 2. TSA officials aren’t particularly attentive searchers. One experiment found that airport scanner operators were just 6 percent better than untrained test subjects at spotting hidden objects. Another study found that the fewer contraband items that had been discovered in a given time period, the more likely operators were to miss hidden objects. As a result, some airports have started regularly inserting images of forbidden swag onto operators’ screens. 3. Refocusing someone’s attention can have concrete physical effects. One such example: The military is using VR to help treat third-degree burns. In a study, putting patients in a virtual snowy environment was shown to have a pain-relief effect similar to that of morphine. *Adapted from How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction, by Stefan van der Stigchel, out March 12

ENCYCLOPEDIA AUTOMATA WHERE ALEXA GETS ITS INFORMATION H U M A N S P R I C K E D B Y info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screenglow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of wired, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines—prose. That’s not a problem when you Google a question. Search engines don’t need to read; they find the most relevant web pages using patterns of links. But when you ask Google Assistant or one of its sistren for a celebrity’s date of birth or the location of a famous battle, it has to go find the answer. Yet no machine can easily or quickly skim meaning from the internet’s tangle of predicates, complements, sentences, and paragraphs. It requires a guide. Wikidata, an obscure sister project to Wikipedia, aims to (eventually) represent everything in the universe in a way computers can understand. Maintained by an army of volunteers, the database has come to serve an essential yet mostly unheralded purpose as AI and voice recognition expand to every corner of digital life (see “Alexa, I Want Answers,” page 58). “Language depends on knowing a lot of common sense, which computers don’t have access to,” says Denny Vrandečić, who founded Wikidata in 2012. A programmer and regular Wikipedia editor, Vrandečić saw the need for a place where humans and bots could share knowledge on more equal terms. Inside the bot-friendly world of Wikidata, every concept and thing is represented with a numeric code dubbed a QID. wired is known, not so snappily, as Q520154. (The Q prefix on every entry is a tribute to Vrandečić’s wife, Qamarniso.) In December, the project added its 60 millionth item—a protein found in the mitochondria of the parasite that causes human malaria, a k a Q133969. In turn, Q-coded entities are interlinked and categorized by tags called properties, so that computers can parse relationships between them. Instead of having to deduce from Wikipedia whose spirit possessed Senior writer Tom Harry Potter (Q3244512), a bot can see that the tag for Simonite (@tsimonite) “possessed by spirit” (P4292) points to Lord Voldemort covers intelligent (Q176132). In other cases, a property denoting “disputed machines for wired .

MAR 2019

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by” (P1310) helps Wikidata reflect that not all truths are universally acknowledged, like whether Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Data can be woven into this tapestry by both people and machines. Human editors add new factoids and provide links to their sources, just as they would in Wikipedia. Some information is piped in automatically from other databases, as when biologists backed by the National Institutes of Health unleashed Wikidata bots to add details of all human and mouse genes and proteins. Institutions like New York’s MoMA and the British Library have used software and crowdsourcing to link their catalogs to Wikidata. Some Wikipedia pages auto-update themselves by drawing on Wikidata. Wikidata’s regimented representation of the world’s complexity still leaves room for whimsy. Pleasingly, Q1 is assigned to the universe. Author Douglas Adams is Q42, a ref-

erence to what his fictional supercomputer Deep Thought calculated to be “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Editors made Q1337 leetspeak, 0f c0urs3, and gave Q13 to triskaidekaphobia. (If you don’t get it, ask Alexa.) This exercise in robot epistemology can’t yet help computers interpret the staccato vocalizations—see Q170579, laughter—that nerdy Easter eggs can elicit from humans. Making machines more like people isn’t the point; the codes are intended to help machines update, find, and remix knowledge in new ways. The connections forged between nuggets of knowledge in Wikidata allow computers to answer complex questions in fractions of a second, without having to trawl through multiple web pages or databases. How many animal species are named after Barack Obama? Wikidata immediately finds and reports 11, the most of any TYLER

ine Maher, called out megacorporations for tapping those free resources without offering much in return, Amazon and Facebook ponied up $1 million each. Google recently announced a $3.1 million donation. The funds will help the foundation’s efforts to make its communities and information stores more representative. Almost 4 million people have a Wikidata entry listing their gender; only 18 percent are female. The resource’s knowledge of the global south is sketchy. Maher is confident we can fix those blind spots, as long as companies do more than just take from Wikipedia and Wikidata. “The only way that that’s going to happen is if the commons is treated as a renewable resource, not one to be strip-mined,” she says. If society makes a collective effort to build out the informational backbone of AI, we and our future bot friends might just achieve Q238651, world peace. —TOM SIMONITE

GROSS

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WIRED GUIDE

THE FAR-OUT SEARCH FOR ALIENS

Sarah Scoles (@ScolesSarah) is a WIRED contributor and the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. MAR 2019

Listening For Life While other types of an alien “Hi there!” might exist, astronomers have spent the most time searching for radio messages. They’re watching for something unnatural in an otherwise normal sky: a broadcast at a thin slice of frequencies, like our FM stations; a quick burst of loud blips, like our airport radars; complex signals spread across wavelengths, like our satellite-transmitted sitcoms. To do this, the SETI Institute built the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.

Secondary Reflector: This smaller dish reflects the waves again, focusing and directing them to their final destination: the receiver.

Receiver: This system detects a wide range of frequencies and funnels that data into a fiber-optic cable, which snakes into the control building.

Targets: The Allen array, made up of 42 antennas, can simultaneously scan three different spots (or beams) in the sky, zooming in on star systems or weird objects about which scientists have proclaimed “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but …”

Digital Conversion: Incoming radio waves are turned into 1s and 0s. The data initially lives in the “time domain,” which shows how strong the signal is every fraction of a second. Software shifts the data into a “frequency domain,” which reveals how strong the signal is at different frequencies, like the bouncing bars on a stereo system.

Primary Reflector: Radio waves coming from each beam hit the 6-meter dish, which bounces them up to the secondary reflector.

Signal Analysis: Software analyzes the signal for unnatural spikes that seem to be coming from deep space (not from electronic interference). If it finds something, it checks its work by looking for the message four more times.

P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y S E T H S H O S TA K

two decades, astronomers have confirmed the existence of about 4,000 planets—out of an estimated 100-plus billion—in our galaxy. That’s way more than anyone knew about before the Kepler Space Telescope launched. All this is good news for alien hunters, whose work has always been on the fringe of scientific pursuits. After decades of ignoring and underfunding the search for extraterrestrial life, NASA is finally taking the idea seriously. The agency recently convened a gathering of scientists to figure out how best to sniff out “technosignatures”—evidence of ET technology. Here’s how, where, and why they’ll do it. —Sarah Scoles I N T H E PA S T

Primest Real Estate

Your Technosignature Here

Scientists at the University of Puerto Rico have maintained a catalog of life-friendly star systems and exoplanets (not too hot, not too cold) since 2011. These are the top three potentially great alien locales.

SETI pioneer Jill Tarter is fond of saying that aliens might use “zeta rays” to communicate. What are those? “I don’t know,” Tarter says. Her point: No one knows what form technosignatures might take. At that NASA meeting last year, researchers decided to aim the alien search at the practical (near-term, economically feasible technology) and the scientific (research that also leads to other information). For example, even if scientists don’t find industrial pollution in a planet’s atmosphere, they’ll still learn about that atmosphere. Ultimately, the technosignatures of NASA’s dreams are bright, loud, and easy to find, like your most extroverted friend at a party. But dreams those are. We can hunt for aliens all we want, but a few glaring challenges—some terrestrial, some celestial—could stand in the way of actually making contact.

Trappist-1e NASA calls this planet “the best hab zone vacation” spot, maybe with an atmosphere thick in oxygen or possibly a global ocean. The system hosts seven rocky worlds, a dream for colonizing alien-Elons. Gliese 667Cf The small star around which Gliese 667Cf orbits will live much longer than ours, so congratulations in advance to potential civilizations on their species’ relatively unlimited longevity.

Nobody’s There Where is everybody? Enrico Fermi asked. And the answer might be: There is no “everybody. ” Maybe civilizations die before they produce rocket scientists, or extraterrestrials lack the exploratory and existential drive that leads us to look for them.

Wrong Targets Scientists regularly scour for blips, for theoretical structures called Dyson spheres that sheath stars and steal their energy, for anomalies that could indicate an intelligent hand. But we have no idea what bread crumbs the aliens might drop.

Fragmented Efforts Alien hunters have been searching and publishing for 60 years—but not always in a coordinated way. It’ll become increasingly important to have a centralized database of progress—the idea behind the SETI Institute’s new Technosearch catalog.

What to Do When ET Phones

Proxima Centauri b This is the nearest potentially habitable planet to Earth. Located around the Sun’s nextdoor solar neighbor, it completes an orbit in just 11.2 days. (Potential Proximians would get 32.6 times more birthdays than us.)

40 B

Lack of Patience Given that ET hasn’t phoned yet, scientists may have to keep their curiosity—and funding—up for generations. But projects that take the long view aren’t an earthly strong suit, especially considering our own planet’s problems.

There’s a protocol—from the International Academy of Astronautics (lightly edited). 1. Scream. 2. Try to make sure, using your own equipment, that “message from an alien” is the most likely explanation, way ahead of “secret spy satellite” or “hoax courtesy of nearby laser lab.”

Estimated number of Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way that orbit in their star’s habitable zone

BILLION

Three Questions for an ET Hunter Shelley Wright doesn’t do oldschool alien searches, scanning for humdrum radio waves. Instead, the UC San Diego professor is keeping an eye out for super-shiny extraterrestrial lasers.

3. Alert your alien-questing colleagues that you may have beaten them to the biggest discovery in (non)human history, and kindly ask them to use their own equipment to confirm it. Request that they redirect their resources to continuing observation. 4. If your colleagues agree you won, send a message out to all the other earthling astronomers via the International Astronomical Union. Also, please

Why ditch radio waves? We searched at radio wavelengths first because that’s how we communicated. But any wavelength of light could carry a signal. Our technology is just now getting good enough to search for evidence of optical and near-infrared signals—lasers— from space.

ALYSSA

FOOTE

phone the secretary general of the United Nations (but gloat less). 5. Send WIRED an encrypted tip of your discovery via Signal. 6. Make the data public so scientists can check your work. 7. Work to protect the frequency at which you received the most important message ever, so that the signal from a new internet of things toothbrush doesn’t interfere with page 17 of the faster-than-light ship schematic. 8. Don’t respond to your new ET BFFs until “appropriate international consultations have taken place.” 9. Pop the champagne!

How’s it work? Our project looks for light with wavelengths a little longer than those you can see, and it can detect pulses that last for just nanoseconds. A dozen nights a month, it operates as an add-on to a telescope at Lick Observatory outside of San Jose. We’ve observed more than 2,500 stars.

Do you ever get discouraged? I don’t search because I’m convinced tomorrow I’ll get a signal. I do it because it’s a completely unexplored space, and we have the ability to do it. You can ask somebody why they climbed Mount Everest, and they’ll say “It’s there.” The cosmic haystack is huge, so we need to search it.

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I AM IMMEASURABLE MY LIFE ONLINE—WITHOUT ALL THE METRICS S O C I A L M E D I A I S a death carousel, and by the start of the new year, I wanted off. National policy and news stories continued to be steered by the tweets and retweets of @realDonaldTrump. A photo of an egg had surpassed 30 million likes on Instagram. Children were eating laundry detergent and setting themselves on fire in exchange for followers. The phrase “late-stage capitalism” was appearing everywhere. ¶ So I purged. Not the social media accounts, but the numerical machinery powering them. Likes. Retweets. Views. Followers. Subscribers. The metrics by which the words, photos, videos—what’s known, in toto, as content—are made valuable. I installed a series of browser extensions that promised to leave the content intact but expunge those boldface, sexy, ubiquitous numbers that cluttered and dominated my feeds.

MAR 2019

DANIEL

SAVAGE

My guide to denumeration was Benjamin Grosser, an artist and assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Grosser builds little UX hacks for liberating Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram from the hegemony of hearts, notifications, and follows. Install one of his extensions, log on, and you’ll find the room looks the same—but the curtains and crown molding have disappeared. Grosser made his first “demetricator” in 2012, hypothesizing that a subtle tweak to Facebook’s design could profoundly change a user’s experience on the platform. The seesaw of content and applause has less to do with what we actually want to post, he reasoned, and more to do with our insatiable appetite for validation. “We’ve become reliant on numbers, so we let them stand in for meaning more than they do,” Grosser says. Remove the integers and we might find our digital Shangri-la. Or at least a slightly healthier, more sustainable life online. I needed this. When I’d open Twitter, it wasn’t to skim the news but to check how many retweets my delicious thought-crumbs had accumulated overnight. I felt anxious when a (laboriously edited) pic on Instagram underperformed. Demetrication promised a new path. I would become an unquantified self, an Instagrammer-Facebookertweeter beyond measure. I installed demetricators for the Big Three and waited. It took a second. The rivers of tweets and ’grams still flowed, dragging along the usual cyberpollution. I composed a tweet with a link to a story I’d written, then refreshed the page and waited for my digital pat on the back. It never arrived. Where once I hovered my cursor, waiting for the dopamine hits, there was only blankness. (You can still see if you have a notification, just not how many.) The number of retweets—gone. Comments—AWOL. How long had my tweet been out in the wild, possibly languishing without recognition? I couldn’t tell; the time stamp, too, had vanished. Not that I immediately stopped searching for approval. When someone new followed me on Twitter, I’d make my way to their follower count … only to find nothing. I’d dreamily wonder how many people liked my latest Instagram post or whether I was the first or 500th to retweet a joke. With the demetricators engaged, I found my cursor circling vacant space, waiting to be told how to think.

The emptiness made apparent how much I’d depended on those numbers. Grosser says that this—the heightened awareness of how quickly we gravitate toward the metrics—is the most pronounced effect of his number-scrubbers. “We create rules for ourselves about how to act within the system based on what the numbers say, but we don’t realize we’re doing this,” he says. Online etiquette is dictated by digits. An underperforming post gets self-consciously deleted. We rarely comment on something that’s more than two days old, lest we appear stalkerish. Our own posts are so shaped by a hunger for numbers that over time we create only what the machine tells us to: the inflammatory, the incendiary, the infantile. I felt a kind of magical oblivion in not knowing how many people liked a recent post. The freedom encouraged a sense of optimism. Ha ha, I thought, it probably went viral! The internet became imprecise, immeasurable. Therefore, interpretable. I could think for myself. With no trophy left to collect, I started reading posts more carefully, on their own terms, uncolored by arbitrary rankings. I left more comments. I sent fewer tweets. I also got ridiculously bored. I still chased the high of a well-liked post, but no rush of brain chemicals arrived. Memes and internet challenges made little sense without the telltale metrics. I could not rubberneck the spectacle of an absurd Kanye West tweet that may have received hundreds of thousands of likes. But I was above all that, I told myself. Then I relapsed. After months of good behavior, I tweeted a joke. I knew it was decent, or at least internet-optimized. So I opened Twitter—in a separate browser without the extension installed—to find hundreds of fresh, glorious likes waiting for me. How I’d missed them! I refreshed the page, watching the numbers swell. Demetrication, I instantly concluded, was for losers. In one last grasp at salvation, I turned back to Grosser. His latest creation, Safebook, removes all the content from Facebook— images, text, reactions, names, everything. I installed it. If this didn’t help, nothing would. The bare-bones version of the site is eerily still usable, the interface so deeply seared into our brains. What would happen if I tried to post? I typed a random thought and clicked the denuded Share button. The post simply vanished into the ether. Hmpff. I think I’d rather eat a Tide Pod. —Arielle Pardee

CHARTGEIST BY J O N J. E I L E N B E R G

Apple (circa 2030) In-app purchases of Candy Crush XR gold bars

Proprietary dongles

iCloud subscriptions

iPhone XXI Flex

Facebook

Social Platforms YouTube Instagram

Gab

Twitter Snapchat TikTok

Yo

Pinterest

Devices Light bulb

Car

Phone

Smart speaker

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YOU HEAR THAT? AN ERA OF AURAL DATA LISA MURATO R I IS a professor of physical therapy who works with patients suffering from neurological conditions, like Parkinson’s, that might impair their strides. “Gait is important,” she notes—if you’re walking too slowly or unevenly, you’re more liable to have accidents. ¶ One tricky part of her practice is helping a patient figure out when their gait is drifting away from a stable pattern. Muratori’s solution: Put sensors in their shoes, which creates a terrific stream of data. The numbers show precisely when that walk goes wonky. But how should she show the patients that data? If you’re trying not to fall while wandering down the sidewalk, it’s crazy to peer at a screen. ¶ So Muratori shifted senses, from the eyes to the ears, training patients to listen to their data. She collaborated with Margaret Schedel, a professor of music at Stony Brook University, to design software that picks up when a person’s stride goes off-kilter and alerts them by distorting the sound of an audiobook or music or whatever is playing in their earbuds. That way patients can instantly—and almost subconsciously— perceive errors and correct them. It’s an example of an intriguing new evolution in our big-data world: sonification, expressing data through sound. ¶ Normally, of course, we think of data as visual, something we transform into charts and graphs when we want to see trend

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lines. But the ear is exquisitely sensitive and has abilities the eye doesn’t. While the eye is superior at perceiving sizes and ratios, the ear is better at detecting patterns that occur over time. It’s great for sensing fluctuations, even the most subtle ones. For example, music professor Mark Ballora and meteorologist Jenni Evans, both at Penn State, recently turned hurricane data into a series of whooping sounds. In sonic form, they could highlight when a hurricane was moving into a lower-pressure mode and thus intensifying. Meanwhile, Wanda Díaz Merced, an astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory, discovered she could study the mechanics of supernova explosions by listening to gamma-ray bursts. “It was such an epiphany,” she tells me. “I could hear things you couldn’t as easily see in the data.” So certainly sonification can be useful in science and medicine. But I think it could also be a boon in our everyday lives. We’re already walking around in our own sonic world, with smartphone-connected headphones plugged into our ears. And app notifications—the ding of the incoming text—are little more than simple forms of data turned into sound. Now imagine if those audio alerts were more sophisticated: What if they connoted something about the content of the text? That way, you could know whether to pull out your phone immediately or just read the message later. Or imagine if your phone chirped out a particular sequence or melodic pattern that informed you of the quality—the emotional timbre, as it were—of the email piling up in your inbox. (Routine stuff? A sudden burst of urgent activity from your team?) You could develop a sophisticated, but more ambient, sense of what was going on. None of us need a cacophony of sonic alerts, of course, and there are limits to our auditory attention. But done elegantly, sonification could help create a world where you’re still as informed as you want to be, but hopefully less frayed by nervous glances at your screens. This could make our lives a bit safer too: Research at Georgia Tech’s sonification lab found that if car computer systems expressed more data audibly, we’d be less distracted while driving. Like Muratori’s patients, we could all benefit from having our ears a little closer to the ground. Write to [email protected].

ZOHAR

LAZAR

MAR 2019

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WORK

MICROSOFT SURFACE STUDIO 2

FETISH ACTION ITEM W I T H T H E D E B U T of the first Surface Studio in 2016, Microsoft established its vision for the future of the desktop: Boosting productivity is as much about thoughtful design as it is about computational brawn. This next-gen Studio has gutsier internals—faster processor, VR-ready GPU, and a solid-state drive with up to 2 terabytes of storage—but the design is what makes it an elegant workhorse for pros. The 28-inch display has a taller-than-most 3 : 2 aspect ratio, giving you more vertical real estate for drafting your latest manifesto. For visual projects, the clever steel hinge lets you push the screen almost flat against your desk. From there, you can doodle on the giant touchscreen with the Surface Pen (included) or twist the Surface Dial, an optional wireless knob ($100) that provides an easy way to select brushes or scrub through video. And with the Studio’s 13.5 million pixels, you’ll see every detail sharply, precisely. — M I C H A E L C A LO R E

$3,499 and up

MAR 2019

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Actions From the people who brought you the iconic Moleskine notebooks, this new app keeps track of tasks, appointments, and reminders. Organize lists as obsessively as you want with custom color coding, and set reminders liberally if you need nudging.

