Imagine a future

where your life is measured by a number—three digits

that dictate your place in society.
That future is now.
048

january 2018
| add it up
 26.01
LAUNCH

“WE ALLOW
TECHNOLOGISTS TO
PROPOSE

THE UNTHINKABLE
AND CONVINCE US THE
U N T H I N K A B L E I S AC T UA L LY
PAGE 86 THE INEVITABLE .”

JAN 2018 DAN WINTERS 0 0 3

 26.01
FE ATURES

48 You Are a Number

Imagine a future where a
three-digit score dictates
your place in society. In
China, that future is now.
BY MARA HVISTENDAHL

60
The Terror-Industrial
Complex
A weapons investiga-
tor uncovers the disturb-
ing supply chain for the
Islamic State’s munitions
production factories.
BY BRIAN CASTNER

74
Game On
A new pro league aims
to bring videogame
competition into the
mainstream—and upend
the world of sports.
B Y N AT H A N H I L L
STYLING BY NICOLE SCHNEIDER; ON-SET STYLING BY CRISTINA FACUNDO

86
Something to
Watch Over Me
One company thinks it
has the answer to the
senior caregiver short-
age: Let tech do the job.
BY LAUREN SMILEY

JAN 2018 DAN WINTERS 0 0 5

 CONTENTS

26.01 20 GADGET LAB

3 Launch
Noted by the editor 32
8 Release Notes
Behind the scenes of this issue

10 Comments
Reader rants and raves

AALPHA
The Martian
Say hello to Justin, the AI-fortified Fetish: Big Foot
space robot The revolutionary snowshoe that’s
built like a flip-flop

13 22 The Single Best Thing We Did

Live Long and Prosper
Silicon Valley’s immortalists will
help us all stay healthy
BY JASON PONTIN
Why the ISS matters
24 Infoporn: Battery Charge
The challenges of powering our
bright e-car future
25 Real or Fake
Tech-enabled boosts for baby
26 The Body Electric
Smart prosthetics that twist,
grab, and see
26 Jargon Watch
Responsible encryption
34 Gearhead: Sleet Smarts
The perfect ski equipment for nasty
weather
36 Gearhead: Powder Play
Prepare for dazzling days on the
slopes
38 How-To: Snow Angles
Six tips for capturing epic footage
with your action camera
39 Benchmark: Gore-Tex
The accidental origins of an outdoor
essential

14 Best of Times 28 Self-Helpers

Daniel Pink on the science of when

FILE: //
My week living with chatbots

29 Angry Nerd
16 Enough with the brain-dead 40 Eye of the Storm
AI metaphors Meet Eric Berger, leisure-time
meteorologist, predictor of
Harvey’s floods, unlikely hero.

30 BY CHRIS JONES

SIX BY SIX
96 Stories by WIRED readers
Rules of the Game
Mandela Schumacher-Hodge on
diversifying the Valley

ON THE COVER
18 Designs Within Robotic Reach Positive Energy Photographed for WIRED by Dan Winters.
How to build a droid-optimized The sunny optimism of clean tech Styling by Nicole Schneider. On-set styling
home BY CLIVE THOMPSON by Cristina Facundo.

0 0 6 JAN 2018
 RELEASE NOTES

a kind of nerd reli-

gion,” he says. For
Pontin, who was until
recently editor in
chief of MIT Technol-
ogy Review, improv-
ing quality of life is
more plausible than
living past 120. Most
In “You Are a Num- people in intensive
ber” (page 48), Pulit- care units are old and
zer Prize finalist Mara sick, he notes. “If we
Hvistendahl explores could cure the dis-
how a Chinese tech eases of old age, the
giant is monitoring great benefit would
people’s behavior be a healthier, hap-
and assigning a score pier life while we’re
that determines each here.” His essay on
person’s trustworthi- antiaging efforts is on
ness. While in Shang- page 13.
hai, Hvistendahl
became the acciden-
tal star of another
project: “I went into
one of these cashless
convenience stores
meant to encourage
people to use mobile
payments. There was
▲
a South Korean film
crew there, and they Writer Nathan Hill
Photographer Andrea
DiCenzo, center, pinned ended up making me spent quite a bit of
down by sniper fire in their subject.” She time playing World of
the remains of a Mosul, scanned her phone Warcraft after finish-
Iraq, hotel in 2017. at a QR reader to get ing grad school. But
in, picked out a bottle those hours didn’t
of water, and flashed go to waste: He
STEADY CAM her phone again to used his expertise
check out. Then the to shape his novel
film crew descended, about gaming, The

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF MARA HVISTENDAHL; MICHAEL LIONSTAR; COURTESY OF JASON PONTIN
asking her how it felt. Nix, which is now
“I mean, it was conve- being developed
nient,” she says. “It’s by JJ Abrams for
probably the future.” television. For this

A
issue, Hill turned his
attention to the rise
NDREA DICENZO is an experienced conflict zone photogra- of esports leagues
pher, but her assignment for “The Terror-Industrial Com- DiCenzo flew to Bagh- (page 74). The pro
dad (1) then drove north gamers he profiles
plex” (page 60) posed a unique challenge: getting lethally to Al Qayyarah (2), Tal make it look easy to
close to live ISIS munitions. Embedding with arms inves- Afar (3), and Mosul (4), play the first-person
returning to Erbil (5). shooter Overwatch
tigators in northern Iraq, the Erbil-based photographer
▲ in a 450-seat arena,
traveled deep into territory only streamed to hun-
recently wrested from the Islamic Decades ago, as the dreds of thousands
3 4 5
State, where the team found a make- editor of a science of viewers. But when
2
journal, Jason Pontin Hill played the game
shift weapons factory filled with dozens of became fascinated himself, he quickly
mortars, rockets, and bomblets. “They were by Silicon Valley discovered that even
absolutely terrifying,” DiCenzo says, “but 1 elites who thought the casual compe-
Iraq science and technol- tition was stiff. “I
it’s much better than having munitions ogy could be used was shocked when I
hurled at you, which was the case when I to achieve everlast- started playing other
was covering the Mosul offensive.” She let the ing life. “It struck me humans for the first
as bizarre that other- time,” he says. “I
more seasoned arms specialists handle the wise intelligent peo- died so quickly. And
explosives before she photographed them. ple were embracing so incredibly often.”

0 0 8 YAN BOECHAT JAN 2018

 COMMENTS
COMME @WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

Re: “The Reckoning: also the same kind

Who’ll take respon- of thinking that will
sibility for Face- give this country a
book?” President Kid Rock.”
“To equate Facebook Theo Reeves
affecting the Trump via email
presidency with the
structural integrity “Mark Zuckerberg
of buildings where is an object lesson
an act of terror cost in the difference
more than 2,600 between smart
ANDROID DREAMS lives is … shall I say and wise.”
it, deplorable. It is jrw on WIRED.com

“Zuckerberg
“Zu isn’t
FOR OUR NOVEMBER cover story, writer Alex Mar meditated on robot- to blame if people
legally
leg
g use Face-
icist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s eerily lifelike androids. Adam Fisher traveled bo
book in a way others
to Paris to catch up on famed technologist Tony Fadell’s plot to get do
don’t like. What the
back at Silicon Valley. Virginia Heffernan challenged Mark Zucker-
Zucker Ru
Russians did is no
diff
different from what
berg to take responsibility for his creation. And Richard Conniff took mi
millions
i of users do.
a look at illegal logging in Peru—and shed light on a frustratingly At the end of the
opaque black market that has dire environmental consequences. day
day, it’s the consum-
er’
er’s responsibility to
Readers responded: be able to discern
tru
truth from baloney.”
Jes
Jesse Kleitman
on (what else?)
Fa
Facebook
Re: “Payback Time: Tony Fadell created the iPod and Nest, then lost
control of them. His next project could be his most ambitious yet:
taking on Silicon Valley itself.”

“HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A Re: “Love in the Time of Robots: Hiroshi
Ishiguro builds androids. Beautiful, realistic,

FADELL SCORNED BY SILICON

uncannily convincing human replicas. But his
true quest is to untangle the ineffable nature

VALLEY (TWICE). GREAT READ.”

of connection itself.”
“At a certain point it’s not the mechanics
that’s the problem. We can sculpt, we can
make animatronics, etc., but we’ve been
Max Pike (@mack_spike) on Twitter doing those things for a very, very long time.
The software, the AI, is the big hill that we
still can’t see over the top of.”
Alexander Diogenes on Facebook
Re: “Invisible Forest: For years,
timber barons in the Amazon “I remember waaaay back on my Commodore
have sent lumber to the US by 64 I had a program called Little Computer
the shipload. But many of the People that pretended to be your friend. It
groves they harvested were was funny how hard it was to remember that
pure fiction.” Steve wasn’t real, and that was an incredibly
“As a Brazilian citizen I have seen simple application. A sophisticated and con-
news about similar situations vincing algorithm will be very difficult for our
too many times, and we still see brains to resist.”
powerful people involved with RamenAvenger on Reddit
this kind of illegal activity. In the
end, it isn’t their children that “The real burning question here is: Will Hiro-
pay the price of the devastation shi Ishiguro’s android replicant be able to
caused by this ‘wood mafia.’ ” unlock his iPhone X?”
Kim Vilá on Facebook Zander Scot (@ZanderScot) on Twitter

0 1 0 JAN 2018
 PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS

Witness the spectacle

of spectacular.

Jan. 9-12, 2018 Ι Las Vegas, NV

Register now at CES.tech

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW @WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK

ARGUMENT

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

TECH’S IMMORTALISTS WILL
HELP US ALL STAY HEALTHY ALPHA

By Jason Pontin

IN EARLY 1954, POPE PIUS XII sum­

moned a venerable Swiss quack
named Paul Niehans to the papal
retreat at Castel Gandolfo. The
pontiff was nauseated with gas­
tritis, fatigued by his 77 years,
and loath to meet his maker. So he
had Niehans administer an anti­
aging treatment called cell ther­
apy, which would become sought
after by midcentury celebrities,
artists, and politicians.
Fetal cells were taken from a
pregnant sheep and injected into
the scrawny pope. Over time, Pius
received a series of shots. The
Holy Patient felt rejuvenated;
Niehans was appointed to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
in thanks. But if the treatments
worked at all, it wasn’t for long:
Pius died four years later.
Niehans’ Clinique La Prairie is
still in business, charging tens of
thousands of dollars for its week­
long “revitalization program.”
But today the death­phobic
elite demand more scientif­

january Alpha theme:

Life-extension tech, perfect timing hacks, self-help bots, AI boosts, smart limbs, robo-optimized design, and more.
power-ups

JAN 2018 JAVIER JAÉN 0 1 3

 ALPHA
ically sound approaches. Inves-
tor Peter Thiel is reportedly
“really interested” in the blood
of the young. Based on an old
idea called parabiosis, the ther-
apy excited new enthusiasm after
a 2013 paper showed that a pro-
tein richly abundant in young
blood made old mice stronger.
For $8,000, a company named
Ambrosia will now infuse older
patients with the blood serum
of donors aged 16 to 25.
All over Silicon Valley and the
regions that imitate it, execu-
tives follow weird revitalization
fads. They think the code of aging
can be hacked and death made
optional. Daniel Gross, a partner
at Y Combinator, fasts enthusias-
tically—and encourages others to
do so—because he believes it will
extend his life. Inventor Ray Kurz-
weil swallows 100 supplements a
day for the same reason, presum-
ably so he’ll live long enough to
be uploaded into the singularity,
circa 2045.
But you don’t have to be a
prophet of posthumanism to
wish for a few more good years.
I’ve followed my own antiaging
routines: For a time I ate 30 per-
cent fewer calories than recom-
mended, and I now starve myself
for 16 of every 24 hours. And while
there’s certainly plenty of folly in
the tech elite’s quest for immor-
tality, I’m glad they’ve embarked
on it—for reasons that go beyond
sheer entertainment value.
UNHAPPILY FOR MEÑand every-
one else—we’ve made little prog-
ress in extending the outer limit
of the human lifespan. Yes, more
people are living longer because
we’ve gotten better at nutrition,
curing acute conditions such as
infections, and treating a hand-
ful of chronic diseases. But the
maximum reported age at death
has plateaued at around 115 years.
0 1 4
What’s tantalizing, however,
are the breakthroughs in extend-
ing the healthy lifespan of other
species. Two decades ago, UC
San Francisco researcher Cyn-
thia Kenyon showed that a muta-
tion in a single gene can allow a
roundworm to live twice as long.
WE’LL STILL DIE WHEN WE DO
NOW, BUT WE’LL BE HEALTHIER
WHILE WE’RE STILL LIVING.
And at MIT, biologists Leonard
Guarente and David Sinclair dis-
covered that a class of genes
called sirtuins regulates longev-
ity in a wide range of organisms.
Restricting the calories of yeast
made them overexpress a partic-
ular sirtuin, extending their life-
spans; mice genetically altered to
overproduce the mammalian ver-
sion lived longer and had fewer
age-related diseases.
But for all those animal dis-
coveries, human aging is a prob-
lem that the biomedical industry
and its regulatory agencies are
ill-suited to solve. It’s not a dis-
ease recognized by the FDA,
and testing drugs for human life
extension would be costly and
time-consuming. As Sinclair says,
“The aging field is thriving sci-
entifically. But the translation of
findings into treatments is poorly
funded. Compared to heart dis-
ease and diabetes, the dollars
allocated to aging are, at best, a
hundred to one. But all it will take
is one success to change the way
people think.”
So far, the search for that first
big success is stuck in the weeds.
Elixir Pharmaceuticals, a com-
pany cofounded by Kenyon and
Guarente to develop therapies
that target aging, failed to create
such a drug. Sirtris, founded by
Sinclair, was equally unsuccess-
ful. And while restricting calories
is the best way we know to extend
lifespans in organisms from yeast
to mice, attempts to create medi-
cines that harness the genes acti-
vated by caloric restriction have
failed FDA approval.
But there are still plenty of
enticing leads. Sinclair offers
up a list of polysyllabic possibil-
ities: “Super metformin, rapalogs,
NAD boosters, mitochondrial
activators, senolytics.” Self-
experimenters are already play-
ing with this menu of molecules.
Some aspiring immortalists have
long taken resveratrol, a com-
pound found in red wine proven
to activate sirtuins. Stem cell
pioneer Robert Hariri swears by
metformin, a diabetes drug that
may extend the healthy lifespan of
the general population. The most
daring are rumored to use rapa-
mycin, a powerful drug that pre-
vents organ transplant rejection.
Rapamycin inhibits a key meta-
bolic pathway called mTOR that
caloric restriction shuts down,
initiating a process where dys-
functional cellular components
are degraded and recycled. No one
old or sick should take rapamycin
lightly, because it suppresses the
immune system, but safer thera-
pies based on analogs of rapamy-
cin, or rapalogs, could be the first
real antiaging medicines.
Even if these ideas become
commercial medicines, they
won’t magically remove the lim-
its on the human lifespan. There
is no master switch for aging.
Jason Pontin We amass damage as we live,
(@jason_pontin)
is a writer living in and damage to our DNA leads
Cambridge, Massa- to cell disease and senescence;
chusetts. He is the the telomeres that cap our chro-
former editor in chief
and publisher of MIT mosomes shorten and fray, plac-
Technology Review. ing a hard stop on the number of

times our cells divide. The mito­
chondria that produce energy in
those cells flicker out. But these
emerging therapies will treat the
ravages of old age. They will help
us stay healthier longer, even if
we still die more or less when we
do now. Gerontologists call this
“compression of morbidity,” and
it would be a wonderful humani­
tarian advance. In industrialized
countries, old age would no longer
mean a ghostly, semidemented,
decades­long senescence.
Kafka once said, “There is
infinite hope. But not for us.”
Death is not optional. But Silicon
Valley immortalists are humani­
ty’s guinea pigs: They fund anti­
aging research, they experiment
on themselves, and they’ll be
the first consumers of approved
treatments, regardless of price.
And as the costs of successful
therapies inevitably drop, their
efforts will trickle down to the
rest of us. Long live them all. �
POWER-UPS
contests, later sing-
ers advanced more
often, and those who
went last had a 10 to
15 percent greater
chance of moving on.
Research suggests
that judges start out
idealistic—evalu-
ating contestants
against an imaginary
goal—but then set-
tle into a less lofty
baseline. One excep-
tion: election ballots.
Voters tend to pick
the first name on the
list, whether they’re
choosing city council-
lors or prom kings.
Resist the “uh oh”
effect. Midpoints—of
work projects, train-
ing regimens, and
yeah, life—can either
discourage (the “oh
no” effect) or moti-
BEST OF TIMES
vate (“uh oh, time’s
running out”). UCLA
researchers studying
THE SCIENCE OF WHEN
teamwork found that
the majority of groups
did almost no work
until halfway to the
SCHEDULE SURGERIES, earnings calls, and therapy appoint­ deadline then sud-
denly buckled down.
ments before noon. Score the biggest bucks by switching Set interim goals and
jobs every three to five years. The ideal age to get hitched adopt the “chain”
(and avoid divorce): 32. In his new book, When: The Scientific technique: Pick a task
and mark a calendar
Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink scours psychological, with an X every day
biological, and economic studies to explore what he calls the you do it—the string
overlooked dimension. “Timing exerts an incredible effect of X’s serves as an
incentive.
on what we do and how we do it,” he says. Now that the sci­
ence of “when” is finally getting its due, Pink shares some Get it together.
temporal hacks to optimize your life. —Caitlin Harrington Whether it’s row-
ing, running, or flash
mobbing, synchro-
nized activities lower
Snag the first said, ‘You are getting gral to the architec- stress and provide
shift. Mood and the first appointment ture of a day’s work,” mind-body benefits.
energy levels follow of the day.’ ” Pink says. Columbia Singing in groups
predictable circadian University research- has been found to
rhythms based on our Brew before you ers found that judges improve self-esteem
genetically predis- snooze. The benefits doled out more and mitigate depres-
posed chronotype. of naps have been lenient sentences sion; in particular,
The average person’s well-documented—10 after breaks, and a choral singing can
mood bottoms out to 20 minutes of shut- CDC study showed increase pain thresh-
approximately seven eye sharpens cog- that kids with longer olds and improve
hours after waking, nitive ability without recesses earned bet- cancer patients’
between 2 and 4 pm. triggering a daze— ter grades. immune responses.
That’s when the inci- but a prenap coffee “It operates on a
dence of on-the-job can enhance those Bring up the rear. If physiological level,”
errors spikes—most benefits. The caffeine you’re competing in Pink says. “Their
notably at hospitals. kicks in after about a large group, wait hearts even beat in
“My daughter had her 25 minutes for a post- until the end to show- sync.” Next time you
wisdom teeth taken snooze brain boost. case your skills. In an hit the karaoke bar,
out a few months “Breaks need to be eight-country study relinquish that glory-
ago,” Pink says. “I thought of as inte- of American Idol–like hogging solo.
AARON FERNANDEZ JAN 2018
 ALPHA
POWER-UPS

HOW I FIGHT
VALLEY
PREJUDICE
⊲ Imagine you’re a black woman
pitching a startup. You look dif-
ferent. You talk different. A table
of white investors has never seen
someone who looks like you and
who’s been successful before.
All these things are working
against you. Do you let that stop
you, or do you just say so what?

⊲ That’s what I train entrepre-

neurs of color to think about.
When I first got to Silicon Val-
ley, I was just like them. My idea
of pitching was basically Shark
Tank. Then I met with Mitch and
Freada, at Kapor Capital, and we
sat around a table, just having a
conversation. They invested in my
ed-tech startup and eventually
hired me to help founders make
their companies more inclusive.
I’ve navigated this world from
multiple angles. I’ve had to adapt,
to learn this group’s language.
⊲ People of color always have
to adapt, to code-switch. That’s
part of winning over investors.
It’s a personal decision: How
much do you compromise your
culture, your norms, to play into
their norms, their culture? Some
will say it’s selling out. This will be
a little controversial, but I say you
can affect the situation. You can
learn the rules, study how funding
works, even just research inves-
tors’ likes and dislikes. That said,
it’s vital to not just put the burden
on underrepresented founders.
The system isn’t fair. Only some-
thing like 1 percent of VC-backed
startups are led by black found-
ers. VCs must be challenged to
change their rules.
⊲ Sure, some VC firms are diver-
sifying. Except then, guess what,
many of these new hires leave. It’s
not just about who you hire. It’s
about who you invite over for Sun-
day brunch, who you follow on
Twitter. Who follows you on Twit-
ter. How can you see the value of
an idea pitched by an underrepre-
sented founder—an idea for their
community—if you have no con-
text for their experience?
▲
⊲ Much of this world isn’t a meri-
tocracy. It’s a mirror-tocracy—the Diversity
people who make it tend to look Coach
like the people who’ve already
Mandela
made it. So a white man comes in Schumacher­
to pitch his startup. He’s a drop- Hodge
out from Harvard. “Wow, look,” recently left
Kapor Cap­
investors think. They see a smart ital to start
kid building a company. They may Founder Gym,
not see that Jamal, a black man, an online
resource for
came from a poverty-stricken underrepre­
environment. Do these VCs have sented entre­
any idea how many obstacles preneurs.
he’s had to overcome just to sit
across from them? That should
count. Distance traveled. Not just
pedigree and where you went to
school and what degrees you got.
Distance traveled. —As told to
Justice Namaste

0 1 6 JUSTIN KANEPS JAN 2018

 ALPHA

DESIGNS WITHIN
ROBOTS CAN WALK, talk, run a hotel … and are entirely stumped by a
doorknob. Or a mailbox. Or a dirty bathtub—zzzzt, dead. Sure, the
SpotMini, a doglike domestic helper from Boston Dynamics, can

ROBOTIC REACH
climb stairs, but it struggles to reliably hand over a can of soda. That’s
why some roboticists think the field needs to flip its perspective.

THE DROID-
“There are two approaches to building robots,” says Maya Cakmak,
a researcher at the University of Washington. “Make the robot more
humanlike to handle the environment, or design the environment to

OPTIMIZED HOME
make it a better fit for the robot.” Cakmak pursues the latter, and to
do that, she studies so-called universal design—the ways in which
buildings and products are constructed for older people or those
with disabilities. Robot can’t handle the twisting staircase? Put in
a ramp. As for that pesky doorknob? Make entryways motion-acti-
vated. If you want droids at your beck and call someday, start think-
ing about robo-fitting your digs now. —Andrew Rosenblum

12

8 6 3 4

5 10 11

7
 POWER-UPS
CHARTGEIST
BY JON J. EILENBERG

1. Wide-Open 8. Doors 2.0

Floor Plan
Since robots hate Netflix’s Bright
Any serious sans- turning spherical
human housekeep- knobs, install flat han-
ing needs a wheeled dles. Better yet, buy
robotic butler with automatic doors that
arms, Cakmak says. can be digitally trig-
That means fewer gered by sensors in
steps, plus hall- the bot—and do the Good cop Orc cop
ways wide enough 5. Upsized same with dressers
for U-turns. Oh, and Bathroom and anything else
hardwood floors. that opens.
Thick carpeting Roomba-type bath-
slows a bot’s roll. room cleaners can’t 9. Trackable
navigate spaces Humans
2. Visual behind toilets or the
Waypoints graduated curves If you’d rather your Law & Order: D&D Unit
around sinks and dinner party not be
Factory robots tubs. And that step interrupted, give bots
work so fast in part at the entrance to permission to track
because their world the shower (already your location via
is highly structured— a hazard to older your phone or fitness
conveyor belt here, people) is a barrier. wearable (“at table,”
truck over there. So Flatten the room and “by stove”). They’ll
for your robo-home, boxify toilet and tub. leave you alone Apps
create landmarks through dessert.
that anchor the bots 6. Matte
in space—a promi- Materials 10. Like by Like
nent light fixture,
say, that tells them, Depth-perception With droids capable
“You’re in the dining sensors in robots of feeding fresh
room.” (RFID tags wig out in the face of clothes into a folding Facebook Local
will help bots locate shiny or transparent machine, there’s
smaller objects, like objects, meaning no need to moni-
cleaning supplies.) your stainless-steel tor wash cycles any-
refrigerator and glass more. Just locate
3. Right Angles tabletops may have the laundry room
to go. Lock away near your walk-in
Imagine holding a fancy stemware in a closet for maximum
Trending event: breakfast
ball between two humans-only cabinet. efficiency. with your family
textbooks. Because Your spouse invited you.
each surface touches 7. Indoor Power 11. Gastrobotics
Going Interested Ignore
the sphere at only Station
a single point, it’s Bots won’t be cook-
easy to lose your Just like architects ing too many meals
grip. Robots have the design a nook for the from scratch (and you
same problem and refrigerator or stove, can’t be bothered),
do better holding flat, your robo-home so get a smart fridge
boxy surfaces. Swap will need space for they can stock with
out rounded dish- a power-up station. meal kits and a smart
ware for rectangu- Wireless recharging oven they can control Devices
lar coffee mugs and when the robot remotely. Mmm—bot-
square bowls. And rolls up to the zone made meals when-
use more plastic— will make it more ever you want.
there will be drops. unobtrusive. Maybe
right next to your 12. Raised Garden
4. Button-Free Tesla Powerwall?
Zone Solar-powered Apple AR glasses
horticultural bots
Machines struggle need plenty of
to “see” buttons—to sunlight and like
say nothing of push- their plants arranged
ing them. They’re in easy-to-navigate
much happier inter- rows and columns.
facing digitally with Put your garden
Wi-Fi-enabled (and on the roof, with a Comes preloaded with
buttonless) coffee nearby shed to store reality-distortion field
makers, stoves, and your autonomous
dishwashers. lawnmower.