$12 per year

Airmail This app for iOS devices streamlines your cluttered inbox with a hyper-personalized approach. You can tag messages with labels and colors of your choosing and customize swipe gestures to trigger specific actions. And yes, it has Undo Send too.

$5

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APP PACK DESK MATES Managing your workday shouldn’t be a distraction unto itself. These apps make your phone handle the hard stuff. — LYDIA HORNE

MAR 2019

Pocket

Freedom

Buffer

Google Assistant

Pocket archives web articles, news stories, and online documents into a personal library so you can read them later in the app’s distraction-free interface. Use it to collect industry headlines, then sync them to your phone for offline reading on the train or the bus.

Every app on your home screen is a potential distraction. But Freedom lets you block specific apps—or the entire internet—for a set amount of time. You can schedule your outages in advance or on the fly. And if need be, you can end a session early.

If social media is a time suck, try automating it. Schedule your posts for the day in Buffer, then close Instagram and get back to work or family. The app handles all the major social media platforms and gives you reports on what your followers clicked on.

Siri is fine for queuing up songs, but Google’s voice assistant gives your iPhone a bigger productivity boost. The AI-powered helper can schedule meetings, set reminders, and take dictation for email and texts. It’ll even tell you when to leave for the airport.

$5 per month

$7 per month

Free

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BENCHMARK CHAIR FORCE How a radical design eschewed tradition to become the most coveted seat in the office. — JONATHON KEATS

Herman Miller Aeron $1,175

WHEN PRODUCT DESIGNER Bill Stumpf was asked by Herman Miller to develop ergonomic seating for the 1990s workplace, he began by watching people at work. What he saw was pandemonium. Personal computers had freed employees to assume any position. They’d lean forward, squinting at the screen, or kick back, keyboards in their laps. With materials expert Don Chadwick, Stumpf built a chair as flexible as the restless startup worker. Introduced in 1994, the Aeron was designed to cradle a person in any posture. They engineered the tilt mechanism so the seat and backrest moved together in one motion for more supportive reclining. They also switched out leather upholstery for an elastic polymer mesh. The stretchy webbing—originally created to protect the elderly from getting bed sores—was added to let the body breathe. It also gave the Aeron an engineered look. Within months, the chair became what New York magazine dubbed a “dotcom throne”—a four-figure status symbol that rose and fell and rebounded with the fortunes of Silicon Valley. The Aeron was rebuilt again in 2016, with updates to the tilt mechanism and webbing that made it ever more flexible. What hasn’t changed is the appearance, which now evokes a bygone era when dotcommers actually went to an office.

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Chances are e-scooters have landed on a sidewalk near you. Gear up, hop on, and brave the urban grid. — AARIAN MARSHALL

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OluKai Waialua Lace An active commute doesn’t mean you have to look like you’re going to the gym. These officefriendly sneaks are made from lightweight mesh and rubber, with a seaweed-inspired tread that’ll help you keep a firm grip on your scooter’s deck.

$90

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MAR 2019

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Closca Stack Packable Helmet

Mission Workshop Bomber

Timbuk2 Robin

Bell Clinch Cup Holder

Even the best balanced two-wheelers among us can get into unexpected scrapes, so scoot smart. This lightweight, telescoping head protector pops up when you need it, and becomes a flat, backpackable oval when you don’t.

$80

It gets chilly scooting along at 15 mph. This slick, drizzlerepellent bomber isn’t just on trend. It has a stretchy and breathable layer of extrawarm insulation on the inside, making the shell handy for temps down to freezing.

The bagmakers at Timbuk2 designed the Robin specifically for MacBook- and iPad-toting riders. Slip your devices into the padded pockets, and nylon flaps secured by magnetic clasps keep your stuff safe. Extra credit: a built-in rain fly for soggy days.

No matter your travel mode of choice, morning caffeine is a must. This no-tools, no-scratch, metal cup holder attaches to any handlebar with a twist of its knob. The foam-lined well keeps drinks upright, tall or venti.

$580

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TIME OUT When you need a moment of zen, reach for these items to turn the break room, or your own corner of the office, into an escape pod. — ARIELLE PARDES

MAR 2019

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Mavogel Cotton Sleep Eye Mask

Gaiam Performance Power Grip Yoga Mat

Need a nap? Block out the midday sun or harsh fluorescents with a sleep mask. This one uses stiffer material between the eyes that forms to the shape of your nose for maximum light-stifling, and the breathable cotton gives you sweat-free shut-eye.

Unfurl this mat for a quick Savasana or meditation. It’s got plenty of grip to hold your pose and enough cushion to make that concrete floor bearable. The natural rubber is only 4 mm thick; easily roll up the mat and stash it under your desk.

$14

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Marpac Dohm Classic If you can’t find peace and quiet, make your own. This palmsized white-noise machine has a fan inside, which creates a soothing, oldschool way to zone out. Twisting the shell covers and uncovers tiny holes to alter the tone and volume.

$45

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LuxFit Foam Roller

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Bose SoundLink Revolve There’s nothing relaxing about the office soundtrack of loud phone conversations, watercooler chitchat, and a wheezing printer. Drown it out with this compact but powerful Bluetooth speaker. A single charge gets you up to 12 hours of calming music or guided meditations— just please don’t hog the wellness room for that long.

$200

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When you can’t spare an hour for a midday massage, roll out your sore muscles on one of these. The extra-firm, high-density polypropylene foam won’t grow soft with use, so you can eradicate the knots in your glutes, calves, and lower back all the way until retirement.

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A.I. IS MY COWORKER Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies are injecting more and more smarts into our daily tasks. — LAUREN GOODE NO WORRIES! That’s the bot talking, offering a breezy response to a mildly apologetic email. Your coworker wants to reschedule a meeting? Sure thing! At a new time? That works! If you’ve opted in to Gmail’s Smart Replies, these exchanges should look familiar. The AI-generated shortcuts at the bottom of an email promise effortless efficiency in exchange for a tiny piece of your digital humanity. But humans are proving eager to make the trade: More than 10 percent of all replies people send with Gmail now start with a suggested Smart Reply. Cool, thanks! ¶ The apps we rely on to stay productive at the office are being infused with ever larger helpings of artificial intelligence. They’ve been getting brainier for a while, but recent advances in cloud computing, neural networks, and deep learning have sped things up. “When we first did spam filtering in Gmail 14 years ago, we were using algorithms that were sophisticated at that time. Our AI techniques have changed a lot since then,” says Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Google

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Cloud AI. Gmail’s Smart Compose is Smart Reply’s show-off cousin. It actually completes phrases for you as you’re typing an email, and it’s uncannily good at predicting what you intend to say next. Other products in G Suite, the company’s assortment of work-related apps, are peppered with assistive features. Microsoft, keen on shedding its staid image, has been imbuing Office 365 with AI- powered features too. Word now knows when you’re making a to-do list and tracks those items as … to-do items. PowerPoint uses computer vision and machine learning to color-match your slides with the hues in imported photos. And thanks to image-recognition tech, you can snap a photo of a data table, import it to Excel, and end up with a fully editable table. Clippy was never so skilled. Tech behemoths aren’t the only ones automating onerous office tasks. The Seattle startup Textio is wielding machine learning to help recruiters write more compelling job postings. Textio cofounder and chief executive Kieran Snyder claims the average time to fill an open job role is about 10 days shorter for clients who use “growth mind-set” phrases suggested by Textio’s AI-powered software. And the tech doesn’t just speed up the hiring process; it also diversifies it. For one Textio client, the phrase “work independently” has driven a 27 percent higher rate of applicants who identify as women. Phrases like “ninja” or “rock star” attract more male applicants. AI-infused work apps do raise bias and privacy issues (you knew your boss had system admin access to your work, but what does your Slack bot know about you?)—not to mention the small matter of humanity. What do chats and emails look like when we’re all exchanging the same AI-penned messages? Will our slide decks all look alike? (OK, they already do.) Will articles drafted in AI-powered writing software all read the same? It’s possible the opposite could prove true: If AI handles the most boring tasks, we humans Lauren Goode (@laurengoode) just might have more is a senior writer free time to be creative. at WIRED covering consumer tech. Sounds good, thanks.

MAR 2019

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Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

DISPATCH THE BEST OF CES

The new X1 Yoga ditches last year’s carbon-fiber shell for a chassis carved out of an aluminum block. It’s 17 percent smaller, has a brighter display, and weighs just over 3 pounds. ($1,929 and up, ships in June)

Here are the most desirable and delightful products we saw at the world’s largest and glitziest consumer-tech trade show.

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Yubico YubiKey for Lightning YubiKey’s security fobs offer extra protection when you log into your online accounts, but Apple’s restrictive rules have kept them away from iOS. That changed at CES when Yubico announced it had a green light from Cupertino. (Price TBD, ships this year) 4

KitchenAid Smart Display This touchscreen/ speaker combo— equipped with Google Assistant’s new voice-driven cooking guide—is built to get saucy, with a water-resistant shell. If you spill sugo on the 10-inch display, just rinse it under the faucet. (Price TBD, ships in fall) 1

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Every January, the expo halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center swim with gadgets. A lot of the stuff we see at CES is make-believe— early prototypes there to spark buyers’ interest and stoke media attention. But most of the products are going to be on sale sometime this year. Of all the devices we saw and played with, these are the ones we thought were the best consumer-electronics bellwethers—because of smart design, canny engineering, or simply as a glimpse of the future.

Bell Nexus TytoCare Tyto Best known for its helicopters, Bell just made the idea of us getting a real flying taxi in the near future a whole lot easier to imagine. It built a full-size (and moderately intimidating) version of a proposed five-seater. The all-electric helicopter-drone hybrid should be ready for traffic-hopping commercial service by 2025. (Price very much TBD)

Contributors: Brian Barrett, Michael Calore, Lauren Goode, Arielle Pardes, Adrienne So, Jack Stewart, Jeffrey Van Camp MAR 2019

AMY

LOMBARD

TytoCare’s telehealth kit lets parents gather info about their sick kids, then consult with a doctor from home. An app guides users through an exam and helps them make a video. Upload it all, and a doctor will be in touch within 30 minutes. ($299, ships this year)

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Cambridge Audio Alva TT with aptX HD Bluetooth 6

Samsung 75-Inch MicroLED 4K TV 5

Samsung’s first MicroLED debuted last year as a 146inch behemoth that mostly proved the display tech worked. The 75-incher proves that MicroLEDs can fit in your home. It will likely be prohibitively expensive, but it is leading the way to a more affordable TV to rival OLED’s picture quality. (Price TBD, ships this year) 7

Sphero Specdrums With this creative toy, kids use an app to assign sounds, notes, loops, or beats to various colors. Then they tap the wireless silicon ring on the multihued playpad to make music. Bonus for parents: There’s nothing to clean up. ($65, ages 5 and up)

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Wireless turntables suffer from Bluetooth’s limits, lacking the crisp sound of wired systems. Not the Alva TT. It’s the first model to use aptX HD, which streams hi-res audio that will make your vinyl sing. ($1,700, ships in spring) 9

Vizio SmartCast Most new TV gadgets connect to Alexa or Google, but rarely both. And Siri? LOL. SmartCast 3.0, the latest edition of Vizio’s TV software, works with all three. You can shout commands and queries at your set, no matter what voice assistant you use. (Free) 10

Otter + Pop Symmetry Series The best new thing in phones isn’t a folding screen or 5G. It’s an OtterBox case with an integrated PopSocket. Laugh if you must, but you can swap your socket whenever you want, and the thing lies flush with the case when it’s closed—no bulge. ($60, plus $8 per extra PopSocket)

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PROMOTION

WIRED. NOW ON YOUR SMART TV. WIRED’s Video App Now Available on Your Smart TV

Available on

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BY DAV I D DO B B S

“ R I G H T A W AY T H E Y W E R E M I N E ”

After sepsis forced the amputation of Sheila Advento’s hands, an intricate transplant technique aimed to make her whole again. It did, and she loved her new hands. Then came the side effects.

P H OTO G R A P H S BY DA N W I N T E R S

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The devastating allure of medical miracles.

SHEILA ADVENTO was not feeling well. It was July 6, 2003, and her mother’s house in northern New Jersey was filled with people. Sheila and her mom were there, along with Sheila’s boyfriend, sister, and brother-in-law—a slice of a huge extended family, many of whom, like Sheila and her parents, had immigrated to the US from the Philippines. They ate cheeseburgers and adobo and raised Pabst Blue Ribbon and San Miguel to toast one another, independence, good health, and freedom—almost all of which Sheila, who was 26, was about to lose. For days she’d been having headaches. Her stomach wasn’t right. She was starting to think she had the flu. She trudged to a basement bedroom to lie down. Family members took turns checking on her. When her mother, Peachie, looked in around dinner time, she found Sheila lying on the bathroom floor. Peachie, who was a nurse manager at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, took one look at her daughter and knew she was in trouble. Sheila, she said, I have to take you to the hospital. Your lips are blue. In the car, Sheila had trouble breathing. Her last memory before blacking out was someone lifting her hand to put one of those white clips on her dusky blue finger. Sheila was in acute septic shock. An infection in her bloodstream had unleashed an inflammatory storm. Her body was shutting down, starting with the limbs. The ER team blasted her with antibiotics and fluids and eased her into an induced coma. They wanted her body, undistracted by mind or maintenance, to focus on the fight ahead. After about eight days on a ventilator, Sheila’s doctors unhooked the machine, stopped the sedatives, and waited. Later that day, she awoke and looked at her hands. They were nearly black, dull, dead as coal. She couldn’t move or feel them. They seemed no part of her. She nodded at her hands and said, “We have to take these off.” She was right. The hands had to go. So did her feet and legs, almost up to the knees. Over the next three months or so, Sheila had five operations. After one, she remembers the surgeon saying something about wanting the muscles in her arm to work “if you get a transplant someday.” Sheila had never heard of hand transplants. At the time, just 20 had been done worldwide. Over the years, Sheila gained mastery of prosthetic legs and the split hooks she used as hands. She lived for a while with her mother, then on her own. After a time, she returned to her job at a call center for a medical diagnostics company. She had work, family, a love

MAKING HER NEW FINGERS AND HANDS PINCH, FLEX, AND GRIP WAS S O M E OF THE HARDEST WOR K SH E ILA HAD EVER DONE.

Previous page: Sheila Advento, who had a bilateral hand transplant in 2010.

life, friends. But like most hand amputees, she missed the fluid dexterity and perceptive power of her fingers, the ability to wipe her nose or scoop up a set of keys, to shuffle cards or remove an eyelash from the corner of her eye. She wanted hands. In 2009, six years after losing her limbs, Sheila heard that the University of Pittsburgh was looking for patients for an experimental hand transplant program. She wrote to them immediately, and a few weeks later drove with Peachie to Pittsburgh. She spent a week there, taking physical and psychiatric tests and giving blood for lab work. The doctor heading the program, W. P. Andrew Lee, was charming and accomplished: He had done physics at Harvard, medical school and training at Johns Hopkins, and more training at Harvard and Massachusetts General. Like Sheila, Lee was an immigrant. He had come to the US as a teenager—in his case, from Taiwan. She liked his warm smile and gentle manner. “I thought he was fantastic,” she says. Lee’s team called a few weeks later to tell Sheila that she had been accepted into the trial. They told her it might be months or years before they found a donor well-matched in size, skin color, and immune profile. Or it could be tomorrow, so pack a duffel. When things moved, they would move fast. She packed as soon as she got home. When the call came about eight months later, in September 2010, she was watching TV in her apartment. She hung up and called Peachie. Mom, she said, come get me.

WHEN SHEILA ADVENTO arrived at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, the man for whom it was named was 84 years old and still a presence there. Starzl, who had done the first human liver transplant in the early 1960s, was acclaimed as “the father of transplantation.” Starzl himself insisted that the rightful owner of that title was a zoologist named Peter Medawar, who at midcentury had helped solve transplantation’s central puzzle—one not surgical but immunological. The body has a fierce need to protect itself. It does so by turning its immune system against any foreign body—an obvious obstacle to accepting another person’s organ. In experiments on animals in the 1940s and ’50s, however, Medawar and his colleagues discovered a mechanism for preventing immune rejection of transplanted organs. In studies on mice, they found that if they introduced an eventual organ donor’s cells to the recipient in utero or just after birth, the mouse would develop an acquired tolerance—a diplomatic ploy to have the foreign flesh accepted as kin. Alas, as a practical matter, introducing a future human donor’s cells in utero or infancy so one could later get a timely transplant from them

LINE ART BY CL AUDIA DE ALMEIDA

would require superhuman prescience. But by demonstrating that immunological tolerance could be acquired, Medawar had given the field hope. In the 1960s, researchers began developing immunosuppressant drugs and launching transplant programs. Unfortunately, the side effects of early anti-rejection drugs were severe, and mortality rates were high. Organ transplants did not become viable as routine treatment until around 1980, when an anti-rejection drug called cyclosporine was introduced. A similar drug, tacrolimus, followed a decade later. With those drugs, five-year survival rates for organ transplant patients jumped. Most transplant patients are now treated with a threedrug cocktail that includes cyclosporine or tacrolimus along with steroids and a second, gentler anti-rejection drug. Such transplants, now routine, have saved or extended more than 750,000 lives in the US. The next big leap came in 1998, when the world’s first initially successful hand transplant, in Lyon, France, accelerated the practice of vascularized composite-tissue allotransplantation, or VCA. (For complex reasons, the patient had it removed in 2001.) These transplants, mainly of hands but also of faces and genitals, differ in two important ways from solid-organ transplants: They involve multiple tissue types intricately tied together, and they don’t extend life—they enhance it. That they improved lives rather than saving them posed a serious new ethical problem. Even today’s transplant drugs cause side effects ranging from passing nausea, dizziness, and weight loss to life-threatening conditions such as diabetes, infection, cancer, and kidney failure. In a 2003 study, up to 21 percent of transplant recipients experienced total renal failure within five years, forcing patients to have dialysis or a kidney transplant. Most people readily accept such risks to get a new heart, lung, or liver: When the benefit is life itself, most find almost any cost bearable. But a hand transplant sharply changes this calculus. Is taking dangerous drugs for the rest of one’s life worth the satisfaction of tying a shoelace or moving a strand of hair from a child’s face? Such deeply personal questions test the boundaries of medical ethics. Solid-organ transplants had been common for almost 20 years by the time doctors and hospitals started performing VCA. It had taken two decades to find the right levels of immunosuppressants. Once this breakthrough arrived and the Lyon team gave their patient a new

hand, doctors and major hospitals worldwide began to add VCA units. The hand transplant’s day had arrived. In 1999, Warren Breidenbach became the first US surgeon to perform a VCA transplant when he gave a new left hand to Matt Scott, a 37-year-old who’d lost his to a firecracker. Hand transplant teams started in Innsbruck, Paris, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Boston, and other cities. In less than two decades, there were dozens. The University of Pittsburgh joined the field in 2002, with the hiring of Andrew Lee to lead its new program. A rising star in hand-reconstruction research, Lee came to Pittsburgh partly to work with Starzl, the legendary surgeon. According to Lee, Starzl may have seen in hand transplants a chance to revisit Medawar’s proposal to trick the body into accepting a donated organ as its own. Starzl began working with Lee to develop a new regimen that might open the way to such a safer, drug-free immune tolerance. (Starzl died in 2017, at age 90.) This new treatment regimen was dubbed the Pittsburgh protocol. Its most distinctive feature was to infuse the recipient with bone-marrow cells from the donor’s body two weeks after surgery. The idea was that those cells, leaving the marrow and spreading through the recipient’s bloodstream, would make the entire immune system receptive to the donated limb. Then, instead of taking three drugs, the patient would take a low dose of just one, tacrolimus. Lee’s hope—the hypothesis his protocol would test—was that the bone-marrow treatment would allow the patient to take only a minimal dose of tacrolimus or even give up the drug entirely. The possibilities raised by Lee’s research and similar efforts elsewhere stirred keen interest at the US Department of Defense. Approximately 1,600 troops returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputations. If a safe way to transplant these multitissue limbs could be developed, it would bring life-changing treatment to these veterans. So in 2008, the Defense Department gave millions of dollars in grants to fund clinical trials, including one to test the Pittsburgh protocol. In March 2009, Lee performed his first hand transplant in that DODfunded trial. The patient was Josh Maloney, a likable, somewhat rambunctious 24-year-old who had lost his right hand to a stick of TNT during a Marine training exercise. A couple of weeks after the surgery, Lee held a press conference with Maloney at his side. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Lee told the gathered reporters about the Pittsburgh protocol and said, “I think there’s clearly a chance of weaning Joshua off immunosuppressants altogether.”

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER , Sheila Advento, having become the fifth patient in Lee’s trial on September 18, 2010, woke groggily in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center recovery area to find her new hands. “People had said they might not seem like mine right away,” she told me. “But mine did. Right away they were mine.” When she had recovered enough to get out of bed, she put on her leg prostheses to walk around the transplant program’s dedicated wing. One of the first people she met was Jessica Arrigo, a slender, friendly, and deceptively tough 27-year-old who had received a transplant of her right hand a week before Sheila’s operation. Like Sheila, Jessica had almost died of septic shock. That was in 2004, when she was barely 21. She had been living with her father, Wayne, in West Virginia when the sepsis hit. It took both feet, her right fingers, and on her left hand, all but the stubs of her middle, ring, and index fin-

Wayne Arrigo and his granddaughter, Cody.

gers. Alongside those, the surgeons fashioned a sort of thumb so she’d have a pinch-grip. It worked pretty well. She worked, drove, shot pool, even went skydiving with Wayne. Jessica met a man with whom she had a daughter, Cody, in 2009. Jessica and Cody moved in with Wayne, who by then was living in Millville, New Jersey. “She was living a pretty full life,” Wayne says. But like Sheila, Jessica wanted a hand. The two women took to each other. Over the next four or five months, they would spend most of their time together, up to five hours a day in occupational therapy, walking the halls, talking, comparing notes on family, love, life, fate, and hands. “I just loved her,” Sheila says. “We had so much fun. We had our own section, our own therapist. We were always laughing.” It was good to have cheerful company, because the physical work the new hands demanded was grueling. The operations Lee had performed were enormously complex, lasting 10 to 15 hours and requiring microsurgery to connect dozens of tendons, muscles, bones, nerves, and vessels sometimes no bigger than vermicelli. These blood vessels promptly pinked the women’s new fingertips. But newly connected nerve fibers do not instantly carry current. The fibers in the recipient’s arm must grow from the transplant’s attachment points clear down into the new hand, at a rate of about an inch a month, to give the donated hands anything but the crudest sensations and movement control. Making her new fingers and hands pinch, flex, and grip was some of the hardest work Sheila had ever done. Sheila and Jessica, for hours at a time, picked up peas, pennies, marbles, and weights, stacked cups, slid blocks into boxes like nursery school children, assembled things and disassembled them. They struggled to remaster buttons and laces. They came up with their own tasks. “You remember friendship bracelets?” Sheila says. “We started making them. Good for the fingers.” They took tests: Close your eyes and tell me which of your fingers I’m touching, then tell me what part of your finger I’m touching. “We found ways to make it interesting,” Sheila says. “But it was exhausting.” Sometimes they were joined by Josh Maloney, who lived with his parents 40 minutes south of Pittsburgh. Eighteen months after his surgery, Maloney was Lee’s star patient. Sheila remembers seeing videos of Maloney lifting weights, Maloney screwing in a light bulb. He

was taking a training course to become a car mechanic. He traveled with Lee to press events and medical meetings to promote the protocol. He even shook hands and chatted with Prince Harry on the USS Intrepid at an event honoring British and American veterans. CBS Evening News ran a spot about him. “I don’t feel broJESSICA’S H A N D WAS ken anymore,” he told the reporter. DOING WELL. At times, two other trial patients would SHE TOOK also return to the hospital for checkups. Jeff CA R E O F CO DY Kepner, Patient 2, had lost both hands to sepA N D W O R K E D. sis; Chris Pollock, Patient 3, destroyed his “SHE SENT US hands while reaching for an ear of corn in a A VIDEO OF corn picker. Pollock already dressed himself, H E R F LY I N G drove, opened windows and doors. Kepner was A PLANE. I struggling. He had trouble holding things or WAS J U S T opening doors. LIKE, ‘OH MY Sheila and Jessica made steady progress. But GOODNESS, in December, while still in Pittsburgh recoverT H AT ’ S ing from the surgery, Jessica confessed to the INCREDIBLE.’” transplant team that she had struggled with drug addiction since she was a teenager. This history would have barred her from participating in the trial had it come out during the screening process, interviews, or drug testing. (It “surprised us,” Lee told me. “I think this shows that even a detailed weeklong process is not perfect.” ) Jessica began getting addiction treatment, which would work better at some times than others. In early 2011, after several months of intense work, Sheila and Jessica had progressed enough to go home. The team reviewed with them what would come next: The women would need to keep up the rehab work at home; return to the hospital monthly or quarterly for a while, and then less as time passed; and for the rest of their lives, or as long as they had the transplant, get regular blood tests that would be sent to the transplant team to monitor for complications and drug side effects. On this everyone agrees. The details of those discussions, particularly about specific dangers from the drugs, would later become a matter of dispute. Sheila packed up and moved into her mother’s house. Jessica returned to Cody and Wayne in Millville.

of 2010, about two months after he performed Jessica’s and Sheila’s transplants, Andrew Lee took a position running the new Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. Some of his Pittsburgh team later joined him, others stayed behind. His transplant trial patients could be treated in either location. In Baltimore, Lee would eventually perform three more transplants, in 2012, 2015, and 2017, bringing the trial’s total to eight. A year after her operation, a CNN report about Sheila showed her putting on eye makeup, driving, and talking about what it meant to be able

IN THE FALL

to feel the fabric of her jeans under her fingers. Other patients found life with the transplanted hands full of complications, some quite challenging. Nearly 16 months after Jeff Kepner’s surgery, he also appeared on a CNN broadcast, but he showed far less progress: He had trouble writing with a marker, picking up small balls, and doing tasks that Lee’s other transplant patients had accomplished just weeks out. Progress in transplant patients is variable, depending on how quickly the nerves regenerate and the patient’s commitment to rehab. Maloney, the ex-Marine, was still in automechanic school. He was also driving two hours round-trip to Pittsburgh, two times a week, for lengthy evening rehab sessions. Sometimes he didn’t protect his hand well enough while working on cars, he said, and the injuries or rejection episodes forced him to rest it, stalling both schooling and rehab. “You’re supposed to keep from getting infections, getting a cold, getting sick, getting cuts and dirt in it,” Maloney told me. “I wasn’t the best at that. I was trying to go back to my old life.” He grew discouraged and at times too disheartened to go to rehab; sometimes he lacked the money to make the trip. He also grew less vigilant about his twicedaily drug regimen. In that, he had company: Some 20 to 25 percent of all transplant patients miss doses. It can be difficult to remember to take the drugs, and side effects ranging from hair loss and heartburn to headaches, confusion, and mood changes can be hard to tolerate. One hope for the Pittsburgh protocol was that by reducing the number of immunosuppressants from three to one, it would be easier for patients to comply. Maloney’s body increasingly tried to reject the transplanted hand. “When it finally started to go downhill,” Maloney told me, “it went fast.” A particularly nasty rejection put Maloney in the hospital for about a week. His hand turned red, rashy, and blistery. Afterward it didn’t work as well. The realization that set in took him weeks to say out loud: I no longer want this hand. On March 14, 2013, four years to the day after he got his transplant, he had the surgeons take it off.

JESSICA ARRIGO HAD gone home in decent health

in early 2011. Her hand was working well, allowing her to take care of Cody and work at a series

of jobs at Toys “R” Us and Kmart. In 2012, she met a man named Robert Doak, whom she would marry two years later. Jaimie Shores, the Lee team’s clinical director, was impressed with her rapid progress. “She really surprised us in some ways with how well she did early on,” he says. “She started taking private pilot lessons. She sent us a video of her flying a plane. I was just like, ‘Oh my goodness. That’s incredible.’ ” Complicating Jessica’s case, however, were two foreboding factors. The first was the history of illicit drug use she’d confessed to the team three months after the transplant: cocaine in her teens, she said, and more recently, struggles with an on-and-off addiction to opioids—a class of drugs that sometimes cause symptoms easily confused with possible immunosuppressant side effects and which she was prescribed periodically for hand pain. (Joseph Losee, a surgeon who helped oversee Jessica’s care at Pittsburgh, declined to comment on her case.) The other factor was that Jessica’s kidneys began to quickly decline. Just seven months after her transplant, a Pittsburgh nephrologist diagnosed her with early chronic kidney disease. The next year, another nephrologist at Pittsburgh gave Jessica her second diagnosis of chronic kidney disease and told her that her kidney function would most likely worsen as long as she continued to take tacrolimus. Managing immunosuppressive drugs, says Yale transplant nephrologist Richard Formica, is a delicate art. You want to give enough medication to restrain the immune system from attacking the transplanted organ, but not so much that it harms the kidneys or other organs. In some patients, you find this sweet spot easily; in others, you find it elusive. Jessica was one of the latter. Physiologically, Shores says, “she was a little bit more challenging in terms of dosing.” All the transplant patients took weekly blood tests to monitor for signs of infection, diabetes, organ damage, or other treatment side effects. Of particular interest was creatinine, a waste product that is cleared by the kidney and whose presence in the blood can be used to derive an estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, the standard lab measure of kidney health. A healthy GFR is around 90 to 100. Scores below 60 signal mild to increasingly severe kidney damage, with the likelihood of permanent damage or total kidney failure rising greatly with sustained scores below 30. A sustained score under 15 usually means you need dialysis or a new kidney. Jessica’s medical records, which her father shared with me, show her scores first dipping below 60 for weeks at a time in 2011, less than a year after her transplant. In 2012 they dropped steadily through the 50s and 40s, plunging to 17 one day that December—which led to a weeklong hospital stay in Pittsburgh to get her kidney function on track. The following year Jessica moved her treatment to Johns Hopkins, which was closer to her home and because Lee was there. After that point the Pittsburgh team no longer received regular updates about her kidney health, says Vijay Gorantla, a surgeon who was at Pittsburgh at the time. Apart from her kidney issues, Jessica had also been suffering bouts of abdominal pain that were sometimes so severe, Wayne says, that she curled up on her bed. She’d have spells of vomiting or diarrhea; other times she’d be constipated for days. Jessica had suffered similar episodes before the transplant, Wayne says, but her GI issues now came more frequently and with more fury. Most dispiriting of all, her hand was having more painful rejections, requiring more trips to the hospital. In March of 2015, a livid rejection sent Jessica to Hopkins. Her hand was in terrible shape. The biopsy revealed areas of deep necrosis in her skin, the tissue below riven with blisters and signs of infection.

Everyone agreed it was time. Shores and a surgical team removed the graft later that day. Shores, who helped oversee Jessica’s post-transplant care at Hopkins, says he viewed her particular mix of problems—the stubbornly recurring rejections; the rising creatinine levels; the gastric torments—as arising both from her distinct physiology and from what appeared to be an inconsistent adherence to diet and drug regimens. To the team, it seemed that Jessica often failed to drink enough water, courting dehydration that strained her kidneys, and took her tacrolimus doses erratically. Both Shores and Lee acknowledge her kidney issues but said that when they adjusted her medication and care, the episodes would pass. Shores noted that patients like Jessica and Sheila who have had episodes of sepsis are more predisposed to kidney problems. Once her arm healed, Jessica resumed using her short thumb and finger stubs on her left hand and made do with her right. She cared for Cody and looked for work. She was free of the tacrolimus, and, according to Shores, her creatinine levels improved immediately after the reamputation. But her GI issues persisted. According to Robert Doak, meals would often put her in excruciating pain. She usually tried to tough it out at home, but every few weeks, it seems, the pain was so bad that Wayne or Doak took her to a nearby emergency room. On November 21, 2017, just before Thanksgiving, Jessica had another painful episode. That evening, Doak took Jessica to the ER while Wayne stayed home with Cody. At the hospital, the ER team worked furiously as Jessica grew weaker. By this time, Doak told me, “She was in absolute agony.” Doak says that as a former EMT and combat veteran, “I’ve seen men shot on the battlefield. I’ve seen all kinds of things. I’ve never seen somebody in quite that much pain.” Doak called Wayne and told him to come. By the time Wayne got there, his daughter was still. “I was there when she died,” he says. “But I SHEILA GOT don’t think she knew.” THE BIOPSY The attending doctors, consulting with the R E S U LT S : medical examiner, ruled the cause of death to HER KIDNEYS be mesenteric ischemia, although there was HAD LOST no autopsy. Mesenteric ischemia is a rare, MUCH OF THEIR painful condition in which the blood supply FUNCTION. to the small intestine slows or closes off. It EIGHT MONTHS sometimes creates a toxic sludge that fills the L AT E R S H E gut and spreads sepsis through the body. The WOULD BE ON disease, which generally arises from multiple A TRANSPLANT factors, is notoriously difficult to diagnose. L I S T. Much of Jessica’s long, complicated medical and drug history likely put her at risk.

WHILE JESSIC A ARRIGO’S health was declining, Sheila Advento was doing well. Her new hands let her work, cook, drive. She got her annual checkups (like Jessica, she’d moved her care to Johns Hopkins, for the shorter trip and because Lee was there), and she says she

faithfully took her drugs each day. She gave talks and did press events. “Everyone loved her,” says Vijay Gorantla, who was a former member of the Pittsburgh team and is now director of the VCA program at Wake Forest School of Medicine, “because she was the perfect patient. She did everything asked of her.” She got more headaches than before, and they were worse—a common side effect of tacrolimus that she accepted as the price of her wondrous hands. She passed the five-year mark, in September 2015, in good health. But in the two years after that, Sheila’s blood tests began to show a decline in kidney health. Around October 2017, Thomas Salazer, a New Jersey nephrologist who often had been Sheila’s primary care provider since her original 2003 sepsis episode, was concerned enough about her blood tests that he recommended a kidney biopsy. He suggested that she schedule one as soon as possible. As it happened, Sheila didn’t have that biopsy until five months later. The Hopkins team says they told Sheila her kidneys were declining and tried to schedule the biopsy starting in November. Sheila, they said, was unable to make any appointments before March. According to Sheila, Salazer’s biopsy recommendation was her first notice that her kidneys were declining, and if she delayed or canceled appointments, it was because she had trouble taking time off work. In any event, Peachie dropped Sheila off in Baltimore on March 13, 2018, for the biopsy. That same day, Sheila says, she remembers learning about Jessica’s death. She hadn’t talked to Jessica in two or three years. “It came to me as a complete shock,” she says. A few weeks later, Sheila received the biopsy results: It seemed her kidneys had lost about three-quarters of their function. Stunned, Sheila called Gorantla, who had counseled her through tough patches before. He urged her to call the Hopkins team immediately and ask for an appointment with their nephrologist to discuss a treatment plan—the sooner, the better. Text messages between Sheila and a patient coordinator show that Hopkins offered to set up an appointment or a conference call. Sheila said she was too tired to make the trip and preferred to speak alone to a nephrologist over the phone. Scheduling efforts continued into June. Meanwhile, the pain in her lower back surged. She was always tired and often nauseous. Her legs swelled, her head hurt. It had been more than six months since Salazer first told her to get a biopsy. She wanted a plan.

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“Six months. There were things I could have been doing,” she said, to try to slow what was now her kidney’s inevitable decline. It was July 2018, and we were eating dinner in a Mexican restaurant near her house, an hour from New York City. Sheila, who walked with only a slight limp and looked sharp in a simple black top and slacks, was animated, funny, smart, and personable. She was also clearly still shocked by the diagnosis she had received only weeks before. She said she felt certain she had never been told the drugs could destroy her kidneys. “I had no idea this could happen,” she told me. Jaimie Shores, who was involved in Sheila’s care from the beginning, says he tried to convey the threats to kidney health vividly and regularly to all patients, including Sheila, starting at the screening process and continuing through all pre- and post-transplant care. According to Hopkins, other team members did too. “She may not have received the message that I thought I was communicating,” Shores says. When I asked the Hopkins team to send me any written records documenting such conversations with Sheila, they said they couldn’t provide any, and added in a statement, “We do not document every conversation with patients.” Sheila and the other patients did sign a 27-page consent form that included a warning about the drug’s possible “toxicity to the nervous system (brain, nerves), kidneys, or liver.” An appendix further warned of side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, abdominal pain, and “kidney injury.” The patients themselves report varying experiences: Jeff Kepner says he doesn’t recall being warned that his immunosuppressants could lead to kidney failure, nor does Wayne Arrigo feel that Jessica was adequately informed. However, Chris Pollock and two others, Jeff Swedarsky and Eric Lund, say they were fully told of the consequences. “The main thing I recall is the fact that there’s a possibility of kidney failure,” Pollock says. “I will remember that until I die.” Gorantla says he’s dismayed that the risks were not unambiguously clear to Sheila. “Informed consent is not just a form you sign,” he says. “It’s an ongoing process in which you keep the patient informed and involve them in every significant decision.” On May 15, 2018, nine weeks after the biopsy, Hopkins sent Sheila a letter. It said she had stage 3b chronic kidney disease, which the letter attributed in part to the tacrolimus she’d been taking for more than seven years, along with her sepsis episodes 15 years before, her hypertension, and other issues. The letter rec-

AT A VC A TRANSPLANT CONFERENCE, THE BIG W O R RY WAS T H AT M O N E Y FOR CLINICAL T R I A L S WAS D R Y I N G U P. “THE FIELD IS RUNNING ON FUMES,” SAID ONE SURGEON.

ommended switching from a twice-daily dose of tacrolimus to an extended-release form taken once a day. Then it said, “Even with these changes and continuous monitoring, it is possible that at some point, you may require a kidney transplant” and suggested she check in at least yearly with the Hopkins hand transplant team and a transplant nephrologist. “As you know from the last seven plus years,” the letter concluded, “our most important priority is your overall health.” It was signed, “The Johns Hopkins Hand Transplant Team.” A few weeks later, Gorantla referred Sheila to a kidney transplant team at the University of Maryland. Around the same time, she says, a transplant physician told her there was a possibility, small but real, that the challenge posed by a new kidney to her immune system might spark a rejection episode that could affect her hands. “I don’t know what to do,” she told me. “I don’t want to lose my hands.”

IT WAS EARLY in my reporting for this story, in May 2018, when I first interviewed Andrew Lee. At that point, I planned to write a story about the emotional challenge of making a new hand one’s own. I hadn’t yet met Sheila Advento or Wayne Arrigo. I had learned of Jessica’s death only a few weeks before, when Jessica’s mother, Janet Carpenter, returned my third call to Jessica’s cell number and told me that her daughter had died in November. She sounded so pained that I didn’t ask how it happened. As I was soon to meet Lee, I figured I’d ask him. Lee, wearing an elegant gray suit, showed me into his office on the Johns Hopkins medical campus in Baltimore. We started by discussing where he saw hand transplants in their arc of development. He said that he believed hand transplants were almost mature enough to be routinely covered by insurance. I asked him what surprised him most about doing hand transplants. He said it was the bond one forms with the patient. “You keep a lifelong close relationship with the patient … You get to know one another really well, you stay in close touch, you have their cell phone number, you text one another. It’s a long-term and close relationship.” He spoke with animation about Brendan Marrocco, his sixth patient, an irrepressible soldier who’d lost both arms and legs to an IED in Iraq. In public appearances, Marrocco seemed delighted with the double hand transplant Lee did for him in 2012; in a 2014 episode with Lee on the Late Show With David Letterman, Marrocco pretty much stole the show. “He’s still driving his car,” Lee told me, smiling, “going all over the country. He does everything a young man does.” When I asked him about Jessica Arrigo he became far more circumspect. I asked how he’d heard of her death. He said through word of mouth. Then he offered, “We really don’t know the cause of death. We don’t think it’s related to her transplant. But we don’t know the cause of death.”