MIKE ELLIS 0 1 9
 ALPHA

WHO: Justin—it was

completed “just
in” time for a
2006 trade show
HEIGHT: 6' 3''
WEIGHT: 440 pounds
LIFTING 31 pounds
STRENGTH: in each arm
UNEXPECTED Making tea
TALENT: and coffee

TOOL

THE
MARTIAN
WHEN HUMANS ARE finally ready to relocate civilization to Mars, they won’t be able to
do it alone. They’ll need trusted specialists with encyclopedic knowledge, composure

FORTIFIED
under pressure, and extreme endurance—droids like Justin. Built by the German space
agency DLR, such humanoid bots are being groomed to build the first martian habitat for
humans. Engineers have been refining Justin’s physical abilities for a decade; the mech

WITH A.I.
can handle tools, shoot and upload photos, catch flying objects, and navigate obstacles.
Now, thanks to new AI upgrades, Justin can think for itself. Unlike most robots, which
have to be programmed in advance and given explicit instructions for nearly every
movement, this bot can autonomously perform complex tasks—even those it hasn’t
been programmed to do—on a planet’s surface while being supervised by astronauts in orbit. Object recogni-
tion software and computer vision let Justin survey its environment and undertake jobs such as cleaning and
maintaining machinery, inspecting equipment, and carrying objects. In a recent test, Justin fixed a faulty solar
panel in a Munich lab in minutes, directed via tablet by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.
One small chore for Justin, one giant leap for future humankind. —anna vlasits

0 0 0 URS BIGLER
 POWER-UPS

Eyes

Hi-def cameras and

sensors embedded
in the head generate
a 3-D view of Justin’s
surroundings.

Hands

Eight jointed fingers

allow the bot to deftly
handle tools.

Probe

An R2D2-style data
interface means
Justin can sync up
to computers and
data collection sta- Base
tions. Eventually
it will be able to charge Justin’s protocols
its own battery by are stored onboard,
plugging into a solar so it can complete
power unit. tasks and save data
even if communica-
tion links fail.

Wheels

DLR tested Justin’s

future all-terrain
robot wheels atop
an active volcano.

JAN 2018 0 2 1
 ALPHA
POWER-UPS
THE SINGLE BEST
THING WE DID
WHY THE ISS MATTERS
THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION is one of the few non-
stellar things up there that we can see from down here
without instruments. It’s a prefab home the size of a foot-
ball field, 462 tons and more than $100 billion worth of
pressurized roomlike modules and gleaming solar arrays,
orbiting 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Its
flight path is available online, and you can find out when
it will make a nighttime pass over your backyard. Right
on schedule, you’ll spot an unblinking white light that’s
moving at 17,500 miles an hour. It will cross your field of
view, on a line straight enough to have been drawn with a
ruler, in only a few seconds. A few minutes more and the
men and women inside that light will be over Greece. A
few minutes more, Mongolia.
There have been 53 expeditions to the ISS; 53 long-duration crews
have called it home since Expedition 1 floated aboard in 2000. They’ve
been mostly from America and Russia, the two principal and unlikely
partners in one of the most expensive and challenging construction
projects ever completed. (The ISS rose out of the ashes of two pre-
vious space stations: Russia’s Mir, last occupied in 1999 before it
fell out of the sky in 2001, and Ronald Reagan’s proposed Freedom,
which never got past the blueprints.) Its first few residents came and
went largely without incident, conducting scientific experiments
in everything from fluid dynamics to zero-G botany while study-
ing what month after weightless month can do to the human body.
In November 2002, Expedition 6 arrived on the station’s doorstep.
They were two Americans, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit, and a Rus-
sian, Nikolai Budarin. They were supposed to complete a four-month
tour in orbit. Then the shuttle Columbia dissolved into a finger of
smoke somewhere beneath them in February 2003. The remaining
shuttles were grounded, and the men of Expedition 6 were asked to
extend their stay. They were told that they might come home in a few
months. They might come home in a year. Maybe longer.
Bowersox has three children. Living in space is dangerous and dirty—
so much can go wrong, and everything floats—but that time away is a
different kind of hard for the families left behind. Bowersox’s children
would bundle up time and again that winter and head
outside to wait for him to appear in the sky. He would
rocket over their heads. One of his children, his then
By Chris Jones 5-year-old son, didn’t quite understand the nature
(@EnswellJones), of orbital velocity, and he would sprint down the
who also writes street, chasing his dad, trying to keep him in sight.
about weather blog-
ger Eric Berger on In the end, Expedition 6 came home in a Russian
page 40. Soyuz capsule, only a couple of months after their
0 2 2 BEN WISEMAN
original return date. Their dramatic descent
didn’t make many headlines, and, except for
Scott Kelly’s recent year-long stint in space,
none of the subsequent 47 expeditions have
garnered much attention either. Few of us
give a thought to the International Space
Station, even though, when the future mea-
sures our collective contribution to human-
ity, the ISS will prove the single best thing
we did. Less than a century after the Model T
was state of the art, we manufactured a kind
of galleon in space and have sent men and
women from 10 countries to live in it, along
with a host of short-term visitors, without
recess or mutiny or fatality, for nearly 20
years. By the time the ISS makes its fiery
return to Earth, possibly in the late 2020s,
it will have become a stepping stone to lunar
colonies and the first human mission to Mars.
It will have taught us so much about our abil-
ity to adapt to the most hostile of environ-
ments. The most beautiful too.
Tonight there are a half-dozen brave peo-
ple, including three Americans, wrapped up
in sleeping bags strapped to the cluttered
walls there, dreaming of their families and
gravity and everything else they’re missing.
They are heroes, but the chances are slim that
you could recall any of their names. Maybe
it will make you feel better to remember
instead, if only for the time it takes for the
station to cross your night sky, that while
everything can seem so awful and cynical
here at home, we are still capable of distant
miracles. Right now the International Space
Station is hurtling through space, and so
is its crew, which means so are we, living in
its constant light. �
JAN 2018
 16%
ALPHA
1 How Many Gas Cars
Would Get Replaced?
The countries that want bans are huge markets
for vehicle sales. If demand for personal
cars stays constant, we can use current sales
to estimate how many EVs we will need.

35 OF ANNUAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS IN

THE U.S. COME FROM PASSENGER VEHICLES.

INFOPORN

BATTERY
30 2 Bring on the Batteries
Projected Cumulative
All those new EVs are going to need

CHARGE
Sales of EVs as More
Countries Enact Bans batteries. Tesla is projecting to
produce 35 gigawatt-hours’ worth
25 annually, but the world is going
to need way more than that. Today,

CLEAN
consumer electronics are the
chief users of batteries, but cars are
about to overtake them—by a lot.

JUICE FOR
20

900 Gigawatt Hours

of Batteries Needed

E-CARS
800

700

15 600
2016 EV ELECTRIC
SALES FOR 500 VEHICLES

GWh
THESE 7
COUNTRIES: CHINA 400
502,038 24,040,902
IF WE HOPE to put the brakes on 300
PORTABLE
climate change, we need more 200
DEVICES
10
NORWAY GERMANY
electric vehicles, and they’ve 105, 523 3,326,995
100

recently gotten an extra boost. 0

16

18

6
2

2
2

2
To reduce the emissions of car-

0
0

0
2

2
2

2
NETHERLANDS UNITED KINGDOM
bon dioxide that contribute to 358,348 2,654,874
5
FRANCE
global warming, at least seven 1,985,670

countries have announced or

are considering plans to ban the INDIA
2,966,187 Elon Musk’s characterization
sales of cars with internal com- 0
of the small quantity of
bustion engines in the next 10 to 2016 2025 2030 2040 DATE UNKNOWN lithium in EV batteries:
20 years. (The US has not signed
on to such a ban on conventional
cars.) Some spots, like Paris and
certain US cities, are just as keen 3 But What
to phase out petrol-drinkers to
Kind of Power
Are We Using 97.9% 30.1% 25.7%
improve local air quality. The to Charge
idea is that those CO2-belching Those Cars?
jalopies will be replaced by elec-
tric vehicles, which should get All those batteries
Norway Germany China
are going to need
cheaper and better as demand juice, and electric
grows. But the road to clean driv- vehicles won’t do
ing machines isn’t without a few anything to combat
climate change if the 25.6% 18.1% 15%
potholes. —Jack Stewart power comes from
dirty sources. It gets a
little weird here: The
benefits of an electric
car will depend on United Kingdom France India
where it’s charged.
It all comes down
to the local energy Sources of Electricity Generated in 2016
production mix. RENEWABLE RESOURCES OTHER (INCLUDES NUCLEAR)

0 2 4

4 Batteries Will
Need Better
Chemistry
Even if (poof!) we
switch the entire
CAIRN ERA; ENERDATA; BENCHMARK MINERAL INTELLIGENCE; U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY; UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS
global energy supply
SOURCES: THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF MOTOR VEHICLE MANUFACTURERS; INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY;
to renewables, we
are going to have to
mine a lot more
lithium, cobalt, and
other raw ingredients
to create all those
batteries—and do
so sustainably and
responsibly. For
example, a lithium-
ion battery also relies
on nickel and cobalt
for the electrodes.
And more than 60
percent of the world’s
cobalt originates
in the Democratic
Republic of the
Congo, where human
rights abuses are
rampant. Researchers
are working on new
batteries that require
fewer problematic
ingredients, and the
countries proposing
bans will ideally
follow through with
commitments to
renewable energy.
After all, if we don’t
make the system clean
from top to bottom,
global warming wins.
“THE SALT ON THE SALAD.”
The Coal Penalty
Variations in local energy production means that sometimes EVs are
dirtier than regular cars. For example, if you live in a state that generates
electricity from coal (Kansas), your electric car probably won’t be much
kinder to the environment than a car that gets more than 35 mpg. In India,
your EV is about as clean as a conventional vehicle that gets 20 mpg.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
COLORADO AND KANSAS
TEXAS REGION
CALIFORNIA REGION
MPG 0 20 40
600K
POWER-UPS
REAL OR FAKE
500K
Annual Demand for
BOOSTS FOR BABY
Raw Materials
400K
They cry, babble, poop, and cry some more. Can technol-
6
2
METRIC TONS
0
2
300K ogy tame them? Parents, there’s help out there for raising
your helpless babes—provided you can tell the real prod-
ucts from the fakes. —J us t i c e N a m a s t e
16
0
2
200K
100K
0
LITHIUM COBALT NICKEL
14 MILLION 7 MILLION 78 MILLION
CURRENT RESERVES (METRIC TONS)
62%
Smartbe stroller
It’s a real drag trying
to create an epic
Animoji while push-
ing a hefty stroller.
Instead, have your
child roll down the
sidewalk in this
self-propelled model.
OR
OF THE GLOBAL DEMAND FOR COBALT WILL
GO INTO LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES BY 2020.
Babblebot
This Alexa skill
records your child’s
gibberish, searches
for patterns, and cre-
ates rough transla-
transla
tions. Do babies really
know the secrets of
the universe?
iPotty RoboBreast
Sitting in this high- This fabric-covered
tech toddler potty, mechanical teat sim-
your little one can ulates the real thing,
browse YouTube keeping your han-
while you toilet-train gry baby happy and
them. They’ll be well-fed when you’re
screen-savvy multi- not around. Next up,
REAL: SMARTBE STROLLER, IPOTTY, BABYNES
taskers by age 2! RoboNanny.
OR OR
Fuel Efficiency a Gas Car Would Need MindBooster BabyNes
to Match the Impact of an Electric Car
If you plan on rais- Instant baby food!
ing an overachiever, Pop in a capsule
stuff them into this and the machine
“smart” booster seat, dispenses an age-
complete with noise- appropriate serving
making buttons and a of formula. Just don’t
foldout keyboard. No confuse it with your
60 80 100 typing at the table. Keurig.
MR. KIJI JAN 2018
 ALPHA
POWER-UPS

THE BODY ELECTRIC

SMART PROSTHETICS
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN prosthetic and real is shrinking. Thanks to advances
in batteries, brain-controlled robotics, and AI, today’s mechanical limbs
can do everything from twist and point to grab and lift. And this isn’t just
good news for amputees. “For something like bomb disposal, why not use a
robotic arm?” says Justin Sanchez, manager of Darpa’s Revolutionizing Pros-
thetics program. Well, that would certainly be handy. —Andrea Powell
JARGON WATCH

Brain-Operated Arm
Capable of: Touching
hands, reaching out
Mind-controlled limbs
aren’t new, but Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh scien-
tists are working on an
arm that can feel. Wires
Hand That Sees
Capable of: Looking for
an opportunity
Researchers at New-
castle University have
designed a hand with
a tiny camera that snaps
pics of objects in its view.
Responsible
Encryption
(ri-'spänt-s -b l en-'krip-sh n)
n. A proposal to ensure that texts
are capable of being decoded,
and phones unlocked, when the
government obtains a warrant.
The Linx
Coined by US deputy attorney gen-
Capable of: Climbing eral Rod Rosenstein, responsible
every mountain encryption is a new name for an
old argument: that public agencies
Unlike older lower-limb fighting crime and terrorism must
prosthetics, the Linx have access to our private com-
can tell when it’s sitting munications—for our own good. In
in a chair. At just under 2016, Apple defied a court order to
6 pounds, it relies on unlock an iPhone used by a shooter

link the arm and brain, so
when pressure is applied,
a signal alerts the sen-
sory cortex.
Bebionic
Then an AI determines
an action. Like, grasp
that beer and raise it
to my mouth.
The Michelangelo
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF DARPA, NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY, ENDOLITE, DARPA, OTTOBOCK (2);
seven sensors that col- in an attack in San Bernardino, Cal-
lect data on activity and ifornia. Libertarians cheered, but
terrain, helping the leg it was a bad look for Apple. After
adapt to new situations. that, tech giants began adopt-
ing end-to-end encryption even
they can’t decode. (So don’t ask!)
In November, the FBI reported it
was unable to open the phone of
Texas church shooter Devin Kel-
ley. ¦ Rosenstein’s rebranding
effort is the latest sally in a seman-
tic battle between Washington and
Silicon Valley. Techies say respon-
sible encryption is “doublespeak”
that would give the feds a pow-
erful new surveillance tool—and
create a “back door” in networks
The LUKE Arm that hackers will exploit. Rosen-
JARGON WATCH ILLUSTRATION BY LEON EDLER

stein says the companies’ moves to

Capable of: Making
rude gestures
It’s the only prosthetic
hand with air-bubbled
fingertips—great for typ-
ing and handling deli-
cate objects (like eggs).
And because individual
motors power natural
movements, wearers can
flip the bird in an instant.
Capable of: Painting
masterpieces
Whereas many prosthet-
ics have a stiff thumb,
Ottobock designed this
model with a secondary
drive unit in the fattest
finger—making it oppos-
able. So it’s easier to
hold, say, a paintbrush.
Big thumbs up!
Capable of: Wielding “go dark” are self-serving and cre-
lightsabers ate a “law-free zone” where jihadis
and child molesters can operate.
Yep, LUKE as in Sky- One thing’s sure: The issue won’t
walker. The Life Under be resolved with euphemisms.
Kinetic Evolution arm —Jo n ath o n K e at s
is the first muscle-
controlled prosthetic to
be cleared by the FDA.
With up to 10 motors in
the arm, the Force is
definitely with this one.

0 2 6 JAN 2018
 ALPHA

EXPERIMENT

SELF-
HELPERS
MY WEEK
LIVING WITH
CHATBOTS
RECENTLY, I was hungry. So I told
the Whole Foods chatbot what I
had in my fridge, and it revealed
that a bacon, lettuce, and heir-
loom tomato sandwich was mine
for the making. Yum. Then, out of
boredom, I booted up the movie-
recommendation bot And Chill,
which suggested I watch Jake
Gyllenhaal repeatedly relive
the last day of his life in Source
Code. I shuddered every time
the train exploded. ¶ Yes, I have
a bot problem. It’s just so con-
venient in the modern era. Sure,
friendly algorithms have existed
since the mid ’60s, when the talk-
back program Eliza started con- me; one was surprisingly life- Spiri, “your spiritual
vincing more gullible users of like. And all, in their way, were assistant.” My prob-
its humanity. But it wasn’t until effective. The problem with self- lems are neither unique
Facebook allowed app develop- help as a genre has always been nor complex—and this was Spiri’s
ers to integrate their chatbots its restriction in time and space: great lesson. One evening, I found
with Messenger a half-century the therapist’s hour, calls from a myself suppressing bile at the
later, in 2016, that bots rose up parent, the book that sits half- thought of telling a friend she wasn’t
on the order of tens of thousands. read on the bedside table. These going to be one of my bridesmaids.
Now they don’t just want to plan bots were talking to me all the But after asking me just eight ques-
your meals—they also want to time, with scant regard for my tions, Spiri diagnosed the problem:
make you a better person. ¶ Does whereabouts or state of mind. I have an unhealthy habit of feel-
this new class of digital coun- Self-help wasn’t some tempo- ing responsible for other people’s
selors work? To find out, I spent rary ideal anymore. It was always happiness. Maybe that’s just being
a week with five of them. Some on, and impossible to ignore. alive, but Spiri’s emotionless deliv-
delighted me; others annoyed —Signe Brewster ery made the point easier to take.

JAN 2018 NEIL STEVENS

 POWER-UPS

R elate, the rela- GoalBot, the moti-

tionship enhancer. va to r. P i c k u p to
I despise cleaning three monthly goals,
showers. Damp, moldy, full of and once a week GoalBot will ANGRY NERD

BRAIN-DEAD
tiny hairs. But I woke up early politely ask if you’ve made any
one morning and started attack- progress. Like most, I’m moti-

ing the filth because Relate told
me to. The bot texts short chal-
lenges meant to bring people
together—divide household labor
more equitably, for one, but also
lovelier things like “take your
S.O. out for their favorite bev-
erage.” Turns out if I splurge on
an old-fashioned at the cocktail
bar, he’ll volunteer to clean the
bathroom himself.
Woebot, the mood
assessor. Woebot
sends daily prompts
(“How are you feeling?”) to log
your mood and current activity.
Ignore at your peril. (“I haven’t
forgotten about you, Signe.”) At
the end of the week, my responses
confirmed that I’m happiest at the
gym and that desk work is more
productive than couch work.
Sound obvious? Tell that to my
daily routine, which now includes
regular walks and heightened
productivity after 3 pm.
vated by a combination of fear
and self-loathing. So, confession:
I accomplished diddly-squat with
this thing. “You’re only human,
so this time it’s OK”? No, it’s
not OK, Goalbot. I need to be
reminded of my failures con-
stantly, preferably with a boss-
from-hell-style “Hey, what’s the
status on this?” text every god-
damn morning.
Invisible Boyfriend,
the bespoke beau.
Even though Relate
improved my relationship, I still
desired the confidence boost of a
digital love-object. Before long, I
was sending heart-eyes emoji to
“Ernesto Quigley.” He liked my
writing! Then, a twist: Ernesto
wasn’t a bot. He was a real person.
I hadn’t read the fine print. But my
mistake made me reflect on the
actual bots. Like Ernesto, they were
engaging, available at weird times,
and often flawed—almost human.
METAPHORS
Here’s a fun drinking game:
Every time someone compares AI
to the human brain, take a shot.
It’ll dull the pain of such mindless
metaphorizing—and serve as a
reminder that you, an at least
semiconscious being, have an
actual brain that can make real
decisions like “Drink!” in the first
place. Contra the hype of mar-
keters (as regurgitated by cred-
ulous journalists—for shame!),
AI resembles the gray matter
in your head about as much as
a pull-string doll resembles a
rocket scientist. There’s a similar-
ity in shape, ish: So-called neural
networks are software programs
inspired by neuroscience. But
these systems have only a few
million “neurons,” which are
really just nodes with some
input/output connections. That’s
puny compared to the 100 bil-
lion genuine neurons in your cra-
nium. Read it and weep, Alexa!
We’re talking 100 trillion syn-
apses. Or 200 trillion. (Of course,
cognition is still pretty incog-
nita itself—which means we’re
“modeling” AIs on something we
barely even comprehend.) The
truth is, tricks like beating people
at Go or diagnosing melanomas
owe more to brute-force com-
puting power than to any higher
sentience. It’s just basic pattern

WACKY VIDEOGAME POWER-UPS by Ena JEisEr

matching under the hood. Yes, a
POWER-UP ILLUSTRATIONS BY MORITZ WIENERT;

“deep learning” system running

ANGRY NERD ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR

on 16,000 processors taught

LOL LETHAL itself to identify cats—with 75
BABY PAC­ SUPER CONTRA percent accuracy—after analyz-
MAN STREET As a ’roided-
Screw a single FIGHTER II out commando, ing 10 million images. A toddler
medium; mini- TURBO there’s nothing can nail that on a walk to the
Pac catapults Teleporting to hide behind but
from arcade made Dhalsim 10-pack abs and playground. So all this Muskian/
screen to pinball the OG ghosting a fireball-spewing Hawkingian/Singularitarian talk
table. yoga bro. spread gun.
SUPER MARIO TEAM FORT­
of “summoning the demon” and
ODYSSEY RESS 2 “existential threats” to our “sur-
The musta- “I AM FULLY
chioed won- CHAAAHGED!” vival”? Eh, let’s just worry about
der’s magic hat, roars the mad that tomorrow. For now, we’re
Cappy, Mario- German medic,
izes beasts and übercharged and human, and we’re here to drink.
rockets alike. impervious. —LEE SIMMONS

0 2 9
 ALPHA
POWER-UPS
CLIVE THOMPSON
POSITIVE ENERGY
THE SUNNY OPTIMISM
OF CLEAN TECH
THE MOOD AROUND TECH is dark these days. Social networks are a
cesspool of harassment and lies. On-demand firms are producing a
bleak economy of gig labor. AI learns to be racist. Is there anyplace
where the tech news is radiant with old-fashioned optimism? Where
good cheer abounds? ¶ Why, yes, there is: clean energy. It is, in effect,
the new Silicon Valley—filled with giddy, breathtaking ingenuity and
flat-out good news. ¶ This might seem surprising given the climate-
change denialism in Washington. But consider, first, residential solar
energy. The price of panels has plummeted in the past decade and
is projected to drop another 30 percent by 2022. Why? Clever engi-
neering breakthroughs, like the use of diamond wire to slice silicon
wafers into ever-skinnier slabs, producing higher yields with less
raw material. ¶ Manufacturing costs are down. According to US gov-
ernment projections, the fastest-growing occupation of the next 10
years will be solar voltaic installer. And you know who switched to
solar power last year, because it was so cheap? The Kentucky Coal
Museum. ¶ Tech may have served up Nazis in social media streams,
but, hey, it’s also creating microgrids—a locavore equivalent for the
solar set. One of these efforts is Brooklyn-based LO3 Energy, a com-
pany that makes a paperback-sized device and software that lets
owners of solar-equipped homes sell energy to their neighbors—
verifying the transactions using the blockchain, to boot. LO3 is
0 3 0 ZOHAR LAZAR
testing its system in 60 homes on its Brook-
lyn grid and hundreds more in other areas.
“Buy energy and you’re buying from your
community,” LO3 founder Lawrence Orsini
tells me. His chipsets can also connect to
smart appliances, so you could save money
by letting his system cycle down your devices
when the network is low on power. The com-
pany uses internet logic—smart devices that
talk to each other over a dumb network—
to optimize power consumption on the fly,
making local clean energy ever more viable.
But wait, doesn’t blockchain number-
crunching use so much electricity it gener-
ates wasteful heat? It does. So Orsini invented
DareHenry, a rack crammed with six GPUs;
while it processes math, phase- changing
goo absorbs the outbound heat and uses it
to warm a house. Blockchain cogeneration,
people! DareHenry is 4 feet of gorgeous,
Victorianesque steampunk aluminum—so
lovely you’d want one to show off to guests.
Solar and blockchain are only the tip of
clean tech. Within a few years, we’ll likely
see the first home fuel-cell systems, which
convert natural gas to electricity. Such sys-
tems are “about 80 percent efficient,” mar-
vels Garry Golden, a futurist who has studied
clean energy. (He’s also on LO3’s grid, with
the rest of his block.)
The point is, clean energy has a utopian
spirit that reminds me of the early days of
personal computers. The pioneers of the
1970s were crazy hackers, hell-bent on mak-
ing machines cheap enough for the masses.
Everyone thought they were nuts, or small
potatoes—yet they revolutionized commu-
nication. When I look at Orsini’s blockchain-
based energy-trading routers, I see the Altair.
And there are oodles more inventors like him.
Mind you, early Silicon Valley had some-
thing crucial that clean energy now does
not: massive federal government support.
The military bought tons of microchips,
helping to scale up computing. Trump’s
band of climate deniers aren’t likely to be
buyers of first resort for clean energy, but
states can do a lot. California already has,
for instance, by creating quotas for renew-
ables. So even if you can’t afford this stuff
yourself, you should pressure state and local
officials to ramp up their solar energy use. It’ll
give us all a boost of much-needed cheer. �
Write to clive@clivethompson.net.
JAN 2018
Crescent
Moon Eva
All-Foam
Snowshoes

JAN 2018
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN

FETISH
BIG FOOT
SNOWSHOES HAVE BEEN around for 5,700 years. But this year Boulder,
Colorado–based Crescent Moon has made the world’s first all-foam
version. Velcro bindings keep your shoes strapped to a teardrop-
shaped platform made from two layers of ethylene-vinyl acetate, or
EVA, the same stuff used to fashion flip-flops. The snowshoes might
look low-tech, but the combination of cleats and tire-like treads pro-
vide ample traction, especially on hardpack trails. Not sure you’re the
snowshoeing type? Company cofounder Jake Thamm is confident this
design will change your mind. “I would describe it as a gateway drug,”
he says. So the next time the trails behind your house look impassi-
bly piled with snow, you know what to do. — S T E P H A N I E P E A R S O N

$160

ALL STYLING BY PAKAYLA BIEHN

DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN 0 3 3
 1

Columbia OutDry
Ex Mogul Jacket

When the snow is

ripping sideways,
you’ll need a sturdy 2
shield to block the
freeze. Constructed Line Soulmate 92
from a composite
material with a water- Versatile, do-it-
proof exterior and all skis are a must
a wicking inner fab- if you don’t know
ric, Columbia’s whether the next
jacket can keep you run will involve
going long after your ice, death cookies,
friends have bailed. mashed potatoes,
or some combo of it
$450 all. An array of pre-
stretched carbon-
fiber filaments inside
the Soulmate’s all-
mountain planks
adds strength, spring,
and responsiveness
to every turn.