Perhaps I’d misheard him. I asked, “Is that because you didn’t know of any existing medical issues?” “Well, after her hand was removed, we did not follow her,” he said. “But the last we heard she was in good health.” A few months later, I got Jessica’s death certificate. I shared with Lee that the certificate listed mesenteric ischemia as the cause of death; it seemed to be news to him. When asked about Arrigo’s cause of death recently, Lee said that he wasn’t aware of any evidence of association between transplantation or immunosuppressive drugs and mesenteric ischemia. Of Lee’s eight transplant patients, I have spoken with six of them and the father of a seventh, Jessica. As one would expect, some have fared better than others. The most recent patient, Patient 8, Eric Lund, 35, lost both arms above the elbows in 2012 to an IED in Afghanistan and had a double transplant in November 2017. When I recently talked to Lund, he said his two-year rehab program to bring his arms and hands to full function was on schedule. He could lift his arms and push things around with his hands, but he couldn’t grab anything with them yet. The hands still provided only faint movement and sensation, as the nerve fibers still had a ways to grow to reach his fingers. He expects better sensation will come. He’s glad he had the operation. Jeff Swedarsky, Patient 7, received a biceplevel transplant of a left arm in mid 2015 and has regained fair function. At 38, he does weight training daily, has built a busy food-tourism business, and is so thrilled with his transplant that he encourages others to apply for the program. “Best decision I ever made,” he says. Brendan Marrocco, Patient 6, did not return my calls but appears to be doing well. Sheila Advento is on the kidney transplant waiting list. Patient 4, Jessica Arrigo, is survived by her husband, Robert Doak; her father, Wayne Arrigo; and her daughter, Cody, who made third-grade honor roll last fall. Chris Pollock, Patient 3, is doing great. When I called him at his home in Pennsylvania, he was mowing his lawn. He easily takes care of himself, makes toast and eggs (scrambled or fried), drives, and much more. He feels blessed. Jeff Kepner, Patient 2, wakes each day to two transplanted hands that he feels are utterly use-

Previous page: Josh Maloney, who asked to have his transplanted hand removed.

less. “I could do almost everything with my prosthetics,” he says. “Now I can’t do anything.” Patient 1, Josh Maloney, the Marine who had his transplant amputated in 2013, started a course in turf management last year—a step toward working in golf course greenkeeping. With his soldier’s acceptance of bad outcomes, he does not question his original decision to get a transplant. Yet when asked if he feels he made the right decision in having it removed, he says, “Absolutely.”

ON A CLOUDY Thursday afternoon last November, about 150 members of the

American Society for Reconstructive Transplantation, the main organization that represents the VCA field in the US, gathered at the Drake Hotel in Chicago for the society’s biennial meeting. As a cold wind swirled outside, transplant surgeons, rehab specialists, immunologists, and others gathered in a ballroom with two-story ceilings and ornate columns—the Gold Coast Room—to hear Gerald Brandacher, the scientific director of Lee’s team and the incoming president of the society, give the opening speech. Brandacher was taking over at a pivotal moment for the VCA field. For one thing, just two weeks earlier, news broke that Andrew Lee, Brandacher’s longtime mentor, a cofounder of the ASRT, and one of the VCA field’s most public faces, was leaving Hopkins to take a job as dean of the huge medical education complex at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. Brandacher later told me that this came as a “complete surprise” to his team. In addition, the VCA field was facing something of an existential crisis: The Department of Defense grants that funded many of the US clinical trials of hand transplants were running out. “The field is running on fumes,” says L. Scott Levin, a prominent surgeon and former ASRT president who runs the VCA program at the University of Pennsylvania. To keep money flowing, the field must now persuade the industry and government bodies that set health insurance and reimbursement standards that hand and face transplants are relatively safe, effective, and financially justified. Only then can the procedures be routinely covered by insurance. The bureaucratic bodies the field must convince include the American Medical Association, the private insurance industry, and the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS. The process of getting these approvals is daunting. But success was the theme of the conference that day, and Brandacher underscored that idea in his opening speech. Just as solid-organ transplants had moved 30 years earlier from doubt to acceptance, he said, so reconstructive transplants were poised to do the same. Challenges remained. Now that many patients had been on immunosuppression for years, Brandacher noted, they were suffering more renal complications and chronic rejection of the grafts. (Later, in his talks at the conference, Jaimie Shores would say what Sheila Advento already knew—that the Hopkins team had a patient in stage 4 renal failure.) Yet reconstructive transplants, Brandacher said, had already shown their power to restore normalcy to people’s lives. Given the progress being made in animal research at Harvard, Hopkins, and elsewhere on convincing the body to tolerate grafts rather than fight them, he said, “I think we are getting closer to this holy grail, and hopefully can see tolerance in VCA in the not too distant future.” VCA was almost ready to join conventional transplants as established practice. But to accomplish this, he said, “we need to have a unified voice to the public 0

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and policymakers, as well as third-party payers.” However, it’s not clear that the VCA field has accumulated the evidence that policymakers and payers normally want to see. Several experts described the tough path the field faces in gathering the evidence to make their case. A recent Canadian government examination of the hand transplant field suggested there was much research work to be done. In 2016, Health Quality Ontario, a government body that evaluates new therapies, used a widely adopted standard to examine all available hand-transplant outcome data. While the report found that successful transplants improved function, it found the outcome evidence itself of “very low quality” because of the small number of studies and poor study designs. It concluded: “There is considerable uncertainty as to whether the benefits [of hand transplants] outweigh harms.” Other observers see similar problems. Francis Perry Wilson, a nephrologist at Yale, read the two most complete studies of global hand transplant outcomes, written by Lee, Shores, and Brandacher in 2015 and 2017, as well as a third study from 2013. The papers “read OK,” he says, and raised no red flags. But they lacked several measures he would have wanted to see. The studies, for instance, were sparse on patients’ own assessments of hand function or quality of life, had little about how the VCA centers chose their patients, and sometimes presented outcome data that was several years old. (The Hopkins team says they plan to include this type of data in future papers.) This past fall, drawing on conversations and data from patients and clinicians, recent papers, and oral histories collected by Emily Herrington, a doctoral student in communications who is also pursuing a masters in bioethics at the University of Pittsburgh, I was able to compile information on 24 of the 31 known US hand transplant patients. Of these, at least 12 have had serious setbacks. These include seven patients with grafts removed and others who have had kidney problems and poor hand function. In addition to Jessica, Louisville patient Rich Edwards died from suicide, and another patient died of metastatic skin cancer. This tally is hardly a scientific study, of course. But when I ran these numbers by Scott Levin, who is currently compiling a quality-of-life report for all US patients, he did not dispute the breakdown.

SOME OF THE people in the Gold Coast Room in November weren’t as eager to speak with one voice about VCA’s success. One such person was Warren Breidenbach, the surgeon who led the team that performed the very first hand transplant in the US and is one of the field’s most accomplished, complicated, and confounding figures. After the 1999 operation in which he gave Matt Scott the first hand transplant in the US at the Louisville Jewish Hospital, Breidenbach followed with five more hand transplants over six years. He became the king of a revolutionary medical practice. Then he fell. By his own account, he tried and failed to get 2008 grants from the Defense Department. Despite serving as a founder of both the field and the ASRT, he felt increasingly alienated at Louisville, which he left in 2011. He hasn’t done a transplant since. He now works as a researcher at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in San Antonio. As the field has developed—and has gone astray, in his view—Breidenbach has grown increasingly vocal about what he describes as its lack of rigor, transparency, and integrity. He feels that practitioners should publish more information about their patients’ experiences and acknowledge how profoundly these experiments disrupt their lives. Herrington agrees. “It is odd,” she says, “that in a discipline whose entire justification and purpose is quality of life, almost no one adequately emphasizes actual patients’ experiences or includes them in their outcome measures.” Breidenbach wants his colleagues to publish more and be more transparent. “The rules have always been simple,” he says. “When you do experimental medicine, you must publish—and you must publish what actually happens.” Some of Breidenbach’s colleagues see him as out of touch. “I love Warren Breidenbach,” Scott Levin says. “But this idea that people are hiding things—you have to put his criticisms in perspective.” Levin does agree with Breidenbach and several others I talked to that Lee’s Pittsburgh protocol has not proven to be better than the three-drug model. As Kadiyala Ravindra, a former Louisville VCA team member who’s now a transplant surgeon at Duke, puts it, the protocol “unfortunately has not worked.” Lee counters that the protocol is designed to reduce immunosuppression and spare patients some of the corrosive effects of the steroids used in the more common three-drug therapy. Several people I talked to lamented that the discipline has no established protocol for following patients like Josh Maloney and Jessica Arrigo who have had their transplanted hands removed. There are now six people in the US who no longer have their hand transplants but who took immunosuppressive drugs for various periods. But because the DOD grants that funded much of this work didn’t require following patients after a graft was removed, their care and monitoring fell to the discretion of the institutions and research teams. Francis Perry Wilson, the Yale nephrologist, says VCA teams should follow their patients for the full length of the trial to provide proper care and to track the experiments’ long-term effects. “The patients who are going to do worse in general are going to be more likely to have the graft removed,” he says. “So all the more reason to keep track of them.” Or, as Levin puts it, “If somebody says, ‘Three months after my hands were amputated, I got liver cancer and died,’ we’d want to know that.” Which is why Levin plans to follow any of his patients who lose their grafts. The Hopkins team’s research protocol does not include a way to do this. The team says they always intended to follow up with patients who had their grafts removed. Shores says he tried to reach both Jessica and Maloney to do a follow-up study around 2016. He couldn’t get ahold of Maloney; he says he talked to Jessica on the phone but couldn’t get her to come in for a follow-up. As a result, the trial has very little data on either of those subjects’ health after the grafts were removed.

IN SOME SENSES , the field is still struggling with two linked problems that

have dogged it at least since that operation in Lyon in 1998: the cost-benefit ratio of VCA transplants and the failure to develop gentler anti-rejection treatments that have been proven to resolve the issue by reducing the risks. Back in 1999, Andrew Lee and a colleague, writing of this quandary in the wake of the Lyon surgery, concluded that the “deficiency of experimental evidence” then available, along with the known dangers of immunosuppression, “renders precarious the risk-benefit balance of hand transplantation at present.” Still, they believed the VCA field represented “the next frontier” in reconstructive surgery. By 2010, having done three transplants and witnessed 37 worldwide, Lee and others in his team wrote that while much work remained to reduce immunosuppression’s costs, they had faith that the experimental protocols being tested—including their own Pittsburgh protocol—“will surely undergo further evolution during the next decade.” Yet the burden borne by today’s hand transplant patients seems to be essentially no lighter than that assumed in 1999. Levin believes that the operation’s proven capacity to “give people back their dignity” makes hand transplants justified even now. Of Levin’s three patients, all have functioning hands, although one has begun having renal issues and may need a kidney transplant in the future. “We have enough data that, in my heart of hearts, I can say that we can continue in this field ethically and forcefully … There will be people who have horrible complications, but that’s called medicine.” Others are less sanguine. Herrington believes the field may need to hit the pause button to gather and weigh more carefully the progress so far. Some surgeons have chosen to wait. Vishal Thanik, a member of the hand transplant team at NYU Langone whose lab is among many trying to develop gentler ways to calm the immune system, does not plan to do any transplants until he has “something really new to bring in terms of immunosuppression.” To lose a hand—or, God forbid, both—is a catastrophe that inflicts physical, emotional, “THERE WILL BE and psychological consequences that, as one PEOPLE WHO paper on the ethics of hand transplants put it, H AV E H O R R I B L E “are notoriously difficult to overcome.” As that C O M P L I C AT I O N S , 2012 paper, published in a journal of the Royal B U T T H AT ’ S Society of Medicine, also notes, the transplant CALLED procedure’s experimental nature, along with the MEDICINE.” temptation for physicians chasing the “thrill of medical advancement” to exaggerate the benefits, “casts doubt on how informed a patient’s decision can truly be.” Consent in hand transplants is devilishly slippery: Can a person who has lost a hand properly weigh the allure of soon regaining such a vital part of themself against the seemingly distant probabilities of suffering treatment’s possible harms? Levin says this is best addressed by confronting the patient with the grimmest picture possible of the risks and by appointing them an independent patient advocate. James Benedict, a bioethicist at Duquesne University who

has studied consent and the US hand transplant community for more than seven years, has a different concern. At this point, he says, “I’m not even sure it’s possible to give informed consent, because the outcome data is so sparse. How can you give consent about accepting risks if you don’t even know what they are?”

talk at the conference, Brandacher acknowledged that the VCA field had not resolved all its issues. But his main message was one of success and the need to move forward. Most of the day’s talks followed this lead. The last speaker of that afternoon’s long opening session, a bioethicist, in fact, ended by crying, “Let us plow forward with this incredible field!” Sitting in the room for most of the afternoon was Sheila Advento. She had listened to one speaker after another talk about success and the importance of including patients in its definition. She was sicker than ever. Within a month, she would be put on the waiting list for a kidney. She had flown to Chicago because she wanted to ask a question of Gerald Brandacher, in front of this crowd. She had worked it all out beforehand with Breidenbach, she told me. Breidenbach would station himself near the microphone that was generally in the center aisle at such conferences for audience questions, and when Brandacher finished his introductory talk, Breidenbach would quickly move to the mic and introduce Sheila as she made her way up the aisle. Then she would tell the room that she was in stage 4 kidney failure and ask Brandacher the question that was eating at her: “Why didn’t anyone tell me this was happening to me?” The plan didn’t work. When Brandacher finished, he left the stage, and a moderator announced that a tight schedule precluded questions, then called the next speaker. Sheila, waiting for her cue in the back of the room, never even stood up. It remained so for the rest of the session. She never got a chance to be heard. IN HIS OPENING

DAVID DOBBS (@david_dobbs) writes on science, medicine, and culture. 0

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Voice computing seeks the one perfect response to any question.

That’s why it’s going to upend our relationship with information.

Alexa, I Want Answers

BY

James Vlahos

ILLUSTR ATIONS BY

Jacob Burge

If you had visited the Cambridge University Library in the late 199Os, 0

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you might have observed a skinny young man, his face illuminated by the glow of a laptop screen, camping out in the stacks. William Tunstall-Pedoe had wrapped up his studies in computer science several years earlier, but he still relished the musty aroma of old paper, the feeling of books pressing in from every side. The library received a copy of nearly everything published in the United Kingdom, and the sheer volume of information—5 million books and 1.2 million periodicals—inspired him. It was around this time, of course, that another vast repository of knowledge—the internet—was taking shape. Google, with its famous mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” was proudly stepping into its role as librarian to the planet. But as much as Tunstall-Pedoe adored lingering in the stacks, he felt that computers shouldn’t require people to laboriously track down information the way that libraries did. Yes, there was great pleasure to be had in browsing through search results, stumbling upon new sources, and discovering adjacent facts. But what most users really wanted was answers, not the thrill of a hunt. As tools for achieving this end, search engines were almost as cumbersome as their bookstuffed predecessors. First, you had to think of just the right keywords. From the long list of links that Google or Yahoo produced, you had to guess which one was best. Then you had to click on it, go to a web page, and hope that it contained the information you sought. Tunstall-Pedoe thought the technology should work more like the ship’s computer on Star Trek: Ask a question in everyday language, get an “instant, perfect answer.” Search engines as helpful librarians, he believed, must eventually yield to AIs as omniscient oracles. This was a technological fantasy on par with flying cars, but Tunstall-Pedoe set about making it a reality. He had been earning money as a programmer since the age of 13 and had always been

particularly fascinated by the quest to teach natural language to machines. As an undergraduate, he had written a piece of software called Anagram Genius, which, when supplied with names or phrases, cleverly rearranged the letters. “Margaret Hilda Thatcher,” for instance, became “A girl, the arch mad-hatter.” (Years later, author Dan Brown used Anagram Genius to generate the plot-critical puzzles in The Da Vinci Code.) Now, sequestered in the library, Tunstall-Pedoe began building a prototype that could answer a few hundred questions. Two decades later, with the rise of voice computing platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, the world’s biggest tech companies are suddenly, precipitously moving in Tunstall-Pedoe’s direction. Voice-enabled smart speakers have become some of the industry’s best-selling products; in 2018 alone, according to a report by NPR and Edison Research, their prevalence in American households grew by 78 percent. According to one market survey, people ask their smart speakers to answer questions more often than they do anything else with them. Tunstall-Pedoe’s vision of computers responding to our queries in a single pass—providing one-shot answers, as they are known in the search community—has gone mainstream. The internet and the multibillion-dollar business ecosystems it supports are changing irrevocably. So, too, is the creation, distribution, and control of information—the very nature of how we know what we know.

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In 2OO7, having weathered the dotcom crash and its aftermath, Tunstall-Pedoe and a few colleagues were close to launching their first product—a website called True Knowledge that would offer one-shot answers to all kinds of questions. At the time, theirs was still a heterodox goal. “There were people in Google who were completely allergic to what we were doing,” Tunstall-Pedoe says. “The idea of a one-shot answer to a search was taboo.” He recalls arguing with one senior Google employee who rejected the notion of there even being such a thing as a single correct reply. The big search engines, despite having indexed billions of web pages, did not possess a deep understanding of user queries. Rather, they engaged in glorified guesswork: You typed a few keywords into the Google search bar, and the company’s PageRank system returned a long list of statistically backed conjectures about what you wanted to know. To demonstrate that True Knowledge’s oneshot ambition was possible, Tunstall-Pedoe and his small team in Cambridge had developed a digi-

tal brain consisting of three primary components. The first was a natural-language-processing system that tried to robustly interpret questions. For instance, “How many people live in,” “What is the population of,” and “How big is” would all be represented as queries about the number of inhabitants of a place. The second component of the system amassed facts. Unlike a search engine, which simply pointed users toward websites, True Knowledge aspired to supply the answers itself. It needed to know that the population of London is 8.8 million, that LeBron James is 6' 8", that George Washington’s last words were “ ’Tis well,” and so on. The great majority of these facts were not manually keyed into the system; that would have been too arduous. Instead, they were automatically retrieved from sources of structured data, where information is listed in a computerreadable format. Finally, the system had to encode how all of these facts related to one another. The program-

mers created a knowledge graph, which can be pictured as a giant treelike structure. At its base was the category “object,” which encompassed every single fact. Moving upward, the “object” category branched into the classes “conceptual object” (for social and mental constructs) and “physical object” (for everything else). The higher up the tree you went, the more refined the categorizations got. The “track” category, for instance, split into groupings that included “route,” “railway,” and “road.” Building the ontology was a grueling task, and it swelled to tens of thousands of categories, comprising hundreds of millions of facts. But the structure it provided allowed new information to be sorted like laundry into dresser drawers. The knowledge graph encoded relationships in a taxonomic sense: A Douglas fir is a type of conifer, a conifer is a type of plant, and so on. But beyond simply expressing that there was a connection between two entities, the system also characterized the nature of each connection: Big Ben is located in England. Emmanuel Macron is the president of France. This meant that True Knowledge effectively learned some commonsense rules about the world that, while blazingly obvious to humans, typically elude computers: A landmark can exist only in a single place. France can have only one sitting president. Most exciting for Tunstall-Pedoe, True Knowledge could handle questions whose answers were not explicitly spelled out beforehand. Imagine somebody asking, “Is a bat a bird?” Because the ontology had bats sorted into a subgroup under “mammals” and birds were located elsewhere, the system could correctly reason that bats are not birds. True Knowledge was getting smart, and in pitches to investors, Tunstall-Pedoe liked to thumb his nose at the competition. For instance, he’d Google “Is Madonna single?” The search engine’s shallow understanding was obvious when it returned the link “Unreleased Madonna single slips onto Net.” True Knowledge, meanwhile, knew from the way the question was phrased that “single” was being used as an adjective, not a noun, and that it was defined as an absence of romantic connections. So, seeing that Madonna and Guy Ritchie were connected (at the time) by an is married to link, the system more helpfully answered that, no, Madonna was not single. Liking what they saw, investors cranked open the venture capital spigot in 2008. True Knowledge expanded to around 30 employees and moved to a larger office in Cambridge. But the technology didn’t initially catch on with con-

sumers, in part because its user interface was “an ugly baby,” Tunstall-Pedoe says. So he relaunched True Knowledge as a cleanly designed smartphone app, one available on both iPhones and Android devices. It had a cute logo—a smiley face with one eye—and a catchy new name, Evi (pronounced EE-vee). Best of all, you could speak your questions to Evi and hear the replies. Evi debuted in January 2012, a few months after Apple launched its Siri voice assistant, and shot to No. 1 in the company’s app store, quickly racking up more than half a million downloads. (Apple, apparently piqued by headlines such as “introducing evi: siri’s new worst enemy,” at one point threatened to pull the app.) Tunstall-Pedoe was swamped with acquisition interest. After a series of meetings with suitors, True Knowledge agreed to be bought out. Nearly everyone would get to keep their jobs and stay in Cambridge, and Tunstall-Pedoe would become a senior member of the product team for a not-yet-released voice computing device. When that device came out in 2014, its question-answering abilities would be significantly powered by Evi. The buyer was Amazon, and the device was the Echo.