$6 25

JAN 2018
 GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN

GEARHEAD
SLEET SMARTS
Some days are crushingly cold and sloppy. Bring the
right equipment and you won’t suffer. —DAVID WOLMAN

POC Auric Cut

Backcountry
SPIN

3 POC’s lid for dare- 5

devils has a series of
Snow Peak impact-absorbing Dakine Fillmore
Titanium Flask silicone pads embed- Trigger Mitt
ded in the liner. They
There are many help protect your Mittens are the
moments during a brain from the rota- warmer choice, but
crap-weather day tional forces that are manipulating buck-
when sipping whis- unleashed when you les and zippers while
key from an expen- wipe out and bounce wearing them? Hard
sive titanium flask off an icy mogul. Plus nope. Dakine’s mitts
improves the overall it’s super warm! free up your index
experience. Deploy finger to maintain just
this 5-ouncer while $220 enough dexterity. A
waiting for the chair- conductive finger-
lift, riding it, or grow- tip lets you text with-
ing impatient when out dropping a glove
it stalls. from the chairlift.

$160 $55

0 3 5
 GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN

GEARHEAD
POWDER PLAY
There’s nothing like skiing under dazzling blue skies.
Don’t ruin it by dressing for a blizzard. —DAVID WOLMAN 1

Trew Men’s
Wander Jacket

A simple wind-block-
ing shell is all you
need in epic weather.
The trim cut of this
one means it doesn’t
feel like you are
wearing a tent, and
the lightweight con-
struction makes it
easy to pack or stuff
in a backpack. If wind
and clouds suddenly
appear, no prob:
You’re still protected.

$419

Faction Dictator
2.0

Engineered for hard-

charging skiers, Fac-
tion’s Dictator series
is supersaturated 2
with aggressive
specs: ultralight alu-
minum alloy skele-
tons; a dual radius
sidecut for fast, pre-
cise turns; and a
slight tail rocker that
ups the fun factor
in the powww.

$729

JAN 2018
 5

Snowshed
3-Season Helmet
4 Beanie

Tecnica Freeride Keeping your head

Cochise 130 Dyn warm is smart, even
3
on beautiful days—
These ski slippers it’s still winter, after
are popular with all. Snowshed’s soft
all-mountain adven- merino wool cap
turers who need is thin and slight
rigidity but don’t enough to fit under a
want the brutal con- helmet, so you don’t
striction of a race have to take it off
4
boot. They’re nice when you strap on
and stiff but light your safety gear.
and maneuverable.
Switch into the more $35
forgiving walk mode
for an après-ski stroll
to the chalet.

3 $700

Smith Optics I/O 7

Skiing in sunglasses
isn’t recommended 3
beyond the bunny
hill. Smith Optics’ lat-
est goggles pair up
with the company’s
swappable Chroma-
Pop lenses for differ-
ent conditions. On the
brightest days, snap
in one of the antire-
flective lenses to nix
nasty glare.

$200

0 3 7
 GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN wired Recommends:
GoPro Hero6 Black

HOW-TO Advanced image stabili-

zation gets you smoother
shots; simple software

SNOW ANGLES
helps you share them.
$500

Get great results from your action cam as you capture

your heroics ... and your epic bails. —BRENT ROSE

When to Slo-Mo When to When to Selfie When to Time-

Chest Mount Stick Lapse
The GoPro Hero6 can
shoot 1080p video For all types of ski- Your best option for Action cams take
at 240 frames per ing, go with a chest getting primo footage great stills too. Set
second—meaning mount. It’s more sta- when snowboarding your camera to
that when you slow ble than the head, solo. Use the same take one shot every
it down 10X, it looks and it puts your video settings as with half-second while
amazing. But hitting hands, poles, and the helmet mount, it’s mounted on a
the brakes doesn’t skis into the frame. but if you’re going for selfie stick to make
work for everything. It’s also best for a a big trick, crank the share-worthy GIFs
Slo-mo is garbage for snowmobile or snow- frame rate to 120 to or an extreme new
point-of-view angles. bike, as it gets the slurp up more detail. Tinder profile pic.
Save it for when handlebars into the Try it with the camera If you’re shooting a
you’re shooting video shot. It’s rubbish for both ahead of you friend hitting a jump
of your friends—place snowboarding. Shoot and following you. or doing a nasty turn,
the camera at ground in SuperView mode For confident carvers try Burst mode. Then
level to film a trick— for skiing, which fills only—wielding a sel- select the most epic
or when you’re (sigh) the top and bottom fie stick on a fast run still from the dozen or
using a selfie stick. of the frame. can be dangerous. so the camera grabs.

When to Helmet When to 4K

Mount
Reserve 4K shots
The helmet mount is for when you really
the easiest approach want to reproduce
for most snowy activi- the scene, like taking
ties. It captures things a panning shot of the
the way you see stunning view from
them, so you want a the mountaintop. The
nice, fat frame: Shoot Hero6 now does 4K
1080p at 60 fps in at 60 frames per sec-
Wide mode, with sta- ond, so it’s also fan-
bilization turned on. tastic for shooting
This makes a tree run incredibly detailed
look like the speeder action shots. Use it
bike chase on Endor sparingly—it devours
from The Return of memory card space
the Jedi. and battery life.

JAN 2018
 BEFORE GORE-TEX was invented,
there were plenty of materi-
als to protect you from harsh
weather, but they all came with
trade-offs. Waxed cotton was
heavy. Vinyl could drown you
in your own sweat. Seal intes-
tine (gut parka!) was favored by
the Inuit but hardly made sense
for mass production. That said,
Bob Gore wasn’t attempting to
improve outerwear when he
created Gore-Tex. Working in
his father’s Teflon factory in the
late 1960s, he was simply trying
to make more efficient use of the
plastic by stretching it. He acci-
dentally found that yanking Tef-
lon filled it with air pockets. And
not only that: The micropores
that appeared in his “expanded
polytetrafluoroethylene” were
700 times larger than a water
vapor molecule but 20,000 times
smaller than a droplet. Gore rea-
soned that if you made a fabric
out of ePTFE, you could block out
rain while still venting steamy
perspiration—with wind protec-
tion as a bonus. The first Gore-Tex
jacket was manufactured in 1977
by a small Seattle company called
Early Winters and marketed as
“possibly the most versatile piece
of clothing you’ll ever wear.”
Since then, ePTFE has proven
much more versatile than that
GADGET LAB
WINTER FUN
and is now found in everything
from space suits to heart patches.

BENCHMARK
It’s certainly better suited to
those modern applications than
seal intestine ever could be.

HUMAN SHIELD
The waterproof material in your favorite jacket—and boots
and ski pants—was born by accident. —JONATHON KEATS

0 3 9

FILE://WEATHER
Eye of the Storm
Meet Eric Berger,
leisure-time
meteorologist,
predictor of
Harvey’s floods,
unlikely hero.
by CHris Jones
ON AUGUST 24 AT 8:20
pm, a 44-year-old moonlighting
meteorologist named Eric Berger
was nearly finished writing a post
for his Houston-centric blog,
Space City Weather, titled “Har-
vey Late Night: Some Final Thurs-
day Thoughts.” He was in his
home office. He had just poured
himself a glass of cabernet.
He had been looking at the
online forecasts from the
National Hurricane Center and
agreed with their essential con-
clusions: Harvey was a well-
organized storm that would land
with hurricane force on the Texas
Gulf Coast somewhere between
Corpus Christi and Port O’Con-
nor. Berger also backed the cen-
ter’s belief that the winds would
be strong in Houston that week-
end, perhaps more than 40 miles
per hour. But he was far more
worried about the rain. The unan-
swered question is what happens
to Harvey once it reaches the
SOURCE: NOAA
coast, Berger wrote. Where will
it go, and will it go fast enough?
Houston’s rainfall totals over the
FAIR WARNING
Over the past several decades, not only have forecasters
gotten a lot better at predicting where big storms will hit—
they can do so a lot sooner. — C a itlin H a rrington
500
(nautical miles)
400
Forecast error
300
200
100
1975 1985 1995
next five days depend on this, and
we just don’t know.
The considerable majority of
modern weather forecasting is
aided by computer algorithm.
Most hurricane tracking relies
on data crunched by various
public and private computer
models, and the models, which
take different variables (tem-
perature, moisture, mass) and
consider them in different ways,
are not always in agreement.
The National Hurricane Center
takes input from several mod-
els to make its predictions, aver-
aging out their differences, in
part because it faces the tallest
order in hurricane forecasting:
It must say that the hurricane
will go here. So must television
meteorologists, one of the cen-
ter’s principal conduits to a con-
cerned public. TV, too, demands
a singular answer.
Berger doesn’t have to draw a
line. He is a certified meteorol-
ogist, but the weather is just a
particularly absorbing hobby
of his; his primary paying gig
is writing about aerospace for
Ars Technica (a site owned by
WIRED Media Group), and he
blogs about the weather in his
free time. That gives him two
luxuries that most front-line
meteorologist don’t have: He can
value certain models and their
ensembles much more heavily
than others, untangling as many
as 50 different versions of each
forecast, and he can also admit
doubt. He can explore the sub-
tlety of the weather, marveling
at its mysteries, the way he has
Eric Berger in Clear
Lake Park, outside of
for his small but loyal commu-
Houston. nity of readers for years, but
BRENT HUMPHREYS
72 hours out
48 hours out
24 hours out
2005 2015
especially since he established
his site in October 2015.
Berger does not generate his
forecasts from scratch, point-
ing his licked finger into the
wind and taking readings from
the Galileo thermometer on his
windowsill. He really does have
a Galileo thermometer on his
windowsill, but he works out
of a home office that he hasn’t
otherwise bothered to deco-
rate, with a basic PC and a sin-
gle monitor on which he toggles
between tabs, from forecast to
conflicting forecast. In Houston
that evening, the US govern-
ment forecast called for about
15 inches of rain. By then Berger
had already begun to wonder.
There is one model he has
come to trust and rely on more
than any other: the European
Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts’ Integrated
Forecasting System, more pop-
ularly known in the US as the
European model. Funded by
22 EU members and 12 coop-
erating states, the European
model is sometimes shockingly
accurate, in part because it’s so
well financed and its computing
power is stronger than most.
With Harvey, it suggested that
the storm would stall over Hous-
ton, dumping 25 inches of rain
or more before eventually mov-
ing on. That synced with Berg-
er’s own analysis of the weather
patterns in the atmosphere. He
detected a troublesome absence
of steering currents, the forces
that push hurricanes to wher-
ever they’re headed next, and
without those currents,
the European model’s
0 4 1
 FILE://WEATHER
forecast of a stall made a lot of
sense. Given the sum of the evi-
dence before him, Berger felt
confident in one fearsome predic-
tion, and he wrote as much: Big-
time floods are coming to Texas.
It was, at its essence, an
informed gut call, and Berger
thought carefully about what he
would write next. He had made
his reputation, such as it was
for a leisure-time meteorolo-
gist with a city-specific weather
blog, by refusing to submit to
the hysterical frenzies that com-
petent weather observers dis-
miss as “storm porn.” He is by
nature a fairly skeptical person.
His twin passions, space and the
weather, share long histories
of broken promises and unmet
expectations. His site’s motto is
“Hype-free forecasts for greater
Houston,” mindful of the cha-
otic and ultimately unnecessary
evacuations prompted by Hurri-
cane Rita in 2005. I am not going
to sugar-coat this, my friends,
he had written in advance of
that storm. As a Houston resi-
dent and property owner, I am
truly mortified right now. Rita
and Berger had both missed.
But underplaying weather of
dire consequences could lead
to a different kind of calamity
for his readers. James Spann,
Alabama’s longtime weather
forecaster of choice, had infa-
mously botched that state’s ice
storms of January 2014. Spann
had predicted a “dusting” of
snow, and unworried commut-
ers headed out on the roads;
when that dusting turned out
to be a thick layer of ice, Spann
shouldered much of the blame
Chris Jones
is a longtime maga-
zine writer. He also
wrote about the
International Space
Station on page 22.
JAN 2018
for the thousands of people who delayed. A man named Petey morning, you’ll have to cancel.
ended up stranded in their cars, James pointed out that Satur- The following morning, Fri-
schools, and workplaces over- day night was the night of the day, August 25, it started to rain,
night. Berger despises alarmism big fight between Floyd May- a few drops at first, and then
in all its forms. He also didn’t weather and Conor McGregor, a fairly steady shower. Har-
want to bear responsibility for and he wanted to know whether vey’s leading edge had come
children drowning in their attics. he should risk going to the local to town, and the models, con-
Berger’s wife, Amanda, was
getting their own two daugh-
ters ready for bed in their
League City apartment, tem-
porary accommodations while
the family builds their dream
home in nearby Clear Creek. His
dog, Bonnie, a Maltese-poodle
cross who dislikes all men but
him, kept her usual vigilant
watch. Berger can be painfully
shy. Now he felt possessed by
an unusual authority, exercised
remotely through the digitally
transmitted written word. He
took another sip of his wine and
returned to his keyboard.
Certainly the Corpus Christi
area and points immediately
north and west of there will get
too much rain, he wrote. Flood-
ing will spread to other parts of
Texas too, quite possibly Hous-
ton. But right now we can’t say
that for certain. As I’ve said, it’s
either going to be pretty bad, or
really really bad here.
He posted his piece. His site
normally averaged somewhere
between 5,000 and 10,000 views
a day. That particular entry
received 207,334 over the next
24 hours. A shocked Berger
surmised that his core read-
ers were recommending him
to their suddenly weather-con-
cerned friends. He had become
the center of a kind of storm
within the storm. Millions turned to Berg-
er’s Space City Weather
In the comments, one reader blog during the storm.
asked what Berger thought the
rainfall totals might be in San
Antonio, 200 miles to the west. bar or pay to watch it at home. stantly updated, began to align:
Someone else asked about Colo- A woman named Deb Walters Harvey was nearly laser-precise
rado County, and another about asked whether she should still in its construction and massive,
the neighborhoods near Elling- have the party she had planned and it was also a slow mover. The
ton Field. Another reader won- to host near Dacus on Saturday rain was going to be measured
dered whether her husband’s afternoon. I’d press ahead at this in feet, not inches. Berger sat
flight out of Hobby Airport on point, Berger wrote to her. Obvi- down at his desk, no wine this
Saturday morning might be ously if things turn ugly Saturday time, and wrote another post.

FORECASTING
“A very serious flooding situa-
tion is coming,” he wrote.
He wrote it two more times
for emphasis.
“A very serious flooding situ-
ation is coming.
A very serious flooding situ-
ation is coming.”
It was 3:15 pm. He hoped Deb
Walters had canceled her party.
SINCE 1980, THERE
have been more than 200
weather and climate events
in the United States that have
each caused more than $1 bil-
lion in damage. Three principal
national bodies are charged with
predicting their arrivals and
effects. The Storm Prediction
Center in Norman, Oklahoma,
keeps watch for tornadoes.
The Weather Prediction Cen-
ter in College Park, Maryland,
monitors heavy rains. And the
National Hurricane Center in
Miami minds hurricanes. They
have been busy.
In the case of Harvey, all three
were involved, funneling their
best information to the Hous-
ton branch of the National
Weather Service, one of its 122
field offices across the coun-
try. Each helps turn national
forecasts into finely tuned
local ones. The Houston office
is the only one that shares space
with its home county’s Office of
Emergency Management—Gal-
veston County in its case—bet-
ter to coordinate their shared
response. It is no accident that
their building sits atop a mound
and that their offices are on
the upper floor. Over the past
few decades, greater Houston
has grown exponentially from
a mosquito- plagued oil port
into the fifth-largest metro area
in the United States, home to
nearly 7 million people. That
population explosion, combined
with a certain regional antipa-
thy toward civic oversight, has
seen former swamps turned
into sprawling, unregulated
developments. Houston has
been built to flood.
Dan Reilly, 52, is the local
Warning Coordination Mete-
orologist, part of the National
Weather Service’s round-the-
clock professional staff. In a
catastrophe-prone city like
his, the job is twofold. The first
is the forecast. “When some-
thing bad is coming, that’s really
when we need to be at the top of
our game,” he says. Of the three
most damaging effects of hurri-
canes—wind, storm surge, and
rain—rain is one of the most dif-
ficult to quantify in advance.
The heaviest rain typically falls
in small pockets, and that level
of precision is difficult to attain
more than six to 12 hours ahead
of its arrival. Houston’s physical
size also makes rain forecasts
challenging: Each side of the
I-10, for instance—one of several
highways that serve as bound-
aries in an otherwise endless
city—might receive a substan-
tially different amount.
A good meteorologist is
almost always, by definition,
skilled at pattern recogni-
tion. Weather, like the law, is
built on a foundation of sim-
ilar cases. Veteran meteorol-
ogists—Reilly has been in the
job for 24 years—mine their
memories for analogues. In the
early hours of Harvey, Reilly’s
team began upping the National
Weather Service’s rain fore-
cast to amounts that no one
had ever seen: 25 inches, 30,
and eventually 50, over a wide-
spread swath of Houston. Reilly
set aside everything he knew
about the weather and decided
to obey the combination of awe
and dread he felt in his chest:
A killing flood was on its way.
The next part of the job, and
perhaps the more important one,
is getting the word out. At a time
when the weather can be more
extreme than ever, and trust in
government is low, convincing
people to heed your warnings,
especially the most severe of
them, might now be the weather
forecaster’s harder task. The
most serious warning when it
comes to rain is called a Flash
Flood Emergency, and before
Harvey, the Houston office had
issued that warning on only
three occasions. It would soon
be used for a fourth.
Berger, sitting behind his Spar-
tan desk that afternoon, anxi-
ety beginning to weigh on him
like heat, was first among those
who might listen—and to whom
others might listen about the
coming storm. He wasn’t the
government; he was a human
being, and somehow the warn-
ings sounded different to their
ears coming from him, the kind
of measured voice that shines
through in a crisis. After he had
written his ominous flood fore-
cast three times, he looked out his
office window at one of the two
garages he keeps. One of them
was bursting with new things
for his new house, and he began
ferrying boxes upstairs to his
office, filling the space in front
of his desk with new light fix-
tures, a microwave, and a tub. In
between trips, he heard Amanda
making arrangements to take
shelter, with their daughters, at
her sister’s house, built on pilings
and tucked away from the wind.
Berger would stay. He would
hunker down behind his wall
of boxes with his PC and his
readers, now numbering in
the hundreds of thousands, for
the duration of the storm. He
knew that his city was in seri-
ous trouble, and he felt an almost
spiritual need to convince his
neighbors that it was time for
them to share his fears.
THE WEATHER STARTED
making an impression on Berger
in 2001, when Tropical Storm
Somehow
the warnings
sounded
different
coming from
him.
Allison came to town. Berger
is from Michigan but had gone
to the University of Texas to
earn his astronomy degree. He
moved to Houston for a girl,
first working weekends at
the Houston Chronicle before
becoming the paper’s desig-
nated “SciGuy,” writing mostly
about physics, chemistry, and
astronomy. He also wrote a lit-
tle about the weather.
He had just bought his first
house near White Oak Bayou.
On June 8, a Friday night—what
was it about storms and Fri-
day nights?—he went out with
some friends to see a Bob Schnei-
der concert. Allison had passed
through Houston once already,
but now it returned to take a
second run at the city. Berger
remembers that the sound of
the rain on the roof drowned
out Schneider, as though there
was too much percussion in the
mix. After the concert, he and his
friends left to wander around
midtown, gawking at the water
rising on the empty streets.
Berger wrote about the storm.
One of his stories, about the
drowning deaths of tens of
thousands of research animals
in the basement of the Texas
Medical Center, drew massive
national readership. He began
having visions—he saw a place
for thoughtful written analysis
of the weather online. His dis-
cussions could be more timely
and interactive than the fore-
casts printed in the paper itself.
And unlike TV meteorologists,
he needn’t worry about ratings
or being available to viewers
only at certain designated times.
In June 2005, he started his
own blog on the Chronicle’s site.
0 4 3
 FILE://WEATHER
He didn’t yet have any meteoro-
logical training; he was just some-
one who liked talking about the
weather. (His colleagues called
him “Weather Boy.” It was not a
compliment.) Three months later
came Katrina. Then came Rita.
And three years later, Hurricane
Ike. Berger’s life could seem gov-
erned by storms; even his first
meeting with Amanda, whom he
married in 2002, came only a few
weeks after Allison’s transfor-
mative rains. He convinced the
newspaper to put him through
a distance learning program at
Mississippi State to earn his cer-
tification as a professional mete-
orologist. Modern technology
and information dissemination
have led to a democratization of
weather forecasting, and that
could mean compounding disas-
ter in the wrong hands. Berger
wanted to make sure his hands
were the right ones.
When he left the Chronicle
to join Ars Technica in Octo-
ber of 2015, he started Space
City Weather. The day after he
opened up shop, the remnants of
Hurricane Patricia began cloud-
ing the skies of Houston. He was
supposed to go out for dinner
with Amanda. He worried his
readers would feel he’d aban-
doned them in a time of need,
and he couldn’t help writing a
post. His first forecast on Space
City Weather was for a flood.
Now in August 2017, the rains
on Harvey’s opening night
shocked even him. They were
biblical. Rain falling at a rate
of 2 inches an hour would force
most drivers to pull over. Har-
vey would sometimes drop 5. It
didn’t look like water; it looked
like milk. Worse, Berger studied
the models and the satellite imag-
ery, and if he knew anything in
that moment, listening to the rain
against his window, he knew that
there was so much more to come.
On Saturday, August 26,
an hour after sunset, the eve-
ning’s first band of precipita-
JAN 2018
tion, which on radar resembled At 12:03 pm on Sunday, Berger
the longest tentacles of an angry finished writing a post that
squid, opened up over Houston, he titled: “Houston, We Will ON TUESDAY EVENING,
slowly crossing the city from Get Through This.” more than four days after the
west to east. As predicted by the With the prospect of more rain first started to fall, Berger
European model, it stalled. Addi- rain, you may feel hopeless would finally write: It’s over.
tional bands trailing behind it or helpless, or both. From a He had been nearly perfect
intensified and merged with the mental health standpoint, the in his forecast. It hadn’t been
first. This created what meteo- uncertainty this brings adds a all that windy, so there weren’t
rologists properly call a seeth- considerable amount of stress many roofs blown off or trees
ing nexus of hate, Berger later to an already stressful situa- toppled, except in those few
wrote. The now-combined band
extended more than 400 miles
over Galveston and deep into the
too-warm waters of the Gulf, cre-
ating a superhighway for rain to
be delivered directly to Houston.
By very early Sunday morning,
Harvey’s enormous size began to
tell, and another band prepared
to make its assault on the already
flooded southern suburbs. The
Houston branch of the NWS had
issued its special emergency bul-
letin, and in the adjacent Office
of Emergency Management, the
walls were being papered with
calls for water rescues. People
were drowning in the rain.
A sleepless Berger sat down
at his desk and began writing
a new post. Amanda and their
daughters had been at her sister’s
house for several hours, and she
texted him to ask if he thought
the latest band would be the
end of it. He inserted the scene
into his piece, which went up
at 2:10 am on Sunday morning.
I wanted nothing more than to
fall in her arms and tell her yes,
this was it. By God, yes. Let’s go
to bed and forget this ever hap-
pened. It had to be it, surely.
It would not be it. Harvey
would make true Berger’s most
pessimistic projections and tion. I wish we could tell you cursed places that were also
refuse to leave. He would tell when the rains will end, but visited by tornadoes. And there
his readers that the rain would we can’t. Here’s one thing we wasn’t much local storm surge.
continue, especially at night. He are sure of, however. The rains The water didn’t come rush-
would later hear that adminis- will end. After that the sun will ing through Houston. It didn’t
trators at the Houston Method- come out. arrive in walls the way it did in
ist Hospital and Baylor College More than a million people New Orleans with Katrina, one
of Medicine were among those would visit Space City Weather of the reasons Harvey directly
looking to him for guidance. He on Sunday alone. Hurricane killed 68 people, many in their
would harbor a guilt for deliver- Harvey already had a name. cars, instead of an estimated
ing bad news for so many. Now it had its face. 1,833 people, many in their beds.

FORECASTING
Harvey was a cataclysmic rain
event, just as Berger had feared.
He could have been wrong and
his readers would have moved
their furniture back downstairs
and grumbled about the wasted
effort. But he had been right, and
thousands of his readers didn’t
have a downstairs anymore.
A month after the storm,
Berger dropped into his Hyun-
Harvey’s unrelenting
rain left so much
underwater—like these
orchards in Pecan Grove.
dai hybrid and went for a drive.
He wanted to see the terrible
reality that had accompanied
his forecasts, as though he could
use the reminder that Harvey
really did do what it did, to Hous-
ton and to him. By then the last
part of weather analysis, the
accounting of the aftermath, was
nearly complete. It had rained
so hard for so long that Hous-
ton’s swamps and reservoirs and
drainage canals filled up, which
meant that the city’s kitchens
and living rooms and dens filled
up next. Then the water drained
away. In the time in between it
made an estimated $75 billion
in property irreparably wet.
He headed south toward Dick-
inson, one of the worst-hit areas.
On some streets, every house
had an enormous pile of debris
out front—everything that had
been inside the house was now
outside of it, rotting in the sun.
Other streets had been picked
clean, and they looked almost
normal, except that through their
windows, Berger could see that
the otherwise pristine-seeming
houses had been stripped down
to the studs.
There was a photograph that
had made the rounds during
the storm. It was of the flood-
soaked residents of a nursing
home, sitting on their loungers
and walkers, water up to their
chests. It seemed like a maca-
bre piece of surrealist art. On
his tour, Berger decided to visit
that nursing home, La Vita Bella.
Nearly everything that wasn’t
human in that photograph was
now sitting out in the yard. The
lamps, the chairs, and the pop-
corn machine from that haunt-
ing image melted in the piles of
sodden sheetrock and carpet,
relics of a viral infamy. They
were joined by smaller but per-
haps more significant losses: a
stuffed animal, a deck of play-
ing cards, a broken mirror, a lip-
stick and a rouge, a large-print
copy of Marley & Me.
Berger had also lost a book in
the flood. Before dawn on Sunday,
lightning had lit up the sky, and he
could see that water had reached
his garages. He had mostly emp-
tied one but not the other—not
the one that contained his old
things, his diplomas and his
Appetite for Destruction poster
and his boxes of books. He raced
down and lifted up a box from the
floor and its bottom fell out. A
book titled From Dawn to Deca-
dence by Jacques Barzun dropped
into the water and disappeared.
Berger had treasured that book,
a massive 500-year history of
Western civilization. Its French-
born author had died in Texas in
2012. Barzun was 104 years old,
and the book had been his life’s
work. Something about losing
that particular book hit Berger
harder than it might have. It was
a metaphor for how easily even
our monuments can be erased.
He had written about the loss
of that book and other things in
a post that went up on Ars Tech-
nica early in the morning on
August 30, the Wednesday after
the storm. The post was titled
“This Is Probably the Worst US
Flood Storm Ever, and I’ll Never
Be the Same.” The cardboard
box had failed, he wrote, and
the book had dropped into the
murk. Almost immediately, a
current from the rushing water
beyond the garage door pulled
the tome away, forever. Damn,
I loved that book. An indescrib-
ably bad night had just gotten
that little bit worse.
Berger started receiving
emails and notes from his grate-
ful readers. They had saved some
of their own treasures because of
his warnings, and they felt they
had a debt to settle. A copy of
From Dawn to Decadence was
eventually put into his hands by
a stranger, a woman who had
attended a talk he had over-
come his nerves to give after
the storm. That book now sits
high and dry on a shelf in his
office, a tiny reminder of the
things that Harvey had taken,
but also a reminder of the things
it had delivered.
The National Weather Ser-
vice is part of a necessary and
effective meteorological bureau-
cracy. It is staffed by thousands
of people—by good and compe-
tent forecasters who care deeply
about the weather and its effects
At 12:03 pm
on Sunday,
Berger finished
writing a post
titled: “Houston,
We Will Get
Through This.”
on their communities. The NWS
can offer its best daily guess,
informed by their forecasters’
computer models and profes-
sional experiences. It can give
warnings and sound alarms.
But the NWS can’t talk about
the weather the way human
beings talk about the weather.
It can’t explore each of its uncer-
tainties, almost reveling in the
sweeping possibilities of hurri-
canes and their animal behav-
iors. It can’t riff.
More important, when the
weather is at its worst: The
National Weather Service can’t
comfort. Even though Dan Reilly
and his colleagues live and work
in greater Houston, even though
they were plenty concerned
during Harvey for their own
families and homes, they can’t
issue a bulletin that says, We’re
sick and tired of the rain, just like
everyone else. They can’t write:
The rains will end. After that the
sun will come out.
Only someone like Eric Berger
can do that, providing a weather
forecast that includes words like
hope or sorry or maybe. Only
someone like Eric Berger can
employ our best technology in
a way that still feels intimate
and human-scale, applying the
wisdom of satellites to Deb Wal-
ters and her doomed party. Only
someone like Eric Berger, look-
ing out his window at the rain
and willing for it to stop even
though he knows that it won’t
be stopping anytime soon, can
speak to a family watching the
water on its torturous rise to
their door, the winds threat-
ening the entirety of their lives,
and make them feel a little less
alone in the storm. �
0 4 5
 FE ATURES | 26.01

Cristina Daura 0 4 7
 YOU
ARE
A
NUMBER

B y MARA HVISTENDAHL P h o t o g r a p h s b y D a n W i n t e r s

0 4 8
 AMERICA
INVENTED THE
THREE-DIGIT
CREDIT SCORE .
NOW COMPANIES
IN CHINA
ARE TAKING
THE IDEA TO
THE EXTREME ,
USING BIG
DATA TO TRACK
AND RANK
WHAT YOU
DO—YOUR
PURCHASES ,
YOUR PASTIMES,
YOUR MISTAKES .

SOON
THE
GOVERNMENT
WILL
JOIN
IN.

ENTER
THE AGE OF
SOCIAL
CREDIT.
2015, when Lazarus Liu moved home to
China after studying logistics in the
United Kingdom for three years, he
quickly noticed that something had
changed: Everyone paid for everything
with their phones. At McDonald’s, the
convenience store, even at mom-and-pop
restaurants, his friends in Shanghai
used mobile payments. Cash, Liu could
see, had been largely replaced by two
smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat
Pay. One day, at a vegetable market,
he watched a woman his mother’s age
pull out her phone to pay for her gro-
ceries. He decided to sign up.¶ To get
an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell
phone number and scan his national ID
card. He did so reflexively. Alipay had
built a reputation for reliability,
and compared to going to a bank man-
aged with slothlike indifference and
zero attention to customer service,
signing up for Alipay was almost fun.
With just a few clicks he was in. Ali-
pay’s slogan summed up the experience:
“Trust makes it simple.”
Illustrations by James Graham
 Alipay turned out to be so convenient that
Liu began using it multiple times a day, start-
ing first thing in the morning, when he ordered
breakfast through a food delivery app. He real-
ized that he could pay for parking through Ali-
pay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s
license and license plate numbers, as well as
the engine number of his Audi. He started
making his car insurance payments with the
app. He booked doctors’ appointments there,
skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese
hospitals are famous. He added friends in
Alipay’s built-in social network. When Liu
went on vacation with his fiancée (now his
wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants
and bought trinkets with Alipay. He stored
whatever money was left over, which wasn’t
much once the vacation and car were paid
for, in an Alipay money market account. He
could have paid his electricity, gas, and inter-
net bills in Alipay’s City Service section. Like
many young Chinese who had become enam-
ored of the mobile payment services offered
by Alipay and WeChat, Liu stopped bringing
his wallet when he left the house.
If you live in the United States, you are by
now accustomed to relinquishing your data
to corporations. Credit card companies know
when you run up bar tabs or buy sex toys. Face-
book knows if you like Tasty cooking videos or
Breitbart News. Uber knows where you go and
how you behave en route. But Alipay knows
all of these things about its users and more.
Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the
massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is some-
times called a super app. Its main competitor,
WeChat, belongs to the social and gaming giant
Tencent. Alipay and WeChat are less like indi-
vidual apps than entire ecosystems. Whenever
Liu opened Alipay on his phone, he saw a neat
grid of icons that vaguely resembled the home
screen on his Samsung. Some of the icons were
themselves full-blown third-party apps. If he
wanted to, he could access Airbnb, Uber, or
Uber’s Chinese rival Didi, entirely from inside
Alipay. It was as if Amazon had swallowed eBay,
Apple News, Groupon, American Express, Citi-
bank, and YouTube—and could siphon up data
STYLING BY NICOLE SCHNEIDER; ON SET STYLING BY CRISTINA FACUNDO
from all of them.
One day a new icon appeared on Liu’s Ali-
pay home screen. It was labeled Zhima Credit
(or Sesame Credit). The name, like that of Ali-
pay’s parent company, evoked the story of Ali
Baba and the 40 thieves, in which the words
open sesame magically unseal a cave full of
treasure. When Liu touched the icon, he was
greeted by an image of the Earth. “Zhima Credit
is the embodiment of personal credit,” the text
underneath read. “It uses big data to conduct
an objective assessment. The higher the score,
the better your credit.” Further down was a but-
ton that read, in clean white characters, “Start
my credit journey.” He tapped.
IN 1956 AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER NAMED BILL
F A I R and a mathematician named Earl Isaac
started a small tech company out of a San Fran-
cisco apartment. They named it Fair, Isaac and
Co., but the business eventually came to be
known, for short, as FICO. Their chief inno-
ON THE
vation was using computer-driven statistical SCREEN WAS
analysis to translate people’s personal details
and financial history into a simple score, pre- A BUTTON
dicting how likely they were to pay back loans.
Before FICO, credit bureaus relied in part on THAT READ,
gossip culled from people’s landlords, neigh-
bors, and local grocers. Applicants’ race could be “START MY
counted against them, as could messiness, poor
morals, and “effeminate gestures.” Algorith-
CREDIT
mic scoring, Fair and Isaac argued, was a more
equitable, scientific alternative to this unfair
J O U R N E Y. ”
reality. FICO’s approach eventually caught on LIU
among the credit bureaus—TransUnion, Expe-
rian, and Equifax—and in 1989 FICO introduced TAPPED.
the credit score we know today, enabling mil-
lions of Americans to take out mortgages and
rack up credit card bills.
During the past 30 years, by contrast, China
has grown to become the world’s second largest
economy without much of a functioning credit
system at all. The People’s Bank of China, the
country’s central banking regulator, maintains
records on millions of consumers, but they
often contain little or no information. Until
recently, it was difficult to get a credit card
with any bank other than your own. Consum-
ers mainly used cash. As housing prices spiked,
this became increasingly untenable. “Now you
need two suitcases to buy a house, not just one,”
says Zennon Kapron, who heads the financial
tech consultancy Kapronasia. Still, efforts to
establish a reliable credit system foundered
because China lacked a third-party credit scor-
ing entity. What it did have by the end of 2011
were 356 million smartphone users.
That year, Ant Financial launched a version
of Alipay with a built-in scanner for reading
QR codes—square, machine-readable labels
that can hold over 100 times more informa-
tion than a standard bar code. (WeChat Pay,
which launched in 2013, has a similar built-in
scanner.) Scanning a QR code can bring you to
a website, or pull up an app, or connect you to
0 5 1
MARA HVISTENDAHL (@marahvistendahl)
is a national fellow at New America and
a contributing correspondent at Science.
a person’s social media profile. Codes started
showing up on graves (scan to learn more about
the deceased) and the shirts of waiters (scan
to tip). Beggars printed out QR codes and set
them out on the street. The codes linked the
online and offline realms on a scale not seen any-
where else in the world. That first year with the
QR scanner, Alipay mobile payments reached
nearly $70 billion.
In 2013, Ant Financial executives retreated to
the mountains outside Hangzhou to discuss cre-
ating a slew of new products; one of them was
Zhima Credit. The executives realized that they
could use the data-collecting powers of Alipay
to calculate a credit score based on an individ-
ual’s activities. “It was a very natural process,”
says You Xi, a Chinese business reporter who
detailed this pivotal meeting in a recent book,
Ant Financial. “If you have payment data, you
can assess the credit of a person.” And so the
tech company began the process of creating a
score that would be “credit for everything in
your life,” as You explains it.
Ant Financial wasn’t the only entity keen on
using data to measure people’s worth. Coinci-
dentally or not, in 2014 the Chinese government
announced it was developing what it called
a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State
Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly
called for the establishment of a nationwide
tracking system to rate the reputations of indi-
viduals, businesses, and even government offi-
cials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be
trailed by a file compiling data from public and
private sources by 2020, and for those files to
be searchable by fingerprints and other biomet-
ric characteristics. The State Council calls it a
“credit system that covers the whole society.”
For the Chinese Communist Party, social
credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible
authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people
toward behaviors ranging from energy con-
servation to obedience to the Party. Samantha
Hoffman, a consultant with the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in London who
is researching social credit, says that the gov-
ernment wants to preempt instability that
might threaten the Party. “That’s why social
credit ideally requires both coercive aspects
and nicer aspects, like providing social ser-
vices and solving real problems. It’s all under
the same Orwellian umbrella.”
In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech
companies granted approval from the Peo-
ple’s Bank of China to develop their own pri-
vate credit scoring platforms. Zhima Credit
appeared in the Alipay app shortly after that.
The service tracks your behavior on the app
to arrive at a score between 350 and 950, and
offers perks and rewards to those with good
scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not
only whether you repay your bills but also what
you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores
of your friends. Like Fair and Isaac decades ear-
lier, Ant Financial executives talked publicly
about how a data-driven approach would open
up the financial system to people who had been
locked out, like students and rural Chinese. For
the more than 200 million Alipay users who
have opted in to Zhima Credit, the sell is clear:
Your data will magically open doors for you.
Participating in Zhima Credit is voluntary, and
it’s unclear whether or how signing up for it could
affect an individual’s rating in the government
system. Ant Financial declined to let me inter-
view anyone from the company, but did provide
a statement from Hu Tao, the general manager of
Zhima Credit. “Zhima Credit is dedicated to cre-
THE SERVICE ating trust in a commercial setting and indepen-
dent of any government-initiated social credit
“WILL system,” the statement reads. “Zhima Credit
does not share user scores or underlying data
ENSURE THAT with any third party including the government
THE BAD
without the user’s prior consent.”
Ant Financial did state, however, in a 2015 press
PEOPLE IN release that the company plans “to help build a
social integrity system.” And the company has
SOCIETY already cooperated with the Chinese govern-
ment in one important way: It has integrated
DON’T HAVE a blacklist of more than 6 million people who
have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s
A PLACE TO database. According to Xinhua, the state news
agency, this union of big tech and big government
GO.” has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million
defaulters, who opened their Zhima Credit one
day to find their scores plunging.
The State Council has signaled that under
the national social credit system people will
be penalized for the crime of spreading online
rumors, among other offenses, and that those
deemed “seriously untrustworthy” can expect
to receive substandard services. Ant Financial
appears to be aiming for a society divided along
moral lines as well. As Lucy Peng, the compa-
ny’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in
Ant Financial, Zhima Credit “will ensure that
the bad people in society don’t have a place
to go, while good people can move freely and
without obstruction.”
I LIVED IN CHINA FOR THE BETTER PART OF A
decade but left in 2014, before mobile pay-
ments had fully taken hold. Today $5.5 tril-
lion in mobile payments are made every year
0 5 2
in China. (In contrast, the US mobile payments
market in 2016 was worth roughly $112 bil-
lion.) When I returned for a visit in August, I
 was determined to be a part of the new cash-
less China. So I signed up for Alipay and Zhima
Credit a few hours after emerging bleary-eyed
from the plane. Because I lacked a transaction
history, I immediately faced what felt like an
embarrassing judgment: a score of 550.
On my first day in Shanghai, I opened Zhima
Credit to scan a yellow bike that I found parked
at an angle on the sidewalk. China’s bike-sharing
culture had, like mobile payments, emerged out
of nowhere, and Shanghai’s streets were littered
with brightly colored bikes, deposited wherever
the riders pleased. A scan of a bike’s QR code
revealed a four-digit number that unlocked the
back wheel, and a ride across town cost roughly
15 cents. Because of my middling score, however,
“IF YOUR I had to pay a $30 deposit before I could scan
my first bike. Nor could I get deposit-free hotel
FRIENDS stays or GoPro rentals, or free umbrella rentals.
I belonged to the digital underclass.
ARE ALL In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers,
HIGH-SCORE runs deep. How do I know youÕre not a pianzi?
is a question people often ask when salespeo-
PEOPLE, ple call on the phone or repairmen show up at
the door. While my score likely didn’t put me in
IT’S GOOD the ranks of pianzi, one promise of Zhima Credit
was identifying those who were. Companies
FOR YOU. can buy risk assessments for users that detail
whether they have paid their rent or utilities or
IF YOU HAVE appear on the court blacklist. For businesses,
such products are billed as time-savers. On
SOME the site Tencent Video, I stumbled across an
BAD-CREDIT ad for Zhima Credit in which a businessman
scrutinizes strangers as he rides the subway.
PEOPLE “Everybody looks like a pianzi,” he despairs.
His employees, trying to guard against shady
AS FRIENDS, customers, cover the office conference room
walls with photos of lowlifes and criminals. But
IT’S NOT then—tada!—the boss discovers Zhima Credit,
and all of their problems are solved. The staff
NICE.” celebrate by tearing the photos off the wall.
For those with good behavior, Zhima Credit
offers perks through cooperation agreements
that Ant Financial has signed with hundreds of
companies and institutions. Shenzhou Zuche,
a car rental company, allows people with credit
scores over 650 to rent a car without a deposit.
In exchange for this vetting, Shenzhou Zuche
shares data, so that if a Zhima Credit user
crashes one of the rental company’s cars and
refuses to pay up, that detail is fed back into
his or her credit score. For a while people with
scores over 750 could even skip the security
check line at Beijing Capital Airport.
Two years after signing up for Zhima Credit,
Lazarus Liu was trending up to that number. I
met Liu, who is 27 and works at a large corpo-
ration, one Saturday afternoon at a mall in cen-
tral Shanghai, outside a Forever 21. He wore a
black shirt, black sneakers, and black Air Jor-
0 5 4
dan shorts, and his face was framed by a fresh
fade, with a jolt of black hair that flopped to
one side. We walked to a Starbucks filled with
young people hunched over their phones, sip-
ping peach iced teas and green tea Frappucci-
nos. Liu claimed the last open table.
Liu told me that he chose his English name,
Lazarus, after converting to Catholicism three
years ago, but that his religion was mostly a pri-
vate affair. He saw his Zhima Credit score the
same way; it revealed something about him,
but he kept those insights mostly to himself.
He rarely checked his score—it just lurked in
the background of the Alipay app on his Sam-
sung—and because it was good, he didn’t have
to. After starting at 600 out of a possible 950
points, he had reached 722, a score that enti-
tled him to favorable terms on loans and apart-
ment rentals, as well as showcasing on several
dating apps should he and his wife ever split
up. With a few dozen more points, he could get
a streamlined visa to Luxembourg, not that he
was planning such a trip.
As Liu amassed a favorable transaction and
payment history on Alipay, his score naturally
improved. But it could go down if he neglected
to pay a traffic fine, for example. And the privi-
leges that come with a high score might some-
day be revoked for behaviors that have nothing
to do with consumer etiquette. In June 2015, as
9.4 million Chinese teenagers took the grueling
national college entrance examination, Hu Tao,
the Zhima Credit general manager, told report-
ers that Ant Financial hoped to obtain a list of
students who cheated, so that the fraud could
become a blight on their Zhima Credit records.
“There should be consequences for dishonest
behavior,” she avowed. The good were moving
without obstruction. A threat hung over the rest.
ALIPAY KNOWS THAT AT 1 PM ON THE AFTERNOON
of August 26, I rented an Ofo brand bike outside
Shanghai’s former French Concession and rode
north, parking it across from Jing’an Temple.
It knows that at 1:24 pm I bought a snack in the
mall next to the temple. It knows that afterward
I got in a Didi car bound for a neighborhood to
the northwest. It knows that at 3:11 pm I dis-
embarked and entered a supermarket, and it
knows (because Alibaba owns the supermarket,
which accepts only Alipay at checkout) that at
3:36 pm I bought bananas, cheese, and crack-
ers. It knows that I then got in a taxi, and that I
arrived at my destination at 4:01 pm. It knows
the identification number of the taxi that drove
me there. It knows that at 4:19 pm I paid $8 for
an Amazon delivery. For three sweet hours—
one of which I spent in the swimming pool—it
does not know my whereabouts. Then it knows
that I rented another Ofo bike outside a hotel
in central Shanghai, cycled 10 minutes, and at
7:11 pm parked it outside a popular restaurant.
Because Ant Financial is a strategic investor in
Ofo, Alipay might know the route I took.
The algorithm behind my Zhima Credit score
is a corporate secret. Ant Financial officially lists
five broad categories of information that feed
into the score, but the company provides only
the barest of details about how these ingredi-
ents are cooked together. Like any conventional
credit scoring system, Zhima Credit monitors
my spending history and whether I have repaid
my loans. But elsewhere the algorithm veers into
voodoo, or worse. A category called Connections
considers the credit of my contacts in Alipay’s
social network. Characteristics takes into con-
sideration what kind of car I drive, where I work,
and where I went to school. A category called
Behavior, meanwhile, scrutinizes the nuances
of my consumer life, zeroing in on actions that
purportedly correlate with good credit. Shortly
after Zhima Credit’s launch, the company’s tech-
nology director, Li Yingyun, told the Chinese mag-
azine Caixin that spending behavior like buying
diapers, say, could boost one’s score, while play-
ing videogames for hours on end could lower it.
Online speculation held that donating to charity,
presumably through Alipay’s built-in donation
service, was good. But I’m not sure whether the
$3 I gave for feeding brown bear cubs qualifies me
as a philanthropist or a cheapskate.
I began to check my score obsessively, but
because scores are only reevaluated monthly,
the number didn’t budge. Each time I opened
the app, I encountered an alarming orange
screen. In the foreground was a gauge in the
shape of a half-circle, with a dial showing that
I had reached only a quarter of my potential. An
article on the portal Sohu.com explained that
my score put me in the category of “common
folk.” The page read: “Cultural level is not high.
Retired or nearly retired.” In China, where many
elderly lost out on years of education during the
Cultural Revolution, this was not a compliment.
According to Sohu, only 5 percent of the popu-
lation had scores worse than mine.
To see if I could do anything to pull my score
up, I took a taxi one morning to a chic open-air
shopping center outside Shanghai’s city center
to meet with Chen Chen, a 30-year-old illustra-
tor. Chen told a mutual friend on WeChat that
she had an “excellent” rating on Zhima Credit,
and I wanted to ask her counsel. We bought
coffee and walked to an outdoor seating area.
Chen wore a button-down shirt open over a
white T-shirt and skinny jeans. Her hair was
bleached to a straw yellow, and a line of spar-
kly eye shadow was swept under each eye. On
Zhima Credit she clocked in at 710, and her back-
ground color was a calming sky blue.
She explained how to boost my score. “They
will check what kind of friends you have,” she
said. “If your friends are all high-score people,
it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit
people as friends, it’s not nice.” After signing
up for Alipay, I sent friend requests to all of my
phone contacts. Only six people accepted. One of
my new Alipay friends was a man I used to tutor
in English and probably my wealthiest friend in
Shanghai. He owned several businesses, a fleet
of cars, and a spacious villa in a posh neighbor-
hood. But another was my old tailor, who lived
with her family in a single room in a dilapidated
house, with piles of cloth obscuring the thin
windows. Did the tailor’s impact on my score
cancel out the businessman’s? And was I drag-
ging both of them down?
Chen said she knew the scores of her close
friends but not those of acquaintances or work
colleagues. There are chat rooms where people
with decent scores seek out other high scorers,
presumably to boost their ratings. But in general,
people simply make assumptions about which
contacts have good credit and which are better
left unfriended. Users like Chen hadn’t yet taken
the step of shutting low scorers like me out of their
network, she assured me. Zhima Credit was still
fairly new, and an acquaintance’s low score might
still be charitably explained, she said: “Maybe
they just haven’t used it long enough.”
TO UNDERSTAND THE ALLURE THAT SOCIAL
engineering holds for Chinese leaders, you have
to go back decades, to long before apps and big
data. In the years after the 1949 Communist
Revolution, the government assigned everyone
to local work units, which became the locus of
surveillance and control. Individuals spied on
their neighbors while also doing everything
they could to avoid black marks on their own
dang’an, or government files. But maintaining
the system required massive state effort and
oversight. As economic reforms in the 1980s
led millions of people to leave their villages and
migrate to cities, the work unit system fell apart.
Migration also had a secondary effect: Cities
filled up with strangers and pianzi.
It didn’t take long for the central government
to start thinking about gamifying good behavior.
“If we are going to have a market system that is
supposed to be self-guiding, we also need to have
self-guiding credit systems,” says Rogier Creem-
ers, a scholar of Chinese law at the Leiden Institute
for Area Studies in the Netherlands. In the late
1990s, a working group at a Chinese Academy of
Sciences institute developed the basic concepts
behind the social credit systems. But the tech-
nology wasn’t advanced enough to support the
Communist Party’s broader political designs.
Nearly a decade ago, I spent a few weeks in
Suining, a mostly rural county in Jiangsu prov-
ince, near Shanghai. Back then, local gover-
nance was not subtle. When officials decided
to clamp down on people running red lights,
they urged citizens to take pictures of offend- Secret Scores
ers, whose images would later be featured on
In the US, your FICO credit score isn’t the only number that follows you
the local television channel. around. Americans are tracked in all sorts of ways. Some scoring systems
Then, in 2010, Suining became one of the first serve to help companies prevent fraud or make better decisions; others
areas in China to pilot a social credit system. help them target consumers for marketing. Here are five you probably didn’t
Officials there began assessing residents on a know exist. — b l a n c a m y e r s