One-shot answers were unfashionable back when TunstallPedoe started programming at Cambridge. But that was no longer the case by the time the Echo came out. In the era of voice computing, offering a single answer is not merely a nice-to-have feature; it’s a need-to-have one. “You can’t provide 10 blue links by voice,” Tunstall-Pedoe says, echoing prevailing industry sentiment. “That’s a terrible user experience.” As the world’s largest tech firms wised up, they began retracing many of True Knowledge’s steps. In 2010, Google acquired Metaweb, a startup that was creating an ontology called Freebase. Two years later, the company unveiled the Knowledge Graph, which boasted 3.5 billion facts. That same year, Microsoft launched what would become known as the Concept Graph, which grew to contain 5 million entities. In 2017, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple all acquired knowledge-graph-building companies. Lately, many researchers have begun designing autonomous systems that crawl the

web for answers, stocking ontologies with new facts far quicker than any human could. The bull rush makes sense. Market analysts estimate that, by 2020, up to half of all internet searches will be spoken aloud. Lately, even the trusty old librarians of onscreen search have been quietly switching to oracle mode. Google has been steadily boosting the prevalence of featured snippets, a type of one-shot answer, in the desktop and mobile versions of its search engine. They get pride of place above the other results. Let’s say you search for “What is the rarest element in the universe?” Right there, under the query box, is the response: “The radioactive element astatine.” According to the marketing agency Stone Temple, Google served up instant answers for more than a third of all searches in July 2015. Eighteen months later, it did so more than half the time. The move toward one-shot answers has been just slow enough to obscure its own most important consequence: killing off the internet as we know it. The conventional web, with all of its tedious pages and links, is giving way to the conversational web, in which chatty AIs reign supreme. The payoff, we are told, is increased convenience and efficiency. But for everyone who has economic interests tied to traditional web search—businesses, advertisers, authors, publishers, the tech giants—the situation is perilous. To understand why, it helps to quickly review the economics of the online world, where attention is everything. Companies want to be found; they want their ads to be seen. So, since the earliest days of the internet, they have worked to master the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO— tweaking keywords and other elements of sites to make them appear higher in the search rankings. To guarantee a prime location, companies also fork over money directly to the search services for paid discovery, purchasing small ads that run atop or beside the results. When desktop search was the only game around, companies jockeyed to be one of the top 10 links listed; people often don’t scroll any lower than that. Since the rise of mobile, they’ve raced to get into the top five. With voice search, companies face an even more daunting challenge. They want to grab what’s known as position zero—to supply the one-shot answer that appears above all the other results. Position zero is critical because it is most often what gets read aloud. And it is often the only thing that gets read, according to Greg Hedges, a VP at the marketing agency RAIN, which advises

brands on their conversational AI strategy. “If you want to be visible in a few years, you have to make sure that your website is optimized for voice search,” he says. Suppose you run a sushi restaurant and have many competitors nearby. A user asks his voice device, “What’s a good sushi place near me?” If your restaurant isn’t the one the AI regularly chooses first, you’re in trouble. There is, of course, a verbal equivalent to scrolling down: After hearing the top option, the customer might say, “I don’t like the sound of that. What else is nearby?” But that requires work, which people avoid when they can. Reaching position zero requires a wholly different strategy than conventional SEO. The importance of putting just the right keywords on a web page, for instance, is declining. Instead, SEO gurus try to think of the natural-language phrases that users might say—like “What are the top-rated hybrid cars?”—and incorporate them, along with concise answers, on sites. The hope is to produce the perfect bit of content that the AI will extract and read aloud. For now, there is no paid discovery for voice search. But when it inevitably arrives, the internet’s ad economy will be turned upside down. Because voice oracles dispense answers one at a time, they offer less real estate for advertisers. “There’s going to be a battle for shelf space, and each slot should theoretically be more expensive,” Jared Belsky, the current CEO of the digital marketing agency 360i, told Adweek in 2017. “It’s the same amount of interest funneling into a smaller landscape.” This may prove especially true in retail environments such as Amazon, where a purchase-ready consumer is right on the other end of the smart speaker. With voice, the goal is to summit Everest—to get the top result—or die trying. What if your product isn’t a hybrid car or a spicy tuna roll but knowledge itself? Publishers are already uncomfortably dependent on the big tech companies for most of their traffic, and thus much of their advertising income. According to the analytics company Parse.ly, Google searches currently account for about half of all referrals to publishers’ sites; shared links on Facebook account for a quarter. One-shot answers could seriously restrict this traffic. For instance: I am an Oregon Ducks fan. In the past, I’d go to ESPN.com

James Vlahos (@jamesvlahos) wrote about the Alexa Prize, a chatbot competition sponsored by Amazon, in issue 26.03.

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the morning after a game to find out who won. Once there, I might click on another story or two, giving the site a few fractions of a cent in ad revenue. If I were feeling especially generous, I might even sign up for a monthly subscription. But now I can simply ask my phone, “Who won the Ducks game?” I get my answer, and ESPN never sees my traffic. Maybe you care about ESPN, a major business in its own right, having its traffic siphoned off; maybe you don’t. The point is that a similar dynamic could affect a huge number of content creators, from the whales to the minnows. Consider the story of Brian Warner, who runs a website called Celebrity Net Worth. On the site, curious visitors can punch in the name of, say, Jay-Z and find out—thanks to research by Warner’s employees—that the rapper is worth an estimated $930 million. Warner claims that Google started harvesting answers from his site even after he explicitly denied the search giant’s request for access to his company’s database. Once this started, he says, the amount of traffic that actually reached Celebrity Net Worth plummeted by 80 percent, and he had to lay off half of his staff. “How many thousands of other websites and businesses has Google paved over?” he asks. (A Google spokesperson declined to comment specifically on Warner’s version of events; she noted, however, that site administrators can use the company’s developer tools to prevent their pages from appearing in featured snippets.) When voice AIs read an extracted bit of content, they often do credit the source. They may offer a verbal attribution or, if the device in question has a screen, a visual one. But namedropping doesn’t pay the bills; publishers need traffic. With a typical smart speaker, the chances that a user would somehow supply that traffic are slim. Google and Amazon’s workarounds are clumsy: A user can go to the smartphone companion app for her Home or Echo, find the result of the search, and click a link to go to the content creator’s site. A user could go to that trouble. But why bother when she already has the answer she sought? As Asher Elran, a web traffic expert and CEO of Dynamic Search, put it in a blog post back in 2013, one-shot answers rig the game in Google’s favor. “As websites, we expect to compete for those ranks by using SEO and providing interesting content,” he wrote. “What we do not expect is the answer to the questions appearing to the searcher before we get a chance to impress them with our hard work.”

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When TunstallPedoe began working on what would become True Knowledge, he got the impression that Google opposed providing one-shot answers. Although some employees undoubtedly felt that way at the time, statements from the company’s leaders make clear that the long-term plan was always to build an oracle. “When you use Google, do you get more than one answer?” Eric Schmidt asked in a 2005 interview, more than a decade before he stepped down as chair. “Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug … We should be able to give you the right answer just once.” For years, technological obstacles kept Schmidt’s goal at a safe remove. This came with certain advantages. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that governs freedom of expression on the internet, online intermediaries cannot be held responsible for content supplied by others. As long as Google remained a mere conduit for information, rather than a creator of that information—a neutral librarian rather than an all-knowing oracle—it could likely avoid a blizzard of legal liabilities and moral responsibilities. “Part of the reason why Google liked 10 blue links was because they weren’t determining what was true or false,” Tunstall-Pedoe says. But the company’s don’t-kill-the-messenger positioning is much harder to accept in the voice era. Say you click on a search result and end up reading an article from the San Francisco

Chronicle. Google is clearly not responsible for the content of that article. But when the company’s Assistant delivers an answer to one of your questions, the distinction becomes murkier. Even though the information may have been extracted from a third-party source, it feels as though it’s coming straight from Google. As such, the companies serving up replies to voice searches gain great power to decree what is true. They become overlords of epistemology. Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, touched on this hazard last year in a blog post about featured snippets. Until recently, he explained, users who asked “How did the Romans tell time at night?” had been getting an absurd one-shot answer: sundials. This was a no-consequence mistake, and Sullivan assured the public that Google was working to prevent such gaffes in the future. But it isn’t difficult to imagine a similar blunder with bigger ramifications, particularly as more and more Americans embrace voice search and the notion of the infallible AI oracle. Past one-shot answers have falsely claimed that Barack Obama was declaring martial law, that Woodrow Wilson was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, that MSG causes brain damage, and that women are evil. Google willingly fixed these whoppers, explaining that it had not authored them—that the mistakes had been automatically extracted from shoddy websites. Giving people a way to check sourcing offers some insulation against misinformation run amok. But it is difficult to imagine a user of Echo or Home going to the trouble of regularly logging into the companion app; the extra effort goes against the whole hands-free, no-look ethos of voice computing. And the verbal attributions, when they exist, are typically vague. A user might be told that an answer came from Yahoo or Wolfram Alpha. That’s akin to saying, “Our tech company got this information from another tech company.” It lacks the specificity of seeing the name of a reporter or media outlet; it also omits mention of the evidence used to arrive at a conclusion. When the source is a company’s own knowledge graph or other internal resource, the derivation becomes even more opaque: “Our tech company got this information from itself. Trust us.” The strategy of delivering one-shot answers also implies that we live in a world in which facts are simple and absolute. Sure, many questions do have a single correct answer: Is Earth a sphere? What is the population of India? For other questions, though, there are multiple

legitimate perspectives, which puts voice oracles in an awkward position. Recognizing this, Microsoft’s Cortana sometimes gives two competing answers to contested questions rather than just one. Google is considering doing a version of the same. Whether or not these companies wish to play the role of Fact-Checker to the World, they’re backing themselves into it. The command that big tech companies have over the dissemination of information, particularly in the era of voice computing, raises the specter of Orwellian control of knowledge. In places such as China, where the government heavily censors the internet, this is not just an academic concern. In democratic countries, the more pressing question is whether companies are manipulating facts in ways that benefit their corporate interests or the personal agendas of their leaders. The control of knowledge is a potent power, and never have so few companies attained such dominance as the portals through which the vast majority of the world’s information flows. The rest of us, meanwhile, may be losing the very skills that allow us to hold these gatekeepers to account. Once we become accustomed to placing our faith in the handy oracle on the kitchen counter, we may lose patience with the laborious—and curiosity-stoking, and thoughtprovoking—hunt for facts, expecting them to come to us instead. Why pump water from a well if it pours effortlessly from your faucet? Tunstall-Pedoe, who left Amazon in 2016, acknowledges that voice oracles introduce new risks, or at least worsen existing ones. But he has the typical engineer’s view that the problems caused by technology can be solved by— you guessed it—more and better technology, such as AIs that learn to suppress factually incorrect information. If online oracles one day get good enough to make a place like the Cambridge University Library obsolete, he imagines that he would feel nostalgic. But only up to a certain point. “I might miss it,” Tunstall-Pedoe says, “but I’m not sure that I would go back there if I didn’t need to.”

“WE ARE BUILDING A 1-TO-1 MAP OF ALMOST UNIMAGINABLE SCOPE.

IT WILL BECOME THE NEXT GREAT DIGITAL PLATFORM.”

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BY KEVIN KELLY

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY STORYTK

E very December, Adam Savage—star

of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld. The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are

now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform. Google Earth has long offered a hint of what this mirrorworld will look like. My friend Daniel Suarez is a best-selling science fiction author. In one sequence of his most recent book, Change Agent, a fugitive escapes along the coast of Malaysia. His descriptions of the roadside eateries and the landscape describe exactly what I had seen when I drove there recently, so I asked him when he’d made the trip. “Oh, I’ve never been to Malaysia,” he smiled sheepishly. “I have a computer with a set of three linked monitors, and I opened up Google Earth. Over several evenings I ‘drove’ along Malaysian highway AH18 in Street View.” Suarez—like Savage—was seeing a crude version of the mirrorworld. It is already under construction. Deep in the research labs of tech companies around the world, scientists and engineers are racing to construct virtual places that overlay actual places. Crucially, these emerging digital landscapes will feel real; they’ll exhibit what landscape architects call placeness. The Street View images in Google Maps are just facades, flat images hinged together. But in the mirrorworld, a virtual building will have volume, a virtual chair will exhibit chairness, and a virtual street will have layers of textures, gaps, and intrusions that all convey a sense of “street.” The mirrorworld—a term first popularized by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter—will reflect not just what something looks like but its context, meaning, and function. We will interact with it, manipulate it, and experience it like we do the real world. At first, the mirrorworld will appear to us as a high-resolution strata of information overlaying the real world. We might see a virtual name tag hovering in front of people we previously met. Perhaps a blue arrow showing us the right place to turn a corner. Or helpful annotations anchored to places of interest. (Unlike the dark, closed goggles of VR, AR glasses use see-through technology to insert virtual apparitions into the real world.) Eventually we’ll be able to search physical space as we might search a text— “find me all the places where a park bench faces sunrise along a river.” We will hyperlink objects into a network of the physical, just as the web hyperlinked words, producing marvelous benefits and new products. The mirrorworld will have its own quirks and surprises. Its curious dual nature, melding the real and the virtual, will enable now-unthinkable games and entertainment. Pokémon Go gives just a hint of this platform’s nearly unlimited capability for exploration. These examples are trivial and elementary, equivalent to our earliest, lame guesses of what the internet would be, just after it was born—fledgling CompuServe, early AOL. The real value of this work will emerge from the trillion unexpected combinations of all these primitive elements. The first big technology platform was the web, which digitized information, subjecting knowledge to the power of algorithms; it came to be dominated by Google. The second great platform was social media, running primarily on mobile phones. It digitized people and subjected human behavior and relationships to the power of algorithms, and it is ruled by Facebook and WeChat. We are now at the dawn of the third platform, which will digitize the rest of the world. On this platform, all things and places will be machinereadable, subject to the power of algorithms. Whoever dominates this grand third platform will become among the wealthiest and most powerful people and companies in history, just as those who now dominate the first two platforms have. Also, like its predecessors, this new platform will unleash the prosperity of thousands more companies in its ecosystem, and a million new ideas—and problems—that weren’t possible before machines could read the world.

G

limpses of the mirrorworld are all around us. Per-

haps nothing has proved that the marriage of the virtual and the physical is irresistible better than Pokémon Go, a game that immerses obviously virtual characters in the toe-stubbing reality of the outdoors. When it launched in 2016, there was an almost audible “Aha, I get it!” as the entire world signed up to chase cartoon characters in their local parks. Pokémon Go’s alpha version of a mirrorworld has been embraced by hundreds of millions of players, in at least 153 countries. Niantic, the company that created Pokémon Go, was founded by John Hanke, who led the precursor to Google Earth. Today Niantic’s headquarters are housed on the second floor of the Ferry Building, along the piers in San Francisco. Wide floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the bay and to distant hills. The offices are overflowing with toys and puzzles, including an elaborate boat-themed escape room. Hanke says that despite the many other new possibilities being opened up by AR, Niantic will continue to focus on games and maps as the best way to harness this new technology. Gaming is where technology goes to incubate: “If you can solve a problem for a gamer, you can solve it for everyone else,” Hanke adds. But gaming isn’t the only context where shards of the mirrorworld are emerging. Microsoft, the other big contender in AR besides Magic Leap, has been producing its HoloLens AR devices since 2016. The HoloLens is a see-through visor mounted to a head strap. Once turned on and booted up, the HoloLens maps the room you’re in. You then use your hands to maneuver menus floating in front of you, choosing which apps or experiences to load. One choice is to hang virtual screens—as in laptop or TV screens—in front of you. Microsoft’s vision for the HoloLens is simple: It’s the office of the future. Wherever you are, you can insert as many of your screens as you want and work from there. According to the venture capital firm Emergence, “80 percent of the global workforce doesn’t have desks.” Some of these deskless workers are now wearing HoloLenses in warehouses and factories, building 3D models and receiving training. Recently Tesla filed for two patents for using AR in factory production. The logistics company Trimble makes a safety-certified

hard hat with the HoloLens built in. In 2018 the US Army announced it was purchasing up to 100,000 upgraded models of the HoloLens headsets for a very nondesk job: to stay one step ahead of enemies on the battlefield and “increase lethality.” In fact, you are likely to put on AR glasses at work long before you put them on at home. (Even the much-maligned Google Glass headset is making quiet inroads in factories.) In the mirrorworld, everything will have a paired twin. NASA engineers pioneered this concept in the 1960s. By keeping a duplicate of any machine they sent into space, they could troubleshoot a malfunctioning component while its counterpart was thousands of miles away. These twins evolved into computer simulations—digital twins. General Electric, one of the world’s largest companies, manufactures hugely complex machines that can kill people if they fail: electric power generators, nuclear submarine reactors, refinery control systems, jet turbines. To design, build, and operate these vast contraptions, GE borrowed NASA’s trick: It started creating a digital twin of each machine. Jet turbine serial number E174, for example, could have a corresponding E174 doppelgänger. Each of its parts can be spatially represented in three dimensions and arranged in its corresponding virtual location. In the near future, such digital twins could essentially become dynamic digital simulations of the engine. But this full-size, 3D digital twin is more than a spreadsheet. Embodied with volume, size, and texture, it acts like an avatar. In 2016, GE recast itself as a “digital industrial company,” which it defines as “the merging of the physical and digital worlds.” Which is another way of saying it is building the mirrorworld. Digital twins already have improved the reliability of industrial processes that use GE’s machines, like refining oil or manufacturing appliances. Microsoft, for its part, has expanded

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KEVIN KELLY ([email protected]) was wired’s founding executive editor. He’s the author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future and many other books, including What Technology Wants; New Rules for the New Economy; and Out Of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.