range of criteria, including education level, online

behavior, and how well they followed traffic laws.
Criminal
Each of Suining’s 1.1 million citizens older than Justice Consumer Keeper
14 started out with 1,000 points, and points were Scoring Score Score
added or deducted based on behavior. Taking care
of elderly family members earned you 50 points. Courts nationwide Acxiom, a large HiQ Labs collects
Helping the poor merited 10 points. Helping the use algorithms to data broker, com- data from public
poor in a way that was reported by the media: 15. help make sentenc- bines publicly avail- profiles on LinkedIn
A drunk driving conviction meant the loss of 50 ing and bail deci- able information to create a score
sions. Northpointe’s (like home and car that purports to tell
points, as did bribing an official. After the points
COMPAS score pre- ownership) with employers if their
were tallied up, citizens were assigned grades dicts recidivism by information on pur- workers are at risk
of A, B, C, or D. Grade A citizens would be given pulling data on more chasing behavior in of being recruited
priority for school admissions and employment, than 100 factors order to score indi- by competitors.
while D citizens would be denied licenses, per- such as age, sex, viduals. The scores,
and criminal involve- in turn, label con-
mits, and access to some social services.
ment. Some reports sumers: “potential Charitable
The Suining system was rudimentary, and it claim the score is inheritor,” or “adult Donor
briefly sparked a national debate over what cri- biased against black with senior parent,” Score
teria should be included in a social credit score. defendants. for example. Some
But it provided a testing ground for what could of Acxiom’s data is
available to con- SMR Research uses
work nationally. And however crude the letter real estate and cen-
Frailty sumers in exchange
grades were, they were less crude than what they Scores for their personal sus data to identify
replaced. Social credit in Suining was accompa- information. But you prospects for chari-
don’t have to give table donations. The
nied by a shift to subtler government messaging.
The Johns Hopkins your personal higher the score,
Since the Suining pilot, dozens of cities have
Frailty Assessment data to Acxiom; it the higher the dona-
developed their own systems. The power of Calculator—which tion is likely to be.
already has it.
technology had caught up. Eventually, these is subject to health
systems will be integrated into the nationwide privacy laws—helps
government social credit system, which entails health care provid-
ers predict health care
a significant logistical headache. To aid in the
needs by calculating
task, the government has enlisted Baidu, a big things like how likely
tech company, to help develop the social credit a patient is to expe-
database by the 2020 deadline. rience postoperative
The Chinese tech companies have, in their surgical complica-
tions or readmission
way, helped to shift the Party’s attitude toward
to a hospital.
digital technologies. When the internet first
came to China, bursting into people’s lives in
the form of blogs and chat rooms, the Party saw
it as a threat. Here was a place where people
might speak their minds, join together, dissent.
Leaders responded to these impulses through
censorship and other aggressive tactics. But
companies like Ant Financial have shown just
how useful digital technologies can be in gath-
ering and deploying information. Instead of
merely reacting to content by banning search
terms or shutting down websites, the govern-
ment now collaborates with the private sector
on facial and voice recognition technologies,
along with artificial intelligence research.
In 2015, a few months after Zhima Credit
debuted, Alibaba founder Jack Ma and 14 other
executives traveled to the US with President
Xi Jinping for his first state visit. Ma, along
with leaders at Tencent and Baidu, also sits
on the board of the Internet Society of China,
a quasi-governmental organization under the
direction of the Party.
This strategic nexus is a delicate one, though.
In recent months Chinese regulators have taken
steps to exert more control over tech companies.
Last August, the People’s Bank of China ordered
mobile and online payment companies to connect
to a central government clearinghouse, giving reg-
ulators access to transaction data. Two months
later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chi-
nese internet regulators were considering taking
a 1 percent stake in the major tech companies.
One possible scenario for a social credit part-
nership is that the central bank will oversee the
development of a broader metric, like a FICO score,
while letting companies like Ant Financial collect
data to feed into that score. Whatever its eventual
structure, the larger social credit system “will defi-
nitely be under the government’s control,” says
You Xi, the reporter who wrote the book about
Ant Financial. “The government doesn’t want
this very important infrastructure of the people’s
credit in one big company’s hands.”
Chinese people who have been branded
untrustworthy are getting the first glimpse of
what a unified system might mean. One day last
May, Liu Hu, a 42-year-old journalist, opened a
travel app to book a flight. But when he entered his
name and national ID number, the app informed
him that the transaction wouldn’t go through
because he was on the Supreme People’s Court
blacklist. This list—literally, the List of Dishonest
People—is the same one that is integrated into
Zhima Credit. In 2015 Liu had been sued for defa-
mation by the subject of a story he’d written, and
a court had ordered him to pay $1,350. He paid the
fine, and even photographed the bank transfer slip
and messaged the photo to the judge in the case.
Perplexed as to why he was still on the list, he con-
tacted the judge and learned that, while transfer-
ring his fine, he had entered the wrong account
number. He hurried to transfer the money again,
following up to make sure the court had received
it. This time the judge did not reply.
Although Liu hadn’t signed up for Zhima Credit,
the blacklist caught up with him in other ways. He
became, effectively, a second-class citizen. He
was banned from most forms of travel; he could
only book the lowest classes of seat on the slow-
est trains. He could not buy certain consumer
goods or stay at luxury hotels, and he was ineli-
gible for large bank loans. Worse still, the black-
list was public. Liu had already spent a year in
jail once before on charges of “fabricating and
THE DIAL spreading rumors” after reporting on the shady
dealings of a vice-mayor of Chongqing. The mem-
SHOWED ory of imprisonment left him stoic about this
new, more invisible punishment. At least he was
THAT I HAD still with his wife and daughter.
Still, Liu took to his blog to stir up sympathy
REACHED and convince the judge to take him off the list. As
of October he was still on it. “There is almost no
ONLY oversight of the court executors” who maintain
the blacklist, he told me. “There are many mis-
A QUARTER takes in implementation that go uncorrected.” If
OF MY Liu had a Zhima Credit score, his troubles would
have been compounded by other worries. The
P O T E N T I A L. way Zhima Credit is designed, being blacklisted
sends you on a rapid downward spiral. First your
MY SCORE score drops. Then your friends hear you are on the
blacklist and, fearful that their scores might be
PUT ME affected, quietly drop you as a contact. The algo-
rithm notices, and your score plummets further.
IN THE
CATEGORY
OF
“COMMON
F O L K .”
SOON AFTER I RETURNED TO THE US FROM MY
visit to China, Equifax, the US credit-reporting
agency, announced that it had been hacked. The
breach exposed the credit records of some 145
million people. Like many Americans, I got a
quick and hard lesson. My credit card number
had been stolen a few weeks earlier, but because
I had been traveling overseas I hadn’t bothered
to freeze my credit. When I tried to do so after
the hack, I found that an already difficult pro-
cess had become nearly impossible. Equifax’s
site was only partly operational, and its phone
lines were jammed. Desperate, I signed up for a
credit-monitoring service called Credit Karma,
which, in exchange for the very same informa-
tion that I was trying to protect, showed me
0 5 7
my score with two of the three major bureaus.
These numbers were communicated to me
through a credit gauge similar to Zhima Cred-
 it’s, down to the color coding of scores. I learned
that my credit score had dipped by a few dozen
points. There were four or five attempts to take
out credit in my name that I didn’t recognize.
Now I had two tracking systems scoring me, on
opposite sides of the globe. But these were only the
scores that I knew about. Most Americans have doz-
ens of scores, many of them drawn from behavioral
and demographic metrics similar to those used by
Zhima Credit, and most of them held by companies
that give us no chance to opt out. Others we enter
MOST into voluntarily. The US government can’t legally
compel me to participate in some massive data-
AMERICANS driven social experiment, but I give up my data to
private companies every day. I trust these corpo-
HAVE rations enough to participate in their vast scor-
DOZENS OF ing experiments. I post my thoughts and feelings
on Facebook and leave long trails of purchases on
SCORES, Amazon and eBay. I rate others in Airbnb and Uber
and care a little too much about how others rate
AND MOST me. There is not yet a great American super app,
and the scores compiled by data brokers are mainly
OF THEM used to better target ads, not to exert social control.
But through a process called identity resolution,
ARE HELD BY data aggregators can use the clues I leave behind
to merge my data from various sources.
COMPANIES Do you take antidepressants? Frequently return
THAT GIVE clothes to retailers? Write your name in all caps
when filling out online forms? Data brokers collect
US NO all of this information and more. As in China, you
may even be penalized for who your friends are.
CHANCE TO In 2012, Facebook patented a method of credit
assessment that could consider the credit scores
OPT OUT. of people in your network. The patent describes
a tool that arrives at an average credit score for
0 5 9
your friends and rejects a loan application if that
average is below a certain minimum. The com-
pany has since revised its platform policies to
prohibit outside lenders from using Facebook
data to determine credit eligibility. The company
could still decide to get into the credit business
itself, though. (“We often seek patents for tech-
nology we never implement, and patents should
not be taken as an indication of future plans,”
a Facebook spokesperson said in response to
questions about the credit patent.) “You could
imagine a future where people are watching to
see if their friends’ credit is dropping and then
dropping their friends if that affects them,” says
Frank Pasquale, a big-data expert at University of
Maryland Carey School of Law. “That’s terrifying.”
Often, data brokers are flat-out wrong. The data
broker Acxiom, which provides some informa-
tion about what it collects on a site called About-
TheData.com, has me pegged as a single woman
with a high school education and a “likely Las
Vegas gambler,” when in fact I’m married, have
a master’s degree, and have never even bought
a lottery ticket. But it is impossible to challenge
these assessments, since we’re never told that
they exist. I know more about Zhima Credit’s algo-
rithm than I do about how US data brokers rate
me. This is, as Pasquale points out in his book The
Black Box Society, essentially a “one-way mirror.”
After I left China, I checked back in with
Lazarus Liu on WeChat. He sent me a screenshot
of his Zhima Credit score, which had increased by
eight points since we met. His screen read “Fan-
tastic,” and the font had shifted to soft italics.
We talked about a new facial recognition fea-
ture called Smile to Pay that Ant Financial had
introduced at a concept restaurant in Hangzhou
owned by KFC. The walls of the restaurant were
adorned with gigantic white phones. To order,
you simply tapped a picture of what you wanted
and then showed the phone your face, typing in
your cell phone number to confirm payment.
First smartphones had eliminated the need for
a wallet; now Smile to Pay eliminated the need
for a phone. All you needed was your face.
Liu wasn’t eager to try Smile to Pay. The “gov-
ernment affairs” page on Zhima Credit’s website
suggests that Ant Financial partners with local
governments throughout China to use its facial
recognition capabilities, but that wasn’t what
made Liu uneasy. While studying abroad, he had
played around with Android’s Face Unlock fea-
ture. His roommate, who shared his square jaw,
had been able to unlock his phone a few times.
“I feel that it could be unsafe,” he messaged me.
“I would want to see that it’s the real thing.”
He wrote real thing in English, for emphasis.
While chatting with Liu, I, too, had opened
up Zhima Credit. My score had increased by
four points. “You still have room to improve,”
the app informed me delicately. But next to my
new score, 554, was a small green arrow. I was
on my way up. �
6 0
 N O L O N G E R S AT I S F I E D W I T H C R U D E R O A D S I D E B O M B S , I S I S I S D O I N G S O M E T H I N G U N P R E C E D E N T E D F O R

A J I H A D I S T G R O U P : D E S I G N I N G A N D M A S S - P R O D U C I N G I T S O W N A D VA N C E D M U N I T I O N S . A N D A S O N E O B S E S S I V E

I N V E S T I G AT O R D I S C O V E R E D , I T S S U P P L Y C H A I N I S R I F E W I T H U N L I K E L Y A N D D I S T U R B I N G S O U R C E S .

by Brian Castner
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CALLIGRAPHY BY

Andrea DiCenzo Mahmut Enes Kemer

 “Habibi! Aluminium!”
The call echoes through the courtyard of
a trash-strewn home in Tal Afar, a remote
outpost in northern Iraq. It is late Septem-
ber and still hot, the kind of heat that seems
to come from all sides, even radiate up from
the ground, and the city is empty except for
feral dogs and young men with guns.
“Habibi!” Damien Spleeters shouts again,
using the casual Arabic term of endearment
At Iraqi military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, weapons inspector Damien Spleeters (left)
and his coworker, Haider al-Hakim, look through crates of ISIS ammunition. Previous page: a PG-7 grenade
launcher, one of thousands of weapons that Spleeters has tracked down.
to call out for Haider al-Hakim, his Iraqi trans-
lator and partner on the ground.
Spleeters is a field investigator for Conflict
Armament Research (CAR), an international
organization funded by the European Union
that documents weapons trafficking in war
zones. He is 31 years old, with a 1980s Fred-
die Mercury mustache and tattoos covering
thin arms that tan quickly in the desert sun.
In another context, he’d be mistaken for a
hipster barista, not an investigator who has
spent the past three years tracking down
rocket-propelled grenades in Syria, AK-47-
style rifles in Mali, and hundreds of other
weapons that have found their way into war
zones, sometimes in violation of interna-
tional arms agreements. The work Spleet-
ers does is typically undertaken by secretive
government offices, such as the US Defense
Intelligence Agency’s Military Material Iden-
tification Division, known as Chuckwagon.
But while Chuckwagon is barely discoverable
by Google, Spleeters’ detailed reports for
CAR are both publicly available online and
contain more useful information than any
classified intelligence I ever received when
I was commanding a bomb disposal unit for
the US military in Iraq in 2006.
In that fight, guerrillas ambushed Amer-
ican soldiers with IEDs. The devices I saw
during my tours were largely hidden in the
ground or deployed as massive car bombs,
detonated in marketplaces and schools so
that the gutters filled with blood. But the
majority of those devices were crude, held
together with duct tape and goopy solder.
The few rockets and mortars the fighters
possessed were old and shoddy, lacked the
correct fuzes, and often failed to detonate.
Many of ISIS’ leaders were veterans of
that insurgency, but as they began ramping
up their war against the Iraqi government
in 2014, they knew they needed more than
IEDs and AK-47s to seize territory and create
their independent Islamic State. A conven-
tional war required conventional arms—
mortars, rockets, grenades—which, as an
international pariah, ISIS could not buy in
sufficient quantities. Some they looted from
the Iraqi or Syrian governments, but when
those ran out they did something that no
terrorist group has ever done before and
that they continue to do today: design their
own munitions and mass-produce them
using advanced manufacturing techniques.
Iraq’s oil fields provided the industrial base—
tool-and-die sets, high-end saws, injection-
molding machines—and skilled workers who
knew how to quickly fashion intricate parts
to spec. Raw materials came from cannibal-
izing steel pipe and melting down scrap. ISIS
engineers forged new fuzes, new rockets and
launchers, and new bomblets to be dropped
by drones, all assembled using instruction
plans drawn up by ISIS officials.
Since the early days of the conflict, CAR
has conducted 83 site visits in Iraq to collect
weapons data, and Spleeters has participated
in nearly every investigation. The result is a
detailed database that lists 1,832 weapons
and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered
in Iraq and Syria. CAR describes it as “the
most comprehensive sample of Islamic State–
captured weapons and ammunition to date.”
Which is how, this autumn, Spleeters came
to be hovering over a 5-gallon bucket of alu-
minum paste in a dingy home in Tal Afar,
waiting for his fixer to arrive. Al-Hakim is
bald, well-dressed, and gives off a faint air
of the urban sophisticate, such that at times
he looks a bit out of place in a sewage-filled
ISIS workshop. The two men have an easy
rapport, though one in which al-Hakim is
the host and Spleeters always the respect-
ful guest. Their job is to notice small things;
where others might see trash, they see evi-
dence, which Spleeters then photographs
and scours for obscure factory codes that
can give a clue to its origins.
The aluminum paste in the bucket, for
example, which ISIS craftsmen mix with
ammonium nitrate to make a potent main
charge for mortars and rocket warheads:
Spleeters discovered the same buckets, from
the same manufacturers and chemical dis-
tributors, in Fallujah, Tikrit, and Mosul. “I
like to see the same stuff” in different cit-
ies, he tells me, since these repeat sightings
allow him to identify and describe different
steps in ISIS’ supply chain. “It confirms my
theory that this is the industrial revolution
of terrorism,” he says. “And for that they
need raw material in industrial quantities.”
Spleeters is also constantly searching for
new weapons that show how ISIS engineers’
expertise is evolving, and with this trip to Tal
Afar he has set his sights on one promising
new lead: a series of modified rockets that
had appeared in ISIS propaganda videos on
YouTube and other social media.
Spleeters suspected that the tubes, trigger
mechanisms, and fins of the new rockets were
all the work of ISIS engineers, but he thought
the warheads likely came from somewhere
else. After discovering similar weapons over
the past six months, he has grown to believe
that ISIS may have captured the warheads
from antigovernment militias in the Syrian
civil war that had been secretly armed by
Saudi Arabia and the United States.
But he needs more evidence to prove it. If
he can find more launchers and more war-
3
heads, Spleeters believes he can build up
6
enough proof—for the first time—that ISIS
is repurposing powerful explosive ordnance,
purchased by the US, for use in urban combat
against the Iraqi army and its American spe-
cial operations partners. For ISIS to produce
such sophisticated weapons marks a signif-
icant escalation of its ambition and ability.
It also provides a disturbing glimpse of the
future of warfare, where dark-web file shar-
ing and 3-D printing mean that any group,
anywhere, could start a homegrown arms
industry of its own.
Nearly all military munitions—from rifle
cartridges to aircraft bombs, regardless of
the country of origin—are engraved and
marked in some way. The arcane codes can
identify the date of manufacture, the specific
production factory, the type of explosive
filler, and the weapon’s name, also known
BRIAN CASTNER (@Brian_Castner) is a
writer, former Air Force explosive ordnance
disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War.
as the nomenclature. For Spleeters, these
engravings and markings mean that ord-
nance is “a document you cannot falsify.”
Pressed stamps on hardened steel are diffi-
cult to change or remove. “If it’s written on
it that it comes from this country, 99 per-
cent chance it is true,” he says. “And if it’s
not, you can figure out that it is counterfeit,
and that means something else. Everything
means something.”
These codes are considered proprietary
information by arms manufacturers, so deci-
phering their markings is both art and science,
part train-spotting, part intelligence collec-
tion, part pattern recognition. Officials at CAR
have been tracking the markings since 2011,
when a group of weapons specialists from
the United Nations founded the organization
to supplement the work being done by gov-
ernments and NGOs around the world. It’s a
small company with less than 20 researchers;
Spleeters’ job title is head of regional oper-
ations, but he has no permanent employees.
Globally, much of CAR’s work involves small
arms—rifles and bullets, mostly—and the
group published its first report on ISIS in 2014,
when its researchers documented that ammu-
nition apparently provided to the Iraqi army
by the US had ended up in the hands of ISIS.
Unlike government agencies that conduct

Improvised claymores—welded steel tubes packed with homemade

explosives—sit unused at an ISIS weapons facility in Tal Afar.
secret investigations and don’t release their
findings, CAR gathers information in the field
and publishes its databases and analyses for
anyone to read. With every trip, every pho-
tograph of another rocket, CAR’s database
grows in authority. Leo Bradley, a retired US
Army colonel who once led the fight against
IEDs in Afghanistan, tells me that CAR serves
as a useful, if perhaps accidental, back door
for US officials to publicly discuss topics that
are otherwise classified. “We can reference
the CAR reports because they’re all open
source, and they never reveal US sources and
methods,” he says. Which in practice means
that if US officials want to convey the totality
of what ISIS forces are up to and they have
only classified information to make their
point, then there’s only so much they can
share with the public. But if that informa-
tion is also available in a CAR report, then
those same officials are often free to discuss
the information. Bradley calls their work
“really impressive,” but he also says the US
government isn’t quite sure how to work with
a “nontraditional actor” like CAR.
One afternoon in Tal Afar, as Spleeters is
lining up 7.62-mm cartridges at an Iraqi army
base, taking a photo of each headstamp, I
tell him that I have never met anyone who
loved ammo as much as him. “I’ll take that
as a compliment,” he says, smiling.
The infatuation began when Spleeters
was a cub newspaper reporter in his native
Belgium. “There was the Libyan war at the
time,” he says of the country’s 2011 civil war,
and he became obsessed with understanding
how Belgian-made rifles made their way into
the hands of anti-Gadhafi rebels. Uncover-
ing that connection, he suspected, “would
interest the Belgian public in a conflict that
otherwise they wouldn’t care about.”
He began sifting through Belgian diplo-
matic cables looking for more information
about the secretive government transfers,
but that approach only got him so far. The
only way to get the story, Spleeters decided,
was to go to Libya and track down the rifles
himself. He bought a plane ticket using grant
money and called out of work. “That was
kinda weird, you know?” he says. “I was tak-
ing vacation so I could go to Libya.”
Spleeters found the rifles he was look-
ing for, and he also discovered that tracking
munitions satisfied him in a way that read-
ing about them online did not. “With weap-
ons you can tell a whole story,” he told me.
“It makes people talk. It can make the dead
talk.” He returned to Belgium as a freelance
journalist, writing a few stories about weap-
ons trafficking for French-language newspa-
pers and producing reports for think tanks
like the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.
But the freelance life proved too unstable,
so Spleeters set journalism aside and joined
CAR as a full-time investigator in 2014.
On one of his first trips in his new job, to
Kobani, Syria, he worked among dead ISIS
fighters left to rot where they fell. He found
one AK-47-style rifle with decomposing flesh
jammed in the cracks and crevices of the
wooden handguard. The whole place smelled
sickly sweet. Among the bodies, he also found
7.62-mm ammunition, PKM machine guns,
and PG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, some
stolen from the Iraqi army. Such discoveries
make him an evangelist for the value of field-
work. He says that his data cannot be repli-
cated by watching news reports or online
videos. “With all the social media things,
when you see ordnance or small arms from
afar, you might think, ‘Oh, that’s an M16.’
But if you see it close up, you figure out it’s
a CQ-556 rifle from China, a copy of the M16.
But you need to be close by to see it,” he tells
me, adding that the camera conceals more
than it reveals. In person, arms can turn out
to have different manufacturers—and thus
different backgrounds—than one could ever
presume based on grainy YouTube footage.
The war between the armies of ISIS and the
government of Iraq has been one of pitched
house-to-house combat. In late 2016, as gov-
ernment forces battled ISIS forces for con-
trol of the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqis
discovered that ISIS had been producing
major ordnance in secret facilities around
the area. To investigate the munitions facto-
ries in Mosul, Spleeters made field visits even
while the fighting was ongoing. One day, while
photographing weapons, bullets arcing in the
air above him, he saw that the Iraqi guard who
was supposed to keep him safe was trying
to cut the head off a dead ISIS fighter with a
butcher knife. The blade was dull and the sol-
dier grew frustrated. Finally he walked away.
Spleeters had pulled some significant intel-
ligence out of Mosul, but thanks to coalition
air strikes, much of the city was flattened,
the evidence probably destroyed or scat-
tered by the time government forces declared
victory this past July. As ISIS began to lose
5
ground across Iraq, Spleeters worried that
6
the group’s weapons infrastructure could be
obliterated before he or anyone else would
be able to document its full capabilities. He
needed access to these factories before they
were destroyed. Only then could he describe
their contents, trace their origins, and piece
together the supply chains.
Then, at the end of August, ISIS quickly
lost control of Tal Afar. And unlike other
pulverized battlefields, Tal Afar remained
relatively undamaged: Only every fourth
home was destroyed. To find more evidence
of covert arms diversions, Spleeters needed
to get to Tal Afar quickly, while he still could.
In mid-September, Spleeters flew to Bagh-
dad, where he met up with al-Hakim and then,
under the protection of an Iraqi army convoy
of gun trucks, drove nine hours north along
highways only recently cleared of IEDs. The
final stretch of road to Tal Afar was lonesome
and scorched, cut by underground detona-
tions at every culvert, the fields all around
burned and black.
 ‹
Spleeters inspects
mortar projectiles
in a building that
ISIS abandoned
when it lost control
SPLEETERS BELIEVES HE CAN BUILD UP ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO PROVE THAT ISIS

of Tal Afar.
IS REPURPOSING EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE PURCHASED BY THE U.S.

On the road back

from the city center
of Tal Afar, Iraqi
‹ soldiers apprehend
a local shepherd.
While Tal Afar had
been liberated
almost a month ear-
lier, civilians were
still banned from
certain military
zones.
 7
6

Spleeters’ team
found molds for
119.5-mm mortars
in the abandoned
‹

Tal Afar bazaar,

where tightly
packed shops and
metal roofing had
helped keep the
ISIS weapons fac-
tories hidden.
 The Iraqi army controls the southern sec-
tors of Tal Afar, but the Hashd al-Shaabi, the
Iran-backed, majority-Shiite militias, con-
trol the north, and the tension between the
two was like a hum in the air. My driver was
Kurdish and spoke little English, but when
we approached the first checkpoint, he saw
the flag of a Hashd militia and turned toward
me with alarm.
“Me no Kurdi. You no Amriki,” he said.
We were quiet at the roadblock, and they
waved us through.
We reach Tal Afar in the heat of the after-
noon. Our first stop is a walled compound
that al-Hakim says could have been a mosque,
where several ISIS-designed mortars lie in
the entrance. They are deceptively simple
on first blush, looking like standard Amer-
ican and Soviet mortars. But unlike those
models, which come in a number of standard
sizes (60 mm, 81 mm, 82 mm, 120 mm, and
so on), these mortars are 119.5 mm, to match
the inside diameter of the repurposed steel
pipes that ISIS uses for launch tubes. This
may sound like a small change, but mortars
must fit perfectly in their launchers so that
sufficient gas pressure can build for ejection.
ISIS’ quality control tolerances are extremely
tight, often down to a tenth of a millimeter.
Past the mortars, in the back of a building,
8
6
stand a series of pressurized tanks connected
with steel pipe and large drums of black liq-
uid. On one tank, a spigot has dripped an ugly
plume. “Would you say that’s corrosion?”
Spleeters asks al-Hakim. It’s textbook toxic,
the side of the tank a waterfall of bubbling
metal in a V, like a drunk vomiting down the
front of his shirt. But Spleeters has no way
to take a sample, no testing kit, no hazmat
suit or breathing mask.
“I feel my eyes a bit burning,” al-Hakim
says. The whole area smells acrid, like paint,
and bags of caustic soda, a decontaminate,
lie nearby.
“There’s something fishy in here, man,”
Spleeters agrees. We don’t stay much longer.
The black sludge could have been a napalm-
like incendiary tar or a toxic industrial chem-
ical of some sort, but Spleeters couldn’t say
conclusively what the tanks produced. (He
would later learn that he might have been
able to identify the industrial process if he’d
taken better photos of the pressure dials and
their serial numbers. No matter how much
Spleeters documents in the field, he says,
there is always the nagging suspicion that
he’s forgotten something.)
After a short drive down the quiet, pock-
marked streets, we arrive at a nondescript
house that looks like the others on the block:
stone wall, metal gate, individual rooms sur-
rounding a central patio, shady and cool,
breezy through spindly trees. Among the dis-
carded shoes and bedding lie mortar tubes
and artillery rounds. Spleeters moves them
aside with casual familiarity.
At the back of the compound, Spleeters
notices something unusual. A hole has been
knocked in the concrete wall—as if by crafts-
men, not bombs—and through the passage
sits a large open room packed with tools and
half-assembled ordnance. The area is shaded
by tarps, out of sight of government drones,
and the air smells of machine oil.
Spleeters knows where we are at once.
This isn’t just a warehouse, like so many of
the other places he’s photographed. This is
a production facility.
On one table he sees some ISIS-designed
bomblets, with injection-molded plastic bod-
ies and small tail kits for stabilization in the
air. These can be dropped from drones—the
subject of many online videos—but they can
also be thrown or shot from an AK-type rifle.
Nearby is a station for fuze production;
piles of gleaming spiral shavings lie at the
foot of an industrial lathe. The most common
ISIS fuze looks like a silver conical plug with
a safety pin stuck through the main body.
There is an elegance to the minimalist, not

Dark Arsenal
T H E N EW G E N E R AT I O N O F W E A P O N S T H AT I S I S
I S U S I N G TO WAG E WA R .
1
— s a r a s wat i r at h o d

BOMBLETS
In 2017, ISIS ramped up its use of grenade­sized
bombs that can be strapped to small hobbyist
drones and dropped on unsuspecting targets. These
“bomblets” are custom­made, likely using injection
molding, and they can also be thrown like a hand gre­
nade or shot out of the business end of an AK­47.

MORTARS AND
MORTAR TUBES
2 ISIS engineers are repurposing steel pipes,
believed to have once been oil pipes, and fashion­
ing them into tubes to fire off explosive shells
known as mortars. However, since most existing
mortars are either too big or too small to fit snugly
inside these pipes, ISIS has started making its
own using clay molds. These ISIS­designed shells
are exactly 119.5 mm in diameter—a perfect fit for
the ISIS­designed mortar tubes.
simple, design, though the ingenuity of this
device actually lies in its interchangeability.
The standard ISIS fuze will trigger all of their
rockets, mortars, and bomblets—a signif-
icant engineering problem solved. For the
sake of security and reliability, the US and
most other countries design specific fuzes
for each type of ordnance. But the ISIS fuzes
a citywide electrical outage means Spleet-
ers can’t examine or photograph this jack-
pot without natural light. Our convoy soon
returns to the Iraqi army base near the city’s
devastated airport. It’s a small post of sal-
vaged single-wide trailers with holes in half
the roofs; two detained fighters, thought
to be ISIS—a young teenager and an older
dles. Unfired ordnance is fairly safe, as long
as you don’t drop it on its nose, but disassem-
bled munitions are unpredictable, and the
lab could have been booby-trapped besides.
But Spleeters isn’t alarmed. He’s frustrated.
“Habibi,” he says, “I really need them to
stop touching and taking stuff away. It’s
important that it’s together, because it makes

TOLERANCES ARE EXTREMELY TIGHT, OF TEN DOWN TO A TENTH OF A MILLIMETER.

are modular, safe, and by some accounts have man, seemingly the only prisoners of the sense together. If they take it away, it doesn’t

MORTARS MUST FIT PERFECTLY IN THEIR LAUNCHERS; ISIS’ QUALITY CONTROL

a relatively low dud rate.
Spleeters continues on to the back of the
factory, which is where he first sees them:
the reengineered rockets he’s been looking
for, in nearly every stage of preparation and
construction, along with assembly instruc-
tions written in marker on the walls. Dozens
of the deconstructed warheads, awaiting
modification, lie in a dark annex, and a long
table with calipers and small tubs of home-
made propellant stands nearby. Any individ-
ual workbench, on its own, would be a gold
mine of intelligence that could illustrate
ISIS’ weapons program. But the combination
here is overwhelming, sensory overload. “Oh
my God, look at this. And look at this. Oh my
God, come here. Oh my God, oh my God, oh
my God,” Spleeters mumbles, over and over,
from station to station. Charlie had just stum-
bled into the chocolate factory.
But night is descending on Tal Afar, and
battle in Tal Afar—sleep in a trailer next to
our quarters. Spleeters passes the evening
impatiently, watching satellite television.
In all the days we spent together, he seemed
to do little more than work and eat, sleeping
only a few hours at a time.
Dawn comes early, and when the soldiers
are awake, Spleeters has the convoy return
us to the workshop. He puts out 20 yellow
crime-scene placards, one on each table, and
then draws a map to help him reconstruct
the room later. In one spot on the map, the
welding rods. In another, a bench grinder.
“It might not be a continuous process,” he
says, thinking out loud. “It might be differ-
ent stations for different things.”
Spleeters then begins to take photos, but
by now the room is full of Iraqi intelligence
officers curious about the workshop. They
open every drawer, pick up every circuit
board, kick scrap, remove papers, turn han-
make sense anymore. Can you tell them?”
“I told them,” al-Hakim says.
“They can do whatever they want when
I’m done,” he says wearily.
In a small room adjacent to the launcher
workbenches, Spleeters begins examining
dozens of rocket-propelled grenades of var-
ious models, some decades old and all of
them bearing some identifying mark. Rock-
ets manufactured in Bulgaria bear a “10” or
“11” in a double circle. The green paints used
by China and Russia are slightly different
shades. “In Iraq, we have fought the whole
world,” one soldier bragged to me a couple
of days before, referring to the many foreign
fighters recruited by ISIS. But he could eas-
ily have meant the arms from the disparate
countries in that single room.
Spleeters carefully picks through the stacks
of warheads until he finds what he’s been
looking for: “I’ve got a PG-9 round, habibi,”

3 3
ISIS-MODIFIED
ROCKETS
Rocket­propelled grenades like PG­7s and PG­9s
have long been used by militaries around the world,
but ISIS engineers take these weapons apart and
reuse the diamond­shaped warheads to weaponize
their own line of customized rockets. The new muni­
tions come in three different types that vary in range
from a few hundred feet to nearly half a mile, accord­
ing to Spleeters. They’re tricked out with new propel­
lant charges and stabilizing fins that can be folded
down so the rockets can be launched from a tube.

ISIS-DESIGNED
ROCKETS
4
ISIS’ network of munitions factories have produced
two main types of rockets: a smaller rocket about
2.5 feet in length and a longer one measuring almost
6 feet. These products are made from scratch using
a combination of steel, plastic, and aluminum, and to
ensure they’re compatible with the other elements
of the ISIS arsenal, each one adheres to a standard
weight and diameter.
Spleeters exclaims to al-Hakim. It is a Roma-
nian rocket marked with lot number 12-14-451;
Spleeters has spent the past year tracking this
very serial number. In October 2014, Romania
sold 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades, known
as PG-9s, with lot number 12-14-451 to the US
military. When it purchased the weapons, the
US signed an end-use certificate, a document
stating that the munitions would be used by
US forces and not sold to anyone else. The
Romanian government confirmed this sale by
providing CAR with the end-user certificate
and delivery verification document.
In 2016, however, Spleeters came across
a video made by ISIS that showed a crate
of PG-9s, with what appeared to be the lot
number 12-14-451, captured from members
of Jaysh Suriyah al-Jadid, a Syrian militia.
Somehow, PG-9s from this very same ship-
ment made their way to Iraq, where ISIS
technicians separated the stolen warheads
from the original rocket motors before add-
ing new features that made them better
suited for urban combat. (Rocket-propelled
grenades can’t be fired inside buildings,
because of the dangerous back-blast. By
attaching ballast to the rocket, ISIS engi-
neers crafted a weapon that could be used
in house-to-house fighting.)
So how exactly did American weapons

Because so much of the ordnance Spleeters found in this Tal Afar factory was largely intact,
he believes the extremists didn’t bother to destroy evidence before they fled.
end up with ISIS? Spleeters can’t yet say for
sure. According to a July 19, 2017, report in
The Washington Post, the US government
secretly trained and armed Syrian rebels from
2013 until mid-2017, at which point the Trump
administration discontinued the program—in
part over fears that US weapons were ending
up in the wrong hands. The US government did
not reply to multiple requests for comment on
how these weapons wound up in the hands of
Syrian rebels or in an ISIS munitions factory.
The government also declined to comment on
whether the US violated the terms of its end-
user certificate and, by extension, failed to
comply with the United Nations Arms Trade
Treaty, of which it is one of 130 signatories.
Other countries seem to be purchasing
and diverting arms as well. CAR has tracked
multiple weapons that were bought by Saudi
Arabia and later recovered from ISIS fighters.
Heavy Traffic
W E A P O N S F RO M A L L OV E R T H E WO R L D M A K E T H E I R
WAY TO I S I S F O RC E S I N SY R I A A N D I R AQ. H E R E’S W H E R E
T H EY C O M E F RO M . — s . r .
E
B A
D
Turkey > Syria > Iraq
On numerous occasions, Conflict Arma­
ment Research (CAR) has discovered
Turkish weapons, ammunition, and explo­
A sive materials among ISIS forces in Iraq
and Syria. The organization also believes
that most of the chemicals that ISIS uses
to make explosives are purchased on the
civilian market in Turkey.
Bulgaria > Serbia > Burundi > Iraq
Iraqi authorities recovered Bulgarian­made
rockets from ISIS forces on two separate
occasions. Both appeared to be part of a
shipment that passed through Serbia and
B Burundi before arriving in Iraq. (Bulgarian
weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia have
also been smuggled into Syria, most likely
through Jordan.)
I L L U S T R AT I O N
Story TK
C
1
7
China > South Sudan > Syria
Chinese­manufactured rifles popular
among rebels in South Sudan were recov­
ered from ISIS during the siege of Kobani, C
Syria, which began in September 2014 and
ended in January 2015.
Belgium > Libya > Syria
Belgian­manufactured ammunition that
was originally sold to Gadhafi’s Libya in D
the 1980s has reemerged decades later
in ISIS strongholds.
Romania > US > Iraq
CAR has tracked numerous shipments of
Romanian rockets that were sold to the
US and later recovered from ISIS forces. E
(Spleeters says CAR is not sure whether
these shipments were ever physically
delivered to the US or if they were sent
directly elsewhere.)
 In one instance, Spleeters checked the flight
records of an aircraft that was supposed to
be carrying 12 tons of munitions to Saudi
Arabia. The records show the plane didn’t
stop in Saudi Arabia, but it did land in Jor-
dan. Due to its border with Syria, Jordan is a
well-known transfer point for arms supply-
ing the rebels fighting the Assad regime, and
while the Saudis could claim the weapons had
been hijacked or stolen, they don’t: Personnel
involved with the flight insist the plane and
IN A FOYER STANDS A TALL FURNACE THAT ISIS SOLDIERS COVERED WITH
igan Tech University, is an expert in open
source hardware (a protocol to create and
improve physical objects—like open source
code, but for stuff), and he describes ISIS
manufacturing as “a very twisted maker
culture.” In this future, weapons schemat-
ics can be downloaded from the dark web or
simply shared via popular encrypted social
media services, like WhatsApp. Those files
can then be loaded into 3-D metal printers,
machines that have become widely available
whole operation is housed in the lower level
of a three-story, open-roofed market, to vent
the incredible heat of the smelter. All of Tal
Afar has been put to industrial use.
Spleeters finishes his evidence collection
quickly. “Is there more?” he asks the Iraqi
army major. “Yes, more,” the major says, and
we walk next door, to the next factory. There,
in a foyer, stands a tall furnace that ISIS sol-
diers covered with painted handprints, like

the weapons landed in Saudi Arabia, flight
records notwithstanding. The Saudi govern-
ment did not reply to requests for comment
on how its weapons ended up in ISIS’ hands.
PAINTED HANDPRINTS, LIKE A KINDERGARTEN ART PROJECT.
in the past few years and cost as little as a
million dollars to set up, to produce weap-
ons with the push of the button.
“It’s a lot easier than people think to prop-

“It’s war,” Spleeters says. “It’s a fucking
mess. Nobody knows what’s going on, and
there’s all these conspiracy theories. We live
in a post-truth era, where facts don’t matter
anymore. And with this work, it’s like you
can finally grab onto something that’s true.”
In Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters are in retreat,
losing ground to government forces and
becoming increasingly constrained in their
attacks and ambitions. But their intellectual
capital—their weapon designs, the engi-
neering challenges they’ve solved, their
industrial processes, blueprints, and sche-
matics—still constitute a major threat.
“That’s really the scary part, to the extent
that the ISIS model proliferates,” says Matt
Schroeder, a senior researcher at the Small
Arms Survey, the Geneva-based think tank
where Spleeters used to contribute. Much
of the international structure that prevents
weapons trafficking is rendered useless if
ISIS can simply upload and share their
designs and manufacturing processes with
affiliates in Africa and Europe, who also have
access to money and machinery.
Most next-generation terrorism and
future-of-war scenarios focus on artifi-
cial intelligence, drones, and self-driving
car bombs. But those are, at best, only half
the story, projecting white-collar Ameri-
ca’s fears of all the possible dystopian uses
of emerging technology. The other, and
potentially more worrisome, half lies in the
blue-collar technicians of ISIS. They have
already shown they can produce a nation-
state’s worth of weapons, and their manu-
facturing process will only become easier
with the growth of 3-D printing. Joshua
Pearce, an engineering professor at Mich-
agate these weapons through additive man-
ufacturing,” says August Cole, director of
the Art of Future War Project at the Atlantic
Council. And the rate at which ISIS’ intellec-
tual capital spreads depends on how many
young engineers join the ranks of its affili-
ates. According to an analysis by research-
ers at the University of Oxford, at least 48
percent of non-Western jihadist recruits
went to college, and nearly half of those were
engineers. Of the 25 individuals involved in
9/11, at least 13 attended college, and eight
were engineers, including Mohamed Atta
and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the
principal planners. Mohammed received a
degree in mechanical engineering from North
Carolina A&T State University, and while in
US custody, the Associated Press reported,
he received permission to build a vacuum
cleaner from scratch. Mindless hobbyism,
according to his CIA holders, or the mark
of a maker. The schematics had been down-
loaded from the internet.
Spleeters has only two days to investigate the
munitions factories in Tal Afar, and on our last
evening there he is anxious to do as much work
as he can in the little time he has left. ISIS uses
a distributed manufacturing model—each site
specializes in a certain task, like automobile
plants—and he wants to document them all. a kindergarten art project. The hallways are
“We only have an hour to see these things,” he lined with clay molds to mass-produce the
says, watching the sun make its way toward interior forms of 119.5-mm mortars.
the horizon. At the first factory, Spleeters The next compound houses what appears
finds an enormous smelter, surrounded by raw to have been an R&D lab. Every surface is
materials waiting to be boiled down. Engine covered with mortars, old and new, illumi-
blocks, scrap metal, piles of copper wiring. A nation rounds, cut-away models, tables full
vice holds molds for fuzes; next to them are of dissected fuzes, and huge 220-mm mor-
mortar tail booms—product awaiting ship- tars—the largest ISIS-developed weapons
ment to the next finishing workshop. The we have seen—plus the massive tube that
fires them, as big around as a telephone pole.
The sun begins to set. Spleeters asks again if
there is more and the major says yes. We have
already been to six facilities in just over 24

3
hours, and I realize that no matter how many

7
times we ask if there is more, the answer will
always be the same.
But night has come, and Spleeters has run
out of time. The other factories will have to
go unexplored, at least until tomorrow. �

The city of Tal Afar once had a population of about 200,000. It’s now virtually
deserted but for the Iraqi army units and Iranian-backed, majority-Shiite militias.
G A ME ON
HIGHLY
PAID
PLAYERS. BY

BILLION-
NATHA N
HIL L

AIRE TEAM
OWNERS.
DEDICATED
FANS. A
MAJOR NEW
LEAGUE
AIMS TO
BRING
VIDEOGAME
COMPETI-
TION INTO
THE MAIN-
STREAM— PHOTOGRAPHS

AND UPEND BY
DAMON

THE CASAREZ

WORLD OF 0 7 5
STEFANO
DISALVO IS A
P R O F ES S I O N A L
ATHLETE.
He has the physical gifts of a profes-
sional athlete, the dedication and
drive of a professional athlete, the
monomaniacal schedule of a profes-
sional athlete. He wakes up at 6:30 in
the morning and spends some time
reviewing game tape of his own per-
formance before calisthenics begin
around 9—jogging, frisbee, soccer—
followed by practice, seven straight
hours of it, where his team plays
against some of the finest competi-
tion in the world, testing new strat-
egies. Then a team meeting at night
to discuss the day’s mistakes and how
to correct them, after which he will
spend another few hours practicing
alone or interacting with his fans or
studying his rivals or, sometimes, all
three. Then bedtime, before doing the
same thing again tomorrow.
It’s likely you’ve never heard of
Stefano Disalvo. You probably hav-
en’t heard of his team either. You
maybe haven’t heard of his sport, and
even if you have heard of his sport,
you wouldn’t know him as Stefano
Disalvo—he’s known as “Verbo,” one
of the top players in the world at a
NATHAN HILL (@nathanreads) is
the author of The Nix. This is his
first piece for wired.
videogame called Overwatch. He’s 18 years old, and he has just
signed his first major professional contract: He’ll get a nice salary,
a robust health insurance plan, free housing, and a 401(k). And
beginning this month, his team, the newly formed Los Angeles
Valiant, will be one of 12 competing in a first-of-its-kind global
esports league, a grand experiment involving some of the biggest
names in sports and entertainment who believe Overwatch can
rival traditional sports in audience and revenue. If this league
succeeds—if its players, coaches, franchise owners, and front-office executives can over-
come a skeptical audience, a complicated and sometimes baffling game, and big problems
of inclusion and harassment—then gamers like Disalvo, who have mortgaged their entire
adolescence for this one shot at glory, could be among the first athletes to get very rich play-
ing videogames, in front of people, for money.
Welcome to the future of sports.
IF YOU ARE, LIKE ME, OF A GENERATION WHERE VIDEOGAMES WERE NOT A SPECTATOR
sport except for maybe gathering around the arcade to watch someone who’s really good
at Street Fighter, then you could be forgiven for not knowing all of this was going on. The
phenomenon of esports—people playing against each other in live videogame competi-
tions—is still so new that there isn’t even consensus about how to spell it: I’ve seen esports,
e-sports, E-sports, and eSports.
I should say, actually, that esports are relatively new—that is, new for some of us. But for
the professionals who play, who are almost uniformly between the ages of 17 and 26, it’s
something that’s been around for most of their lives and something they take for granted.
When Disalvo was a 16-year-old high school student in Toronto, he already knew he wanted
to be an esports professional. He knew this mostly through a process of elimination: He had
tried every other thing, and none of them felt transcendent or even interesting. He played
hockey and tennis, he swam. He took all the classes you’re supposed to take, and when people
asked him what his favorite subject was, he’d say lunchtime. “I was trying to find something
that I loved doing,” Disalvo says. “I honestly didn’t really enjoy anything.”
There was one thing he did enjoy, though, a secret he kept from almost everyone: He loved
playing videogames, and he was extraordinarily good at it. And when he saw players win-
ning tournaments for games like League of Legends, he decided that he wanted, more than
anything else, to do that.
A basic problem, though, was that League of Legends already had a well-established
and very competitive esports scene, and the path to becoming a pro in that game seemed
very narrow. However, in November 2014, Disalvo saw that Blizzard, the company behind
such massive franchises as Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, was developing a new game.
It was called Overwatch, and it looked to be a first-person shooter. Knowing that most of
Blizzard’s games eventually generate big esports scenes, Disalvo decided to switch. “New
game,” he says. “Everybody’s starting at the same level. It’s not as if I have to catch up to
all the other professional players.”
I was surprised to hear this, as I’d assumed that pro gamers began playing a game because
they enjoyed it and then gradually became good enough to turn pro. But Disalvo decided
to make Overwatch his young life’s work before he’d ever even played it. “I saw the esports
potential,” he says with a shrug. “I didn’t care if the game was fun.”
He got access to the Overwatch beta and committed himself to mastering the game. He
stopped eating lunch with his friends, using that time to finish homework so he could go
home and play Overwatch for seven hours straight. He didn’t go to parties, he didn’t go out
with friends, he didn’t date, he wasn’t in any way social.
If you’re thinking that Disalvo fits the stereotype of a friendless, socially awkward gamer,
disabuse yourself of that notion. He’s an affable and confident young man who’d been a swim
instructor, a lifeguard, and an excellent hockey player. He has a good sense of humor, and
when he laughs, he looks startlingly like James Franco. In other words, if he’d wanted to date,
he probably could have. But he didn’t, and his classmates didn’t know what to make of it.
Playing the beta, and before Overwatch was even officially released in May 2016, Disalvo
began competing in amateur tournaments. He started playing even longer hours, and his
studies suffered. His mother demanded he focus on school, but he announced he was going
to be an esports professional. His mother said no, he was going to college. He said no, he
was skipping college to go pro in Overwatch. Looking back, he’s not sure how that standoff
would have been resolved were it not for a job offer that came two weeks after his mother’s
ultimatum. A professional esports outfit wanted him on its Overwatch team, and it wanted
to move him to Southern California to live and train with his teammates. against other real people who are con-
Armed now with an official contract, Disalvo went back to his mother, and she eventually nected to the internet and seeing and
agreed to let him leave school early, on the condition that he would finish his diploma online. hearing the same things as you. You
Most of his classmates were mildly puzzled by his sudden disappearance. There were rumors can play as any of the 26 heroes, even
about California. Were it not for a yearbook article about his new career, it’s possible that his swapping from one hero to another
classmates would still be asking: Whatever happened to Stefano Disalvo? during the course of the game. Mostly,
the game is played as a series of timed
JEFF KAPLAN, WHO OVERSEES ALL THINGS OVERWATCH AT BLIZZARD, SAYS THAT rounds: The attacking team has four
when developers began work on the game in 2013, they felt the need to create a world wholly minutes to capture certain areas or
apart from the trio of worlds that the company already offered: the high fantasy of War- move a payload (think: the pigskin
craft, the space opera of Starcraft, the gothic horror of Diablo. What would be the most going downfield) while the defending
unexpected, most fantastical place they could take gamers next? team tries to thwart them. Once time’s
The answer, they decided, was Earth. up, attackers and defenders switch
The team ultimately began working roles for the next round. Whichever
on a game that would be Blizzard’s first team captures more areas or moves
entry into the popular first-person- the payload farther wins the game,
shooter genre, and they would set it and if a player is killed in action, they
on Earth, sometime in the not-too- have to wait 10 seconds (sometimes
distant future. more) before rejoining the fight.
But when they began researching The formula—refreshing optimism
other earthbound first-person shoot- plus interesting heroes plus shoot-
ers, they found a surplus of what ’em-up action— was an immediate
Kaplan calls “cynical, borderline post- hit. Overwatch became Blizzard’s
apocalyptic dystopia.” In other words, fastest-growing game ever, a best
morbidly dark, gritty, and depressing. seller that, after a little more than
Lots of blood and gore. Games you’d a year, has 35 million players and
feel a little weird about if you played generates more than a billion dol-
them in front of your kids. lars annually.
This led the team in a different and Nate Nanzer, who was Blizzard’s
sort of radical direction: optimism. global director of research and con-
“We wanted it to be a future worth sumer insights leading up to Over-
fighting for,” Kaplan says. “So it’s a watch’s launch, says the game’s
bright, aspirational future, and when popularity comes, in part, from
conflict happens you have to go out gamers’ love for the heroes, not-
and defend it, because this world is so ing particularly the significance of
awesome we can’t let anybody ruin it. a lineup that “looks like what the
So it really led us to a place of hope.” world looks like,” by which he means
STEFANO DISALVO, BETTER KNOWN
AS VERBO, IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S The basic premise of the game is racially diverse, multinational, and
TOP OVERWATCH PLAYERS. that AI robots, designed to usher in equitably gendered.
an economic golden age for human- The other thing Nanzer noticed
ity, try to take over the world. To respond to the crisis, the United Nations forms Overwatch, early in Overwatch’s development
a team of fighters and adventurers recruited to quash the robot rebellion. The Overwatch cycle was a surge in interest in video-
forces defeat the robots, and then end up battling each other. games as a spectator sport. Esports
These characters—they’re called “heroes” in Overwatch lingo, and there are 26 of them originated largely in South Korea,
as of this writing, though Blizzard tends to update this a lot—are the beating heart of the with the game StarCraft: Brood War,
game. As opposed to many other first-person shooters, where your avatar is just a kind of roughly 20 years ago, and eventually
anonymous good guy or bad guy, the heroes you play in Overwatch have personality. They found its way onto Korean television.
have persuasive origins and very human hopes and fears and complicated relationships Then it jumped to Korean internet
with the other heroes. There’s Mei, for example, a climate scientist who was stranded streaming platforms around 2003,
in her research station in Antarctica and has since become this gallant adventurer who which is when North American gamers
nevertheless still wears these huge, nerdy round glasses and an adorable poofy coat. Or began getting clued in. The popular-
Bastion, an anthropomorphic machine gun who’s friends with a tiny delicate bird that he ity of gaming streams eventually
gently cares for. This game doesn’t just have backstory, it has lore, which is all explicated gave rise to Twitch, a platform that
in animated web movies and comic books that are intended to drive “deep engagement,”
to borrow the language of Blizzard’s quarterly reports.
The game is team-based, six versus six. If you’re playing Overwatch, you are playing with and 0 7 7