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the notion of digital twins from objects to whole systems. The company is using AI “to build an immersive virtual replica of what is happening across the entire factory floor.” What better way to troubleshoot a giant six-axis robotic mill than by overlaying the machine with its same-sized virtual twin, visible with AR gear? The repair technician sees the virtual ghost shimmer over the real. She studies the virtual overlay to see the likely faulty parts highlighted on the actual parts. An expert back at HQ can share the repair technician’s views in AR and guide her hands as she works on the real parts. Eventually, everything will have a digital twin. This is happening faster than you may think. The home goods retailer Wayfair displays many millions of products in its online home-furnishing catalog, but not all of the pictures are taken in a photo studio. Instead, Wayfair found it was cheaper to create a three-dimensional, photo-realistic computer model for each item. You have to look very closely at an image of a kitchen mixer on Wayfair’s site to discern its actual virtualness. When you flick through the company’s website today, you are getting a peek into the mirrorworld. Wayfair is now setting these digital objects loose in the wild. “We want you to shop for your home, from your home,” says Wayfair cofounder Steve Conine. It has released an AR app that uses a phone’s camera to create a digital version of an interior. The app can then place a 3D object in a room and keep it anchored even as you move. With one eye on your phone, you can walk around virtual furniture, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional setting. You can then place a virtual sofa in your den, try it out in different spots in the room, and swap fabric patterns. What

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you see is very close to what you get. When shoppers try such a service at home, they are “11 times more likely to buy,” according to Sally Huang, the lead of Houzz’s similar AR app. This is what Ori Inbar, a VC investor in AR, calls “moving the internet off screens into the real world.” For the mirrorworld to come fully online, we don’t just need everything to have a digital twin; we also need to build a 3D model of physical reality in which to place those twins. Consumers will largely do this themselves: When someone gazes at a scene through a device, particularly wearable glasses, tiny embedded cameras looking out will map what they see. The cameras only capture sheets of pixels, which don’t mean much. But artificial intelligence—embedded in the device, in the cloud, or both—will make sense of those pixels; it will pinpoint where you are in a place, at the very same time that it’s assessing what is in that place. The technical term for this is SLAM—simultaneous localization and mapping—and it’s happening now. For example, the startup 6D.ai built a platform for developing AR apps that can discern large objects in real time. If I use one of these apps to take a picture of a street, it recognizes each car as a separate car-object, each streetlight as a tall object different from the nearby tree-objects, and the storefronts as planar things behind the cars—dividing the world into a meaningful order. And that order will be continuous and connected. In the mirrorworld, objects will exist in relation to other things. Digital windows will exist in the context of a digital wall. Rather than connections generated by chips and bandwidth, the connections will be contextual, generated by AIs. The mirrorworld, then, also creates the long-heralded internet of things. Another app on my phone, Google Lens, can also see discrete objects. It is already smart enough to identify the breed of a dog, the design of a shirt, or the species of a plant. Soon these functions will integrate. When you look around your living room with magic glasses, the system will be taking it all in piece by piece, informing you that here is a framed etching on the wall and there is four-colored wallpaper, and that this is a vase of white roses and this is an antique Persian carpet, and over here is a nice empty spot where your new sofa could go. Then it will say, based on the colors and styles of the furniture you already have in the room, we recommend this color and style of sofa. You’ll like it. May we suggest this cool lamp as well? Augmented reality is the technology underpinning the mirrorworld; it is the awkward newborn that will grow into a giant. “Mirrorworlds immerse you without removing you from the space. You are still present, but on a different plane of reality. Think Frodo when he puts on the One Ring. Rather than cutting you off from the world, they form a new connection to it,” writes Keiichi Matsuda, former creative director for Leap Motion, a company that develops hand-gesture technology for AR. The full blossoming of the mirrorworld is waiting for cheap, always-on wearable glasses. Speculation has been rising that one of the largest tech companies may be developing just such a product. Apple has been on an AR hiring spree and recently acquired a startup called Akonia Holographics that specializes in thin, transparent “smart glass” lenses. “Augmented reality is going to change everything,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call in late 2017. “I think it’s profound, and I think Apple is in a really unique position to lead in this area.” But you don’t need to use AR glasses; you can engage using almost any kind of device. You can kind of do this today with Google’s Pixel phone, but without the convincing presence that you get with 3D visors. Even now, wearables like watches or smart clothes can detect the proto-mirrorworld and interact with it.

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v e r y t h i n g c o n n e c t e d t o the internet will be

connected to the mirrorworld. And anything connected to the mirrorworld will see and be seen by everything else in this interconnected environment. Watches will detect chairs; chairs will detect spreadsheets; glasses will detect watches, even under a sleeve; tablets will see the inside of a turbine; turbines will see workers around them. The rise of a massive mirrorworld will rely in part on a fundamental shift underway right now, away from phone-centric life and toward a technology that is two centuries old: the camera. To recreate a map that is as big as the globe—in 3D, no less—you need to photograph all places and things from every possible angle, all the time, which means you need to have a planet full of cameras that are always on. We are making that distributed, all-seeing camera network by reducing cameras to pinpoint electric eyes that can be placed anywhere and everywhere. Like computer chips before them, cameras are becoming better, cheaper, and smaller every year. There may be two in your phone already and a couple more in your car. There is one in my doorbell. Most of these newer artificial eyes will be right in front of our own eyes, on glasses or in contacts, so that wherever we humans look, that scene will be captured. The heavy atoms in cameras will continue to be replaced with bits of weightless software, shrinking them down to microscopic dots scanning the environment 24 hours a day. The mirrorworld will be a world governed by light rays zipping around, coming into cameras, leaving displays, entering eyes, a never-ending stream of photons painting forms that we walk through and visible ghosts that we touch. The laws of light will govern what is possible. New technologies bestow new superpowers. We gained super speed with jet planes, super healing powers with antibiotics, super hearing with the radio. The mirrorworld promises super vision. We’ll have a type of x-ray vision able to see into objects via their virtual ghosts, exploding them into constituent parts, able to untangle their circuits visually. Just as past generations gained textual literacy in school, learning how to master the written word, from alphabets to indexes, the next generation will master visual literacy. A properly educated person will be able to create a 3D image inside of a 3D landscape nearly as fast as one can type today. They will know how to search all videos ever made for the visual idea they have in their head, without needing words. The complexities of color and the rules of perspective will be commonly understood, like the rules of grammar. It will be the Photonic Era. But here’s the most important thing: Robots will see this world. Indeed, this is already the perspective from which self-driving cars and robots see the world today, that of reality fused with a virtual shadow. When a robot is finally able to walk down a busy city street, the view it will have in its silicon eyes and mind will be the mirrorworld version of that street. The

robot’s success in navigating will depend on the previously mapped contours of the road—existing 3D scans of the light posts and fire hydrants on the sidewalk, of the precise municipal position of traffic signs, of the exquisite details on doorways and shop windows rendered by landlord scans. Of course, like all interactions in the mirrorworld, this virtual realm will be layered over the view of the physical world, so the robot will also see the real-time movements of people as they walk by. The same will be true of the AIs driving cars; they too will be immersed in the mirrorworld. They will rely on the fully digitized version of roads and cars provided by the platform. Much of the real-time digitization of moving things will be done by other cars as they drive around themselves, because all that a robot sees will be instantly projected into the mirrorworld for the benefit of other machines. When a robot looks, it will be both seeing for itself and providing a scan for other robots. In the mirrorworld too, virtual bots will become embodied; they’ll get a virtual, 3D, photorealistic shell, whether machine, animal, human, or alien. Inside the mirrorworld, agents like Siri and Alexa will take on 3D forms that can see and be seen. Their eyes will be the embedded billion eyes of the matrix. They will be able not just to hear our voices but also, by watching our virtual avatars, to see our gestures and pick up on our microexpressions and moods. Their spatial forms—faces, limbs—will also increase the nuances of their interactions with us. The mirrorworld will be the badly needed interface where we meet AIs, which otherwise are abstract spirits in the cloud. There is another way to look at objects in the mirrorworld. They can be dual use, performing different roles in different

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planes. “We can pick up a pencil and use it as a magic wand. We can turn our tables into touchscreens,” Matsuda writes. We will be able to mess not only with the locations and roles of objects but with time as well. Say I’m walking along a path beside the Hudson River, the real Hudson River, and I notice a wren’s nest that my bird-watching friend would be keen to know about, so I leave a virtual note along the path for her. It remains there until she passes by. We saw the same phenomenon of persistence with Pokémon Go: virtual creatures remaining in a real physical location, waiting to be encountered. Time is a dimension in the mirrorworld that can be adjusted. Unlike the real world, but very much like the world of software apps, you will be able to scroll back. History will be a verb. With a swipe of your hand, you will be able to go back in time, at any location, and see what came before. You will be able to lay a reconstructed 19th-century view right over the present reality. To visit an earlier time at a location, you simply revert to a previous version kept in the log. The entire mirrorworld will be like a Word or Photoshop file that you can keep “undoing.” Or you’ll scroll in the other direction: forward. Artists might create future versions of a place, in place. The verisimilitude of such crafty world-building will be revolutionary. These scroll-forward scenarios will have the heft of reality because they will be derived from a full-scale present world. In this way, the mirrorworld may be best referred to as a 4D world.

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I K E T H E W E B and social media before it, the m i r ror world w i l l u n fold a nd g row, producing unintended problems and unexpected benef its. Start w ith the business model. Will we try to jump-start the platform with the shortcut of advertising? Probably. I a m old enou gh to remember t he internet before it a llowed commercial activity, and it was just too broke to grow. A commercialfree mirrorworld would be infeasible and undesirable. However, if the only business model is selling our attention, then we’ll have a nightmare—because, in this world, our attention can be tracked and directed with much greater resolution, which subjects it to easy exploitation. On a macro scale, the mirrorworld will exhibit the crucial characteristic of increasing returns. The more people use it, the better it gets. The better it gets, the more people will use it, and so on. That self-reinforcing circuit is the prime logic of platforms, and it’s why platforms—like the web and social media— grow so fast and so vast. But this dynamic is also known as winner-take-all; this is why one or two parties come to dominate platforms. We are just now trying to figure out how to deal with these natural monopolies, these strange new beasts like Facebook and Google and WeChat, which have the characteristics of governments as well as corporations. To muddy the view further, all these platforms are messy mixtures of centralization and decentralization. In the long term, the mirrorworld can only sustain itself as a utility; like other utilities such as water, electricity, or broadband, we’ll have to pay a regular recurring fee—a subscription. We will be happy to do that when (and if) we believe we get real value from this virtual place. The emergence of the mirrorworld will affect us all at a deeply personal level. We know there will be severe physiological and psychological effects of dwelling in dual worlds; we’ve already learned that from our experience living in cyberspace and virtual realities. But we don’t know what these effects will be, much less how to prepare for them or avoid them. We don’t even know the exact cognitive mechanism that makes the illusion of AR work in the first place. The great paradox is that the only way to understand how AR works is to build AR and test ourselves in it. It’s weirdly recursive: The technology itself is the microscope needed to inspect the effects of the technology. Some people get very upset with the idea that new technologies will create new harms and that we willingly surrender ourselves to these risks when we could adopt the precautionary principle: Don’t permit the new unless it is proven safe. But that principle is unworkable, because the old technologies we are in the process of replacing are even less safe. More than 1 million humans die on the roads each year, but we clamp down on robot drivers

when they kill one person. We freak out over the unsavory influence of social media on our politics, while TV’s partisan influence on elections is far, far greater than Facebook’s. The mirrorworld will certainly be subject to this double standard of stricter norms. Many of the risks of the mirrorworld are easy to imagine, because they are the same ones we see on current platforms. For instance, we’ll need mechanisms in the mirrorworld to prevent fakes, stop illicit deletions, spot rogue insertions, remove spam, and reject insecure parts. Ideally, we can do this in a way that is open to all participants, without having to involve a Big Brother overseer like a dominant corporation. Blockchain has been looking for a job, and ensuring the integrity of an open mirrorworld might be what it was born to do. There are enthusiastic people working on that possibility right now. Unfortunately, it is not too difficult to imagine scenarios where the mirrorworld is extensively centralized, perhaps by a government. We still have a choice about this. Without exception, every researcher in this field that I’ve spoken to has been acutely aware of these divergent paths and claims to be working toward a decentralized model—for many reasons, including the chief one that a centralized and open platform will be richer and more robust. Clay Bavor, vice president of AR and VR at Google, says, “We want an open service that gets better each time someone uses it, like the web.” The mirrorworld will raise major privacy concerns. It will, after all, contain a billion eyes glancing at every point, converging into one continuous view. The mirrorworld will create so much data, big data, from its legions of eyes and other sensors, that we can’t imagine its scale right now. To make this spatial realm work—to synchronize the virtual twins of all places and all things with the real places and things, while rendering it visible to millions—will require tracking people and things to a degree that can only be called a total surveillance state. We reflexively recoil at the specter of such big data. We can imagine so many ways it might hurt us. But there are a few ways big data might benefit us, and the prime one is the mirrorworld. The route to civilizing big data so that we gain more than we lose is uncertain, complex, and not obvious. But we already have some experience that can inform our approach to the mirrorworld. Good practices include mandatory transparency and accountability for any party that touches the data; symmetry in the flow of information, so that the watchers are themselves watched; and the insistence that data creators—you and me—receive clear benefits, including monetary ones, from the system. I am optimistic that a viable path can be found to handle this ubiquitous data, because the mirrorworld is not the only place it will accumulate. Big data will be everywhere. My hope is that with a fresh start, the mirrorworld is the place we can figure this out first.

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stirrings of the internet, the digital world was seen as a disembodied cyberspace— an intangible realm separated from the physical world, and so unlike material existence that this electronic space could claim its own rules. In many respects, the virtual and the physical worlds have indeed run in parallel, never meeting. In the virtual there was a sense of infinite liberty, unleashed by disconnecting from physical form: free of friction, gravity, momentum, and all the Newtonian constraints holding us back. Who wouldn’t want to escape into cyberspace to become the best (or worst) version of themself? The mirrorworld bends that trajectory upon itself. Rather than continue two separate realms, this new platform melds the two so that digital bits are embedded into materials made of atoms. You interact in the virtual by interacting in the physical, moving your muscles, stubbing your toes. Information about that famous water fountain in a Roman plaza can be found at that fountain in Rome. To troubleshoot a 180-foot wind turbine, we troubleshoot its digital ghost. Pick up a towel in your bathroom and it becomes a magical cape. We will come to depend on the fact that every object contains its corresponding bits, almost as if every atom has its ghost, and every ghost its shell. I imagine it will take at least a decade for the mirrorworld to develop enough to be used by millions, and several decades to mature. But we are close enough now to the birth of this great work that we can predict its character in rough detail. Eventually this melded world will be the size of our planet. It will be humanity’s greatest achievement, creating new levels of wealth, new social problems, and uncountable opportunities for billions of people. There are no experts yet to make this world; you are not late.

CAREFUL The inside story of Italy’s Five Star Movement

WHAT YOU and the cyberguru who dreamed it up.

WISH FOR

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Just a few years before, in the mid2000s, the movement had been little more than the fan base of a blog fronted by a foulmouthed comedian, Beppe Grillo; from there it became an earnest protest movement organized around Meetup.com groups called Friends of Grillo; then it had unified under the name Five Star in 2009. The movement tapped deeply into one of the most powerful forces in Italian politics: disgust with Italian politics. Rather than offer an ideology or platform, Five Star offered a wholesale rebuke of the country’s entrenched, highly paid, careerist political class—left, right, and center. And it married that disdain to a grand techno-utopian project: Through an online voting and debate portal, Five Star was building a direct democracy on the internet. The long-term goal was to replace Parliament altogether—to automate it out of existence. But in the meantime, Five Star had also decided to displace the establishment seat by seat. The 2013 election was Five Star’s first foray into national politics. While a handful of its candidates were expected to win their races, Nugnes highly doubted she would be one of them; she barely gave it a thought, in

ON THE NIGHT OF ITALY’S 2013 parliamentary elec-

tions, Paola Nugnes decided to stay late at her office and catch up on work. She skipped the rolling election coverage on TV. And by the time she finally left her architecture studio to go out, it was well past dark. When she arrived at Mumble Rumble, a nightclub in western Naples, at around 9 pm, Nugnes still hadn’t checked the news. The club was hosting a party for activists in a political movement Nugnes had been part of for the past six years. And as she walked in, the crowd erupted. Nugnes asked if her friend Roberto Fico, the most famous local figure in the group, had won his race for a seat in Parliament. But before anyone could answer, a pack of journalists pounced, thrusting microphones in her face: “How do you feel about being elected?” Nugnes stared at them, dumbfounded. That’s how she found out she was now a senator. Along with hundreds of other political rookies, Nugnes had run for office under the banner of something called Five Star, an online phenomenon whose explosive, organic rise was shocking even to those it had just swept into power.

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fact. So Nugnes had worked through the evening, while the rest of the country reeled from the news that Five Star was now Italy’s secondbiggest party, having swept 25 percent of the vote, upending the political establishment in a single stroke. Amid the whirl of embraces and congratulations at the election night party, Nugnes struggled to think through the ramifications. “We were all very excited—and frightened,” she says. She would have to quit her architecture studio. “It was very traumatic,” she says. A couple hours’ drive up the coast, near Rome, Elena Fattori, a molecular biologist who was also active in Five Star, faced a similar bout of disbelief that night. “I had taken it all very lightly,” she says of her run for the senate—so much so that she volunteered to help supervise the vote count that day. As she watched the running tally, Fattori could see firsthand that Five Star was far exceeding expectations and, eventually, that she herself had been elected. “It was a shock,” Fattori tells me. “I took a couple of days to accept it.” All told, some 160 Five Star candidates with virtually no experience in politics became members of Parliament that day. This put the movement in an awkward position. Governments in Italy are normally formed via alliances between two or more parties that can command a majority of seats in Parliament; Five Star had won so many seats that it had the option of going straight into a governing coalition with the first-placed bloc, led by the center-left Democratic Party. But that was out of the question: One of Five Star’s founding principles was “no alliances.” And besides, the movement saw the Democratic Party as central to the corrupt establishment it had sworn to fight. So Five Star went into opposition. While Five Star sees itself as neither right- nor left-wing, much of the party’s base is left-leaning. Many of its voters and activists, including Fattori and Nugnes, were drawn to the movement after becoming dis-

enchanted with the Democrats and other parties on the left. Nugnes, a woman with Marxist sympathies, had grown alienated from Italy’s communist parties, which she viewed as ailing, top-down institutions. “I felt like an orphan,” she recalls. Five Star, by contrast, was a “cultural revolution,” a horizontal movement that put governing directly in the hands of anyone who cared to log on. To the extent that Five Star did have a political platform, it vaguely resembled that of a Green Party. The movement’s name ostensibly refers to its first five policy priorities: sustainable transportation, sustainable development, public water, universal internet access, and environmentalism. Nugnes was particularly attracted to the movement’s more recent flagship policy, a universal basic income that proposed a monthly stipend of 780 euros (a bit less than $900) for Italy’s poorest citizens. In short: While the movement had always included people across the political spectrum, it was easily taken for a progressive popular front. But if Nugnes and Fattori were shocked to become elected members of government, the next few years would be even more vertiginous. As the movement’s fledgling nonpoliticians found their feet in Parliament, they realized that dealing with other parties was unavoidable. At times, in opposing the Democratic Party–led government, Five Star found itself siding with another faction defined by antiestablishment roots—a right-wing populist party called Lega, or the League. Lega’s nativist leader, Matteo Salvini, had long campaigned on an “Italians first” platform. He has said that his country needs a “mass cleansing” of illegal immigrants, “street by street, district by district, piazza by piazza.” When Italy’s 2018 national elections came around, Five Star—whose emphasis on pop-

ular sovereignty had, at times, come to sound sympatico with anti-EU, anti-immigrant sentiment—won so many seats that it became the largest party in Italy. This time, the movement didn’t shy from stepping up to run the country. And it chose to do so in partnership with Salvini’s Lega. Last September, Stephen K. Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump and would-be pied piper to Europe’s ethno-nationalists, visited Rome to celebrate the alliance. Of all the countries he had visited in his recent travels, he singled out Italy as “the center of the political universe.” The new government there was a Bannonite dream come true: a left-right, antiestablishment coalition. “A populist party with nationalist tendencies like the Five Stars, and a nationalist party with populist tendencies like the League,” he enthused to Politico’s European edition. “It’s imperative that this works, because this shows a model for industrial democracies from the US to Asia.” While Bannon gushed, members of Five Star like Nugnes and Fattori reeled at where their movement had ended up: tied to a party led by a man many of them regarded as a fascist. They were also beginning to real-

ize that Five Star’s evolution had never been as organic as it seemed. At every step along the way—from the creation of Grillo’s blog and the organization of the movement’s first mass protests to the construction of its direct-democracy platform, all the way to its recent turn toward nativist politics—Five Star’s course had been meticulously directed by a camera-shy cyber-utopian named Gianroberto Casaleggio, the movement’s cofounder. Casaleggio, who died of brain cancer in 2016, was, in some ways, a familiar type. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he and a slew of other Internet Age prophets—many of them writing in this magazine—foretold a digital revolution that would flatten the priesthoods of politics, government, and journalism, and replace them with decentralized webs of direct participation. But Casaleggio, unlike his fellow pundits, actually went on to mount a revolutionary force that took over a country. Not only that, he directed this supposedly leaderless movement while drawing barely any attention to himself. So here’s the mystery at the heart of Five Star: Who the hell was Gianroberto Casaleggio—and how did he do it?

The Faces of Five Star

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GIANROBERTO CASALEGGIO Cofounder and intellectual father of the movement.