launched in 2011 and specializes in
videogame livestreaming. By 2014,
when Amazon purchased Twitch for
almost a billion dollars, the total num-
ber of minutes that people spent every
year watching other people, mostly
strangers, play videogames on Twitch
was 192 billion. By the end of 2016, it
had risen to 292 billion.
Even while Overwatch was in beta,
fans and entrepreneurs were already
organizing Overwatch tournaments,
broadcasting matches live on Twitch.
It was completely grassroots, seri-
ously hardcore, totally decentralized,
and kind of a mess. Nanzer wondered
what would happen if Blizzard could
take control of the tournaments. “If
we structure a league the right way
and put the right investment behind
it, we can actually monetize it in a
way that’s not too dissimilar from
traditional sports,” he says.
Enter Overwatch League.
Blizzard announced the venture
in November 2016 at Blizzcon, the
company’s annual convention. Over-
watch League would be the world’s
first esports venture to follow the
North American sports model: fran-
chised teams in major cities, live
spectator events, salaried athletes.
Along with all the revenue oppor-
tunities offered by sports leagues—
ticket sales, media rights, licensing,
and so on—there were also opportu-
nities for “team-based virtual mer-
chandise.” For example, fans might
be able to buy a “skin” so that when
they’re playing Overwatch at home,
their hero will be wearing the jersey
of the Los Angeles Valiant.
“We are literally building a new
sport,” says Nanzer, who was
appointed the league’s commis-
sioner last year. “We’re trying to
build this as a sustainable sports
league for decades and decades to
come.” And while you might think,
at first glance, that such an ambi-
tion is outrageously optimistic, the
expertise recruited may change your
mind. The co-owner of the Boston Overwatch franchise, for example, is Robert Kraft, who
also owns the New England Patriots. The owner of the New York franchise is Jeff Wilpon,
COO of the New York Mets. Philadelphia’s Overwatch team is owned by Comcast, which
also owns the Philadelphia Flyers. Blizzard hasn’t made public the cost of a league fran-
chise, but the reports are $20 million, and when I asked Nanzer about that number, he nei-
ther confirmed nor denied it, saying: “You know, if you hear the same rumor over and over
again, you can figure out what that means.” So, OK, $20 million.
“There’s going to be kids who can say ‘I play professional Overwatch for the same guy
that Tom Brady plays for,’” Nanzer said. “That’s pretty cool.”
Perhaps the most high-profile executive recruit for Overwatch League is Steve Bornstein.
One of the early architects of ESPN and a former president of ABC Sports, he left his most
recent job as CEO of the NFL Network to become Blizzard’s esports chair. When asked why
he made the change from traditional sports to electronic, Bornstein borrows an old Gretzky
quote: “Skate to where the puck is going.”
“When I left the NFL, the only thing I saw that had the potential to be as big was the
esports space,” he says. “What fascinated me was just the level of
engagement, the fact that we measure consumption in billions of
minutes consumed.”
And it’s growing, especially among younger people, which is not
something that can be said of traditional sports. For the cord-cutter
and cord-never generations, sports tend to be behind what is, in effect,
a giant paywall. The big, exclusive contracts that leagues sign with
the TV networks mean there are few other ways to access sports “ THE
content—which seems annoying or downright bizarre to people
KILL
accustomed to getting their entertainment for free on YouTube.
Every major sport in the US has seen the average age of its view-
CAM
ership increase since 2000. The NBA’s average fan is 42. The average SAYS,
NFL fan is 50. The average MLB fan is 57. What’s more, these audi- THIS IS
ences are limited almost entirely to North America. The Overwatch HOW YOU
League, meanwhile, will begin with nine US teams and three from WERE
abroad—Shanghai, Seoul, and London (with more, I’m told, on the
KILLED,
way)—and its average fan is a demographically pleasing 21 years old.
There’s no better symbol for Blizzard’s confidence in the game’s
SO
potential than the place it chose for its new home: Burbank Studios, LET'S
Stage One. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s the very AVOID
same soundstage that Johnny Carson used when he brought The THAT
Tonight Show to California. Every match of Overwatch League’s inau- IN THE
gural season will be played here, while the teams work with Blizzard
FUTURE.
to bring matches to their respective hometowns in future seasons.
The studio’s centerpiece is the long dais up front, big enough for
two entire Overwatch teams—six players on the left, six on the right.
Each player will have their own personal pod (Blizzard’s term for
what appears to be a simple table), and each pod is separated from
the adjacent pods by a space of a few inches, because apparently some players can get a little
excited during a match and bother their neighbors with their table-tapping or knee-banging
or fist-pounding. Every player is issued a standard desktop computer and a standard mon-
itor (144 hertz), though many players like to choose their own keyboard and mouse. Above
everything are three enormous LED screens, approximately 20 feet by 11, that will be show-
ing the audience the in-game action, as well as intermittent close-ups of the players them-
selves, their faces, their twitching hands.
Kitty-corner to the players, stage right, is an elevated desk for the on-air talent—the hosts
and analysts and interviewers. Backstage, these folks get their own hair and makeup room,
one of the few places still serving its original Tonight Show function. Next to the analysts’
desk is a room for the “shoutcasters,” which are what play-by-play commentators are called
in esports. The term was coined in the earliest days of esports, before high-speed broadband
made video streaming possible; the feeds were audio-only, and commentators used a Winamp
plug-in called SHOUTcast to broadcast their voices. The name lives on, though. There’s even
a paper taped up on the door that says shoutcasters.
Taped to the next door, a piece of paper says observers, which strikes me as sort of sin-
ister, like the Eyes from The Handmaid’s Tale. The Observers are actually cinematographers
who operate in the game’s digital space. If you’re watching an Overwatch match, you might
be watching it from the point of view of one of the players or from the point of view of one
of the Observers, who float around the players and capture the in-game action as it unfolds.
Imagine a camera operator at a hockey match skating around on the ice with the players and game version of the Undertaker
yet magically not interacting with them in any way. The Observers are like that. character from WWF wrestling, circa-
Directly across the hall from the Observers is where the technical stuff happens, all the 1990s, but with guns—a pair of shot-
wizardry needed to create a professional-looking sports broadcast: a whole room for instant guns that, instead of reloading, he
replay, two rooms for audio, two control rooms with walls of flatscreen TVs. All told, it takes tosses to the ground and replaces by
between 80 and 100 people to broadcast one match of the Overwatch League. Some of the grabbing two new ones from under
people who work here say there’s a special significance in the league’s broadcasting from The the folds of his black overcoat. I’m
Tonight Show’s old home. It’s an obvious metaphor: new media replacing old media. It all running to get into place with my
reminds Steve Bornstein of the moment in the early ’80s when he came aboard the fledgling teammates, wondering what exactly
ESPN, then only three months old. He says all the critics at the time argued there wouldn’t I’m supposed to be doing, and also
be any interest in a whole channel devoted to sports. Who would ever watch that? idly wondering how many shotguns
Reaper can hide under that coat.
(The answer, it turns out, is infinite.
Infinite shotguns. He never runs out.
Just go with it.) Suddenly a firefight
erupts ahead of me and I run up to
aid my companions and promptly
get killed. Swiftly and abruptly and
bewilderingly, I am dead. I have no
idea why. This is when I am intro-
duced to the kill cam.
Let me tell you about the cruelty
of the kill cam.
After you die in Overwatch and the
camera pans back to show your now
lifeless corpse on the ground, you
endure the kill cam, which shows
you what you looked like and what
you were doing the moment before
you were killed, from the perspective
of your killer. It’s like being able to
watch your own face while getting
dumped. As I died over and over, I
would be treated anew to kill-cam
footage showing just how long some-
one had me in their sights, how many
SHOUTCASTERS PROVIDE REAL-TIME GAME COMMENTARY FOR
BOTH IN-STUDIO AND STREAMING AUDIENCES. shots they took before I even noticed,
how I just stood there and sort of
spun in place, dumbly looking around
MY FIRST TIME PLAYING OVERWATCH WAS ASTOUNDING TO ME FOR TWO REASONS: while my killer patiently picked me
first, for the sheer amount of onscreen information I was asked to digest at any given moment, off. According to the game’s develop-
the bullet tracers and grenade explosions, the bright blossoming energy shields and walls of ers, the kill cam’s primary function
ice that were sometimes mysteriously erected and then shattered, plus the head-up display is not actually sadistic, but educa-
overlaying various timers and health bars and glowing mission objectives, and sometimes tional. The kill cam says: This is how
floating yellow plus-sign things (which I eventually figured out meant I was getting healed you were killed, so how about avoid-
by someone, somehow), plus all the pretty little environmental details like streetlamps that ing that in the future, eh?
flicker a bit of lens flare onto your screen when you accidentally aim at them, the wooden The fact that it’s so easy to be killed
chairs that splinter and the wine bottles that shatter when they take stray fire, not to mention means that players in Overwatch are
the outlines of your teammates and all the enemy players who (for reasons that will become never still for a second, which pres-
clear momentarily) tend to jump around constantly, spasmodically, almost insectoidally—all ents a cognitive challenge: You must
of this happening at the same time in a way that felt not only disorienting, not only mentally keep track of 11 other players who
taxing, but more like New York City air-traffic-control-level overwhelming. are always in motion while you your-
The second thing I was astounded by was the number of times I died.
It was a little surprising to me how quickly, simply, and even sort of eagerly my character
bit it. I was playing a hero called Reaper, whose whole basic deal is to be an updated video- 0 7 9
 >
HERO SHOTS

FAN MARCUS SILVOSO DRESSED AS THE HEALER HERO LUCIO

NINE STANDOUT PLAYERS IN THE NEW
OVERWATCH LEAGUE—AND SOME OF THE
FANS WHO'LL BE WATCHING THEM.

YOUNG-SEO BAK (KARIV), L.A. VALIANT

self zig and zag. Overwatch is, above
all, a team game, and you have the
responsibility not only to avoid con-
stant death but also to avoid constant
death while helping your team exe-
cute the proper strategy. The 26 Over-
watch heroes fall into four categories:
eight are primarily damage-dealers
(offensive players that specialize in
eliminating enemy players); six are
defensive; six are “tanks” designed
to soak up a lot of damage to pro-
tect their team; and six are healers
who work as in-game medics. That
works out to 230,230 possible six-
hero “comps” (gamer lingo, born
when the gaming community took

CHRISTOPHER SCHAEFER (GRIMREALITY), L.A. VALIANT

the phrase “team composition” and
nouned it), and to be good at Over-
KEVYN LINDSTRÖM (TVIQ), FLORIDA MAYHEM

watch you have to recognize each of

these comps, understand what effect
they’ll have on your own team’s comp,
and react accordingly.
And by “react accordingly” I mean
that you not only execute a certain
strategy correctly, but you also, if
necessary, do so with any number of
different heroes. Overwatch involves
constant on-the-fly improvisational
skill, an almost instinctive reaction
to ever-changing conditions inside
the game. If you play a really great
damage-dealer but the other team is
running a comp that neutralizes your
particular hero, you must be able to
extemporaneously and at any time
switch to a different hero with a dif-
ferent specialization that disrupts
the other team’s strategy. Plus, each
FAN JOE SILVOSO AS THE DEFENSIVE HERO JUNKRAT

hero has up to four different abili-

BENJAMIN CHEVASSON (UNKOE), L.A. VALIANT

ties that they can deploy at various

times, including an “ultimate” ability
that takes a long time to charge up
and, when spent correctly, can be a
total game-changer. So that’s about
a hundred different abilities from 26
different characters teamed up in one
of 230,230 different combinations. It’s
mind-boggling. The sheer number of
variables in play seems to exceed the
JAKE LYON (JAKE), HOUSTON OUTLAWS

KANG-JAE LEE (ENVY), L.A. VALIANT

human brain’s ability to grasp the
scale and scope of big things. Which
raises a question: How is it even pos-
sible to be good at this? I decided to
travel to Redondo Beach, California,
to the house where Stefano Disalvo
lives with his team, to find out.

I ARRIVE AT THE HOUSE AT 11 AM

on a late September Friday, and
Disalvo is sitting with his teammates
in a large living room that has been
completely transformed for gaming
purposes. Seven small office tables
have been arranged in two rows, each
table equipped with a computer mon-
itor, keyboard, mouse, and mouse-
pad, with a mass of cables and wires
spread out around the PC towers on
the floor. Actually “towers” is the

SEBASTIAN BARTON (NUMLOCKED), L.A. VALIANT

FAN DOROTHY DANG AS THE TANK HERO D.VA

wrong word for these machines,

which are enormous hexahedrons
that look less like computers and
more like glowing, diamond-shaped
relics in a science-fiction movie about
the future. All but one of the cur-
tains are closed (to eliminate glare,
I assume), though the windows are
open for the welcome and pleasant
California sea breeze.
The house they’re sharing is a
six-bedroom, 4,100-square-foot
grand Spanish-style building with
orange roof tiles and a three-car
garage. The kitchen is ambitiously
large, with a double oven and a wine
fridge that is poignantly empty.
Almost no one who lives here is old
enough to legally drink.
The team wakes early each day,
and after reviewing footage of
SEBASTIAN WIDLUND (CHIPSHAJEN), DALLAS FUEL

their performance from the previ-

ous day’s practices, they eat break-
PAN-SEUNG KOO (FATE), L.A. VALIANT

fast and walk to the beach for an

hour of exercise. (Shane Flanagin,
the team’s PR manager at the time
of my visit, says the organization
takes player health very seriously:
They hire physical therapists, sports
psychologists, and an in-house chef,
and they have a daily fitness routine.
“We don’t want them to be stuck in

0 8 1

chairs for nine hours without mov-
ing,” he says—though from what I
can tell, the players, left to their own
devices, literally, would be happy to
remain in their chairs for even lon-
ger.) By the time I arrive, the players
are seated and warming up for their
first “scrim” of the day.
A scrim is the primary way a pro
Overwatch team practices. The
team’s coaches set up scrims with
other pro teams, and the players will
do three two-hour scrims a day, every
day. Once the day’s first scrim begins,
everything gets very serious, very
fast. The players hunch their shoul-
ders, and their eyes are about even
with the top bevel of their monitor
so that they’re looking down at the
screen, which makes them appear,
in profile, something like carnivores
eyeing dinner. They give one another
constant updates about what the
other team is doing, what heroes
are in use, what special abilities are
available. Their shouted instructions
and updates sound to me like soldiers
speaking some kind of wacky code.
“Monkey monkey monkey!”
“Are they right or left?”
“Clear left!”
“Inside! Saloon! Saloon!”
“EMP! EMP! EMP!” which, shouted
very quickly, sounds like “empee
empee empee!”
In the kitchen, meanwhile, the
team’s chef is busy cooking lunch.
She seems to be successfully ignor-
ing all of this.
Despite living together, the players
do not call each other by their real
names. They exclusively use their
screen names, so much so that I find
it odd and even jarring to call Disalvo
“Stefano.” Here, he’s Verbo, and the
teammates he’s playing with today
are GrimReality (which everyone
shortens to Grim), Fate, envy, and
KariV, who, among all of them, seems
the most likely to spontaneously
shout or giggle or exclaim “What
the fuck!” very loudly and, I would
think, distractingly, though the other players don’t seem to care or even really notice.
This is one of the ostensible reasons they all live together, so that they can get accus-
tomed to each other’s tics and moods and can develop the kind of shorthand with one
another that I usually associate with best friends or intimates. They come from very dif-
ferent places—Verbo is Canadian, Grim is American, while Fate, envy, and KariV are from
Korea—but they need to communicate in the quickest way possible. Like the game itself,
the team must operate with no lag.
Sitting in an adjoining room, the team’s manager, Joshua Kim, and one of its coaches,
Henry Coxall, observe that morning’s scrim in the game’s spectator mode. They discuss
failures of strategy, how one player was baited into a disadvantaged position. But they also
seem very attentive to their team’s emotional state. Any blip of negative emotion from any
of the players is immediately registered and discussed. Kim talks about not bringing bad
emotions to “work,” and how living together presents a challenge on this front.
At 27, Kim is the old man in the house. I ask him whether it’s hard sharing a living space
with a bunch of teenage boys—and, yes, they’re all boys, and with the exception of one
20-year-old, they’re all teens. The house itself
bears the filthy evidence of this. The boys’ dis-
carded shoes litter the front foyer. Their bed-
rooms are totally bare but for mattresses sitting
on the floor surrounded by clumps of wrinkled
clothes. The kitchen counters are covered with
PEAK
jars of peanut butter and Pop Tarts and a family-
size box of Frosted Flakes and protein powder
PERFOR-
in big bulbous jugs and a few spray bottles of MANCE
Febreze.
I won’t even tell you about the condition of Playing a videogame for
the bathroom. 50-plus hours a week
But if this bothers Kim, he tries not to show isn’t just an exercise in
sustained concentra-
it. “It teaches me patience,” he says. As the first tion and laser focus;
scrim ends, the players blink back into the reality it’s also hard on the
of the living room, almost like they’re surprised body. We asked Bryce
Browne, a performance
to be there. There’s a sort of incorporeal quality coach with fitness facil-
to the players while they’re in the game: They ity Sports Academy,
play with such focus and intensity that, as soon and Levi Harrison, an
orthopedic surgeon
as a match is over, it’s as if they suddenly real- nicknamed “the Esports
ize they have bodies. They crack their knuckles Doctor,” for their rec-
and stretch and shake out the stiffness in their ommendations on how
players can prevent
hands. They wander into the kitchen, where the injury and optimize per-
chef has prepared a meal of mostly Korean fare: formance. —Phuc Pham
barbecued short ribs, glazed chicken drumsticks,
and a really fantastic fried rice. The players con-
sume all of this in less than 10 minutes.
During their break I’m able to ask the ques-
tions that have been on my mind: How do you
learn to play this game at a high level? And how do you possibly keep track of everything
that’s happening onscreen?
It’s Grim who first suggests the concept of “mental RAM.” The basic idea, he says, is that
there is only so much the mind can process at once, an upper limit on the number of things
any player can pay attention to; the key, then, is to put as many things on autopilot as pos-
sible, so you have fewer things to consciously think about. “For a lot of people who aren’t
pro, aiming takes a lot of concentration,” Grim says. “It gives you less room to think about
other things. So that’s why I practice really, really hard on my aiming, so I can think more
about my positioning and what I need to do next.”
Grim, whose real name is Christopher Schaefer, is 18 years old and from Chico, Califor-
nia. He is one of the team’s primary damage-dealers. Like Verbo, Grim wanted more than
anything to be an esports professional. And like Verbo, he decided to go pro in Overwatch
before he’d ever played it. When he first began the game—at 16—he was “really bad,” he
says. “I would spend hours at a time just practicing flicks.”
I interrupt to ask: What’s a flick?
 “It’s basically starting from one point of the screen and then snapping to the enemy’s
head or something. And so it’s a very fast muscle-memory movement.”
Being able to flick effectively is essential to pro play. It requires you to understand the
exact ratio of mouse-movement to game-space distance, plus how to compensate if, for
example, you’re moving left and your target is to the right, which will require an extra IN LATE SEPTEMBER, THREE
millimeter or so of flick, and you have to possess the kinesthetic body awareness to do this months before the league’s first
with your hand and wrist perfectly almost 100 percent of the time. This is why pro players’ regular-season game and a mere
mouse choices are so personal and why the team insists that, with any sponsorship deal 60-some days from the start of pre-
with any company that sells peripherals, players always get to choose their own mouse. season play, Disalvo shakes his head
Grim uses a Logitech G903 with a DPI of 800 and an in-game mouse sensitivity setting of in disbelief at the prospect of play-
5. He is now, suffice it to say, extraordinarily good at flicking. ing for the Los Angeles Valiant. “It
“A lot of people think that I just have natural talent,” he says, laughing. “No, no, not at feels like I’m part of something that’s
all. It took a lot, a lot, a lot of practice to be able to aim properly.” going to be big, like very big,” he says.
After the lunch break, the teammates return to their stations for more sitting, more “There’s going to be billboards? I’m
scrims, more shouting. gonna be representing a city like Los
Angeles? Like … what? That’s crazy.”
It’s especially crazy given that he
didn’t actually move to LA to join the
Valiant. His first professional esports
contract, the one that achieved peace
with his mother, actually came from
an organization called the Immor-
tals, one of the independent esports
brands, known as endemics, that field
teams in a number of different video-
DOOR STRETCH LUNGE SEQUENCE SUPERMAN games. (The Immortals, for example,
Hunched shoulders can lead Strong glutes prevent the type This super-flex strengthens have teams that play Counter-Strike:
to low energy, so players can of lower back pain that can the players’ core to improve
boost endurance by opening distract players during hours- posture and avoid neck and Global Offensive and League of Leg-
up their upper torsos. long gaming sessions. shoulder fatigue. ends, among others.) Endemic teams
have been in esports for a long time
and have been essential to its growth.
They’re well known within gaming
circles, but they are not billion-dollar
organizations like Blizzard or the
New England Patriots, and thus they
GLIDING EXERCISES DOUBLE COBRA STRETCH NIRSCHL EXERCISE are not able to be as generous with
Rotating both wrists Stretching their hand, wrist, By stretching the muscles in their players.
(with both open and closed and forearm muscles keeps their forearms, players avoid
palms) wards off carpal players loose for clutch head tennis elbow. Jake Lyon, a 21-year-old from San
tunnel syndrome. shots. Diego whose screen name is the
refreshingly straightforward “JAKE,”
is one of the best damage-dealers in
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURIE ROLLITT
Overwatch. He earned about $2,000
a month as a member of an endemic
called Luminosity Gaming—that is,
“Monkey’s up for a jump! Monkey monkey! I’m dead.” until the Luminosity Overwatch ros-
“Small regroup! Regroup!” ter disbanded in mid-2017, as Blizzard
“I’m on soldier, I’m on soldier!” began consolidating control over pro-
“We have numbers! Let’s go!” fessional Overwatch play. “In the past
“Monkey monkey!” there’s been no security in an esports
About the monkey: One hero named Winston is a supersmart, genetically engineered contract,” he says. “Even though we
gorilla who has the ability to jump really far, right into the middle of the scrum. And were signed to a two-year contract
when an enemy team’s Winston lands nearby, he’s automatically your team’s number with Luminosity, there’s always a
one target. If you take down Winston, you can really disrupt the other team’s strat- clause—and it’s not just them, every
egy. So when he lands, everyone shouts his name. But because “Winston” is hard to say single esports contract looks like
many times fast, Overwatch players started calling him “monkey.” The effect is that, this—that says they can buy you out
for the many hours I watched the Los Angeles Valiant play scrims, as I was dutifully for one month’s salary. When they
taking notes and thinking earnestly about how this might be the future of sports,
every few minutes this whole pack of teenage boys would suddenly burst out shouting,
“Monkey monkey monkey monkey!” 0 8 3
 and play games with my son,” he said. “But then the other day my daughter asked me, ‘Can I
play Overwatch too?’ and I was like, oh shit, I gotta be better about this. I gotta treat it equal.”
And the women who do play Overwatch often find themselves to be targets of harassment.
Glisa is the screen name for a 19-year-old Overwatch player who lives in Portland, Oregon.
decide it’s your last month: goodbye.” Despite being busy with her college studies, Glisa is one of the top 100 Overwatch players in
Lyon went on to sign with the Over- terms of time spent in the game. She has so far logged thousands of hours of gameplay, and she
watch League’s Houston Outlaws, keeps a YouTube channel with highlight reels. But sometimes she posts videos of her interac-
and he says the new league is a “huge tions with other gamers. She uploaded a montage recently called “Online Gaming as a Girl.”
improvement.” Contracts are guaran- “That was spawned after I had several different, very toxic encounters with people who
teed for at least a year, after which the brought up the fact that I was female many times and tried to use that to degrade me,” she says.
team will have a second-year option This will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the horrors of Gamergate over the
with a prenegotiated salary. And, crit- past few years, and the video is hard to watch. The gamers she encounters aren’t just being
ically, players cannot be fired during a little insensitive—they are straight-up knuckle-dragging misogynists:
the length of their contract, unless “You’re such a bimbo.”
they’re guilty of something that would “You’re probably ugly.”
get them fired from any job.
Players are provided with hous-
ing, health insurance, a retirement
plan, and a minimum league salary
of $50,000, though Lyon believes that
most players who are among a team’s
starting six will earn much more than
that. (Most teams also have a few
backup players.) Plus, there’s revenue
sharing and a prize pool of $3.5 mil-
lion for successful teams, $1 million
of which is reserved for the inaugural
season’s eventual champions.
When he signed his contract with
Houston, Lyon sat at his computer
clicking his e-signature to the doc-
ument’s relevant places, and he real-
ized how different it was from what
had come before. “Maybe this could
be the way esports is going forward,”
he says. “That it can be a legitimate
career, and that it’s not like someone
is going all-in on some fragment of
a dream.”