BEPPE GRILLO The movement’s cofounder and front man.

T T H E S M A L L C I T Y of Ivrea sits cra-

dled in the foothills of the Italian Alps, 30 miles south of the Swiss border. An 18th-century bridge over the Dora Baltea river leads to a quaint historic downtown of cobbled streets and pastel-colored buildings. But in the 1970s, Ivrea was Italy’s answer to Silicon Valley. It was the hometown of Olivetti, an icon of postwar European design, electronics, and manufacturing. The company’s most famous devices— its portable typewriters—were the

Apple products of their day, technological fetish objects that were coveted around the world. In the early days of the computer industry, Olivetti was one of the few European contenders for market dominance; in 1965, it released the world’s first device marketed commercially as a “desktop computer.” The young Gianroberto Casaleggio was one of Olivetti’s software designers. A local with a long mane of frizzy hair, he had studied physics in college before dropping out and turning to computers. He ended up in a small office on a quiet lane developing Olivetti’s operating systems. Enrica Zublena, an engineer who worked next to Casaleggio for many years, remembers their early days at the company as an exciting time. “We thought we could become a reference point for the evolution of basic IT around the world,” Zublena says. Olivetti was a heady place to work in other ways as well, especially for anyone prone to utopian thinking. Adriano Olivetti, the late owner and general manager of the firm, had run his company as a kind of philosopher-CEO. He built futuristic factories and liv-

ing complexes for his workers in Ivrea and advocated a “third way” between right and left sociopolitical thinking; he started his own political movement—a fusion of liberalism, socialism, and local self-determinism—which took him all the way to Parliament. He also wrote books expounding on his views. In one, Democracy Without Political Parties, he argued that technology should be used to hand the mechanics of politics back to citizens. Casa leggio shared Olivetti’s interest in the transformative potential of computing. “We saw the birth of the client-server model in IT,” Zublena says—the emergence of systems that distribute tasks among many computers in a network, allowing distant nodes to cooperate. “It brought a level of decisionmaking freedom to the periphery.” It seemed inevitable to Casaleggio that such architectures would change everything in society. By the 1990s, Casaleggio was running his own company, and it was his turn to play philosopherCEO. The firm, which was eventually called Webegg, quickly became

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LUIGI DI MAIO A Casaleggio protégé, elected the leader of Five Star in 2017.

ALESSANDRO DI BATTISTA Another Casaleggio protégé and one of the movement’s most visible members.

ROBERTO FICO Unofficial leader of Five Star’s left wing.

one of the leading internet consulting outfits in Italy, doing a brisk business helping older firms to find “web-based solutions” and otherwise navigate the bewildering world of bits, messaging software, and online marketing. “It was the time of the first call centers, the first internet banking,” says Zublena, who followed her colleague to Webegg. But Casaleggio was impatient to explore the grander implications of the internet. In a monthly column for a magazine called Web Marketing Tools, he inveighed against the drabness of most thinking about the web. “The net has been reduced to an instrument of financial speculation and marketing,” he wrote, but its true significance was as a force for “radical social and revolutionary change.” Perhaps most of all, Casaleggio was interested in how the internet would transform organizations from the inside. Accordingly, he turned Webegg into a laboratory for sometimes bizarre social experimentation. Throughout his career, Casaleggio liked to give extraordinary responsibilities to his youngest, most talented, and most impres-

PAOL A NUGNES Left-wing Five Star senator who has been critical of the movement’s rightward turn.

sionable recruits. One such hire at Webegg was a Bolognese engineer named Carlo Baffè. When he arrived fresh out of school in 1997, Baffè was promptly handed the reins to one of the company’s biggest projects. “Don’t worry,” Casaleggio reassured him. “Napoleon invaded Italy when he was 26.” About a year later, Baffè got another call. “I have this new special project in mind,” Casaleggio told him. “Would you like to join?” Baffè accepted eagerly. He went to the company’s Milan headquarters and, in a meeting room near Casaleggio’s office, sat at a circular table with the CEO and four other young, excited employees, all from different parts of the firm. Casaleggio explained that the aim of this new project was to ex per i ment w it h com mu n ication dynamics on the company’s intranet. Casaleggio would select topics from the firm’s internal forum and assign members of the group specific roles to play in each discussion. Say he wanted a forum debate to reach conclusion X: One member of the restricted group would suggest X, a second would argue for contradictory conclusion Y, and over time a third would post a variation on X—and so on, subtly driving the rest of the unwitting employees toward the preordained conclusion. Baffè and the other experimenters worked a few hours a week on the project and met with Casaleggio once a month to evaluate progress. The original stated aim of the project was to observe how i nter na l elec t ron ic communications worked, and then to sell the findings as a consulting service. But the experiment also had more far-reaching implications, Baffè realized. Casaleggio was interested in learning how consensus— on, say, whet her people should be happy to work long

hours—could be manufactured in a way that looked organic. Twenty years before trolls working for Russia’s Internet Research Agency would use similar techniques to steer debate on Facebook and other online forums, Casaleggio seemed to be using his own company as a laboratory to figure out how online discourse could be guided from above. “I’d just started working and was excited to be part of a project like that,” Baffè says. It wasn’t until years later, he says, that he “realized it was the beginning of a longterm experiment.” The intranet study group was only one such special project. Baffè was also invited to join another select group of about 20 employees who were given advanced communications training, grounded in something called neuro-linguistic programming. A new-age therapeutic phenomenon, NLP purportedly offers a means to influence people by surreptitiously tapping into the unconscious patterns that guide their behavior. Practitioners are taught that people can be “reprogrammed” —to shed a phobia, say, or desire a product—with relative ease. “It

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taught us how to classify people,” Baffè says: By identifying which kinds of metaphors a client favored, employees at Webegg could aim to “m i r ror ” t h at c l ient, m a king them more susceptible to the company’s message. The sessions also focused on the teachings of an American hypnotherapist named Milton H. Erickson, who likewise made extraordinary claims about the suggestibility of the unconscious mind. By subtly confusing and unsettling his patients, Erickson claimed that he could induce them into trance states that made them more pliable. (NLP is popular among sales gurus and with the modern pickup artist community, but psychologists tend to regard it as a pseudoscience.) The mont h ly session s were led by two psychologists, a man and a woman, and they were a bit like “group therapy,” Baffè says. Employees were encouraged to air their feelings. At first, Baffè was thrilled to take part. But gradually his enthusiasm waned as he began to wonder who, exactly, was being inf luenced. The psychologists were seemingly omnipresent in the Webegg offices, where they appeared to be keeping tabs on staff for Casaleggio. “I’m sure he controlled every single detail of their activity,” Baffè says. (W I R ED spoke to one of the psychologists, who confirmed that she had worked with Webegg and called Casaleggio a “true visionary” but declined to be interviewed.) In practice, Casaleggio’s intranet discussions, group sessions, and psychological interventions often seemed to be a means of bypassing directors and team leaders—the firm’s middlemen—to exert maximal influence over his staff. “The channel is direct between the boss and every employee,” Baffè says. Increasingly, the young engineer started to see Casaleggio as an “evil scientist.” This impression was reinforced by his boss’s increasingly eccentric

behavior. During the Y2K panic, Casaleggio printed out a “decalogue”—a set of 10 commandments—telling employees what to do if civilization collapsed. He wrote a magazine column praising Genghis Khan’s (apocryphal) practice of murdering his generals at random as an effective means of keeping subordinates and intermediaries on their toes. Khan, he wrote, “became the greatest conqueror in history with the application of techniques and principles that are necessary today to compete on the web.” But even as he praised Khan’s absolute r u le, Casa leggio a lso extolled the absolute power that masses of people would have over their leaders in the internet era. In a 2001 book entitled The Web Is Dead, Long Live the Web, Casaleggio described how technology would force governments to become completely transparent and accountable to the will of the people. “Referenda on topics of national importance will become as routine as reading the papers or the evening news,” he wrote. “The interactive leader will then be the new politician, someone who continually transforms the wishes of public opinion into reality. This new politician will not need interpretation by today’s media, which will thus lose their importance.” L i ke a ny nu m b e r of c y b e rutopians writing in places like W I R ED—several of whose writers he cited in his work—Casaleggio repeatedly predicted the imminent demise of journalism. He held that in a few years, information would become a utility, like electricity or water, pervading people’s daily lives; it would replace the current “virtual reality” that the press had constructed for them, “the Matrix that surrounds us.” To his point, the media Matrix in Italy was exceptionally claustrophobic: In 2001, the scandal-prone media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi had just begun his second term as prime

minister; not only did he own the biggest commercial television network, he also dominated the state broadcaster, RAI. While Casaleggio was busy peering into the future, he was neglecting more run-of-the-mill sources of revenue that Webegg needed to turn a profit. “He put all the best people on the new stuff that was very sexy for him,” Baffè says. But the company’s core business foundered. “At some point,” Baffè says, “his ego took over.” Amid mounting financial losses, Casaleggio was forced out in 2003 by the company’s main shareholder, Telecom Italia. Webegg closed shortly thereafter. Casaleggio had the contacts and experience to remain a player in the Italian tech industry, but by then his interest in the early internet was pivoting from business to another arena: politics. Even those who knew Casaleggio well (but who perhaps didn’t read his books closely) were surprised by the sudden turn. Zublena remembers telling him, “But Gianroberto, you’ve never been remotely interested in politics!” In response, the usually taciturn Casaleggio burst out laughing, exposing the boyish gap between his front two teeth. “Come on,” she persisted, “with all the things in the world, you’re going into politics?” But Casaleggio only laughed and kept his reasons to himself. Edoa rdo Na rduzzi, who had k now n Ca sa leg g io si nce 1998 and served as a Webegg board member, thinks Casaleggio saw “an interesting space” in Italian politics, ripe for testing out his ideas for a web-based, bottom-up movement—“a political startup.” It all began with a simple punt. In 2004, Casaleggio ran as an independent candidate in his home village, near Ivrea. Out of 294 votes cast for a seat on a local council, Casaleggio won just six. That didn’t mean he would give up. All he needed was a front man.

A A S I T A LY ’ S T O P b a r n s to r m-

ing comedian, Beppe Grillo was accustomed to overzealous fans. But none made an impression like the visitor who came to see him one night in April 2004. After a show in the coastal city of Livorno, Gianroberto Casaleggio appeared at Grillo’s dressing room door and introduced himself as a web entrepreneur. But with his shock of wild gray hair, John Lennon glasses, and quiet intensity, Grillo recalls, he seemed more like an “evil genius.”

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Grillo recounts this first meeting in a preface he wrote for Casaleggio’s next book, Web Ergo Sum. “He explained webcasting to me, direct democracy, chatterbots, w ik i, downshifting, usability, objects of digital interaction, social networks, Reed’s law, intranets, and copyleft,” Grillo recalled. He likened Casaleggio to the medieval radical Saint Francis of Assisi, but “instead of talking to wolves and to the birds, he spoke to the internet.” The comedian was initially wary: “Ever y thing was clear,” Grillo wrote, “he was a madman.” But Casaleggio’s madness was one that envisioned a better future thanks to the web: companies made democratic, the end of political intermediation, and the devolution of power dow n to t he ind iv idual. Before long, Grillo fell under Casaleggio’s spell—which was remarkable, given that Grillo had famously long been a technophobe. For a time, he had been known for smashing computers with a sledgehammer during his act. Casaleggio offered to build Grillo a blog. The comedian was a household name in Italy, but he’d been sacked from state television in the 1980s after making an off-color joke about corruption in the thenSocialist government. Now Casaleggio was offering him a new route to a mass audience and a way out of endless theater tours: the internet. “We’re going to become one of the three top blogs in the world,” Casaleggio promised. And so began a partnership that would transform Italian politics. On January 26, 2005, nine months after Casaleggio’s visit to Grillo’s dressing room in Livorno, the blog, beppegrillo.it, went live. It was, at the start, a simple black and white affair, firing out a post or two a day. The few tabs listed tour dates, information on Grillo’s latest show— fairly typical elements of a fan page. But another tab, labeled “How to Use the Blog,” gestured at something more grand and open-ended. “Beppe

Grillo’s blog is an open space at your disposal,” the page explained. “Its usefulness depends on your collaboration; for this reason, you are the real and only person responsible for the content and its fate.” Grillo’s first posts were short and snappy. “Is there any sense in still speaking of right, or left, or center?” ranted one. “We don’t need a leader, we are adults!” Within months, the number of commenters on any given post had mushroomed into the hundreds, and soon thousands. Posts became ever more detailed and elaborate, with embedded video, images, and cartoons. Video and phone interviews with intellectuals brought in the likes of economist Joseph Stiglitz, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Noam Chomsky. The blog hosted articles and letters by other writers; it started to seem more like a cultural institution than a comedian’s promo page. Today, when the most prominent members of Five Star think back to what got them hooked on beppegrillo.it, most of them describe how it provided a compelling source of alternative information: a rival to the traditional, Berlusconidominated media. Alessandro Di Battista was a young university graduate in music and performing arts when he started frequenting the site. “I read in Beppe’s blog what I’d always wanted to read in the newspapers, but that you could never find,” Di Battista says. Grillo’s blog dealt in “counterinformation,” as Di Battista calls it, “taking political positions that seemed to me fundamental but that no one else had the courage to take.” Beginning that first year, Grillo and Casaleggio also used the blog to push their readers toward political action. They launched initiatives like Parlamento Pulito, or “Clean Parliament,” an email-w riting campaign to protest the number of elected officials in Italy with criminal convictions. And in July 2005, six months after the web-

site’s launch, a blog post announced a new group on Meetup ca lled Friends of Beppe Grillo, through which readers could arrange to meet, discuss, and “transform a virtual debate into a moment of change.” Several such groups instantly popped up around the country, including one in Naples started by a recent communications graduate named Roberto Fico. “Within two months, there were almost 300 members,” Fico says. The young Fico poured all of his spare time into the burgeoning Friends of Grillo movement as he cycled through jobs in PR, tourism, and at a call center. “As soon as I finished work, I’d go to the meetings, the demonstrations,” he says. Thanks in part to his group’s activism, in 2006 a local Democratic Party water privatization scheme was successfully blocked. “The point,” Fico says, “was that it was political, but outside the institutions.” In addition to commenting on posts and joining Meetup groups, beppegrillo.it also urged its readers to start their own blogs. One such fan turned blogger was a you n g col lege d ropout na med Marco Canestrari. In September 2006, the unemployed Canestrari happened to meet Casaleggio at an event; he had no idea who the older man was. But Casaleggio told him, “I know you who you are; I follow your blog.” Shortly thereafter, Casaleggio offered Canestrari a job at his new internet consulting firm, Casaleggio Associates. Canestrari, 23, could hardly believe his luck: “That was my first job, actually.” Based in an exclusive neighborhood in Milan, Casaleggio Associates employed about 10 people

at the time—most of them former employees of Webegg. The young Canestrari found his new boss “very clever, interesting, and exciting,” an avid reader of history, comics, and science fiction, particularly the novels of Isaac Asimov. Despite their age gap, Canestrari and Casaleggio, then in his fifties, formed a close rapport, with Casaleggio often expounding on his views about the web and the future. “He basically talked about that all day, all the time,” says Canestrari, one of the few people Casaleggio took into confidence. Within a short time, Casaleggio— in keeping with his habit of delegating large tasks to unformed young men—made Canestrari a manager of beppegrillo.it. After just three years, Grillo’s page was already the most popular site on the Italian internet and one of the 10 mostread blogs in the world. But the fact that most astounded Canestrari as he took up his new position was this: “Grillo never wrote a single word on the blog,” he says. Grillo and Casa leggio would speak several times a day to discuss the contents of the daily posts, and Casaleggio might read out the final draft to Grillo over the phone, says Filippo Pittarello, another employee who helped to produce the site. But according to multiple sources, it was Casaleggio, not Grillo, who actually wrote the hottest blog in Italy. Just like the page’s millions of readers, Canestrari had no inkling of this before coming to work for Casaleggio. Far from feeling hoodw in ked, he was thrilled to see behind the curtain. At Casaleggio’s side, he would get to play a vital role in a political revolution.

Darren Loucaides (@DarrenLoucaides) is a British writer who covers politics, populism, and identity.

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I N 2 0 0 7, T H E staff at Casaleggio Associates celebrated the millionth comment on beppegrillo.it. Casaleggio spent whole days reading the comments, according to Canestrari and Pittarello, and he recognized a lot of the commenters, especially the more active ones. He thought that, through the blog, he was seeing into the belly of Italy—what its people really thought and felt. And what he noticed was anger. Casaleggio had recently watched V for Vendetta, a 2005 dystopian futuristic thriller. (Tagline: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”) In the film, Britain is ruled by a fascist dictatorship; one night, a lone insurgent wearing a Guy Fawkes mask hacks into a state-controlled news broadcast and tells the people of Britain to meet him outside Parliament in exactly one year, setting in motion the end of the regime. Inspired by the movie, Casaleggio wrote a latenight post, published under Grillo’s name, on June 14, 2007. Beneath a picture of a Guy Fawkes mask, Casaleggio summoned all of Grillo’s readers to gather in person for something called Vaffanculo Day, or “Fuck Off Day,” in three months’ time—a mass collective middle finger to the political establishment.

The morning after writing the post, on his way to the office, Casaleggio reportedly called and told his son, Davide—who was also a young employee at Casaleggio Associates—to gather the rest of the staff for a breakfast meeting downstairs. “We have to do something big,” Casaleggio told the group, according to a book that Canestrari later cowrote about the origins of Five Star, called Supernova. “The anger is rising, and if we don’t let it vent in some way, it’ll die out.” The ostensible purpose of V Day would be to ratchet up the Parlamento Pulito campaign. The goal: to collect signatures to force a law that would limit elected representatives to two terms and ban candidates with criminal convictions. But the deeper purpose was to muster a show of force—to demonstrate that the movement wasn’t just a virtual phenomenon. Canestrari worked day and night over the next three months, coordinating with Friends of Grillo Meetup groups to mobilize them. Casaleggio called every contact he had. The Italian web fizzed with anticipation; the national press was silent. The day before V Day, Canestrari and Pittarello drove down from Milan to Bologna, where a giant stage was being set up in the city’s main plaza. By the afternoon of V Day, September 8, 2007, the square had swollen w ith a crowd of about 50,000 people. All around Italy, in some 200 squares, other crowds were massing too. In Naples, people started lining up at 9 am to sign petitions, says Fico, who ran the signature-collecting campaign in his home city. “We couldn’t believe our eyes.” When Grillo got to the microphone in Bologna at around 4:30 pm, he took in the crowd, visibly shaken. It was enormous. “Boh … what have we done?” he finally said, teetering around the stage and shaking his head in disbelief.

Gathering himself, he launched into a typically throat-tearing tirade against Italy’s ruling elite. The success of V Day was thrilling. Two million people had turned out across the country; 350,000 signatures were gathered for the Pa rla mento P u lito. A nd it had a ll been meticulously planned by Casaleggio Associates. “The entire company was there that day,” Canestrari says. Yes, the grassroots Meetup groups had been in charge of collecting signatures, “but everything else—everything else—was organized by us.” And if anyone asked who Canestrari and his colleagues were? “We called ourselves the ‘Beppe Grillo staff,’ so nobody knew.” The vast majority of people in the movement had no idea that Casaleggio or his consulting firm even existed. “Grillo has always been the front man, and he knew that,” Canestrari says. “And it was fun for him. But he never made a real decision about anything.” Hoping to channel the energy of V Day, Friends of Grillo groups around the country started to talk about putting some of their members forward as independent candidates in local elections. Paola Nugnes ran for a seat in the regional senate of Campania. Roberto Fico ran for the presidency of the same region. Alessandro Di Battista ran in municipal elections in his native Rome. The idea was that, even with just a few elected officials at the lowest levels, the movement’s “counterinformation” would inexorably seep into town and regional governments. With this turn toward electoral politics, Casaleggio told Canestrari to start developing an online platform to unify the disparate Meetup groups: a single web portal with a forum. Casaleggio also wanted to give some shape to the movement’s politics. “Let’s set some rules,” he said. Friends of Grillo members elected to office would have to observe a two-term limit. No candidates with criminal con-

victions were allowed, nor were those who had ever sought election under another party. Just a few fixed principles, Casaleggio said, like Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The rules offered insurance that the movement’s politicians would be amateurs, not careerists. They also ensured that Grillo could never run for office in his own movement: He had been convicted of manslaughter in 1981 after a tragic car accident. The Friends of Grillo barely made a showing in those early local elections; many candidates, including Fico and Di Battista, failed to get more than 1 or 2 percent of the vote. But their careers in politics were far from over. On October 4, 2009—as the global economic crisis began to pummel Italy, setting off a decade of malaise and widespread youth unemployment—the Five Star Movement was officially launched in a packed theater in Milan. From the stage, Grillo said they were starting the party because no one was listening to them, but he admitted that he wasn’t sure what they were doing or where they were going. Casaleggio, however, knew exactly where they were headed: Rome.