INSIDE BLIZZARD ARENA, THREE ENORMOUS L.E.D. SCREENS, APPROXIMATELY 20

IT'S HARD NOT TO NOTICE THAT,
as of this writing, there are no women
on any of the rosters of any of the 12
teams in Overwatch League. “They
are all dudes,” Nanzer says, shaking
his head. It’s something he’s been
thinking a lot about, and he admits
that part of the problem is cultural.
Gaming can be seen as acceptable and
normal behavior for boys, but not nec-
essarily for girls. (Though many stud-
ies show that roughly equal numbers
of men and women play videogames
casually, competitive play remains
overwhelmingly male.) “There was
never a question that I was going to sit
FEET BY 11, SHOW THE AUDIENCE THE IN-GAME ACTION AND PLAYER REACTIONS.
“Grab her by the pussy.”
“Women’s rights are a fucking joke.”
And on and on and on.
“The internet is a very angry place,” Glisa says. After posting the video, she received emails
and comments from people criticizing her “for not being able to deal with it, for being weak,
for finding this upsetting.”
She was also contacted by other female Overwatch players who’d had similar run-ins.
“Other women who were like, this is why I don’t join voice chat and never talk to people;
this is why I use a male-style username. And that’s what upsets me the most. I don’t feel like
people should have to hide who they are to be able to feel safe.” (Glisa didn’t want to use her
real name for this article. She says she’s going to be applying for jobs soon, and if potential
employers Google her, she doesn’t want them to think she’s someone who complains about
sexual harassment. Which sort of proves her point.)
I ask her how it made her feel that something she loves can also be so hurtful. “Disap-
pointed,” she says, “in life, in the universe, for being this way. Sometimes it affects me a lot
more, and I leave the voice channel so I don’t have to deal with it. There are days that are just
 a lot harder than other days, and I try to insulate myself more from the anger.”
Overwatch executives are quick to point out there’s a system in place for players to report
toxic behavior, and hundreds of thousands of accounts have been disciplined for the type
of harassment that Glisa describes. (She reported each of the players who harassed her,
but she is not sure whether they received suspensions or bans. The system needs work.) pro, he didn’t have high hopes. “Nor-
Still, the problem persists, and if Overwatch is a game that requires constant communica- mally you can compete until you’re
tion between players, and women are made to feel uncomfortable communicating within about 25,” he says. “Right now, up
the game, then perhaps it’s clear why few of them go pro. until when I’m around 21, 22-ish, I’m
Ysabel Müller is an Overwatch player who lives in Rodenbach, Germany. She began play- going to be the sharpest. But as soon
ing the game while it was still in beta, and she became highly ranked and friendly with a you hit 25, your reaction speeds are
lot of the pros she played with. She says she had designs on going pro herself but found going to slow down.”
that getting useful feedback from her teammates was difficult. They treated her, she says, Stefano Disalvo said the same
like she couldn’t endure criticism—that if criticized she would be offended and accuse her thing: “How long do I think I’ll play?
teammates of sexism and get them kicked out of the game. I say maybe four years, five years.”
“That’s a big fear of some of the male players, and so they’d rather distance themselves,” When he decided to become an
she says. She didn’t ultimately go pro in Overwatch. Instead, she esports professional, Disalvo did
helped organize regional tournaments. She’s now sending out appli- not know that Overwatch League
cations to Overwatch League teams, hoping for a job in team man- would exist. He committed to going
agement and player relations. pro during a time when the pay was
“I think it will change over the years, once more female players uncertain and there was no job secu-
come in and it gets more accepted,” she says. rity, despite knowing that it would
Blizzard seems to be trying to solve this problem from within. Kim last only five years max.
Phan, Blizzard’s director of esports operations, says the company has Which seems just astonishingly
THE been proactive in hiring women, including for key on-air shoutcaster irrational. What drove him to do it?
SHEER jobs, which she hopes will promote female involvement in esports. “I saw everybody doing the norm:
NUMBER And while she says these kinds of visible women role models are college, university, major in some-
OF essential, Phan also stressed the importance of men advocating and thing,” he says. “But I didn’t want to

VARI- supporting women in gaming. do that. I wanted to do something

ABLES “Having mentors, advisers, who are men is very impactful,” she
says. “It gives you the courage to stay because you know that the
more because I felt like I wanted to
prove something. I don’t know. It felt
IN PLAY toxic voice is just one among many other voices. It’s a reminder that like this thing that I had to prove.”
SEEMS not everyone is like that.” Which makes sense to me. That,
TO When asked what the Overwatch League was doing to attract more yes, for the people who go pro in
EXCEED female players, nobody at Blizzard could point to any specific out- esports, there’s a certain happiness

THE reach or recruiting efforts. Nanzer says he’s been looking at data from in playing videogames for a living. But

HUMAN women-only sports leagues like the WNBA that suggest a women’s
league would bring more women into the game. “The idea comes up
maybe more than that, esports allows
people an avenue to do something
BRAIN'S all the time: Should we have a women’s-only tournament or league?” different, to be special. Like musi-
ABILI- he says. “I think there’s a way to do that where it’s awesome and sup- cians or actors or writers pursuing
TIES. portive and grows the sport. I think there is a way to do it where it’s an unlikely dream, it strikes me as
actually detrimental and it makes it seem like, oh, you’re not as good both romantic and brave.
as men. We kind of go back and forth on that.” Meanwhile, to try to absorb the
Shock’s frantic offense, the Valiant
BACK IN REDONDO BEACH, THE EARLY EVENING SUNLIGHT IS STREAKING IN THROUGH team has figured out a new strategy.
gaps in the curtains as the Los Angeles Valiant begins its last scrim of the day. Tonight’s match They go with a hero lineup that’s big-
is against another Overwatch League team, the San Francisco Shock, which recently made head- ger—more tanks, more health.
lines by signing superstar damage-dealer Jay “sinatraa” Won for a rumored $150,000 a year. “Niiiiiiice,” comes a chorus from
And while I’m still a noob at Overwatch, even I can tell that this San Francisco team plays around the room when they finally
with an unusual intensity. “They’re a team of 17-year-olds who just do not stop,” says Coxall, the win a round.
Valiant coach, making the Shock sound young and insane as opposed to the Valiant’s qualities “There you go, boys,” Coxall says
of wisdom and tactics. “If you think you’ve won a fight, you haven’t,” he tells the team. “These into his headset’s microphone. “You
guys will keep throwing themselves at you. And one of them will clutch. Always expect that.” took control. ”
I ask him about that word, “clutch,” and he explains that it refers to someone overcom- The sun has gone down, but nobody
ing dubious odds to win. In other words, the Shock’s strategy is not necessarily to maneu- seems to have noticed. By the end
ver as a team but rather to have their players engage in seemingly suicidal encounters and of the last scrim of the day, they are
trust that they have the skill to pull it off. It’s unrelenting, high-intensity pressure designed playing in the dark.�
to fluster opponents.
It’s a reminder that this is truly a young person’s game—not just in its audience but also
in its players. When I asked Christopher Schaefer, aka Grim, how long he thought he’d be a 0 8 5
 SOMETHING TO

0 8

OVER ME
AS THE U.S.
POPULATION AGES,
OLDER PEOPLE
IN NEED OF 24/7
MONITORING WILL
OUTNUMBER
THE AVAILABLE
CAREGIVERS. ONE
COMPANY THINKS
IT HAS THE ANSWER:
LET TECH DO THE
JOB.
BY
LAUREN SMILEY

GRANT CORNETT

7
 Arlyn Anderson grasped her
father’s hand and presented him
with the choice. “A nursing home
would be safer, Dad,” she told him,
relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s
risky to live here alone—” “No way,”
¶ either. But the daily churn of diapers and
Jim interjected. He frowned at
his daughter, his brow furrowed
under a lop of white hair. At 91,
he wanted to remain in the woodsy
Minnesota cottage he and his
wife had built on the shore of
Lake Minnetonka, where she had
died in his arms just a year before.
His pontoon—which he insisted
he could still navigate just fine—
bobbed out front. Arlyn had
¶ weeks after broaching the subject of the
moved from California back to
Minnesota two decades earlier to
be near her aging parents. Now,
in 2013, she was fiftysomething,
working as a personal coach, and
finding that her father’s decline
was all-consuming.
0
Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and
general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—
started experiencing bouts of paranoia in
his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The
disease had progressed, often causing his
thoughts to vanish midsentence. But Jim
would rather risk living alone than be clois-
tered in an institution, he told Arlyn and
her older sister, Layney. A nursing home
certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him
cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides,
and the compounding financial strain (she
had already taken out a reverse mortgage
on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers)
forced her to consider the possibility.
Jim, slouched in his recliner, was deter-
mined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated
to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled
up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s
house was a 40-minute drive from the cot-
tage, and for months she had been relying
on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs
on her dad. She set an open laptop on the
counter so she could chat with him on Skype.
She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen
and another in his bedroom, so she could
check whether the caregiver had arrived
or, God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when
she read in the newspaper about a new digi-
tal eldercare service called CareCoach a few
nursing home, it piqued her interest. For
about $200 a month, a human-powered ava-
tar would be available to watch over a home-
bound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that
same amount for just nine hours of in-home
help. She signed up immediately.
A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail
a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in,
an animated German shepherd appeared
onscreen, standing at attention on a digi-
tized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy
and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink
tongue and round, blue eyes.
She and Layney visited their dad later
that week, tablet in hand. Following the
instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pic-
tures to the service’s online portal: images
of family members, Jim’s boat, and some
of his inventions, like a computer terminal
known as the Teleray and a seismic surveil-
lance system used to detect footsteps during
the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn
clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve
STYLING BY CHLOE DALEY
to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial
instinct that the service could be the per-
fect companion for a former technologist
had splintered into needling doubts. Was
she tricking him? Infantilizing him?
 Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney
finally snatched the tablet and presented
it to their dad, who was sitting in his arm-
chair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog
blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s
female text-to-speech voice, started to talk.
Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim
would have wanted to know exactly how
the service worked. But in recent months
he’d come to believe that TV characters
were interacting with him: A show’s vil-
lain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie
Couric was his friend. When faced with wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo,
an onscreen character that actually was in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people
talking to him, Jim readily chatted back. on the other side of the screen don’t know
Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched
the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s liv-
A that. They don’t know his name—or, in the
case of those like Jim, who have dementia,
ing room, where he could see it from the that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisi-
couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and ble. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from,
Pony had settled into a routine, exchang- he might say MIT (the CareCoach software
ing pleasantries several times a day. Every About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, was created by two graduates of the school),
15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens but if anyone asks where their pet actually
look for Jim, calling his name if he was his laptop in his home office and logs in to the is, he replies in character: “Here with you.” 
out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach
the sleeping dog onscreen with his fin- He talks baseball with a New Jersey man employees in Latin America and the Phil-
ger to rustle her awake. His touch would watching the Yankees; chats with a woman ippines. The contractors check on the ser-
send an instantaneous alert to the human in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she vice’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a
caretaker behind the avatar, prompting places a cookie in front of her tablet for him few times an hour. (When they do, the dog
the CareCoach worker to launch the tab- to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, or cat avatar they embody appears to wake
let’s audio and video stream. “How are who sips coffee while looking out over a lake. up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and
you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a sur- their words are voiced robotically through
reminded him which of his daughters or geon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, the tablet, designed to give their charges
in-person caretakers would be visiting a former international business student, the impression that they’re chatting with
that day to do the tasks that an onscreen and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach work-
dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s into his sparsely decorated home office each ers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the
sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll morning. He grew up crossing the border to people he watches over so he can coordinate
wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the their care with other workers and deepen his
read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or English that he now uses to chat with elderly relationship with them over time—this per-
watch TV with him. “You look handsome, people in the United States. Rodrigo found son likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers
Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him CareCoach on an online freelancing plat- Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses
shave with his electric razor. “You look form and was hired in December 2012 as while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote
pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would one of the company’s earliest contractors, a note explaining that the correct response
hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while,
inventions between her paws, prompting service’s avatars. crocodile.” These logs are all available to the
him to talk about his past. The dog com- In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with customer’s social workers or adult children,
plimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wherever they may live. Arlyn started check-
him on when he struggled to buckle his
watch in the morning. He reciprocated
by petting the screen with his index fin-
ger, sending hearts floating up from the
dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told
him a month after they first met—some-
thing CareCoach operators often tell the
8 9
people they are monitoring. Jim turned to
Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks
I’m real good!”

LAUREN SMILEY (@laurensmiley)

wrote about the Kansas murder of engi-
neer Srinivas Kuchibhotla in issue 25.07.
ing Pony’s log between visits with her dad
several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really
nice person,” reads one early entry made
during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim
that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”
After watching her dad interact with Pony,
Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her
father’s companionship vanished. Having
Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving
Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk
lightened the mood.
Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human
caretakers but also inadvertently keeping
an eye on them. Months before, in broken
sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn
that his in-home aide had called him a bas-
tard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of
her father’s recollection, gave her a second
chance. Three weeks after arriving in the
house, Pony woke up to see the same care-
taker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide
yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked
why she was screaming and checked to see
if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—
later reported the aide’s behavior to Care-
Coach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn
about the incident. (The caretaker knew there
was a human watching her through the tab-
let, Arlyn says, but may not have known the
extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s
family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the
short-tempered aide and started searching
for a replacement. Pony watched as she and
Jim conducted the interviews and approved
of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,”
the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”
Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
V fellow MIT student working on her computer
Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tamagot-
chis and coding choose-your-own-adventure
games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents
moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver,
British Columbia, when Wang was a year
old, and his grandmother, whom he called
Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call
from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao
would often tell Wang’s mom that she was
lonely, pleading with her daughter to come
to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older,
she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11,
his mother moved back home for two years
to care for her. He thinks of that time as the
honey-sandwich years, the food his over-
whelmed father packed him each day for
lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but
adds, “I was never raised to be particularly
expressive of my emotions.”
At 17, Wang left home to study mechan-
ical engineering at the University of Brit-
ish Columbia. He joined the Canadian
Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a
maintenance platoon while working on his
undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his
military future when, at 22, he was admitted
to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical
engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation
on human-machine interaction, studying
a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts
on the International Space Station. He was
particularly intrigued by the prospect of
harnessing tech to perform tasks from a dis-
tance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competi-
tion, he pitched the idea of training workers
in India to remotely operate the buffers that
sweep US factory floors.
In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother
was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia,
a disease that affects the areas of the brain
associated with memory and movement. On
Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang
watched as his grandmother grew increas-
ingly debilitated. After one call, a thought
struck him: If he could tap remote labor to
sweep far-off floors, why not use it to com-
fort Lao Lao and others like her?
Wang started researching the looming
caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010
and 2030, the population of those older than
80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the
number of family caregivers available is
expected to increase just 1 percent.
In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a
science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build
CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI
speech technology was too rudimentary for
an avatar capable of spontaneous conversa-
tion tailored to subtle mood and behavioral
cues. For that, they would need humans.
Older people like Jim often don’t speak
clearly or linearly, and those with demen-
tia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a
machine that misunderstands. “When you
match someone not fully coherent with a
device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe
for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other
hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s
needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was hold-
ing onto furniture for support, as if he were
dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down,
then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about
0 9
The Senior
Market
Silicon Valley is increas­
ingly developing technol­
ogy with seniors in mind,
simplifying interfaces,
honing motion and con­
tact sensors, and improv­
ing voice recognition
capabilities. Here, four
other promising elder
companies. —L.S.
20 years for AI to be able to master that kind
of personal interaction and recognition. That
said, the CareCoach system is already deploy-
ing some automated abilities. Five years
ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the
offshore workers behind the camera had
to type every response; today CareCoach’s
software creates roughly one out of every
five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims
to standardize care by having the software
manage more of the patients’ regular remind-
ers—prodding them to take their medicine,
urging them to eat well and stay hydrated.
CareCoach workers are part freewheeling
raconteurs, part human natural-language
processors, listening to and deciphering their
charges’ speech patterns or nudging the per-
son back on track if they veer off topic. The
company recently began recording conver-
sations to better train its software in senior
speech recognition.
CareCoach found its first customer in
December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved
from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, rent-
ing a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch
of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport.
Four employees congregate in one room
with a view of the parking lot, while Wang
and his wife, Brittany, a program manager
he met at a gerontology conference, work
in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets
onscreen are lined up for testing before
being shipped to their respective seniors.
The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an
eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.

1
CareLinx
Families can search for
local, qualified care­
givers in this database
of 200,000 registered
nurses, nurse practi­
tioners, and nurse’s assis­
tants. Each caregiver
sets their own hourly rate,
and the platform handles
background checks, time
tracking, and an online
payment system.
ElderCheck Now
Download this free app to
keep tabs on your loved
one. Tap the app to send
an “Are you OK?” mes­
sage. Two button options
appear on the senior’s
phone: “I’m OK” or “Call
Me!” Meanwhile, the app
sends the person’s GPS
location and heart rate to
the person checking in.
Paro
This therapeutic, anima­
tronic seal is rigged with
sensors that provide a
calibrated response to
the patient’s touch and
speech ($6,000). The
seal cuddles, turns its
head toward voices, and
makes sounds that elicit
positive reactions.
SimpleTherapy
This website aims to
make physical therapy
more affordable by
offering 15­minute guided
therapy videos ($180
per year). Seniors specify
their problem area and
degree of pain, then
an algorithm selects var­
ious tailored stretch­
ing and strengthening
exercises incorporating
everyday items such
as chairs and towels.
Wang spends much of his time on the
road, touting his product’s health benefits
at medical conferences and in hospital exec-
utive suites. Onstage at a gerontology sum-
mit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly
impersonated the strained, raspy voice of
an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet
while Brittany stealthily cued the replies
from her laptop in the audience. The compa-
ny’s tablets are used by hospitals and health
plans across Massachusetts, California, New
York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washing-
ton state. Between corporate and individual
customers, CareCoach’s avatars have inter-
acted with hundreds of users in the US. “The
goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little fam-
ily business that just breaks even.”
The fastest growth would come through
hospital units and health plans specializing in
high-need and elderly patients, and he makes
the argument that his avatars cut health care
costs. (A private room in a nursing home can
run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary
research has been promising, though limited.
In a study conducted by Pace University at
a Manhattan housing project and a Queens
hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to
reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and
falls. A health provider in Massachusetts
was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home
nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which
diligently reminded him to take his medica-
tions. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nag-
ging reminded him of having his wife back in
the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but
he loves it at the same time,” the project’s
lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so
cordial: In the Pace University study, some
aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out
and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen
pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.
More troubling, perhaps, were the peo-
ple who grew too fiercely attached to their
digital pets. At the conclusion of a University
of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one
woman became so distraught at the thought
of parting with her avatar that she signed up
for the service, paying the fee herself. (The
company gave her a reduced rate.) A user
in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d
cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless
her digital cat could come along.
We’re still in the infancy of understand-
ing the complexities of aging humans’ rela-
tionship with technology. Sherry Turkle,
a professor of social studies, science, and
technology at MIT and a frequent critic of
tech that replaces human communication,
described interactions between elderly peo-
ple and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in
her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came
to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out,
one that would ultimately degrade human
connection. “This kind of app—in all of its
slickness and all its ‘what could possibly
be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making
us forget what we really know about what
makes older people feel sustained,” she
says: caring, interpersonal relationships.
The question is whether an attentive ava-
tar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle
sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is
that it’s always cheaper and easier to build
an app than to have a conversation,” she
says. “We allow technologists to propose the
unthinkable and convince us the unthink-
able is actually the inevitable.”
But for many families, providing long-term
in-person care is simply unsustainable. The
average family caregiver has a job outside the
home and spends about 20 hours a week car-
ing for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly
two-thirds of such caregivers are women.
Among eldercare experts, there’s a resig-
nation that the demographics of an aging
America will make technological solutions
unavoidable. The number of those older than
65 with a disability is projected to rise from
11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030.
Given the option, having a digital compan-
ion may be preferable to being alone. Early
research shows that lonely and vulnerable

elders like Jim seem content to communi-
cate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, direc-
“I don’t think they need to know anymore.” 1/4/2013 6:15:51 pm
At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular
I was introduced by Arnie
in-person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the and her sister, Layney,
truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like to Jim. Had a group con­
Siri,” she said when told later that it was a versation, included pet­
ting me and showing a
human in Mexico who had watched Jim and few photos. Jim seemed
typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuck- amazed by me.
led. “If I knew someone was there, I may have
2/10/2013 11:06:48 am
been a little more creeped out.” 
Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are Jim read the comics sec­
completely aware of the person on the other tion of the newspaper
and told me a joke. I said
end of the dashboard tend to experience the that he is so funny!
avatar as something between human, pet,
and machine—what some roboticists call a 11/17/2013 7:05:12 am

tor of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would third ontological category. The caretakers Jim was sitting on his
always prefer the human touch over a robot,” seem to blur that line too: One day Pony couch and looking out­
he says. “But if there’s no human available, I told Jim that she dreamed she could turn side. Jim thanked me
for being there when
would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”  into a real health aide, almost like Pinocchio he’s alone and said that
CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam wishing to be a real boy. he loves me so much.
of both. The service conveys the percep-
2/24/2014 7:00:28 pm
tiveness and emotional intelligence of the
humans powering it but masquerades as Arnie said they had
an animated app. If a person is incapable of dinner but Jim did not rec­
ognize her at first. I told

M
consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then her everything will be fine.
someone must do so on their behalf. But the
more disconcerting issue is how cognizant 3/5/2014 7:31:12 am
these seniors are of being watched over Jim was on the stretcher
by strangers. Wang considers his product and the paramedics
“a trade-off between utility and privacy.” carried him out. Joyce,
the caretaker, said she
His workers are trained to duck out during Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside could not contact Arnie
baths and clothing changes. in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To so I offered her my help. 
Some CareCoach users insist on greater undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang
3/7/2014 5:15:42 am
control. A woman in Washington state, posts English-language ads on freelancing
for example, put a piece of tape over her job sites where foreign workers advertise A nurse came into Jim’s
CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t room to take his vital
signs, but he won’t let
she could be viewed. Other customers like disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang them. He’s afraid they
Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or claims the company bases its salaries on fac- are going to hurt him.
other diseases, might not realize they are I told Jim they are friends.
I also informed them he
being watched. Once, when he was tem- likes ice cream.
porarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic
after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked 6/12/2014 6:16:18 pm
Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You
mean there’s someone overseas looking
Man’s I woke up and saw Jim
sleeping on his bed.
at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. Best Friend I think Arnie already went
home. Hope I can talk
(Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remem- Excerpts from Pony’s to Jim when he wakes up.
bered the incident later.) By default, the CareCoach log. Good night, Jim! :)
app explains to patients that someone is
surveilling them when it’s first introduced.
But the family members of personal users,
like Arlyn, can make their own call.
Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about
whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling
Jim about the human on the other side of the 0 9 2
screen “would have blown the whole charm
of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s
as well, and Arlyn had learned how to nav-
igate the disease: Make her mom feel safe;
don’t confuse her with details she’d have
trouble understanding. The same went for
her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says,
tors such as what a registered nurse would
make in the CareCoach employee’s home
country, their language proficiencies, and
the cost of their internet connection.
The growing network includes people like
Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives
in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Phil-
ippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college
graduate. She earns about the same being
an avatar as she did in her former call cen-
ter job, where she consoled Americans irate
about credit card charges. (“They wanted
to, like, burn the company down or kill me,”
she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works
nights to coincide with the US daytime, typ-
ing messages to seniors while her 6-year-
old son sleeps nearby.
Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Para-
gas via video, then vetted her with an inter-
national criminal background check. He
gives all applicants a personality test for
certain traits: openness, conscientiousness,
extroversion, agreeableness, and neurot-
icism. As part of the CareCoach training
program, Paragas earned certifications in
delirium and dementia care from the Alz-
heimer’s Association, trained in US health
care ethics and privacy, and learned strat-
egies for counseling those with addictions.
All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone
who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only
about 1 percent of its applicants.
Paragas understands that this is a com-
plicated business. She’s befuddled by the
absence of family members around her
aging clients. “In my culture, we really
love to take care of our parents,” she says.
“That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why
is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that,
for some people, she’s their most significant
daily relationship. Some of her charges tell
her that they couldn’t live without her. Even
when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with
his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a
friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had
gained a valuable ally.
A
As time went on, the father, daughter, and
family pet grew closer. When the snow
finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to
the picnic table on the patio so they could
eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as
Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted,
Pony could coax him to talk about his past,
recounting fishing trips or how he built the
house to face the sun so it would be warmer
in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around
the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony
along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)
One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting
on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held
up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy,
between her paws. It had been more than a
year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly
mentioned her anymore; he struggled to
form coherent sentences. That day, though,
he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love
her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoul-
der, clasping her hand over her mouth to
stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,”
Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the
picture of his deceased wife and petted
her face with his finger, the same way he
would to awaken a sleeping Pony.  wouldn’t have developed if Pony was sim-
When Arlyn first signed up for the ser-
vice, she hadn’t anticipated that she would
end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in
the sincerest sense of the word—the ava-
tar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah,
sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know”
like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh
even more than her dad. When Arlyn col-
lapsed onto the couch after a long day of
caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch
on the table:  heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my
0 9
The
Eldercare
Gap
Aging in America, by the
numbers. —BLANCA MYERS
“Arnie, how are you?”
Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way
Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly ther-
apeutic—and told the pet how hard it was
to watch her dad lose his identity.
“I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you,
Arnie.”
When she recalls her own attachment
to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection
ply high-functioning AI. “You could feel
Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to
think of Pony as her father did—a friendly
pet—rather than a person on the other end
of a webcam. “Even though that person
probably had a relationship to me,” she
says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”
Still, she sometimes wonders about the
person on the other side of the screen. She
sits up straight and rests her hand over her
thought is: Did Pony really care about me and
my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully
at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds.
“Did this really happen? Was it really a rela-
tionship, or were they just playing solitaire
and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it
seemed like they cared.”
When Jim turned 92 that August, as
friends belted out “Happy Birthday”
around the dinner table, Pony spoke the
lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the
single candle on his cake. “I wish you good
health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more
birthdays to come.” 

up when the paramedics arrived. The dog
told them Jim’s date of birth and offered
to call his daughters as they carried him
5
out on a stretcher.
Jim was checked into a hospital, then
into the nursing home he’d so wanted to
avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which
made it difficult for Jim and Pony to con-
nect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet
to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from
those months chronicle a series of com-
10,000
munication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,”
Baby boomers Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all
estimated to turn 65
the time.” One day, in a rare moment of
every day
connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim
79 percent go sailing that summer, just like the good
old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
Projected increase
in the number of baby That July, in an email from Wang,
boomers aged 80 Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his
and older, from 2010 sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo
to 2030
bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s
1 percent Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that
his friend would be accepted into heaven.
Projected increase
in the number of “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had
potential family care­ a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I
givers, aged 45 to 64,
felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve
from 2010 to 2030
met them.” In the year and a half that he
348,400 had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to
him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a
Number of home
health aide jobs sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry
expected to be created and learned about his rich past. They had
in the next decade celebrated birthdays and holidays together
COLOPHON
SOCIAL FAUX PAS THAT
HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
Failing to reply to the monthly “Colo­
phon” submission request; demanding
colleagues emoji­react to your Slack com­
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pest; well­timed “accidental” reply­alls;
requesting to hang out in person; inexpli­
cable breakdowns with the dog trainer;
closing the art department’s window with­
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over Slack—to that coworker; accidentally
“liking” a source’s two­year­old Instagram
photo; mishearing Sarah Fallon as Sarah
Palin; texting while jaywalking in order
to make it to Jay’s morning meeting;
Slacking one coworker while Zoom con­
ferencing with another; freaking out and
tweeting something totally inappropriate
(read: aggro) at @realDonaldTrump;
getting food in your hair while eating at
your desk; agreeing to host a stop for a
progressive Halloween party, then giving
the address to only half the guests.
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as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah,
$22,600
sure, you betcha” countless times.  MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address
Median annual salary
That day, for weeks afterward, and even
of a home health aide
in the US now when a senior will do something that
reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels
$7,698 a pang. “I still care about them,” he says.
Median monthly cost After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Vic-
of a private room in a tor Wang to say she wanted to honor the
nursing home in the US workers for their care. Wang forwarded
her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s
team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony
to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing
forward on the pew beside her. She invited
any workers behind Pony who wanted to
attend to log in.
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I
In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks
about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s
ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.
In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his
head on his way to the bathroom. A care-
taker sleeping over that night found him
and called an ambulance, and Pony woke
A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the
CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt
like a kind of second burial. She still sighs,
“Pony!” when the voice of her old friend
gives her directions as she drives around
Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.
After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo
heaved a sigh and logged in to the Care-
Coach dashboard to make his rounds. He
ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and
hospital rooms around the United States—
seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody
needed to talk. �
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