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F F I V E S TA R ’ S AT T E M P TS at com-

peting in local and regional politics in the next few years were fairly undistinguished. The party did well in Sicily’s regional vote in October 2012, after Grillo, 64, swam to the island from mainland Italy in a media stunt. (A life-jacketed Casaleggio followed by boat.) But ahead of 2013’s general election, the movement’s huge slate of candidates was barely polling in the double digits. No one was prepared, in other words, when Five Star stormed into Italy’s Parliament with 25 percent

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of the vote in February 2013. Casaleggio suddenly found himself an object of morbid public fascination. The Italian press was relentless in its scrutiny—and its derision—of the bizarre-looking web entrepreneur turning Italian politics on its head. The papers often described Casaleggio as Grillo’s “guru.” The business daily Il Sole 24 Ore wrote that Casaleggio ran Five Star “like the cult of Genghis Khan.” Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, mocked a 2008 video that Casaleggio had made as the ravings of a crank. (The short animated film, which refers darkly to the Masons and the Bilderberg Group, envisions an apocalyptic world war that will usher in a single, global direct democracy, administered by Google.) “I will never forget how they treated him,” says Alessandro Di Battista, who’d just been elected to the lower house. At the same time, 163 brandnew, almost wholly inexperienced Five Star MPs also came under the media’s klieg lights. Unsurprisingly for a movement with no ideological consistency or message discipline, the MPs offered plenty of fodder. The new leader of the lower house, Five Star’s Roberta Lombardi, made front-page news when it came out that she had once written a blog post that seemed to defend fascism and its original “socialist-inspired sense of national community.” And a live feed in which the new MPs earnestly introduced themselves to the public was met with widespread mockery. “Hi, I’m Simona,” went one parody. “I  have a degree and I’m unemployed. I bend over backwards to manage my monthly budget and I want to be economy minister.” Casaleggio came to Rome to try to reassure the new MPs, many of whom had never met their party’s cofounder. “If we stay united,” he told them, “there’s no obstacle we can’t overcome.” Suffice it to say, they didn’t stay united. Several paradoxes were quickly emerging at the heart of the Five Star project. On the one hand, Casaleggio

Steve Bannon’s Recruitment Tour For the past couple of years, Steve Bannon— the former White House chief strategist and far-right impresario—has been trying to knit together Europe’s most strident populists into a supergroup called the Movement. He’s met with a host of nationalist leaders: Some have taken him up on the invitation; others see him as an unwelcome foreign influence. (Go figure.) Bannon has singled out Italy as “the center of the political universe” for its populist governing coalition between the left-leaning Five Star Movement and the anti-immigrant party Lega. But Five Star has held off on joining the Movement. Here’s how Bannon has fared with other leaders. —GRAHAM HACIA

BELGIUM Mischaël Modrikamen Cofounder of the Belgian People’s Party. Helped establish the Movement.

FRANCE Marine Le Pen Leader of France’s far-right National Rally. Met with Bannon but distanced herself.

S PA I N Santiago Abascal Leader of Spain’s ultraconservative VOX party. Said to count his party in.

I TA LY Matteo Salvini Interior minister and leader of the anti-immigrant party Lega. Said his party would join.

UK Jacob Rees-Mogg Pro-Brexit conservative parliamentarian. Said he has no interest.

GERMANY Alice Weidel Cofounder of the farright Alternative for Germany party. Called the project “exciting” but then backed away.

HUNGARY Viktor Orbán Prime minister and leader of the nationalist Fidesz party. Praised the idea but hasn’t committed.

CZECH REPUBLIC Milos˘ Zeman President of the Republic. Said “I absolutely disagree with his views.”

NETHERLANDS Geert Wilders Parliamentary leader of the anti-Islam Party for Freedom. Likes Bannon but hasn’t joined.

Has promised to join the Movement Has not joined

was busy developing the technology that would evenly distribute power across the breadth of the movement. By mid 2013, users of beppegrillo .it, still Five Star’s central website, could click through to a web portal where they could sign up as Five Star members, log in, and access a basic direct democracy platform—for the moment, a glorified web forum that let members review laws proposed by Five Star MPs, debate their content, and suggest wiki-style edits. Even still, users felt the thrill of direct participation in policymaking. But at the same time, Casaleggio was anxious to mold and prop up a few key leaders. Shortly after the elections, he invited a select group of the most telegenic young MPs to Milan for media and communications training. Di Battista, who had won a seat in the lower house, was one of them. So was Fico. They were joined by a young college dropout named Luigi Di Maio and a few others. The meetings were led by a TV coach who was skilled in, among other things, neuro-linguistic programming. Casaleggio began using the blog and, increasingly, social media to elevate this handpicked group to become the biggest political stars in Italy. They had little in common with each other, save that they had almost all been near-penniless young men before Casaleggio picked them up and mentored them. “Gianroberto was a second father to me,” Di Battista says. “He was the man who gave me the biggest opportunity of my life ... I have never known a person who knew how to listen like him.” Casaleggio maintained an arm’slength relationship with the rest of Five Star’s parliamentary caucus. He hired a former journalist named Nicola Biondo to help run the movement’s press office in Rome and to run herd on the other new members of Parliament. Biondo regretted taking on the role after just a few weeks on the job. The Five Star MPs were difficult to manage. They often ignored his advice; they tried to make TV appearances that hadn’t been sanctioned by

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Casaleggio or Grillo. Time and again, Biondo would get a call from Casaleggio saying: “Why are they saying that?” Things got worse when Casaleggio fell ill and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. “Some MPs tried to profit by his absence,” Biondo says. The web entrepreneur was desperate to stay in control of his wildly successful project, but he felt his grip weakening. Biondo recalls sitting in Casaleggio’s office one day; the older man placed a hand on Biondo’s leg and confided in him. “I’ve realized that in my political activity there are many people who wish me ill, who attack me with negative energy,” Casaleggio said. “I sense that so many people hate me.” Casaleggio seemed increasingly obsessed with the idea that people were out to get him. “He was constantly searching for people who would adore him, who would never question his intelligence,” says Biondo, who would go on to coauthor the book Supernova with Canestrari. Meanwhile, dissenters began to be expelled from the movement—one for going on TV without permission, another for criticizing the running of the party as a “feudal system of loyalty.” One MP was kicked out for calling Five Star a “cult of fanatics” in which criticism was not permitted. The movement was streamlining. MPs were reportedly told to hand over the usernames and passwords to their email accounts; some gave Casaleggio Associates access to their social media accounts as well. Rising stars like Di Battista and Di Maio were constantly posting on Facebook to their hundreds of thousands of followers, and Casaleggio appointed employees at his firm to study Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to monitor which social media posts went viral, so their success could be replicated. According to Biondo, Casaleggio was also building his online movement into an army of “digital soldiers” that could be steered against political adversaries, establishment figures, and internal dissenters alike.

“He did the same on the blog as he did at Webegg,” Biondo says. “This is called social engineering.” Although Grillo’s blog had supposedly been founded to combat the virtual reality—the “Matrix”— of traditional media, Casaleggio’s employees at times peddled dubious information themselves. Some posts on the blog attacked obligatory vaccination in Italy, regurgitating unfounded claims that vaccines were linked to autism. The site also began to lead its readers toward political conclusions that strayed somewhat from Five Star’s origins. Despite the movement’s vaguely progressive cast of mind, Casaleggio himself had long harbored certain right-wing sympathies. He thought the rights of citizens should not become subservient to international bodies like the European Union, and he respected that populist parties like Lega often called for referenda in the name of self-determination. (As it happens, Casaleggio and the founders of Lega both share a common inspiration: the political philosophy of Adriano Olivetti.) And as Five Star attained real political power, Casaleggio set about steering it to the right. In 2014, Italian voters sent 17 members of Five Star to serve in the European Parliament, the body that oversees the European Union. According to one of the movement’s young delegates to Brussels, Marco Zanni, Casaleggio quickly made it clear that he wanted Five Star to ally with the UK Independence Party—the party led by far-right British provocateur Nigel Farage, whose lifelong mission was to get Britain to leave the European Union—in the EU Parliament. Five Star’s web portal now included a tool for subjecting important decisions to an online vote, and so the decision on whether to ally with UKIP was put to the movement: direct democracy in action. But in the days and weeks before the vote, Casaleggio published articles on the blog hailing Farage as a democratic crusader against a monolithic EU. “Farage Defends the Sovereignty of

the Italian People,” read one headline. Another article, entitled “N i g e l Fa r a g e , T h e T r u t h ,” listed UKIP’s supposedly progressive credentials, such as being an “antiwar … democratic organization” where “no form of racism, sexism, or xenophobia is tolerated,” and which believes in “direct democracy.” The post that finally teed up the online vote made it very clear that the proposed alliance with UKIP was the best and only solution. According to Zanni, this was Casaleggio Associates’ modus operandi when it came to online votes: Provide a “cosmetic” appearance of choice while pushing for a particular option. In the end, 78 percent of the members who voted opted to join Farage. After years of studying how to shape online consensus, Casaleggio had mastered the art.

T THE ALLIANCE WITH UKIP was just

the beginning. On a crisp morning in January 2015, Casaleggio Associates received some unusual visitors: Farage, Raheem Kassam—then a UKIP strategist, later a Breitbart London editor and aide to Steve Bannon on his European missions—and Liz Bilney, the future CEO of proBrexit campaign group Leave.EU.

The group wanted to learn how Five Star had pulled off its stunning political rise, and to grasp how it used technology—“to understand the mechanics of it all,” Bilney says. Casaleggio and his son, Davide, gave them a briefing that offered a timeline of important events in web-based politics and the development of Five Star. Then father and son explained the new and improved direct democracy platform they were developing for the movement. Soon, they said, registered members would be able to propose laws and debate and edit them, as well as use the portal to put themselves forward and select candidates in online ballots. As an engine for user engagement—a crucial metric in social media as in politics—the platform seemed formidable. Farage “thought it was fascinating,” Bilney says, “because UKIP were keen to build their membership.” Kassam agrees that Farage was “very excited” by the meeting. “He wanted me to go and look into the systems that they used,” Kassam says, “and how UKIP might implement them.” The Casaleggios didn’t share much technical know-how with the group, but Kassam was impressed by how many resources they were dedicating to Five Star’s digital operations and data analysis. Bilney, for her part, left the meeting buzzing with ideas about the way Five Star used social media. It was this meeting, she says, that “planted the seed of ideas” that would lead to the success of Brexit. Leave.EU was founded six months after the Milan meeting, and a year after that the UK voted to leave the EU. (Bilney is now under criminal investigation for allegedly breaking spending rules.) A few months after the meeting, a post on Grillo’s blog announced that the new version of Five Star’s online direct democracy platform was almost ready. It would be called Rousseau, and it would serve as the Five Star Movement’s mobilefriendly “operating system.” After users logged in, they would land on a homepage with different primary-

colored windows for voting on candidates and party decisions, as well as for proposing and debating laws, participating in fund-raising, and more. Beppe Grillo had known that Rousseau—the long-awaited, all-singing, all-dancing version of the direct democracy web portal—was on its way. What he hadn’t been told was that Casaleggio Associates was also building a new website that would supplant beppegrillo.it as the online home of Five Star. Fearing he was being squeezed out, Grillo confronted Casaleggio. As recounted in the book Supernova, the phone call quickly turned sour: “Vaffanculo!” Casaleggio yelled down the line. “I never want to hear from you again.” Those were the last words Grillo would ever hear from Casaleggio. Grillo initially agreed to a written interview for this article, only to later demand 1,000 euros per question, with a minimum of eight questions. I wondered if it was a weird joke—Grillo is famous for his offbeat humor—but a few days later a post appeared on his blog detailing his new tariff for conversations with the press. WIRED does not pay for interviews. Despite Grillo’s vital role in the rise of Five Star, Casaleggio arranged,

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from his deathbed, for the ascension of his son, Davide, to a position of great power within the movement. Legal documents signed just before Casaleggio’s death state that Rousseau was to be managed by a new organization, the Rousseau Association. The documents also set up Davide Casaleggio, the new CEO of Casaleggio Associates, to be the Rousseau Association’s president and treasurer. He is, in short, the absolute ruler of Five Star’s data. (Casaleggio declined to speak with WIRED.) Five Star’s MPs are forced by new rules to pay 300 euros a month toward the running of the platform. Grillo, for his part, retained the rights to Five Star’s name and logo. On April 12, 2016, Gianroberto Casaleggio died in Milan at the age of 61. As his coffin was carried out of the church that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, a throng of Five Star supporters chanted “Onesta!” (“Honesty!”)—a party slogan. Di Maio and a tearful Di Battista led the chorus. Also in attendance was Umberto Bossi, the founder of Lega. Outside the funeral, a banner read: “We will realize your dream.” The day after Casaleggio died, Rousseau went live. As the 2018 national elections approached, Five Star took one more step away from its original conception as a horizontal, leaderless movement: Via an online ballot on Rousseau, it set about choosing an official party chief. Once again, the contest offered a somewhat cosmetic appearance of choice. Of the best-known, highly groomed members of Five Star, only Luigi Di Maio ran for the job. Fico and Di Battista kept their heads down. So Di Maio was pitted against a slate of relative unknowns, including Elena Fattori. To no one’s surprise, Di Maio won, becoming Five Star’s leader at 31 years old in the fall of 2017. Only about 30 percent of Rousseau’s members voted. Afterward, Grillo began to distance himself from the movement. In January 2018, when Grillo relaunched his blog, there wasn’t a Five Star logo in sight.

O O N M A RC H 4 , 2018, Five Star par-

ticipated in its second national election. This time, Nugnes, the architect turned parliamentarian, watched the coverage on TV alongside activists and representatives in a hotel in central Naples. Unlike in 2013, everyone knew Five Star would do well. But the final results were nevertheless stunning—with 33 percent of the vote, and after just five years in parliament, Five Star had become the largest party in Italy. While her colleagues celebrated, Nugnes worried. “I just saw right away that the overall picture was very disquieting,”

she says. Right-wing parties—particularly Lega—had performed well too, off the back of a fiercely antiimmigrant campaign. Nugnes watched uneasily as Five Star tried to form a government, seeming to go against the movement’s original “no alliances” principle. From the start, it was clear that Di Maio— who had criticized the previous, centrist government for presiding over a corrupt, NGO-run “sea taxi” service for migrants to Italy—favored a deal with Lega. Nugnes, who had made a name during the previous five years as an outspoken senator, wrote a scathing post on Facebook about the prospect of an alliance with “he who wants to end immigration,” referring to Lega’s leader, Salvini. “I wouldn’t get into the same elevator,” she went on, “or breathe the same air.” After nearly 90 days of talks, Five Star and Lega came to an agreement; Di Maio and Salvini would share power as deputy prime ministers. When the agreement went up for a vote before Five Star’s members via Rousseau, an astounding 94 percent approved the deal. Movement heavyweights insist that the agreement isn’t an alliance. “If it were an alliance, it would be completely different,” Fico says, explaining that the two parties had instead

“Vaffanculo!” Casaleggio yelled down the line. I never want to hear from you again.” Those were the last words Grillo would ever hear from Five Star’s cofounder.

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A Five Star demonstration in Rome in 2013, shortly after the movement sent 163 of its members to serve in Italy’s Parliament.

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arrived at a “contract” on a specific program of legislation—a contract that included, crucially, Five Star’s cherished plan for a universal basic income. The new Italian government was hailed by populists around the world. “What is happening here is extraordinary. There has never been a truly populist government in modern times,” Bannon told La Repubblica. “I want to be a part of it.” Bannon gloated that he had advised Salvini to make the deal with Five Star, and he claimed that he had advised Five Star as well. A source close to Bannon confirmed to WIRED that when he was in Rome in June, Bannon met with Davide Casaleggio. Days after the new government took power, Salvini—assuming a dual role as both interior minister and deputy PM—closed Italy’s ports to migrant rescue boats and proposed a census of the country’s Roma community ahead of possible expulsions. Some four months later, Five Star’s universal basic income was approved by Parliament in the government’s annual budget. Di Maio promptly took to the balcony of the parliamentary palace to punch the air in celebration. “We’re going to end up with machines replacing many of today’s jobs,” he tells me later, echoing a common argument in Silicon Valley. “The basic income can be a tool not just to help struggling families but one that allows us to face the fourth industrial revolution.” The EU has denounced Italy’s universal basic income as profligate. The country’s public debt stands at 2.3 trillion euros, or 130 percent of the country’s GDP, which far exceeds EU limits; authorities in Brussels fear that Italy’s spendthrift budget will cause the country to default on its loans. Salvini quickly seized on Europe’s rejection of the policy to drum up anti-EU support. As his rants against immigration and the EU continue, Lega is soaring past Five Star in opinion polls. Di Maio has done little to push back against the government’s rightward turn, even as the rebels in

his party are growing more defiant. Nugnes and Fattori have both courted expulsion from Five Star over the past year, after refusing to vote with the party at times. They have been subjects of internal investigation, severe criticism by Di Maio, and storms of online abuse. “If they expel me, it will mean that this is no longer the right place for me,” Nugnes says. But she adds: “There are so many like me in the movement. No one can know the future of the movement.” Many believe that the future of the movement is Alessandro Di Battista. The popular former MP decided not to run for election in 2018, despite being omnipresent during the campaign; he says he wanted to get back to the “real world” outside Parliament for a while. Insiders speculate that the real aim of his political hiatus is to avoid hitting his mandatory two-term limit. Once his ally Di Maio’s time is up, many figure, Di Battista will take over the party’s leadership. Of all the movement’s leaders, Di Battista is Five Star’s unabashed Casaleggian radical. On a scratchy WhatsApp line from Guatemala, where he has passed much of his time out of power, Di Battista comes out swinging when I ask about Five Star’s apparent rightward slide: “Today, whoever wants to take back sovereignty is considered a fascist, a nationalist, a populist, a demagogue,” he says. Such allegations, he says, are just another case of media elites missing the point. “The world can’t be judged from an attic in Manhattan. They don’t understand anything—just as they understood nothing of Trump and Brexit, just as they’ve understood nothing about the Five Star Movement.” For Di Battista, Five Star’s grand techno-utopian project is never far from sight. “Representative democracy is obsolete,” he tells me. It will soon be as old hat as absolute monarchy seems to us today. “The future is inevitably direct democracy,” he says. But who knows if that future will be quite as inevitable without a hidden hand to steer it.

COLOPHON BURNING QUESTIONS THAT HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT: Why does everything look bigger when I wear contact lenses? Did brontosauruses get bronchitis? Can people really change? Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Is it possible to get 100 percent in Red Dead Redemption 2 without the internetz? How do I keep my dog from nosing through the cat’s litter box? What’s really to be gained from Dry January? How is Joan Ocean so powerful? What does potable water taste like? Why would someone steal the old underwear my mom shipped me? Alexa, what’s the weather forecast today? How do I keep my new kitten from clawing my new sofa? Will CES ever be over? Why do children insist on touching everything? Why can’t medicine for kids taste better? Why does anyone tell Facebook their real birthday? Why is Google Drive so slow? Who invented liquid soap and why? Can Matt Pike’s amps go any louder? What did you look like 10 years ago? What is TikTok for again? When will this all end? WI R E D is a registered trademark of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2019 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Volume 27, No. 3. WI R E D (ISSN 1059– 1028) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Editorial office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Principal office: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885 RT0001.

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